Make no mistake about it, though—America is doomed, and there is nothing any well-intentioned person (this by definition excludes the elites) can do about it.

In recognizing this, I do not mean to imply that disaster is forthcoming. It is already here, and we are likely doomed to waste away in the present condition—or worse. But no matter how far we fall, America will never experience the finality of ‘collapse’ because the elites will be forever shielded from the outcomes of their actions. The poor—those who had the least ability to alter the course of history—will bear the totality of the suffering forevermore, a plight which will never benefit from anything as consoling as a prospective end.

The disaster doesn’t loom on the horizon, and like the Biblical doomsday, the notion of an American collapse can be pushed back indefinitely from a position of relative present safety: things can always get worse. In this way, doomsday will never come, because it is a moving goalpost.

No, doomsday is already upon us.

In the present moment, 45,000 Americans die each year due to a lack of health insurance. When is doomsday for the uninsured and sickly? When 100,000 die needlessly each year? When 500,000 do?

In the present moment, 1 in 7 Americans lives in poverty (one in five children). When is doomsday for the impoverished? When the proportion is closer to one half?

In the present moment, 40 million Americans rely on food stamps to subsist. When is doomsday for the hungry? When 100 million Americans sign up for food stamps? When the program is slashed and they starve in the streets?

In the present moment, 1 in 3 Americans does not have the income to make ends meet. When is their doomsday?

In the present moment, 300,000 people worldwide are killed by complications of global climate change. Is this what doomsday looks like?

In the present moment, 500,000 Americans are killed due to air pollution alone. Seems that doomsday came soon for them.

In the present moment, 28,000 newborns die each year in America, which places it behind 28 other countries in terms of infant mortality. These deaths are attributable directly to the private healthcare system, a bringer of premature doomsday for unfortunate babies.

When is doomsday for the abused and raped individuals who fill our overcrowded prisons? Is it scheduled anytime soon for the refugees who waste away pointlessly in immigrant jails? Does it matter that doomsday comes sooner for minorities and the marginalized, who bear the disproportionate brunt of the above statistics?

There is a class war in this country, and the rich are winning. They have always won and they will continue win unless a massive systemic overhaul occurs—the chances of America becoming a tolerable place for the have-nots is only decreasing over time in the present era.

How did we become doomed? Essentially, because the rich have vastly greater resources, they will be able to erode any egalitarian protections of the American government and help themselves to a greater and greater share of the resources. They are free to do so because of a peculiarity of the American consciousness: its gullibility.

The American political system is best understood as a division between the propagandists and the propagandized. The propagandists may or may not believe they say, but this is immaterial, because they are intellectual mercenaries who are disinterested in an honest debate. They alternately intellectualize meritless positions and espouse anti-intellectual skepticism of meritorious positions. Their intent is not to cultivate a real dialogue, but to do whatever is necessary to serve the interests of their affluent patrons. To the propagandist, the ends justify the means; whereas earnest participants in a political dialogue take care to ensure that their methods of argumentation are themselves moral and respectful, the propagandist will hesitate only when the ignorance, hatred, and violence they’ve stirred up can be traced back to them.

Those who make up other main group, the propagandized, are viewed by the prior group as useful idiots more than as comrades. They are the far more numerous group, and therefore far more dangerous. The propagandized are made up of, among other ignorant sometimes-participants in our political system, evangelicals, who overwhelmingly vote Republican. As I wrote in the entry “Johann Hari on the Source of Right-Wing Delusion,”

To be sure, the Bush era was disastrous: fully one in eight Americans (worse, one in four children) are now on food stamps, and 2000-2009 is the first decade since 1940 in which zero net job growth occurred. The income gap has widened, causing a drop in revenue for entitlement programs such as social security, as has the life expectancy gap, and the government became ever more mired in the reverse-socialism of wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich. The illusion of economic growth was fueled entirely by the statistical outlier of the rich becoming exponentially richer while the poor saw only stagnation or loss (more than half of the workforce has lost ground to inflation over the past few decades, and median income during the Bush years actually fell).

Yet it is not only the Tea Party fringe which has misplaced its faith, but any capitalist. The system exists solely to perpetuate historical inequalities–the playing field after the primitive accumulation of resources (the historical process in which the power-holders came to be the power-holders) was never level, and economic liberalization has not leveled it. The old slave-drivers, god-mandated kings, and plutocrats have passed on their wealth to a new generation of manipulators, who rely upon such manipulations as the prosperity gospel to ensure that the market arrangement is not questioned. The thrall of capitalism is such that wars are now being fought, poorly and without overarching goal, in order to ensure that the correct individuals get paid. Aid from international organizations such as the World Bank is contingent upon trade liberalization and privatization in the receiving country, resulting in the evaporation of crucial safety net programs and contributing only the enrichment of already-affluent power-holders. This liberalization is considered necessary to ensure that the government will have funds to repay the loans—otherwise, it might waste the money prolonging the lives of its citizens, who are viewed as little better than chattel.

Where the propagandists are evil yet perhaps intelligent, the propagandized are the victims of a lack of education (funding for which continues to be slashed) as much as they are of cable news and dishonest preachers. The average American simply hasn’t been given the tools to reject propaganda, and this gullibility reinforces the very dismantling of the public school system which weakened them in the first place. Americans are callous, dense, and prejudiced, and because of this, they will forever remain as such.

This is not to say that the ideals of fairness, openness, and peace are not intuitive to most Americans. A recent study found that Americans overwhelmingly underestimate the amount of wealth inequality in the United States, and 92% find the more egalitarian Swedish distribution of resources preferable. Despite this, the chance of these ideals surviving the politicization of their methods of implementation (wealth redistribution, or socialism, both dirty words in the U.S.) is effectively nil. In addition, pernicious phenomena such as the “backfire effect” render even eloquent and patient argumentation unequal to the task of addressing some forms of ignorance. In order to maintain any sort of hope in ability of the propagandized to break free of their chains, they must both recognize that the chains exist and wish to break them. Neither of these conditions can be found in the average American voter circa 2010.

We Americans can’t even muster the energy to protest the ongoing wars of aggression which are being fought disastrously by the military and state department. Though outright sabotage of the military and its enablers is both moral and legal, we no longer even attempt to justify the occupation—it is taken, instead, as a given. This may be because Iraq War protests, though large enough to set turnout records, were ignored and downplayed by the complicit media. Instead of seeing this and thinking “We must do more to make our dissatisfaction known,” the progressive opposition in America gave up. There is no greater indictment of the American civil consciousness than the pristine condition of our military bases. Nary a plane has been sabotaged, nary a soldier molested, nary a high-up commander inconvenienced. With our inaction, we acquiesce to the deadly misuse of our taxes.

No, doomsday is upon us. It isn’t a distant cataclysm, it is Tuesday.

A cataclysmic doomsday scenario is the only kind feared by elites, and only because it carries with it the potential for a revolution. They care nothing for the slow burn doomsdays of indigent suffering, no matter how widespread the anguish may be. The elites feared such a cataclysm during the Great Depression, and as such permitted some minor reforms of a free market run amok. Though we now linger in the largest financial downturn since then, with no end in sight and with neither reform nor relief reform forthcoming, the elites are brashly confident. They are secure in the knowledge that the propagandists in this era are far more persuasive, the fringe right is far more mainstream, and the government is sufficiently weakened and privatized—the realistic hope for a New Deal in 2010 is nonexistent, as is the possibility of any well-organized armed uprising. The aforementioned fringe right has monopolized and thereby stigmatized all talk of revolution, whether justified or not; private security contractors, police, and military alike are reliably aligned with the interests of elites and would move to quash any movement against them; leftist and anti-war groups are monitored much more closely than rightist groups, often illegally. A revolution is not possible.

In the 30s, there was a nascent business plot against President Roosevelt; today, no conspiracy is necessary:

In 2006, Koch Industries owner Charles Koch revealed to the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that he coordinates the funding of the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks, media outlets and other anti-government efforts through a twice annual meeting of wealthy right-wing donors. He also confided to Moore, who is funded through several of Koch’s ventures, that his true goal is to strengthen the “culture of prosperity” by eliminating “90%” of all laws and government regulations. Although it is difficult to quantify the exact amount Koch alone has funneled to right-wing fronts, some studies have pointed toward $50 million he has given alone to anti-environmental groups. Recently, fronts funded by Charles and his brother David have received scrutiny because they have played a pivotal role in the organizing of the anti-Obama Tea Parties and the promotion of virulent far right lawmakers like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). (David Koch praised DeMint and gave him a “Washington Award” shortly after the senator promised to “break” Obama by making health reform his “Waterloo.”)

It is time to give up on reforming the American political system from within or without. The parasites have won, and will continue to win. Attempting to reform the system from within is akin to brushing a brick wall with a feather, and attempting to reform it from without is akin to throwing oneself against the brick wall. A revolution may be justified (and has been for many decades), but it would not accomplish a thing. The rich own the whole lot: resources, politicians, the apparatuses of violence, and, worst of all, the dialogue (talk of even slightly reforming the financial system or holding elites accountable is now dismissed with the epithet “socialist!”). They have succeeded in convincing the Americans most harmed by their existence that the real source of their misery is immigration and lazy minorities, not wealth inequality. The electorate is treated like easily-distracted children, and it loves it.

At every step of the way, progress by any means is forever stymied.

So what do we do? Even passively accepting the American system is intolerable, yet actively opposing it is impossible. Every day an American lives in comfort is a day stolen from the lives of the global poor, on whom the American underclass, themselves bled dry by the American ruling class, has preyed in turn. Only a benevolent dictator could ever save us, and this is impossible: the only dictator America could ever produce would be far from benevolent.

While we wait for real change, the free market destroys what is left of the world at an ever-accelerating rate. Climate change is already irreversible, and soon there will be nothing left to save. Environmental regulation is becoming less likely, not more, as environmental problems multiply. As the knife is driven further into our back, it seems, our ability to resist it diminishes.

Are we too late? If doomsday was a far-off appointment, perhaps we could say.

Regardless, overall economic growth is less meaningful if the lion’s share of profits is held by the rich at the expense of the vast swathes of non-rich demographic groups. Conversely, if progressive taxation led to less economic growth but greater income equality, and this was necessary for the provision of a robust social safety net, the brunt of short-term stagnation should be rightfully born by those most able to bear it: the group whose prosperity is most directly benefited by the existence of government-engendered political stability. Economic growth is a courtesy of the state, subordinated to income equality, rather than a goal in and of itself (moreover, there are European countries with higher tax rates which have comparable purchasing power parity to that of the U.S., such as Ireland and Austria; and then there is Norway, which has more). The fallacy of trickle down economics is not that wealth cannot trickle down, but that a substantial portion of spent wealth (charitably disregarding that sizeable portion which is reinvested or indefinitely traded among the rich) is cast off as the upper class employs the services of the upper middle class, who employ the services of the middle class, and so on. By the time the spent wealth reaches those who most need it, it has been greatly diminished; to once again borrow the superficial parlance of the economists, a rising tide raises some boats, but some still founder underneath the water and only see the distance to the surface increasing (indeed, the world’s poorest individuals have experienced little to no economic growth in several decades while the rich have become exponentially richer, despite increasing worker productivity; in America, income for over half of the workforce over the last few decades has not kept up with inflation). As this distance grows, the economy becomes unstable: income inequality was at record level before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, a level it surpassed during the Bush era (in 2007, the top .01% took in more than 1000 times the amount earned by the bottom 90% for the first time in the nation’s history). Deregulation allows the wealth of the affluent to grow at exponential levels compared to that of the poor, but it also leads to boom and bust cycles in which revolution–and thus endangerment of even the wealthy and their holdings–becomes a distinct possibility.

The free market stands in direct opposition to notions of demographic fairness in political interest articulation due to the twin unbalancing effects of lobbyists and campaign donations, of which economically successful individuals and companies are able to make disproportionately effective use. A truly free market ought to allow corporations access to favorable concessions from the government, as part of a basic right to organize and parley monetary contributions into a preferred policy outcome (essentially equating money with a right to freedom of speech). Doing so, however, allows powerful corporations to become more powerful and monopolistic, abrogating the freedom of the market and leading to anticompetitive outcomes (essentially, redistribution of wealth to the rich, or redistributive injustice, the sort practiced by Treasury Secretary Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, when he chose forego his old private sector rival Lehman Brothers for the bailout). On the other hand, if the government was explicitly forbade from instituting any policy which may result in favorable conditions for one corporate entity over another (though even ironclad regulations can eventually be bought away), then the very idea of capitalistic democratic participation is compromised, and there would be little reason for any corporate entity to care whether or not monetary donations constitute free speech. The free market is at its most basic level a majoritarian system, except in that the voice of the mob is replaced by its financial holdings; because the anti-democratic use of these holdings (the transformation of an ostensibly free market into an engine of government-assisted wealth redistribution to the rich) is inevitable, a truly representative system requires some measure of economic equality.

Here are 12 articles which provide yet more evidence that the forces of capital will subvert and make a mockery of democracy where it is thought to be in danger of acting unfavorably, and the ramifications for this are dire for the survival of the human race.

1)

FL GOP Poll Watcher Allegedly Records Information On Cell Phone (TPM)

More allegations are surfacing against apparently untrained poll watchers, this time in Florida, where an early voter says a Republican poll watcher improperly used a cell phone to take pictures and record information.

David Woodward told TPMMuckraker that he went to Delray Beach City Hall yesterday afternoon to cast his ballot. There he says he observed a Republican poll watcher recording data on his cell phone from computer screens, information from a voter registration book and appeared to be taking pictures.

But he said the clerk who runs the polling station has denied that the man had a phone or that he was anywhere he wasn’t supposed to be. Woodward is not satisfied with the response he has received.

Andrew Katz, another early voter, told TPMMuckraker that he never met Woodward but backed up his story. He said the poll watcher’s actions “didn’t quite pass the smell test” and that there was a “certain amount of voter intimidation” involved in the poll watcher’s actions.

Katz described the poll watcher as a man who looked to be in his mid-50s with grey hair. He was holding the cell phone chest high, “essentially a position where he could enter information or take a photograph,” Katz said. There were signs that said there were no cell phones allowed in the area, Katz said.

2)

Rand Paul: On Second Thought, No I Won’t Give That Stomper’s Money Back (TPM)

Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul has decided not to return the nearly $2,000 in campaign money he collected from Tim Profitt, the man who Paul recently forced out as Bourbon County coordinator of his Kentucky Senate campaign after he stepped on a MoveOn.org activist outside a debate Monday night.

Profitt has given Paul’s Republican campaign $1,950, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports, money Paul’s campaign told the paper it’ll hang on to even as Profitt (and maybe other Paul volunteers) come under criminal investigation for their part in the Kentucky stomp.

The explanation from Paul’s campaign manager, Jesse Benton:

“The Paul campaign condemned the incident far before Conway’s camp ever addressed it and decisively severed all ties with the supporter in question,” Benton told the paper, referring to Democratic nominee Jack Conway. “To suggest otherwise is nothing but a desperate attempt to distract voters from the issues facing Kentucky.”

As Greg Sargent reports, the decision to keep Profitt’s money is a flip-flop for Paul. “Last night,” Sargent writes, “the Paul campaign told Fox News that they would be returning the money.”

3)

Maker Of Ad Telling Latinos Not To Vote Has Long History In GOP (TPM)

The man behind a new Spanish-language ad, encouraging Nevada Latinos not to vote is a veteran of Republican politics and now an advocate for what most would consider conservative, business-friendly immigration policy.

In an interview with TPM, Robert de Posada, founder of Latinos for Reform, said he’s become equally disgruntled with both parties. His current goal, though, is to punish Democrats for failing to deliver on a promise to pass comprehensive immigration reform. And his CV includes a long list of affiliations with conservative immigration reform groups.

In 1994, according to de Posada, he helped create the Hispanic Business Roundtable, which later became the Latino Coalition, where he was president until 2007. He served as co-director with Dick Armey on Americans for Border and Economic Security, on George W. Bush’s Social Security Commission, and as director of Hispanic affairs at the Republican National Committee until becoming disgruntled with the GOP and settling into conservative advocacy.

He founded Latinos for Reform during the 2008 campaign but only truly activated it recently.

“The Democratic party went to the Latino community and made solid promises that they would deliver immigration reform within a year,” de Posada said. “Then they did nothing.”

4)

DOJ Probes TX Voter Intimidation Complaints During Tea Party Anti-Voter Fraud Drive (TPM)

Poll watchers in Harris County, Texas — where a Tea Party group launched an aggressive anti-voter fraud effort — were accused of “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of voters who were waiting to cast their ballots as early voting got underway yesterday.

Now, TPMMuckraker has learned, the Justice Department has interviewed witnesses about the alleged intimidation and is gathering information about the so-called anti-voter fraud effort.

“We are currently gathering information regarding this matter,” Justice Department spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement confirming the Civil Rights Division’s involvement.

Harris County, the biggest county in the state, is where a Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots launched an anti-voter fraud initiativecalled “True the Vote,” which recruited poll watchers and amped up fears over groups like the community organizing group ACORN.

Chad Dunn, a lawyer who is representing the Texas Democratic Party, told TPMMuckraker a number of witnesses have been interviewed by Civil Rights Division lawyers already. “We’ve gotten a number of reports — quite a few out of the Houston area — that poll watchers, King Street Patriot training poll watchers, are following a voter after they’ve checked them out and stand right behind them,” Dunn said. There’s at least a dozen reports that they could confirm with witnesses, he said. “Interestingly, it’s all in the polling places in Hispanic and African-American areas,” he added.

Terry O’Rourke, the first assistant in the Harris County Attorney’s office, told TPMMuckraker that there have been allegations of poll watchers talking to voters, which they are not allowed to do, as well as hovering over voters as they are waiting to vote. He said the complaints came from Kashmere Gardens, Moody Park, Sunnyside and other predominantly minority neighborhoods of the county.

5)

US veteran who killed unarmed Iraqis wins Tea Party support (Guardian)

The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons.

Pantano ordered the two men to search the car for a second time and then, with no other US soldiers in view, unloaded a magazine of his M16A4 automatic rifle into them, before reloading and blasting a second magazine at them – some 60 rounds in total.

Over the corpses, he left a placard inscribed with the marine motto: “No better friend, No worse enemy.”

Six years later Pantano is on the verge of a stunning electoral victory that could send him to the US Congress in Washington. He is standing as Republican candidate in North Carolina’s 7th congressional district, which was last represented by his party in 1871.

With the help of the right-wing Tea Party movement, and with the benefit of his image as a war hero acquired from what happened on that fateful day in 2004, he has raised almost $1m (£630,000) in donations and is now level-pegging with his Democratic opponent, Mike McIntyre.

“We are in complete contention. We are certainly neck-and-neck. And we are feeling terrific,” he said at a Tea Party rally outside Wilmington.

6)

Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard)

Should waterboarding—the practice of simulating drowning and then reviving the victim—be considered torture?

Journalists and editors have grappled with this question hundreds of times since 2004, when revelations regarding U.S. interrogation methods revived the public debate about waterboarding.

In their paper, Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media, students from Harvard Law School and Harvard College examine how newspapers in the United States referred to waterboarding.

Neal Desai and his co-authors report that from the 1930s until 2003, waterboarding was commonly referred to as torture by American newspapers.  However, from 2004 to 2008, these same papers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. More specifically, Desai and his team discovered that “[U.S.] newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator.”

7)

Much of planet could see extreme drought in 30 years: study (AFP)

Large swathes of the planet could experience extreme drought within the next 30 years unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut, according to a study released Tuesday.

“We are facing the possibility of widespread drought in the coming decades, but this has yet to be fully recognized by both the public and the climate change research community,” said National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai, who conducted the study.

“If the projections in this study come even close to being realized, the consequences for society worldwide will be enormous,” he said.

Parts of Asia, the United States, and southern Europe, and much of Africa, Latin America and the Middle East could be hit by severe drought in the next few decades, with regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea seeing “almost unprecedented” drought conditions, the study says.

“Severe drought conditions can profoundly impact agriculture, water resources, tourism, ecosystems, and basic human welfare,” says the study, published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change.

In the United States, drought causes six to eight billion dollars in damages a year on average, and drought-related disasters killed more than half a million people in Africa in the 1980s, the study says.

While vast areas of the world will become extremely dry for long periods, higher-latitude regions from northern Europe to Russia, Canada, Alaska and India could become wetter.

Increased moisture in those regions would not, however, make up for the drier conditions across much of the rest of the world.

8 )

Tigers could be extinct in 12 years: WWF (CBC)

The world’s tiger population could soon be extinct because of illegal trophy hunting, deteriorating habitats and the use of tiger parts in Eastern medicine, environmental experts warn.

World Wildlife spokeswoman Marie von Zeipel says the tiger is one of the most threatened species and could face extinction within 12 years. The organization estimates that there are 3,200 tigers in the wild.

Von Zeipel told The Associated Press that the wild tiger population has shrunk 97 per cent in 100 years and that “if nothing drastic happens the [population] curve is heading straight for disaster.”

Her comments on Friday came after the wildlife organization hosted a seminar in Stockholm about the plight of wild tigers.

9)

Banks Face Two-Front War on Bad Mortgages, Flawed Foreclosures (Bloomberg)

Shoddy mortgage lending has led bankers into a two-front war, pitting them against U.S. homeowners challenging the right to foreclose and mortgage-bond investors demanding refunds that could approach $200 billion.

While federal regulators and state attorneys general have focused on flawed foreclosures, a bigger threat may be the cost to buy back faulty loans that banks bundled into securities.JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup Inc. have set aside just $10 billion in reserves to cover future buybacks. Bank of America alone said this week that pending claims jumped 71 percent from a year ago to $12.9 billion of loans.

Investors such as Bill Gross’s Pacific Investment Management Co. contend that sellers are obligated to repurchase some mortgages because of misrepresentations such as overstatements of borrowers’ income or inflated appraisals. Their case may be bolstered by probes in 50 states into whether banks used documents that were also flawed to conduct foreclosures. Neither dispute is likely to be resolved quickly.

“It’s going to be trench warfare with years of lawyering,”Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, said in a telephone interview from White Plains, New York. “The banks can’t afford to lose.”

The biggest risks for banks may be loans packaged into mortgage-backed securities during the housing bubble, of which $1.3 trillion remain. The aggrieved bondholders include government-controlled firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bond insurers and private investors.

Fannie, Freddie

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest mortgage-finance companies, may be owed as much as $42 billion just on loans they bought directly from lenders, according to Fitch Ratings. On top of that, investors in private mortgage bonds, including them, may collect as much as $179.2 billion, Christopher Gamaitoni, vice president of research at Compass Point Research & Trading LLC in Washington, said in an August report. That brings the total to more than $220 billion.

Pimco, BlackRock Inc., MetLife Inc. and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York are seeking to force Bank of America to repurchase mortgages packaged into $47 billion of bonds by its Countrywide Financial Corp. unit. In a letter to the bank, the group cited alleged failures by Countrywide to service the loans properly.

“It enhances the likelihood of claims coming to fruition,” said Gamaitoni, a former senior financial analyst at Fannie Mae.

Repurchase Obligations

Bank of America, which acquired Countrywide, the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, in 2008, faces potential repurchase obligations of $74 billion, according to an August report by Branch Hill Capital, a San Francisco hedge fund, which is betting against the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company’s shares. Potential claims consist of $21.8 billion to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $45 billion for investors in mortgage bonds and $7.2 billion for insurance companies, Branch Hill said.

Bank of America has $4.4 billion in reserves for claims on $12.9 billion of loans, the company reported Oct. 19, and has already resolved claims on more than $14 billion of loans.

The company will “defend our shareholders” by disputing any unjustified demands that it repurchase mortgages, Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Most claims “don’t have the defects that people allege.”

JPMorgan took a $1 billion third-quarter expense to increase its mortgage-repurchase reserves to about $3 billion. Citigroup raised its reserves to $952 million in the third quarter, from $727 million in the previous period. Wells Fargo reduced its repurchase reserves to $1.3 billion, from $1.4 billion in the second quarter.

10)

Robbed of Jobs by the Deficit Cultists (Guardian)

Friday’s US jobs report caught most economic analysts by surprise. After touting the strength of the recovery for months, they had to come to grips with the fact that the economy just is not creating very many jobs.

If the temporary jobs generated by the census are pulled out of the count, the economy created just 20,000 jobs in May. The average rate of growth of non-census jobs over the last three months has been just 130,000 a month, only slightly faster than the growth of the workforce. At this rate of job growth, it will take decades, not years, to get back to normal levels of unemployment. It’s time that we stop the happy talk about recovery and get serious about the country’s economic problems.

Once again, the reason for this downturn is very simple, even if most of the country’s top economists were (and are) unable to see it. We saw an $8tn housing bubble and a somewhat smaller bubble in non-residential real estate collapse. This bubble had been driving the economy prior to the recession.

The bubbles directly generated close to $500bn in annual demand by stimulating construction. The housing wealth created by the bubble indirectly spurred another $500bn in demand by lifting consumption. With the destruction of this wealth consumption has now been drastically curtailed. The question is not one of consumer sentiments. Consumers are not spending for the same reason that homeless people don’t spend: they lack the money.

The $1tn plus in lost demand is the cause of the downturn and there is no obvious basis for replacing it. The stimulus package pushed a bit more than $300 billion a year into the economy, but close to half of this was offset by cutbacks and tax increases at the state and local level. The negative impact of the state and local actions will intensify after 1 July when most new fiscal years begin.

There will be additional downward pressure on consumption coming from further drops in house prices. The first-time buyer tax credit, along with other supports for the housing market, temporarily reversed the drop in prices. However, with the end of the initial credit, and now the expiration of the extended credit on 30 April, house prices are again falling and are likely to drop at an accelerating rate in the second half of 2010. Purchase mortgage applications fell to their lowest level since April 1997last week, suggesting that the falloff in demand is likely to be substantial.

11)

What’s Holding Back Small Businesses? (NY Times)

The biggest single problem facing America’s small businesses isn’t taxes or overregulation. It’s low demand, according to a new report released by the National Federation of Independent Business.

Thirty-one percent of small businesses surveyed by the N.F.I.B. said that “poor sales” are their company’s “single most important problem.” The other options included were competition from large businesses, insurance costs and availability, financing and interest rates, government requirements and red tape, inflation, quality of labor, cost of labor and “other.”

…

Additionally, lending help for small businesses is another key stimulative policy in play, and meanwhile financial and interest rate concerns are a comparably negligible concern.

By contrast, the share of companies saying the poor sales is their main challenge has about doubled since the downturn began.

12)

‘Forbes’ Rich List: Number Of New Billionaires Reflects Global Recovery (Radio Free Europe)

The editor in chief of “Forbes” magazine, Steve Forbes, says the number of new billionaires in the world is a sure sign that the global economy is recovering from its brush with disaster.

“The number of billionaires has gone from 793 last year to 1,011 this year, almost to where it was [in] the record level of 2008,” Forbes told reporters at a new conference in New York to announce the magazine’s annual ranking. “The overall net worth of these billionaires is $3.6 trillion, up from $2.4 trillion just a year ago — a 50 percent increase.”

In 2009, the global financial crisis wiped out some 300 members of the dollar-billionaires club. This year, 164 of them are back on the list, joined by 97 first-time members.

The average worth of the world’s billionaires is now $3.5 billion, or $500 million more than last year. These fantastically rich citizens come from 55 countries — two of which have never before made the list: Finland and Pakistan.

The biggest surprise on the list is the world’s new richest man. With a personal fortune of $53.5 billion, Carlos Slim Helu, a mobile phone mogul from Mexico, has dethroned Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who held the top spot for more than 10 years.

Gates is now second, followed by American investor Warren Buffet. Gates and Buffet have each donated billions of dollars to worthy causes, which decreased their fortunes and opened the door for Slim’s rise.

Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law

Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.

Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.

“The gentleman that’s the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger,” Nichols said. “He’s a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman.”

What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.

“They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community,” Nichols said, “the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate.”

But Nichols wasn’t buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?

“They talked like they didn’t have any doubt they could fill it,” Nichols said.

That’s because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona’s immigration law.

Behind-The-Scenes Effort To Draft, Pass The Law

The law is being challenged in the courts. But if it’s upheld, it requires police to lock up anyone they stop who cannot show proof they entered the country legally.

When it was passed in April, it ignited a fire storm. Protesters chanted about racial profiling. Businesses threatened to boycott the state.

Supporters were equally passionate, calling it a bold positive step to curb illegal immigration.

But while the debate raged, few people were aware of how the law came about.

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.

Democracy is dead, and greed killed it.

President Obama utilized his appearance at the United Nations this week to make an impassioned call to Israelis, Palestinians and their allies to seize the opportunity to advance peace and end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The President specifically called on Israel to extend its freeze on settlement construction, due to expire on Sunday. Indeed, it is crucial that this freeze be extended if the fledgling peace process is to have any chance of success. If it is not, the Palestinians would find it nearly impossible to justify continued negotiations, with their public already skeptical of the process and having learned the danger of conducting a peace process alongside settlement expansion.

Since the first negotiations began in Madrid in 1991, the West Bank settlement population has tripled. The settlers are dispersed among over 121 settlements and about one hundred outposts. From a bird’s eye view of the West Bank, settlements occupy a very small part of the West Bank – less than 1 percent of the land is actually built-up settlements. Yet this belies the extent of their reach. The municipal boundaries of settlements are over 9 percent of the West Bank – and all these are areas Palestinians are forbidden to enter without a special permit. Their regional councils encompass vast swaths of land; fully 42 percent of the West Bank is under settlement control.

The implications for property rights, both collective and individual, are perhaps self-evident. Despite Israeli claims that it obeyed the pre-existing land laws, over 20 percent of settlements are built on privately-owned Palestinian land. Israel seized land for settlements in the West Bank in a legally and politically manipulative way, designed to circumvent legal rights such as due process as well as specific Israeli obligations during prior peace negotiations. Even those lands “legally” seized for public use are held for the settler public and are not available for Palestinian construction or economic development. One of many striking examples: the Dead Sea abuts Israel and the West Bank, as well as Jordan. While hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to the hotels on the Israeli part of the Dead Sea, Palestinians earn no income from this unique natural wonder. In fact, the entire area around the Dead Sea belongs to a settlement regional council, and Palestinians are not allowed access even for a picnic. Certainly they cannot develop tourist sites there.

But the implications of settlements extend far beyond land issues. Settlements bring with them a host of hardships for Palestinians, ranging from restrictions on movement to obstacles to sewage treatment. They dictated the winding route of the Separation Barrier deep in the West Bank which in turn causes more hardships. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this landscape is the entrenchment of two completely separate and discriminatory legal systems in a single area. In some cases, Palestinians and Israelis literally live side by side, yet the former are governed by military law while the latter enjoy all the benefits of Israeli democracy. This discrimination is manifest in almost every sphere of life: access to justice, due process, protection from violence, planning and building codes, access to water, and much more.

Israel repeatedly promised to halt construction in settlements. This was explicitly part of the 2003 Road Map agreed with the Quartet as well as the 2007 Annapolis conference under the Bush administration. Despite this, settlements continued to grow, and at a much faster rate than the Israeli population as whole. While Israel argued that this “natural growth” cannot be stopped, it also continued to provide a myriad of financial benefits to encourage Israelis to move to settlements, including free preschools, a long school day, housing and mortgage subsidies, grants and subsidies for industry and agriculture, tax breaks and government assistance to municipalities to cover their debts. It is no wonder that in 2008 fully 20 percent of settlement growth was the result of migration from Israel proper.

The settlement-freeze imposed by the Netanyahu government ten months ago was only partial. It did however slow development in many settlements, and demonstrated to the Palestinians some good faith on the part of the Israeli government. On Sunday, this freeze expires, just as the renewed peace talks are getting off the ground. And the big question is whether Netanyahu will renew the freeze.

Everyone knows that settlements are a political, diplomatic issue, central to the negotiations – in fact, the Palestinians threaten that the talks will not get started at all unless the settlement freeze is extended. Yet settlements are also a violation of Israel’s legal obligations and a daily thorn in the side of hundreds of thousands of people who want to build a house, farm their land, travel freely, keep their children safe from violence, and have clean water and treated sewage — in short, to live in dignity. In order for the peace process to have any chance of succeeding, these issues must also have a place at the table.

It should be no surprise that the Israeli government directly subsidizes and protects (brutally and frequently, through the I.D.F.) illegal Israeli settlers. It is in fact a nation of settlers, legal in the territorial state of Israel only by dint early ethnic cleansing and U.S. and British patronage and illegal in Palestinian territories (immoral in both). This is the reason the Israeli government cannot allow itself to budge even on the clear-cut impediment to peace that the settlements represent–one, strife of any kind (such as that engendered by the settlements) allows the government to further take control of life in Palestine; two, any retreat on the issue of settlements presents a slippery slope. If Israel has no business expanding into Palestinian land, then why does Israel even exist? A fully rational reduction in settlements would see not only the expansionist Israelis moved, but the entire population forced into the Mediterranean Sea. This is in fact the only way that any Palestinian will secure the right to return to their homes and land. Israel’s refusal to budge is, from a purely self-interested standpoint (the only standpoint in Israel), a matter of survival. This also explains why any criticism of Israel is met with immediate cries of “biased!”, “anti-Semitic!”, and “terrorists!”, much in the way a spoiled dauphin might struggle to explain a broken palace window to his nanny.

Here are several articles which can be reinterpreted in light of this known intractability:

1)

Children Behind Israeli Bars (Al-Jazeera)

With a timid smile, 16 year-old N twiddles his thumbs as he tells me his frightening story. Israeli soldiers came to his house a year ago at dawn. He was blindfolded, handcuffed, and taken away without any explanation.

When the military jeep finally stopped, the soldiers took him to a room with chairs. They began cursing at him and using derogatory terms against his mother and female siblings. The soldiers then put sunglasses on N’s eyes and a female headband on his head.

“They took pictures of me; they were laughing,” he told me.

“Aren’t you going to confess?” the soldiers kept asking him… “To what?” he would reply. “To throwing stones,” they would say.

Afraid of ending up in jail, N refused to confess to the alleged offence.

“I kept telling them: I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything,” he recalled.

Until this point, N’s story sounded familiar to someone like me, who’s been covering the conflict in Palestine for years. Beatings, humiliation, and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees, including minors, are regularly documented by human rights organisations.

But N’s story was just beginning.

“There was a dog barking outside the room… The soldier told me he would bring it in to f**k me if I didn’t confess… I was so scared… The guy then took out a stick; he whipped it forward and it got longer. He told his friends, who were looking on and laughing at me: “This boy doesn’t want to talk. Let’s pull down his pants so I can shove this stick up his a**.”

“I tried to hold on to the chair; he kept poking me, groping my privates with the stick, trying to get me off the chair,” N said while avoiding eye contact with me.

The Palestine Chapter of Defence for Children International (DCI) has collected 100 sworn affidavits this year of Palestinian children, under the age of 18, who said they were mistreated by their Israeli interrogators. Fourteen of them say they were either sexually abused or threatened with sexual assault, including rape, if they didn’t confess to what their interrogators accused them of.

N is one of these children… His confession landed him a three month sentence in an Israeli jail.

Because of the stigma attached, there are fears that many more children may have suffered similar abuse but have been afraid to come forward.

N kept telling me he felt awkward talking about his experience. “It feels bad to talk about this. I mean, what a thing to talk about… It’s shameful,” he told me.

So I asked this shy teenager why he mustered the courage to speak out. “I want justice,” he said. “I wish these people could be tried in a court so that they don’t do this to other guys.”

N told me that at prison, he met many boys who had suffered similar abuse.

Israeli forces arrest approximately 700 Palestinian minors every year. During interrogation, these minors are not allowed to have contact with their lawyers or families. Human rights organisations say the alleged abuses happen during this period of isolation.

“These practices are meant to break the children. In a way, when you break the spirit of these children, you’re breaking the spirit of the nation,” Rifaat Kassis, the director general of DCI, told me.

And it’s because of the powerful impact sexual abuse has on these children that DCI has sounded the alarm at the highest possible international levels. The organisation has communicated affidavits to the Special UN Rapporteur on Torture, hoping to galvanise enough international pressure to bring these abuses to an end.

This step is a reflection of the stonewalling human rights organisations usually face from Israeli authorities.

“Most of the time, the Israelis, they just dismiss our allegations and say this is not correct, this is not true; so if this is the case, we challenge them to record these interrogations and let the interrogations happen with the lawyer,” Kassis told me.

This time was no different. We tried to request a response from the Israeli army but all our requests were turned down. The army told us they would only comment if they had more specific details about these cases, which is a demand the children’s lawyers say could jeopardise their clients.

2)

Pro-settler group launches “Hebron aid flotilla” (Salon)

It’s fairly well-known that U.S. groups raise millions of tax-deductible dollars each year to support Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. But here’s the most brazen fundraising effort we’ve encountered in a while: the Brooklyn-based Hebron Fund is holding a dinner cruise that will leave from Chelsea Piers in Manhattan next month, and the group is dubbing the event the “Hebron Aid Flotilla.”

That name, of course, is a play on the Gaza aid flotilla, the boats carrying humanitaritan aid that were raided in May by Israeli commandoes, who killed nine of the passengers.

Those participating in the Hebron Aid Flotilla select from donation levels ranging from $100 to $100,000 in order to “raise our voices and take out our checkbooks in protest against the evil discrimination against the Jews of Hebron and Eretz Yisrael.” The main honoree and keynote speaker, will be Caroline Glick, the right-wing Jerusalem Post editor.

The Jews of Hebron are no ordinary settlers:

Today there are between 500 and 600 settlers living in the center of the city, guarded by 4,000 Israeli troops. They live among nearly 200,000 Palestinians.

The opulence of the recent Grand Hyatt event in New York stands in stark contrast to the brutal reality of life for the Palestinians who must live amid the settlements supported by the Hebron Fund’s charity. Like most of the West Bank and the entirety of Gaza, the Israeli occupation has transformed Palestinian Hebron into an open-air prison in which any sort of normal life is impossible. Hebron’s Palestinian citizens regularly endure round-the-clock curfews. They are effectively under house arrest, sometimes for weeks at a time. Violence at the hands of settlers is also a fact of Palestinian life in Hebron.

In its fundraising pitch, the Hebron Fund boasts that tax-deductible donations to the group will work against U.S. government policy:

2) Support for settlements is tax deductible! The fact that this administration may decide to fly in the face of US law and commitment does not negate the tax deduction on donations to Jewish causes on the West Bank. Even the NY Times wrote: “…the tax code encourages citizens to support nonprofit groups that may diverge from official policy, as long as their missions are educational, religious or charitable.”

They’re right — that Times article is right here.

3)

Israeli presence on Palestinian land ‘irreversible’ (BBC)

A UN human rights rapporteur has said continued settlement construction will probably make Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land irreversible.

Richard Falk said the peace process aimed at creating an independent, sovereign Palestinian state therefore appeared to be based on an illusion.

He said the UN, the US and Israel had failed to uphold Palestinians’ rights.

Israeli officials said Mr Falk’s report on the Palestinian territories was biased and served a political agenda.

Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

‘De-facto annexation’

In a report for the UN General Assembly, Mr Falk said Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had become so extensive it amounted to de-facto annexation of Palestinian land.

He said this undercut assumptions behind UN Security Council resolutions which said Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967 was temporary and reversible.

Such assumptions are the basis for the current peace process aimed at creating an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

This now appears to be an illusion, said Mr Falk.

Israel said the report was utterly biased and served a political agenda, criticising its author for making no mention of what it called Palestinian terrorist attacks.

4)

Leading rabbi encourages IDF soldiers to use Palestinian human shields (Haaretz)

A leading rabbi in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar has encouraged Israel Defense Forces soldiers to make use of the outlawed “neighbor procedure” while operating in Palestinian areas.

“Anything you do to keep the war tough is permissible, and obligatory according to the torah,” Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, headmaster of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva, wrote in fliers distributed to his students.

“According to true Jewish values, your lives come before those of the enemy, whether he is a soldier or a civilian under protection. Therefore, you are forbidden from endangering your own life for the sake of the enemy, not even for a civilian,” Shapira declared.

Shapira was arrested over the summer for encouraging Jews to kill Gentiles in his book “The King’s Torah.” The preface of the book, which was published in November, states that it is forbidden to kill non-Jews – but the book then apparently describes the context in which it is permitted to do so.

The rabbi’s decree came less than a month after the southern command military court convicted two IDF soldiers of using human shields during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip, in the winter of 2008-2009.

The soldiers were convicted of offenses including inappropriate behavior and overstepping authority for ordering an 11-year-old Palestinian to search bags suspected to have been booby trapped.

The conviction is the first such conviction for soldiers who made use of human shields during an operation, an act strictly prohibited in IDF protocols.

5)

Israeli settlement building surges as US pushes for a new freeze (Christian Science Monitor)

In the two and a half weeks since Israel’s settlement freeze expired, there’s been a surge in construction on new West Bank homes, dimming prospect the Palestinians will agree to resume peace talks.

“The resumption at this scale makes it more complicated to make arrangement that will allow a resumption of talks,” says Palestinian government spokesman Ghassan Khatib. “They are putting more sticks in the wheels.”

In Beitar Illit, one of the biggest and fastest growing settlements, construction crews have started working on 100 new units previously stifled by the moratorium. As iron rods sprout up amid newly poured cement foundations, bulldozers are carving an entry road to an empty hill slated as a new housing development.

Monitors who toured dozens of building sites throughout the West Bank over the past week estimate work has begun on about 500 housing units – one-fourth the number of housing starts for all of 2008.

“A few hundred in two weeks is a lot,” says Dror Etkes, a housing monitor who opposes expanded building, as he navigates from memory the construction sites at the perimeter of settlements. “Obviously [the settlers] felt that they had to start fast to have facts on the ground again in case there will be a new freeze so they’ll have enough construction. This is the game.”

The pace of the new building significantly dilutes the impact of a US proposal to defuse tensions over settlement expansion and get peace talks moving again. The US and Israel have discussed a two- to three-month extension of the moratorium on housing starts that expired on Sept. 26. But a new freeze will have no significance for the Palestinians if the hundreds of new units begun in the last two weeks aren’t stopped as well.

“This 60-day extension is basically nonsense,” says Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli Consul General to New York, who sees little prospect of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reaching common ground on a peace deal. “Logic dictates if you are going to delineate a border, you stop building now, or at an early stage in the negotiations, you agree on a border” – and thus agree on where it is permissible to build.

Ideological settlements see surge in construction

The freeze is also having an unintended consequence: building in the West Bank is slowly shifting from large settlements near Israel’s border to smaller far-flung settlements that Israel is expected to evacuate if a peace deal is reached.

In the rush to build both before and after the 10-month moratorium, settler construction has surged on medium- and small-sized projects overseen by ideologically driven builders. Those require less bureaucracy than large-scale building.

6)

Pope Urged to Denounce Archbishop’s ‘Political Stunt’ (YNet)

Jewish groups call on Benedict XVI to condemn remarks denying Jews’ link to Land of Israel. ‘These latest moves will damage interfaith relations and embolden anti-Semites and terrorists,’ Simon Wiesenthal Center says

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is urging Pope Benedict XVI to immediately denounce a statement by Melkite Catholic Archbishop Cyrille Salim Bustros at a Vatican Synod on the Middle East wherein he denied the Jewish people’s link to the Land of Israel.

The archbishop asserted, “We Christians cannot speak about the promised land for the Jewish people. There is no longer a chosen people. All men and women of all countries have become the chosen people. The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians.”

He added that “the justification of Israel’s occupation of the land of Palestine cannot be based on sacred scriptures.”

“This political stunt, wrapped in theological garb, not only insults every Jew but flies in the face of the statements and actions of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, both who have visitedIsrael and expressed solidarity with her people,” charged Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, dean and founder and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, respectively, who have had audiences with both Pontiffs.

“The archbishop’s statement comes at the end of the conference wherein the so-called ‘Palestine Kairos Document’ – which openly denies the right of Israel to be a Jewish state – was presented at the Vatican for the first time.

“These developments demand immediate action by the Pope. Hopes for peace in the Middle East will only come when both sides recognize the rights of the others. These latest moves, left unchallenged, will damage interfaith relations and embolden anti-Semites and terrorists,” they concluded.

Another Jewish group, B’nai B’rith International, said it was deeply concerned that the just-concluded Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops indicates unsettling views regarding Jews and Israel among Catholic clergy and laity in the Arab world.

B’nai B’rith said it was greatly disappointed that rather than promoting reconciliation and self-reflection in the region, the assembly focused on amplifying Arab political positions and narratives on the Jewish state.

Anti-Semitic incidents rise sharply in 2009, study says

The number of anti-Semitic incidents around the world more than doubled from 2008 to 2009, according to a Tel Aviv University study.

In 2009, 1,129 such incidents were recorded — an increase of more than 100 percent from the 559 incidents noted in 2008, according to the study, released Sunday by the university’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism.

“In addition, many more hundreds of threats, insults, graffiti signs and slogans and demonstrations featuring virulently anti-Semitic content were registered, sometimes resulting in violence,” the study said.

Researchers documented only those incidents that showed “clear anti-Semitic content and intention,” according to the study. However, the actual number might be higher, as some Jews may not have reported incidents, the study said.

The sharp increase can, at least partially, be attributed to Israel’s incursion into Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.

The 22-day operation “triggered a wave of anti-Semitic manifestations that swept the world,” the study said. “This trend subsided in February and March, but even during the months that followed this peak of anti-Semitic incidents, the baseline remained higher than before the war.

“In fact, there has been a rising trend since the early 1990s, even in years when there was no significant Middle East trigger. Thus, the origins of the 2009 escalation in anti-Semitic expressions must lie deeper.”

Israel takes the good name of the Jewish faith and throws it under the bus in order to justify expansionist and racist policies which would give any real follower of a peaceful religious doctrine pause. Yet here again, the danger of religious justification presents itself, and we must ask why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are such easy prey for subversion in the hands of demagogues and hatemongers? The answer is simple: like Zionism, religious faith is all the more worrying because it is built around an explicitly and happily anti-rational message.

After Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing the lies, brutality and inhumanity that drove America’s role in the Vietnam War, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger infamously plotted to smear his reputation and destroy his credibility.  As History Commons puts it in its richly documented summary of those events:

President Nixon authorizes the creation of a “special investigations unit,” later nicknamed the “Plumbers,” to root out and seal media leaks. The first target is Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press (see June 13, 1971); the team will burglarize the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, in hopes ofsecuring information that the White House can use to smear Ellsberg’s character and undermine his credibility . . . .

Nixon aide John Ehrlichman passes on the president’s recommendations to the heads of the “Plumbers,” Egil Krogh and David Young (see July 20, 1971), regarding “Pentagon Papers” leaker Daniel Ellsberg (see Late June-July 1971). . . . Within days, Keogh and Young will give Ehrlichman a memo detailing the results of investigations into Ellsberg anda dozen of Ellsberg’s friends, family members, and colleagues. . . .

This weekend, WikiLeaks released over 400,000 classified documents of the Iraq War detailing genuinely horrific facts about massive civilian death, U.S. complicity in widespread Iraqi torture, systematic government deceit over body counts, and the slaughter of civilians by American forces about which Daniel Ellsberg himself said, as the New York Times put it: “many of the civilian deaths there could be counted as murder.”

Predictably, just as happened with Ellsberg, there is now a major, coordinated effort underway to smear WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and to malign his mental health — all as a means of distracting attention away from these highly disturbing revelations and to impede the ability of WikiLeaks to further expose government secrets and wrongdoing with its leaks.  But now, the smear campaign is led not by Executive Branch officials, but by members of the establishment media.  As the intelligence community reporter Tim Shorrock wrote today on Twitter:  ”When Dan Ellsberg leaked [the] Pentagon Papers, Nixon’s henchmen tried to destroy his reputation. Today w/Wikileaks & Assange, media does the job.”

Yesterday, Assange walked out of an interview with CNN, which he thought had been arranged to discuss the significance of the Iraq War revelations, because the CNN ”reporter” seemed interested in asking only about petty, vapid rumors about Assange himself, not the substance of the leaks.  The Nation‘s Greg Mitchell summarized that interview this way:  ”Assange to CNN: ‘Do you want to talk about deaths of 104,000 people or my personal life?’”  CNN’s answer could not have been clearer:  the latter, definitely.

But the low point of this smear campaign was led by The New York Times’ John Burns, who authored a sleazy hit piece on Assange — filled with every tawdry, scurrilous tabloid rumor about him — that was (and still is) prominently featured in the NYT, competing for attention with the stories about the leaked documents themselves, and often receiving more attention.  Here’s the current iteration of the front page of the NYT website, with the Assange story receiving top billing:

It shouldn’t be surprising that Burns is filling the role played in 1971 by Henry Kissinger and John Ehrichman.  His courageous and high-quality war reporting from Iraq notwithstanding, it’s long been clear from his U.S.-glorifying accounts that Burns was one of the media’s most enthusiastic supporters of the occupation of Iraq.  That’s why even theNYT-hating necons regularly lavished him (along with Judy Miller’s partner, Michael Gordon) with uncharacteristic praise (National Review‘s Michael Ledeen:  ”Rich [Lowry, Editor of National Review] and I share an admiration for Michael Gordon, one of three (along with Burns and Filkens) NYT reporters who really work hard to get the Iraqi story right”).  To justify and excuse his and his media colleagues’ gullibility about Iraq, Burns wrote two months ago — falsely — that “there were few, if any, who foresaw the extent of the violence that would follow or the political convulsion it would cause in Iraq, America and elsewhere” and that “[w]e could not know then, though if we had been wiser we might have guessed, the scale of the toll the invasion would unleash.”

The Iraq War is John Burns’ war, and for the crime of making that war look bad, Julian Assange must have his character smeared and his psychiatric health maligned.  Burns — along with his co-writer Ravi Somaiya — is happy to viciously perform that function:

Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. . . . He demands that hisdwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends. . . .

Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeurunmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood. . . .

Effectively, as Mr. Assange pursues his fugitive’s life, his leadership is enforced over the Internet. Even remotely, his style isimperious. . . .

When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. “I don’t like your tone,” he said, according to a transcript. “If it continues, you’re out.” . . . In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. “He is not in his right mind,”he said.

Mr. Assange’s detractors also accuse him of pursuing a vendetta against the United States. In London, Mr. Assange said America was an increasingly militarized society and a threat to democracy. Moreover, he said, “we have been attacked by the United States, so we are forced into a position where we must defend ourselves.”

Richard Nixon and his plumbers could have only dreamed about being able to dispatch journalists to dutifully smear whistle-blowers in this manner.  And all of that is totally independent of the lengthy discussion which Burns predictably includes of the unproven rape and harassment allegations against Assange.  Apparently, faced with hundreds of thousands of documents vividly highlighting stomach-turning war crimes and abuses — death squads and widespread torture and civilian slaughter all as part of a war he admired for years and which his newspaper did more than any other single media outlet to enable — John Burns and his NYT editors decided that the most pressing question from this leak is this:  what’s Julian Assange really like?

“Erratic and imperious behavior.”  “Delusional grandeur. “Imperious.” “A vendetta against the United States.” “Not in his right mind.”   Burns didn’t even bother to break into Assange’s psychiatrist’s office to smear the whistle-blower as a psychologically ill, America-hating subversive and paranoid narcissist.  He just passed on snide rumors and accusations from disgruntled associates and — presto — the Nixonian smear job is complete.  Of course, even for a borderline-sociopath, the guilt that one must experience for having enabled and cheered on a War that led to the amount of human suffering evident in these documents must be immense.  The temptation to smear the messenger is undoubtedly a strong one.  But no matter how much distracting sleaze Burns and his newspaper wallow in and spew at Assange, that damn spot won’t come out.

What makes Burns’ role here all the more ironic is that he was one of the media ring-leaders who attacked and condemned Michael Hastings for revealing, in Rolling Stone, the truth about the mindset of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was running America’s war in Afghanistan.  In the wake of the McChrystal article and resignation, Burns went on right-wing talk radio with Hugh Hewitt and blasted Hastings for violating some unspoken code — that seems to exist only in Burns’ head — that calls for people like Gen. McChrystal to be protected by journalists from truths that may harm them.  Said Burns of Hastings’ article:

I think it’s very unfortunate that it has impacted, and will impact so adversely, on what had been pretty good military/media relations. I think, you know, well, this will be debated down the years, the whole issue as to how it came about that Rolling Stone had that kind of access. My unease, if I can be completely frank about this, is that from my experience of traveling and talking to generals, McChrystal, Petraeus and many, many others over the past few years, is that the old on-the-record/off-the-record standard doesn’t really meet the case, which is to say that by the very nature of the time you spend with the generals, the same could be said to be true of the time that a reporter spends with anybody in the public eye. There are moments which just don’t fit that formula. There are long, informal periods traveling on helicopters over hostile territory with the generals chatting over their headset, bunking down for the night side by side on a piece of rough-hewn concrete. You build up a kind of trust. It’s not explicit, it’s just there. And my feeling is that it’s the responsibility of the reporter to judge in those circumstances what is fairly reportable, and what is not, and to go beyond that, what it is necessary to report.

So when it comes to top Generals running a war, it’s the duty of reporters to conceal from the public statements made by the General, even when they’re not off-the-record and even when they’re clearly relevant, based on the so-called “trust” that a reporter and military officials “build up” together.  But when it comes to people like Julian Assange — who are not prosecuting American wars but exposing the truth about them (which is supposed to be a journalist’s job) — no such discretion is warranted.  There, everything is fair game, including posing as an amateur psychiatrist issuing diagnoses of mental illness and passing on the most scurrilous accusations about personality, character and psyche.

None of this is to say that WikiLeaks and Assange shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny.  Anyone playing a significant role in political life should be, including them.  But Julian Assange’s personality traits have absolutely nothing to do with the infinitely more significant revelations of this leak.  They shed zero light on these documents, the authenticity of which is not in question.  Focusing on the tabloid aspects of Assange’s personal life can have no effect — and no purpose — other than to distract public attention away from the heinous revelations about this war and America’s role in it, and to cripple WikiLeaks’ ability to secure and disseminate future leaks.

It’s not hard to see why The New York Times, CNN and so many other establishment media outlets are eager to do that.  Serving the Government’s interests, siding with government and military officials, and attacking government critics is what they do.  That’s their role.  That’s what makes them the “establishment media.”  Beyond that, the last thing they want is renewed recognition of what an evil travesty the attack on Iraq was, given the vital role they know they played in helping to bring it about and sustain it for all those years (that’s the same reason establishment journalists, almost by consensus, opposed any investigations into the Bush crimes they ignored, when they weren’t cheering them on).  And by serving as the 2010 version of the White House Plumbers — acting as attack dogs against the Pentagon’s enemies — they undoubtedly buy themselves large amounts of good will with those in power, always their overarching goal.  It is indeed quite significant and revealing that the John Ehrlichmans and Henry Kissingers of today are found at America’s largest media outlets.  Thanks to them, the White House doesn’t even need to employ its own smear artists.

It is not only the function of creating hit pieces to delegitimize the source of inconvenient revelations of government wrongdoing that have been privatized. The forces of fascism and capital have realized that it is easier to privatize their evil—to pass it off through layers of plausible deniability to mercenaries who are themselves protected by a lack of clear jurisdiction—than it is to commit it themselves. This is why there is a move toward privatized prisons (which are no more efficient than government-run facilities despite housing less dangerous inmates), mercenaries and war contractors (which overwhelmingly operate in an excessively brutal and fraudulent way), charter schools (which act as a method of de facto segregation and perform no better than public schools, while being more exclusive), infrastructure and water services privatization (a disaster–the latter especially–in each and every instance it has been attempted in the U.S. and abroad), and even voting (see the notoriously insecure machines provided by Diebold, now Premier Election Solutions).

This dilution of accountability is modeled on the military command structure, which I explained in detail in God and Whose Army?:

While on tank patrol through the narrow streets of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, Pfc. Clifton Hicks was given an order. Abu Ghraib had become a “free-fire zone,” Hicks was told, and no “friendlies” or civilians remained in the area. “Game on. All weapons free,” his captain said. Upon that command, Hicks’s unit opened a furious fusillade, firing wildly into cars, at people scurrying for cover, at anything that moved. Sent in to survey the damage, Hicks found the area littered with human and animal corpses, including women and children, but he saw no military gear or weapons of any kind near the bodies. In the aftermath of the massacre, Hicks was told that his unit had killed 700-800 “enemy combatants.” But he knew the dead were not terrorists or insurgents; they were innocent Iraqis. “I will agree to swear to that till the day I die,” he said. “I didn’t see one enemy on that operation.”

While our soldier has not likely had any direct participation in similar massacres, he has taken part in an ongoing atrocity. All troops are, in a sense, Winter Soldiers. A cognizance and open admission of their moral culpability would do much to dispel the hero myth which has risen around the United States military and which renders those who take part in illicit wars above criticism (both by their comrades in military tribunals and by Americans at large). The soldier-as-hero myth implicitly disconnects the war from those who are fighting it, and hampers any real criticism of the war itself. As is common in cases of specific atrocities, it shifts blame by passing the buck as far as it must go in order to reach an administrator who is effectively beyond reproach. The widespread lionization of soldiers is the first step in an exhausting and disillusioning odyssey up the chain of command, which ends at the far-removed and effectively unassailable Commander in Chief. President Truman famously displayed a plaque on his deck which read “The buck stops here,” yet he never suffered any consequences for the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians, despite the already-disproportionate devastation wrought by Allied firebombing of Japanese cities and a Japanese government preparing to offer a truce. The American public continues to support this decision overwhelmingly to this day.

Again, from God and Whose Army?:

This formulation of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War era has had devastating implications for those would-be self-determining nations (including, perhaps most visibly, South Vietnam) which were caught in the middle of the ideological struggle. Under one of its most recent manifestations–the Reagan Doctrine–the U.S. supported and trained oppressive right-wing regimes throughout Latin America, Asia and Africa in the name of combating Marxism and Soviet expansionism, overtly in some cases through the use of the U.S. Armed Forces, and covertly in others through the use of C.I.A. assets and personnel. In Latin America, this was an extension of Operation Condor, the violently anti-communist movement supported by Nixon- and Ford-era Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.By and large, the doctrine was enforced indirectly and without active fighting by U.S. troops; the role of the military was focused more on material aid and instruction of so-called “freedom fighters” at the Army-run School of the Americas,as part of a paradigmatic shift away from direct accountability and toward twice-removed complicity in the form of proxy wars financed by America and its allies. The move toward private military firms can be cast as the logical next step in this process–even the transportation of detainees to torture sites has been outsourced to a Boeing subsidiary.

Tracking Loans Through a Firm That Holds Millions

Judge Walt Logan had seen enough. As a county judge in Florida, he had 28 cases pending in which an entity called MERS wanted to foreclose on homeowners even though it had never lent them any money.

MERS, a tiny data-management company, claimed the right to foreclose, but would not explain how it came to possess the mortgage notes originally issued by banks. Judge Logan summoned a MERS lawyer to the Pinellas County courthouse and insisted that that fundamental question be answered before he permitted the drastic step of seizing someone’s home.

“You don’t think that’s reasonable?” the judge asked.

“I don’t,” the lawyer replied. “And in fact, not only do I think it’s not reasonable, often that’s going to be impossible.”

Judge Logan had entered the murky realm of MERS. Although the average person has never heard of it, MERS — short for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems — holds 60 million mortgages on American homes, through a legal maneuver that has saved banks more than $1 billion over the last decade but made life maddeningly difficult for some troubled homeowners.

Created by lenders seeking to save millions of dollars on paperwork and public recording fees every time a loanchanges hands, MERS is a confidential computer registry for trading mortgage loans. From an office in the Washington suburbs, it played an integral, if unsung, role in the proliferation of mortgage-backed securities that fueled the housing boom. But with the collapse of the housing market, the name of MERS has been popping up on foreclosure notices and on court dockets across the country, raising many questions about the way this controversial but legal process obscures the tortuous paths of mortgage ownership.

If MERS began as a convenience, it has, in effect, become a corporate cloak: no matter how many times a mortgage is bundled, sliced up or resold, the public record often begins and ends with MERS. In the last few years, banks have initiated tens of thousands of foreclosures in the name of MERS — about 13,000 in the New York region alone since 2005 — confounding homeowners seeking relief directly from lenders and judges trying to help borrowers untangle loan ownership. What is more, the way MERS obscures loan ownership makes it difficult for communities to identify predatory lenders whose practices led to the high foreclosure rates that have blighted some neighborhoods.

In Brooklyn, an elderly homeowner pursuing fraud claims had to go to court to learn the identity of the bank holding his mortgage note, which was concealed in the MERS system. In distressed neighborhoods of Atlanta, where MERS appeared as the most frequent filer of foreclosures, advocates wanting to engage lenders “face a challenge even finding someone with whom to begin the conversation,” according to a reportby NeighborWorks America, a community development group.

To a number of critics, MERS has served to cushion banks from the fallout of their reckless lending practices.

“I’m convinced that part of the scheme here is to exhaust the resources of consumers and their advocates,” said Marie McDonnell, a mortgage analyst in Orleans, Mass., who is a consultant for lawyers suing lenders. “This system removes transparency over what’s happening to these mortgage obligations and sows confusion, which can only benefit the banks.”

A recent visitor to the MERS offices in Reston, Va., found the receptionist answering a telephone call from a befuddled borrower: “I’m sorry, ma’am, we can’t help you with your loan.” MERS officials say they frequently get such calls, and they offer a phone line andWeb page where homeowners can look up the actual servicer of their mortgage.

In an interview, the president of MERS, R. K. Arnold, said that his company had benefited not only banks, but also millions of borrowers who could not have obtained loans without the money-saving efficiencies it brought to the mortgage trade. He said that far from posing a hurdle for homeowners, MERS had helped reduce mortgage fraud and imposed order on a sprawling industry where, in the past, lenders might have gone out of business and left no contact information for borrowers seeking assistance.

“We’re not this big bad animal,” Mr. Arnold said. “This crisis that we’ve had in the mortgage business would have been a lot worse without MERS.”

About 3,000 financial services firms pay annual fees for access to MERS, which has 44 employees and is owned by two dozen of the nation’s largest lenders, including Citigroup,JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. It was the brainchild of the Mortgage Bankers Association, along with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the mortgage finance giants, who produced a white paper in 1993 on the need to modernize the trading of mortgages.

At the time, the secondary market was gaining momentum, and Wall Street banks and institutional investors were making millions of dollars from the creative bundling and reselling of loans. But unlike common stocks, whose ownership has traditionally been hidden, mortgage-backed securities are based on loans whose details were long available in public land records kept by county clerks, who collect fees for each filing. The “tyranny of these forms,” the white paper said, was costing the industry $164 million a year.

“Before MERS,” said John A. Courson, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association, “the problem was that every time those documents or a file changed hands, you had to file a paper assignment, and that becomes terribly debilitating.”

Although several courts have raised questions over the years about the secrecy afforded mortgage owners by MERS, the legality has ultimately been upheld. The issue has surfaced again because so many homeowners facing foreclosure are dealing with MERS.

Advocates for borrowers complain that the system’s secrecy makes it impossible to seek help from the unidentified investors who own their loans. Avi Shenkar, whose company, the GMA Modification Corporation in North Miami Beach, Fla., helps homeowners renegotiate mortgages, said loan servicers frequently argued that “investor guidelines” prevented them from modifying loan terms.

“But when you ask what those guidelines are, or who the investor is so you can talk to them directly, you can’t find out,” he said.

MERS has considered making information about secondary ownership of mortgages available to borrowers, Mr. Arnold said, but he expressed doubts that it would be useful. Banks appoint a servicer to manage individual mortgages so “investors are not in the business of dealing with borrowers,” he said. “It seems like anything that bypasses the servicer is counterproductive,” he added.

When foreclosures do occur, MERS becomes responsible for initiating them as the mortgage holder of record. But because MERS occupies that role in name only, the bank actually servicing the loan deputizes its employees to act for MERS and has its lawyers file foreclosures in the name of MERS.

The potential for confusion is multiplied when the high-tech MERS system collides with the paper-driven foreclosure process. Banks using MERS to consummate mortgage trades with “electronic handshakes” must later prove their legal standing to foreclose. But without the chain of title that MERS removed from the public record, banks sometimes recreate paper assignments long after the fact or try to replace mortgage notes lost in the securitization process.

This maneuvering has been attacked by judges, who say it reflects a cavalier attitude toward legal safeguards for property owners, and exploited by borrowers hoping to delay foreclosure. Judge Logan in Florida, among the first to raise questions about the role of MERS, stopped accepting MERS foreclosures in 2005 after his colloquy with the company lawyer. MERS appealed and won two years later, although it has asked banks not to foreclose in its name in Florida because of lingering concerns.

Last February, a State Supreme Court justice in Brooklyn, Arthur M. Schack, rejected a foreclosure based on a document in which a Bank of New York executive identified herself as a vice president of MERS. Calling her “a milliner’s delight by virtue of the number of hats she wears,” Judge Schack wondered if the banker was “engaged in a subterfuge.”

In Seattle, Ms. McDonnell has raised similar questions about bankers with dual identities and sloppily prepared documents, helping to delay foreclosure on the home of Darlene and Robert Blendheim, whose subprime lender went out of business and left a confusing paper trail.

“I had never heard of MERS until this happened,” Mrs. Blendheim said. “It became an issue with us, because the bank didn’t have the paperwork to prove they owned the mortgage and basically recreated what they needed.”

The avalanche of foreclosures — three million last year, up 81 percent from 2007 — has also caused unforeseen problems for the people who run MERS, who take obvious pride in their unheralded role as a fulcrum of the American mortgage industry.

In Delaware, MERS is facing a class-action lawsuit by homeowners who contend it should be held accountable for fraudulent fees charged by banks that foreclose in MERS’s name.

Sometimes, banks have held title to foreclosed homes in the name of MERS, rather than their own. When local officials call and complain about vacant properties falling into disrepair, MERS tries to track down the lender for them, and has also created a registry to locate property managers responsible for foreclosed homes.

“But at the end of the day,” said Mr. Arnold, president of MERS, “if that lawn is not getting mowed and we cannot find the party who’s responsible for that, I have to get out there and mow that lawn.”

See also the following for an even starker example:

Wall Street Is the New Tax Collector? Governments Relinquish Taxation Powers to Big Banks

Nearly a dozen major banks and hedge funds, anticipating quick profits from homeowners who fall behind on property taxes, are quietly plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into businesses that collect the debts, tack on escalating fees and threaten to foreclose on the homes of those who fail to pay.

The Wall Street investors, which include Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co., have purchased from local governments the right to collect delinquent taxes on several hundred thousand properties, many in distressed housing markets, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found.

In many cases, the banks and hedge funds created new companies to do their bidding. They gave the companies obscure, even whimsical names and used post office boxes as their addresses, masking Wall Street’s dominant new role as a surrogate tax collector.

In exchange for paying overdue real estate taxes, the investors gain legal powers from local governments to collect the debt and levy fees. At first, property owners may owe little more than a few hundred dollars, only to find their bills soaring into the thousands. In some jurisdictions, the new Wall Street tax collectors also chase debtors over other small bills, such as for water, sewer and sidewalk repair.

Some states allow the investors to tack on as much as 18 percent interest and a passel of legal fees and other charges. When property owners fail to make full payment, the investors can sue to foreclose – in some states within as little as six months.

In June, Bank of America snatched up liens on properties in Florida owned by low-income residents and nonprofit public interest groups, including a Salvation Army shelter, a preschool and a wildlife rescue group involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleanup, the Investigative Fund found in its examination. Bank of America also bought liens on properties of the wealthy, including a professional basketball star with the Los Angeles Lakers, Lamar Odom.

 

 

1)

U.S. defense industry girding for predicted slump (Reuters)

After years of predictions of a downturn that never materialized, U.S. defense companies are now bracing in earnest for leaner times, lower profit margins and tougher negotiations about government contracts.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has launched a major efficiency drive to trim $100 billion out of the Pentagon’s bloated overhead accounts from 2012 to 2016 to help avert cuts to modernization programs or funding for troops.

The Pentagon insists it expects to get growth of 1 percent after inflation in its overall budget in the fiscal 2012 budget request, despite cuts expected in other government accounts.

But much of that will be eaten up by rising personnel and health costs, leaving far less money for weapons programs than during years of double digit growth in defense spending after the September 11, 2001, hijacking attacks.

That has left industry executives with a growing sense of apprehension about the future, especially given the end of combat operations in Iraq and yawning deficits that have even some normally hawkish Republican lawmakers calling for cuts.

2)

US pushing $60bn Saudi arms deal (Al Jazeera)

The US government is charging ahead with a plan to sell $60bn worth of advanced aircraft and other sophisticated weapon systems to Saudi Arabia, in what is thought to be the largest US arms deal ever.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the administration of Barack Obama, the US president, was also in talks with the Saudis about naval and missile-defence upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more.

Under the deal, the US is also to expand Saudi Arabia’s ballistic-missile defences “to reduce the threat from Iranian rockets”, US officials were reported to have said. They also said that it was unclear how much that package would be worth, but it could be similar to one in the United Arab Emirates.

The Obama administration sees the sale as part of a broader policy aimed at supporting “Arab allies against Iran,” and is expected to notify the US congress about these plans in the upcoming weeks, the report said.

Job creator

The administration plans to frame the Saudi deal as a major job creator, supporting at least 75,000 jobs, according to company estimates.

This will come as a welcome boost to a job market that was shedding thousands of jobs every month as the Obama administration struggled with economic woes.

While pro-Israel US lawmakers have in the past voiced concerns about arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel’s fears were allayed because the fighter jets would not be equipped with the type of long-range systems that could threaten Israeli soil.

3)

US to give $2bn to Pakistan army (Al Jazeera)

The US has announced it will release a $2bn military aid package to Pakistan over a five-year period, as it pressed the Islamabad government to step up the fight against Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda affiliates there and in Afghanistan.

The administration of Barack Obama, the US president, will ask Congress for $2bn for Pakistan to purchase US-made arms, ammunition and accessories from 2012 to 2016.

Speaking alongside Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the US secretary of state, announced the plan in Washington on Friday.

“The United States has no stronger partner when it comes to counterterrorism efforts against the extremists who threaten us both than Pakistan,” said Clinton, who unveiled the plans at the end of the latest round of US-Pakistani strategic talks.

The new military aid replaces a similar but less valuable package that began in 2005 and expired on October 1.

It will complement $7.5bn in civilian assistance the administration has already committed to Pakistan over five years, some of which has been diverted to help the country deal with devastating floods.

Washington hopes the announcement of the new package will reassure Pakistan of the long-term US commitment to Pakistan’s military needs.

4)

Foreclosure funny business (Guardian)

Virtually everyone has had the experience of being forced to pay a late fee or a bank penalty because of some fine-print provision that we overlooked. Sometimes, begging by good customers can win forbearance, but usually we are held to the written terms of the contract, no matter how buried or convoluted the clause in question may be.

That is the way it works for the rest of us, but apparently this is not the way the banks do business, at least when those at the other end of the contract are ordinary homeowners. As a number of news reports have shown in recent weeks, banks have been carrying through foreclosures at a breakneck pace and freely ignoring the legal niceties required under the law, such as demonstrating clear ownership to the property being foreclosed.

The problem is that when mortgages got sliced and diced into various mortgage-backed securities, it became difficult to follow who actually held the title to the home. Often the bank that was servicing the mortgage did not actually have the title and may not even know where the title is. As a result, if a homeowner stopped paying their mortgage, the servicer may not be able to prove they actually have a claim to the property.

If the servicer followed the law on carrying through foreclosures then it would have to go through a costly and time-consuming process of getting its paperwork in order and ensuring that it actually did have possession of the title before going to a judge and getting a judgment that would allow them to take possession of the property. Instead, banks got in the habit of skirting the proper procedures and filling in forms inaccurately and improperly in order to take possession of properties.

GMAC, the former financing arm of General Motors and now called Ally Financial, has become the poster-child for these sorts of practices.Jeffrey Stephan, a leader of one of its foreclosure units, acknowledged that he had signed thousands of affidavits claiming that he had reviewed documents he had never seen.

In addition to being a major sub-prime lender during the heyday of the housing bubble, Ally Financial also has the notoriety of being primarilyowned by the federal government following its collapse last year. This fact may ensure greater accountability at Ally, but there is no reason to believe that its practices are qualitatively different than those of other servicers carrying through foreclosures. The basic point is that the banks foreclosing on homes don’t feel that they should be held to the letter of the law like ordinary people.

As we approach the two-year anniversary of Tarp, it is certainly understandable the big banks think the laws that apply to others don’t apply to them. After all, the lesson of Tarp was that when the banks got themselves into trouble with their reckless lending, the taxpayers would come to the rescue with whatever loans and guarantees were needed to keep them in business.

In fact, many of the bankers who were begging Congress for below-market loans two years ago are now bragging about having paid back the money with interest. This should prompt ridicule. Instead, all the reporters and columnists who were too thick to see an $8tn housing bubble are repeating the banks’ lines and telling us how happy we should be about the bailouts.

5)

Obama administration does not support national freeze on foreclosures (Washington Post)

The Obama administration does not support a nationwide moratorium on foreclosures at this time, Federal Housing Administration Commissioner David Stevens said Sunday in an e-mail response to questions.

“We believe freezing foreclosures for all banks in all states, whether we have reason to believe them to be in error or not, is simply not the prudent step to take in this fragile housing market,” he said.

With approximately one in four homes sold in the second quarter in foreclosure, administration officials worry that a moratorium could have a significant impact on the economic recovery.

“While we understand the eagerness to make sure that no American is foreclosed upon in error, we must be careful not to over-reach and apply a remedy that will make the underlying problem of foreclosures worse,” he added.

Stevens’s comments echoed those made earlier in the day by White House senior adviser David Axelrod, who on CBS’s “Face the Nation” outlined the administration’s current thinking about the issue as pressure from Congress, labor unions and consumer groups mounts for the federal government to take action.

Calling the growing evidence that lenders have used inaccurately prepared and even fraudulent documents to foreclose on homes a “serious problem,” he said it had already “thrown a lot of uncertainty into the housing market that is already fragile.”

“I’m not sure about a national moratorium, because there are, in fact, valid foreclosures that probably should go forward, and where the documentation and paperwork is proper,” Axelrod said.

6)

Services Exceed 2010 Recruiting Goals (Military.com)

he Pentagon’s top adviser on recruiting offered a positive assessment on Oct. 12 of the services’ efforts to bring in new troops during fiscal 2010.

Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Clifford Stanley played down the poor economy’s effect on recruiting and underscored his view that those joining are “the best ever” by pointing out that nearly all came in with at least a high school diploma.

…

Stanley only briefly referenced the economy, which began to tank at the end of 2008 and has cost millions of jobs across the country.

“Our economy has something to do with this [success in recruiting], but not everything,” he said. “To a person, serving their nation, doing it with honor, being patriots, seems to be the recurring theme that comes up every time you look at and talk to those wearing the uniform today.”

7)

No Social Security Increase Next Year (NY Times)

Another year without an increase in Social Securityretirement and disability benefits is creating a political backlash that has President Barack Obama and Democrats pushing to give a $250 bonus to each of the program’s 58 million recipients.

The Social Security Administration said Friday inflation has been too low since the last increase in 2009 to warrant a raise for 2011. The announcement marks only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. This year was the first.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to schedule a vote after the Nov. 2 election on a bill to provide one-time $250 payments to Social Security recipients. Obama endorsed the payment, which would be similar to one included in his economic recovery package last year.

Obama had pushed for a second payment last fall, but the proposal failed in the Senate when a dozen Democrats joined Republicans on a procedural vote to block it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday that in the post-election session “I will be working hard to gain Senate passage for a proposal that ensures that America’s seniors are treated fairly.”

Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, said that if Democrats were serious about a bonus, they would have voted on it before lawmakers went home to campaign for re-election.

8 )

Education of a President (NY Times)

While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong — and what he needs to do to change course for the next two years. He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.

Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

…

The other side would like more ideological rigidity. Norman Solomon, a leading progressive activist and the president of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said Obama has “totally blown this great opportunity” to reinvent America by being more aggressive on issues like a public health care option. Other liberals feel the same way about gays in the military or the prison at Guántanamo Bay. “It’s been so reflexive since he was elected, to just give ground and give ground,” Solomon told me. “If we don’t call him a wimp, which may be the wrong word, he just seems to be backpedaling.” Solomon added: “It makes people feel angry and perhaps used. People just feel like, Gee, we really believed in this guy, and his rhetoric is so different than the way he’s behaved in office.”

9)

Deficit reduction: argument by authority (Guardian)

The deficit hawks are going into high gear with their drive to cut social security and Medicare. President Obama’s deficit commission is having a big public event on Tuesday in which many of the country’s most prominent deficit hawks will tout the need to reduce the budget deficit. The next day, Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson will be hosting a “summit on fiscal responsibility”, which will feature more luminaries touting the need to get deficits under control.

What will be missing from both of these events is any serious debate on the extent of the deficit problem and its causes. These affairs are not about promoting a real exchange of views on issues like the future of social security, Medicare, and public support for education, research and infrastructure, the purpose of these events is to tell the public that everyone agrees, we have to cut the deficit. And, this means cutting social security and Medicare. This is argument by authority.

Many public debates in the United States take this form. The issue is not what is said, but rather who says it. A few years ago all the authorities said that there was no housing bubble. The large body of evidence showing that house prices had hugely diverged from the fundamentals did not matter when the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the president’s Council of Economic Advisers and other leading lights of the economic profession insisted that everything in the housing market was just fine.

Going further back to the mid-90s, many of this same group of deficit hawk luminaries tried to use argument by authority to cut social security. They came up with the story that the consumer price index (CPI) overstated the true rate of inflation. After workers retire, their social security benefits are indexed to the CPI. This crew (which included thenSenator Alan Simpson, a co-chair of President Obama’s commission, and Peter Peterson) argued that social security benefits should lag the CPI by one percentage point a year. In other words, if the CPI shows 3% inflation, then social security benefits will only rise by 2%.

That may seem a small cut, but it adds up over time. A worker retired for 10 years would have their benefits reduced by approximately 10%. A worker retired for 20 years would have their benefits cut by almost 20%.

10)

The Mortgage Morass (NY Times)

American officials used to lecture other countries about their economic failings and tell them that they needed to emulate the U.S. model. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, in particular, led to a lot of self-satisfied moralizing. Thus, in 2000, Lawrence Summers, then the Treasury secretary, declared that the keys to avoiding financial crisis were “well-capitalized and supervised banks, effective corporate governance and bankruptcy codes, and credible means of contract enforcement.” By implication, these were things the Asians lacked but we had.

We didn’t.

The accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement — in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.

The story so far: An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on mortgage payments. So servicers — the companies that collect payments on behalf of mortgage owners — have been foreclosing on many mortgages, seizing many homes.

But do they actually have the right to seize these homes? Horror stories have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits asserting that the papers are in order. And these affidavits were often produced by “robo-signers,” or low-level employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.

Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist. In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible. These loans were sold off to mortgage “trusts,” which, in turn, sliced and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.

This is very, very bad. For one thing, it’s a near certainty that significant numbers of borrowers are being defrauded — charged fees they don’t actually owe, declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they aren’t.

Beyond that, if trusts can’t produce proof that they actually own the mortgages against which they have been selling claims, the sponsors of these trusts will face lawsuits from investors who bought these claims — claims that are now, in many cases, worth only a small fraction of their face value.

And who are these sponsors? Major financial institutions — the same institutions supposedly rescued by government programs last year. So the mortgage mess threatens to produce another financial crisis.

11)

John Boehner: Raise Social Security Retirement Age to 70 (CBS News)

House Republican Leader John Boehner said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review out today that he would back raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 for those who will not retire for another 20 years.

The comment – along with Boehner’s statement that the financial reform compromise reached last Friday creates a bill that amounts to “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon” — has drawn the attention of Democrats eager to cast the GOP as uncaring about the problems of average Americans.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee National Press Secretary Ryan Rudominer told Hotsheet in response to the comment that the Republican “blueprint” is to privatize Social Security and Medicare, citing the budget of Representative Paul Ryan (R – Wis.). (Republicans are quick to note that while Ryan’s “blueprint” for the future has advocated such measures, he has not put them forward as the House Republican budget.)

Liberal group Americans United for Change, meanwhile, said Boehner “hopes to unravel progress made as far back as 70 years by scaling back Social Security” and said the “ant” comment reflects “a blunt acknowledgment of the ant-sized appreciation Republican leaders have for the pain and suffering working Americans are still feeling in the wake of the meltdown on Wall Street.”

Boehner spokesman Michael Steel told Hotsheet that Democrats are twisting the “ant” comment and noted that Boehner advocated raising the Social Security retirement age at President Obama’s fiscal summit last year, as part of an effort to reduce the deficit.

It’s also important to note that some in the liberal base have complained that Democrats themselves are working to scale back Social Security and Medicare via President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission, which is charged with bringing down the deficit to three percent of the economy by 2015.

12)

Obama: Republicans will bear more responsibility after the elections (USA Today)

It sounds like President Obama is already thinking about the prospect of working with a more Republican Congress.

“It may be that, regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible,” Obama toldThe New York Times in an interview to be published Sunday. “Either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated — and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them — or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.”

Obama suggested that the next two years of his presidency won’t include many new initiatives but will be about protecting the fruits of his first two years, including health care and Wall Street regulations.

“Even if I had the exact same Congress, even if we don’t lose a seat in the Senate and we don’t lose a seat in the House, I think the rhythms of the next two years would inevitably be different from the rhythms of the first two years,” Obama said. “There’s going to be a lot of work in this administration just doing things right and making sure that new laws are stood up in the ways they’re intended.”

13)

MEMO: Health Insurance, Banking, Oil Industries Met With Koch, Chamber, Glenn Beck To Plot 2010 Election (Think Progress)

In 2006, Koch Industries owner Charles Koch revealed to the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that he coordinates the funding of the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks, media outlets and other anti-government efforts through a twice annual meeting of wealthy right-wing donors. He also confided to Moore, who is funded through several of Koch’s ventures, that his true goal is to strengthen the “culture of prosperity” by eliminating “90%” of all laws and government regulations. Although it is difficult to quantify the exact amount Koch alone has funneled to right-wing fronts, some studies have pointed toward $50 million he has given alone to anti-environmental groups. Recently, fronts funded by Charles and his brother David have received scrutiny because they have played a pivotal role in theorganizing of the anti-Obama Tea Parties and the promotion of virulent far right lawmakers like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). (David Koch praised DeMint and gave him a “Washington Award” shortly after the senator promised to “break” Obama by making health reform his “Waterloo.”)

While the Koch brothers — each worth over $21.5 billion — have certainly underwritten much of the right, their hidden coordination with other big business money has gone largely unnoticed. ThinkProgress has obtained a memo outlining the details of the last Koch gathering held in June of this year. The memo, along with an attendee list of about 210 people, shows the titans of industry — from health insurance companies, oil executives, Wall Street investors, and real estate tycoons — working together with conservative journalists and Republican operatives to plan the 2010 election, as well as ongoing conservative efforts through 2012. According to the memo, David Chavern, the number two at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Fox News hate-talker Glenn Beck also met with these representatives of the corporate elite. In an election season with the most undisclosed secret corporate giving since the Watergate-era, the memo sheds light on the symbiotic relationship between extremely profitable, multi-billion dollar corporations and much of the conservative infrastructure. The memo describes the prospective corporate donors as “investors,” and it makes clear that many of the Republican operatives managing shadowy, undisclosed fronts running attack ads against Democrats were involved in the Koch’s election-planning event:

– Corporate “investors” at the Koch meeting included businesses with a strong profit motive in rolling back President Obama’s enacted reforms. Several companies impacted by health reform, including Allan Hubbard of A & E Industries, a manufacturer of medical devices and Judson Green, a board member of health insurance conglomerate Aon, were present at the meeting. Other businessmen at the meeting, like Omaha Burger King franchiser Mike Simmonds, are owners of fast food stores which have fought efforts to provide health insurance to their employees. Many corporate attendees of the meeting represent the financial industry impacted by Wall Street reform. For instance, attendee Bill Cooper is the CEO of TCF Financial, a corporation involved in the mortgage banking industry. Cooper recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Wall Street reform. Other financial industry players in the meeting hail from firms ranging from Bank of America, JLM Investment, Allied Capital Corp, AMG National Trust, the Blackstone Group and Citadel Investment. Annie Dickerson, a representative of Paul Singer, a powerful hedge fund manager who also gives tens of millions to Republican causes, was present. In addition, Koch Industries itself has a hedge fund and other financial derivative products in its portfolio of interests, which include oil pipelines, coal shipping, asphalt, refineries, consumer goods, timber, ranching, and chemicals.

– Corporate “investors” at the Koch meeting included businesses with a strong profit motive in preventing progressive reforms promised by President Obama. Several executives at the meeting have an incentive to stop Democrats and President Obama from addressing climate change and enacting clean energy reform. The meeting included oil executives from Aspect Energy, Murfin Drilling, Anschutz Company, GeoPark Holdings, Smoky Oil, and several members of Koch’s various subsidiaries. The meeting documents explicitly state that funding efforts to curb “climate change alarmism” were discussed.

– Fred Malek, Karl Rove’s top fundraiser for his $56 million attack ad campaign against Democrats, attended the meeting, along with leaders of other secret attack groups. Heather Higgins, who leads the Independent Women’s Forum, a shadowy group that has spent millions of dollars in attack ads on health reform, attended the meeting. So did Gretchen Hamel, a former Bush flak who now runs an attack ad group called “Public Notice,” which denounces spending programs.

– Participants collaborated with infamous consultants who specialize in generating fake grassroots movements, as well as experts on how corporations should take advantage of Citizens United. One session, about how to “mobilize citizens for November,” involved a discussion with Republican strategists Tim Phillips and Sean Noble, anti-union leader Mark Mix, and longtime Koch operative Karl Crow. Phillips — a veteran astroturf lobbyist who previously managed a deceptive grassroots lobbying campaign to help the Hong Kong-based Tan family maintain their forced abortion sweatshops in the Mariana Islands — now leads the day-to-day operations of Americans for Prosperity, the group ThinkProgress first reported to have helped organize many of the initial Tea Party rallies against Obama. Americans for Prosperity, founded and financed by David Koch, has a field team of over 80 campaign staffers spread out around the country, and additionally plans to spend $45 million dollars worth of attack ads against Democrats. Shortly before the planning meeting, Crowauthored a campaign finance memo explaining that because of theCitizens United Supreme Court ruling, he advised specifically that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 501(c)(6) and Americans for Prosperity’s 501(c)(4) can “now use general treasury funds to produce communications materials opposing or supporting specific candidates” and corporations can aggressively pressure their employees to vote a certain way.

The memo notes that participants in the 2010 election planning meeting “committed to an unprecedented level of support.”

14)

Six Months Later: Land Ownership At the Crux of Haiti’s Stalled Reconstruction (Haiti Analysis)

At a UN Conference on Mar. 31, about 60 countries and multilateral banks promised $5.3 billion for Haiti’s reconstruction over the next 18 months. Only about 10% of those promises have been delivered on (some of it just forgiven debt), and of that money delivered into a World Bank managed fund, only a fraction has been spent to help Haiti .

Meanwhile, private citizens around the world gave hundreds of millions of dollars to NGOs and impromptu efforts like the Clinton-Bush Foundation, but (where statistics are available) less than 25% of those contributions, sometimes much less, have been spent while desperation in Haiti grows.

Much of the blame for Haiti’s faltering recovery has focused on this trickling release of money and the disorganization of inefficient, administratively costly NGOs which have received most of the funds to date.

But big NGOs reply that they are ready to build new storm resistant houses – the most urgent priority, everybody agrees, as the hurricane season bears down on the 1.7 million displaced people still living under tents and tarps. The problem, Bekele Gelata, the secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross Societies said last week, is that the Haitian government has not provided open land on which to build large numbers of houses. “We have high hopes that the Red Cross will get a little land soon,” he said.

In this way, the Jan. 12 earthquake reveals that the principal fault-line in Haiti is not geological but one of class. A small handful of rich families own large tracts of land in suburban Port-au-Prince which would be ideal for resettling the displaced thousands. The lands are located near the city, often with water and some trees, and are largely undeveloped.

However, these same families control the Haitian government and, more importantly, have great influence in the newly formed 26-member Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti (CIRH), co-chaired by former President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. Thirteen of the CIRH directors represent multilateral banks like the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank and donor nations like the U.S., France and Canada. The other thirteen members represent Haiti’s elite.

US Must Investigate Detainee Abuse Claims in Wikileaks Files

The US government must investigate how much US officials knew about the torture and other ill-treatment of detainees held by Iraqi security forces after new evidence emerged in files released today by Wikileaks.

We have not yet had an opportunity to study the leaked files in detail but they add to our concern that the US authorities committed a serious breach of international law when they summarily handed over thousands of detainees to Iraqi security forces who, they knew, were continuing to torture and abuse detainees on a truly shocking scale.

The new disclosures appear to closely match the findings of New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful Detentions and Torture in Iraq, a report we published last month detailing the widespread torture and other ill-treatment of detainees by Iraqi forces, committed with impunity. Thousands of Iraqis who had been detained by US forces were transferred from US to Iraqi custody between early 2009 and July 2010 under an agreement between the USA and Iraq that contains no provisions for ensuring protection of the detainees’ human rights.

These documents apparently provide further evidence that the US authorities have been aware of this systematic abuse for years, yet they went ahead and handed over thousands of Iraqis they had detained to the Iraqi security forces.

The United States is a party to the UN Convention against Torture, the main international treaty prohibiting torture, which requires all states to prohibit torture and to refrain from transferring detainees to the authorities of another state at whose hands they face torture.

Amnesty International continues to campaign for full accountability for those detainees tortured and ill-treated by USA military personnel in Iraq, such as those in Abu Ghraib prison.

The US authorities, like all governments, have an obligation under international law not only to ensure that their own forces do not use torture, but also that people who were detained and are being held by US forces are not handed over to other authorities who are likely to torture them.

The USA failed to respect this obligation in Iraq, despite the great volume of evidence, available from many different quarters, showing that the Iraqi security forces use torture widely and are allowed to do so with impunity.

The information said to be in these documents also underscores the urgent need for the Iraqi government to take concrete measures to end torture, ensure the safety of all detainees, and root out and bring to justice those responsible for torture and other serious human rights abuses, however senior their position.

Join us in calling on President Obama and Congress to respect human rights and counter terror with justice.

Further reading (in addition to these links, see the website Iraq War Logs):

1)

Huge Wikileaks release shows US ‘ignored Iraq torture’ (BBC)

Wikileaks has released almost 400,000 secret US military records, which suggest US commanders ignored evidence of torture by the Iraqi authorities.

The documents also suggest “hundreds” of civilians were killed at US military checkpoints after the invasion in 2003.

And the files show the US kept records of civilian deaths, despite previously denying it. The death toll was put at 109,000, of whom 66,081 were civilians.

The US criticised the largest leak of classified documents in its history.

But Mrs Clinton did not go into specifics on the disclosures.

‘Nothing new’

The 391,831 US army Sigacts (Significant Actions) reports published by Wikileaks on Friday describe the apparent torture of Iraqi detainees by the Iraqi authorities, sometimes using electrocution, electric drills and in some cases even executing detainees, says the BBC’s Adam Brookes, who has examined some of the files.

The US military knew of the abuses, the documents suggest, but reports were sent up the chain of command marked “no further investigation”, our correspondent adds.

One document shows the US military was given a video apparently showing Iraqi Army (IA) officers executing a prisoner in the northern town of Talafar.

“The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him,” states the log, which also names at least one of the perpetrators.

In another case, US soldiers suspected army officers of cutting off a detainee’s fingers and burning him with acid.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told the BBC that if abuse by the Iraqi security forces was witnessed, or reports of it were received, US military personnel were instructed to inform their commanders.

“And at the appropriate level that information would then be shared with the Iraqi authorities and the military for them to take action.”

The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which US forces killed civilians at checkpoints and during operations.

In one incident in July 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed by a helicopter, about half of them civilians, according to the log.

Another record shows an Apache helicopter gunship fired on two men believed to have fired mortars at a military base in Baghdad in February 2007, even though they were attempting to surrender. The crew asked a lawyer whether they could accept the surrender, but were told they could not, “and are still valid targets”. So they shot them.

The helicopter – with the callsign “Crazyhorse 18″ – was also involved in another incident that July in which two journalists were killed and two children wounded.

The documents also appear to show that the US military falsely claimed that there were no official statistics available on the death toll in Iraq. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths between 2004 and the end of 2009.

This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as “enemy”, 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces, and 3,771 coalition troops.

Iraq Body Count, which collates civilian deaths using cross-checked media reports and other figures such as morgue records, said that based on an analysis of a sample of 860 logs, it estimated that around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths would be identified.

An IBC spokesperson commented: “It is totally unacceptable that for so many years the US government has withheld from the public these essential details about civilian casualties in Iraq.”

“Every recoverable detail about the human death toll in Iraq, and in all other conflicts around the world, must be brought to light. Only such detailed and specific knowledge makes the full human consequences of war impossible to deny.”

The Guardian newspaper also reported that the US military appeared not to have recorded any civilian deaths during its two major offensives on the city of Falluja in 2004.

Mr Morrell told the BBC that the leak was a “travesty” which provided enemies of the West with an “extraordinary database to figure out how we operate”.

He said the cache of documents contained “nothing new” with regards to fundamental policy issues.

And he once again asked Wikileaks to remove the documents from the web and return them to the Department of Defense.

Wikileaks has said it has deleted all names from the documents that might result in reprisals.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggested the whistle-blowing website had blood on its hands in July after it published more than 70,000 secret papers about the war in Afghanistan.

The investigation into the Afghan leak has focused on Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence analyst who is in custody and has been charged with providing Wikileaks with a video of the July 2007 attack by a helicopter with the callsign Crazyhorse 18.

The release of the documents comes as the US military prepares to withdraw all 50,000 remaining troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Violence in the country has declined sharply over the past two years, but near-daily bombings and shootings continue.

2)

Iraq war logs: How friendly fire from US troops became routine (Guardian)

The logs also show that British forces were mistakenly attacked by US and other coalition units at least 11 times. In one previously unreported incident a group of US military police trying to repair a broken-down vehicle shot at two Royal Marine Land Rovers, injuring one commando on 20 October 2004.

Approaching US convoys was a particularly risky endeavour for the British. On 27 February 2004 three British vehicles overtook a Czech convoy north of Safwan, close to the Kuwait border. That brought them directly behind an American convoy, lumbering along at 30mph, prompting a US soldier to threaten them with his .50 calibre machine gun.

An intelligence report written by the British but passed to the Americans emphasised: “There was sufficient daylight for the US convoy to clearly see the British military number plates on the vehicles.” It went on: “The British convoy attempted to get close to and pass the US convoy a total of three times and was threatened in the same way each time.”

Five months later, on 20 July, a US convoy opened fire on British vehicles trying to overtake in the same area. British vehicles were also shot at by American convoy escorts again in November and December and by a Bulgarian convoy the same month.

By February 2005 the British seemed to have become resigned to being shot at by their allies as an occupational hazard. A report from that month of a three-vehicle British convoy being strafed by an American gunner concludes “both convoys continued on their journey without stopping”.

In May 2005 a gunner on a US convoy opened fire on two Kings Royal Hussars vehicles when one of the Hussars drivers swerved to avoid a piece of debris on the road.

One night in October 2006 a British patrol, festooned with the blue light sticks, agreed on as a sign to identify themselves as friendly, reported they had been shot at by US troops who had no night vision goggles and had been listening to their iPods.

3)

Iraqi civilians used as minesweepers by a US soldier (Iraq War Logs)

Iraqi civilians were used as minesweepers by a US soldier, according to an allegation recorded in the Iraq war logs.

In a written statement, an eyewitness described how the leader of a US mounted cavalry platoon ordered Iraqi civilians to
“clear the road of trash and debris” if he suspected a bomb might be hidden on their route.

“The witness claimed the incidents occurred during mounted patrols on several occasions in August and/or September 2005,” stated the 2006
report. It does not say whether any civilians lost their lives while clearing roads.

The incidents allegedly took place in the western Anbar Province, which at the time  was one of Iraq’s most dangerous regions.

Investigations were expected to be carried out on the suspect named by the eyewitness  and a court martial was possible, the log added.

However, the Bureau has discovered that the soldier was not court martialled, but “reprimanded” and returned to a military base in the US.

4)

Death at a Checkpoint (Al Jazeera)

This is the US military’s record of the death of a pregnant woman shot by its soldiers at checkpoint while on her way to give birth at a maternity hospital.

Nabiha Jassim was 35 years old when she was killed in the town of Samarra, 110km  north of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. She was being rushed to hospital by her brother, Khalid, when their car approached a US military checkpoint and observation post that had recently been set up. It was a journey the family would never complete.

The Iraq war files reveal that US troops manning the checkpoint believed that Nabiha’s car posed a threat. As the vehicle carrying the family approached the checkpoint, the soldiers opened fire.

Nabiha was killed in the hail of bullets that ripped through the car, shattering the windscreen and leaving Khalid badly cut. Her cousin, Saliha Hassan, 57, was also shot dead in the incident, which left the road covered in blood and broken glass.

Nabiha’s body was rushed to the hospital in an effort to save her baby, but the unborn child died in her womb. Had she reached the hospital safely, she would have given birth to a boy.

Her story is just one of the hundreds of human tragedies that are catalogued in the Iraq war logs, which reveal that over the course of the conflict, almost 700 civilians were killed in more than 14000 violent incidents that took place at US military checkpoints.

These so-called “escalation of force” incidents follow a repetitive and deadly pattern. An Iraqi civilian approaches a US checkpoint, fails to understand soldiers’ demands to stop, and is shot dead after being assessed as a threat to the platoon manning the checkpoint.

Just as repetitive is the US military response to such incidents: they are put down as a sort of collateral damage, seen as part of the inevitable cost of conflict, as victims of the accidents that happen under the fog of war.

After Nabiha’s death, the military said that the vehicle had entered a “clearly defined prohibited area” when they opened fire on it.

The war log makes no warning of any warning given to Khalid as he drove his sister and cousin towards their deaths, and he has said none was given.

“I was driving my car at full speed because I did not see any sign or warning from the Americans. It was not until they shot the two bullets that killed my sister and cousin that I stopped,” he told the Associated Press news agency, shortly after the incident.

A brief statement was issued by military authorities in the aftermath of the incident that said: “US forces killed two women by mistake… when they were heading to a maternity hospital.”

5)

A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq (NYT)

The reports in the archive disclosed by WikiLeaks offer an incomplete, yet startlingly graphic portrait of one of the most contentious issues in the Iraq war — how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and by whom.

The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.

But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.

The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.

The archive contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice. Read the Document »

In another case, in February 2007, an Apache helicopter shot and killed two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.” Read the Document »

The shooting was unusual. In at least three other instances reported in the archive, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot. The Pentagon did not respond to questions from The Times about the rules of engagement for the helicopter strike.

The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.

6)

Allegations of prisoner abuse by US troops after Abu Ghraib (Iraq War Logs)

The US promised a crackdown after the Abu Ghraib scandal. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal that 303 allegations of abuse by coalition forces were reported in the military files after 2004.

The reports date from August 2005 until the end of 2009. They began 16 months after the Abu Ghraib scandal. Forty-two of these involve allegations of serious abuses, including the use of electric shocks, beatings, water torture and mock executions. In nearly half of these, the claims are reported to be backed up by medical examinations carried out by US medical personnel.

Abu Ghraib scandal
In April 2004, news broke of the torture of Iraqi inmates by the US military in Abu Ghraib. The accounts prompted the then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to apologise. He promised to bring the perpetrators to justice and “make changes as needed to see that it doesn’t happen again”.

Fresh allegations

There are no allegations of abuse reported in the files in 2004. But the secret logs reveal that between 2005 and the end of 2009 at least 303 claims of alleged abuse by coalition forces in Iraq were reported to American forces. The majority of the alleged incidents occurred at the point of arrest or during transfer to detention centres rather than in prisons.

7)

Afghans say Nato ‘as bad as the Taliban’ (Guardian)

Last week marked the ninth anniversary of the United States’s invasion of Afghanistan, and the beginning of the 10th year of the current international engagement there. In the coming months, the US, Nato and its international allies will take a hard look at the current military counterinsurgency strategy, and the prospects for peaceful reconciliation. Both strategies are likely to be challenged by the absence of key ingredient to their success – Afghan trust in international efforts.

My organisation, the Open Society Foundations, recently asked 250 Afghans across Afghanistan who or what they thought was contributing to the escalation of conflict in Afghanistan, and, in particular, whom they blamed for the high civilian casualties and other civilian losses that have been such a flashpoint among the Afghan population.

Despite statistics suggesting insurgents are disproportionately responsible for civilian harm, our analysis found that Afghans blamed international forces as much, if not more, than insurgents. Few spoke warmly about the Taliban. But the vast majority described international forces as equally brutal toward civilians, and equally, if not more responsible for civilian casualties, detention abuses and other concerns.

They said international forces were often indiscriminate, and that many civilian deaths could have been prevented through better targeting,intelligence or coordination (pdf). “When an accident happens, or there is an attack against Nato troops, then Nato troops react and start firing on people. They never think about those around them as human. They think every person on the street is their enemy,” said a man from western Herat province.

Most alleged more horrific stories of international forces shooting people point blank in front of their families, of kidnapping women and returning their dead bodies, or of firing on or abusing children. Many also accused international soldiers of giving weapons or supplies directly to the Taliban; transporting insurgents to peaceful areas, of international forces planting bombs or mines or paying suicide bombers and then blaming the Taliban.

8 )

‘Germans killed’ in US drone strike (Al Jazeera)

A suspected US drone strike has killed eight fighters in northwest Pakistan, with Pakistani intelligence officials saying that at least five of them were Germans.

They also said that the fighters killed in the attack in Mir Ali, North Waziristan, on Monday were members of the Jihad Islami group and the Germans were of Turkish origin.

Details of the incident could not be independently verified and both the US and German governments have yet to comment on the strike.

Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from the Pakistan capital Islamabad, said at least three women were also killed in the raid. There are reports of some children being killed too, he said.

“What is raising the alarm bells here is that despite the fact that there may be some evidence to suggest that these people are indeed militants, Germans in this case … there is, of course, this apprehension that most of the time these strikes are taking place not caring about the civilian casualties.”

9)

Soldier silenced for testimony in Afghan killings probe (CNN)

First, Justin Stoner blew the whistle on his platoon. Now, the Army apparently wants to silence him.

In photos obtained by CNN, Stoner sports bruises and abrasions on his back, chest and near his neck — the marks of a beating inflicted by fellow soldiers as payback for reporting their rampant hashish use, the Army said.

At the time, those close to the investigation tell CNN, Stoner just wanted the smoking in his tent and around him to stop. So he went outside his group and reported the drug use to his superiors.

But that move, and the subsequent beating he endured for being viewed as a snitch, triggered a wide-ranging criminal investigation that has left some soldiers accused of killing innocent Afghan civilians and others accused of posing in gruesome photos with the dead or keeping body parts as war trophies.

Now the Army is doing everything it can to limit the publicity its own explosive account created.

Stoner, a private first class now back in the United States, had agreed to speak with CNN about the torment he went through at the hands of fellow soldiers earlier this year.

But just three hours before the interview was to take place in Seattle, CNN received this e-mail from his military attorney, Capt. Ernesto Gapasin, Jr., abruptly pulling the plug on the scheduled interview:

“About two hours ago, prosecutors and I met re [regarding] the disposition of the case against PFC Stoner,” the attorney wrote. “Based on this meeting, PFC Stoner will be given full immunity in this case and not be prosecuted for any allegations made against him, contingent also however, on staying away from the media.”

The Army disputes that account, however, saying Stoner has not been given immunity.

“Discussing PFC Stoner’s direct involvement in these hearings is inappropriate and could affect the outcome of these cases,” Lt. Col. David P. Doherty, a spokesman for the Army’s I Corps, told CNN in a statement issued Thursday.

“It is imperative that we follow the judicial process in order to provide the accused a fair and impartial trial, while at the same time serve justice,” Doherty said. “PFC Stoner is currently not charged in these matters, nor has he been granted immunity by the convening authority for his cooperation in these ongoing investigations.”

What is clear is the Army is scrambling to contain the news of an apparently out-of-control platoon.

10)

Linda Norgrove: US navy Seal faces disciplinary action over grenade death (Guardian)

Startling details of the daring rescue mission that ended in the death of the British aid worker Linda Norgrove can be revealed today, as a joint US-UK investigation into the incident gets under way.

The Guardian has learned that a member of US special forces who is believed to have accidentally killed Norgrove is likely to face disciplinary action after failing to inform his commanding officers that he had used a grenade until long after the event.

Sources in Kabul and London have confirmed that during the assault on the kidnappers’ hideaway the hostage broke away from her captors and lay in a foetal position to avoid harm.

The soldier from the elite Seal Team Six special forces unit failed to see Norgrove and tossed his fragmentation grenade in, which exploded next to her.

It has also emerged today that:

• US forces monitored the kidnappers using a network of informers and drones

• Conversations were intercepted indicating Norgrove could be executed “like the Russian” or shipped across the Pakistan border

• British officers working with the Americans were kept informed of the intelligence at all times

• The entire mission was relayed on to six widescreen televisions back at the command centre

Norgrove’s death was first attributed to an insurgent detonating a suicide vest – an account that was reported around the world.

The use of a fragmentation grenade was first discovered when the taskforce commander in charge of the mission reassessed surveillance video of the attack and saw the Seal toss the grenade into the compound four seconds before the blast.

It is unusual to use a fragmentation grenade (as opposed to a smoke grenade or a stun grenade) in a hostage rescue. However, the rescue team carried them in this mission to give them flexibility in dealing with whatever resistance they met on the way to or back from the target.

The Seals involved in the assault were summoned by their commander and asked if any of them had used a fragmentation grenade. One stepped forward and identified himself, triggering a frantic effort by embarrassed US commanders to correct the official record and alert the British government.

11)

Inside a Secret DOD Prison in Afghanistan (Harper’s)

In a new report (PDF) by the Open Society Institute, human-rights researcher Jonathan Horowitz contrasts the official prison system that the Pentagon has constructed in Afghanistan—where they often arrange press briefings and invite journalists on tours—with the super-secret facility run on the periphery of Bagram Air Base, the “Tor” or “Black Jail.”

[M]edia outlets in late 2009 and 2010 reported allegations of detainee abuse at a smaller facility on Bagram Air Base which Afghans refer to as the “Tor Jail” or “Black Jail” that is physically distinct from DFIP or the BTIF. (“Tor” is Pashtu for “black”). These reports included accusations of sleep deprivation, holding detainees in cold cells, forced nudity, physical abuse, detaining individuals in isolation cells for longer than 30 days, and restricting the access of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—all of which raise serious concerns about U.S. compliance with domestic and international rules on detainee treatment. Media reports and commentators have described the facility as associated with Joint Special Operations Command, under the command of Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, and Defense Intelligence Agency agents from the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center.

The Horowitz report summarizes interviews with 18 prisoners held at the Tor Jail, half of whom were prisoners during the Obama Administration. They report a consistent pattern of abuse:

• Exposure to excessive cold
• Exposure to excessive light
• Inappropriate and inadequate food
• Inadequate bedding and blanketing
• Disorientation and lack of natural light
• Sleep deprivation due to an accumulation of circumstances
• Denial of religious duties
• Lack of physical exercise
• Nudity upon arrival
• Detrimental impact from an accumulation of confinement conditions
• Facility rules and relevant Geneva Conventions rules/rights not posted
• Lack of transparency and denial of International Committee of the Red Cross access to detainees

Many of these practices cannot be reconciled with Field Manual 2-22.3 (PDF), which provides the Army’s rules for detention conditions, including those connected with human intelligence gathering. As the Horowitz report notes, some of the practices appear to be forbidden even under the special circumstances of the manual’s Appendix M.

Israel conducts population transfer training exercises

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 14 October 2010

Israel secretly staged a training exercise last week to test its ability to quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority requiring the forcible transfer of many Palestinian Arab citizens, the Israeli media has reported.

The drill was intended to evaluate the readiness of the civil defense units, police, army and prison service to contain large-scale riots by Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority in response to such a deal.

The transfer scenario echoes a proposal by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister, for what he has termed a “population exchange.”

Lieberman proposes land swaps that would force many of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian Arab citizens into a future Palestinian state in return for annexation to Israel of most of the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. The scheme has been widely criticized as a violation of international law.

He outlined his proposal to the United Nations General Assembly last month. Although Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said he was not consulted about the speech, he did not admonish Lieberman.

The training exercise has fueled fears among Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority that the government might be hoping to pressure Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority whose elected mandate expired in early 2009 and remains in power under controversial emergency laws, to agree to land and population swaps as part of US-sponsored peace negotiations, which have stalled.

Dov Chenin, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the joint Jewish-Arab Communist Party, called Tuesday for more details of the exercise from the government during a speech in the chamber, although officials offered no immediate response.

Chenin said the drill was a sign Israel was heading in an “extremely dangerous direction.”

“A few years ago, only the extreme right-wing parties talked about transferring Arab citizens, but now we see that even the security forces are preparing concrete plans for carrying out such a scenario.”

Netanyahu demanded this week that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state before further progress was possible — a move seen by the Palestinian Arab minority as a threat to its status inside Israel. A US State Department spokesman referred to recognition as “a core demand” and said it had Washington’s support.

Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian Arab member of parliament, said the exercise was designed to send “very clear messages” to the Palestinian Arab minority and Abbas’ negotiators.

“Netanyahu is letting us know that we are not part of his vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish state and that, if we try to resist his plans, our protests will be greeted with violent repression,” she said.

“He also wants the Palestinian negotiators to understand his minimum requirements for an agreement. He is not interested in justice for the Palestinians or in creating a viable state.”

Details of the five-day drill were reported last weekend on the Voice of Israel radio station by Carmela Menashe, one of Israel’s most respected military correspondents.

The exercise envisioned extensive disturbances by Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, as security forces prepared to enforce border changes that would forcibly relocate many to a new Palestinian state, according to her report.

In the operation, code-named Warp and Weft, the security services established a large detention center in the Galilee region between Nazareth and Tiberias to cope with an “unprecedented” number of arrests of Palestinian Arab citizens.

The drill anticipated a rapid takeover of the West Bank by Hamas following the signing of the peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority. In the exercise, the security forces had to handle the firing of hundreds of rockets into Israel, armed attacks, prison riots and breakouts.

As Chenin raised his concerns, Lieberman opened a new front in his attacks on Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens, following his repeated statements questioning their loyalty to the state. While hosting the Finnish foreign minister on Tuesday, he accused groups of Palestinian Arab citizens of plotting to secede from the state under orders from the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The Palestinians will try, through various groups among Israeli Arabs, to overturn the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state and will work to create different autonomous areas within the state,” he said.

Aluf Benn, a senior columnist for the Haaretz newspaper, wrote yesterday that Netanyahu was “hiding behind” Lieberman and that the prime minister was the “true instigator” of the wave of anti-Arab policies and laws the government was promoting.

On Sunday the cabinet approved a bill that would demand a loyalty oath from non-Jews seeking citizenship.

In the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian Arab MP, accused Netanyahu of being behind “a gradual ethnic-cleansing scheme — removing as many Arabs as possible while creating a Jewish, homogeneous Israel.”

Opinion polls among Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority have repeatedly shown strong opposition to any plan to revoke their citizenship or force them into a Palestinian state.

The Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s largest human rights group, wrote to Netanyahu this week calling the media reports “alarming” and demanding assurances that there were no plans for “population transfer.”

It added that the impression was being created that “an issue which is completely illegitimate — the forced revocation of the citizenship of some of the country’s Arab citizens — is perceived by the government as a reasonable and even likely possibility.”

Some observers have speculated that the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, who is a member of Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party, may have been the driving force behind the exercise.

However, Chenin said such an extensive drill involving so many different branches of the security forces could not have been carried out without the involvement of other government ministers, including Ehud Barak, the defense minister.

Barak, leader of the Labor party, has presented himself in Washington as a moderating influence on Israel’s right-wing government.

These are, of course, just training drills. However, given the recent history of Israel, the readiness to commit ethnic cleansing should give any observer pause. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman recently spoke before the U.N. general assembly, calling for a two-state solution (Israel and whatever disempowered scraps and bantustans are offered to Arab Israelis and Palestinians):

The emotional problems are first and foremost the utter lack of confidence between the sides and issues such as Jerusalem, recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish People and refugees. Under these conditions, we should focus on coming up with a long-term intermediate agreement, something that could take a few decades. We need to raise an entire new generation that will have mutual trust and will not be influenced by incitement and extremist messages. To achieve a final status agreement, we must understand that the primary practical obstacle is the friction between the two nations.

As is true everywhere, where there are two nations, two religions and two languages with competing claims to the same land, there is friction and conflict. Countless examples of ethnic conflict around the world confirm this, whether in the Balkans, the Caucuses, Africa, the Far East or the Middle East. Where effective separation has been achieved, conflict has either been avoided, or has been dramatically reduced or resolved. Consider the cases of the former Yugoslav republics, the split-up of Czechoslovakia and the independence of East Timor, as cases in point.

Thus, the guiding principle for a final status agreement must not be land-for-peace but rather, exchange of populated territory. Let me be very clear: I am not speaking about moving populations, but rather about moving borders to better reflect demographic realities.

Ladies and gentlemen,

This is not an extraordinary insight, and is far less controversial than some may seek to claim. In fact, precisely this notion – that a mismatch between borders and nationalities is a recipe for conflict – has long been accepted as a virtual truism in the academic community.

Leading scholars and highly respected research institutions have even coined the term “Right-Sizing the State” to capture the idea that states and nations must be in balance in order to ensure peace. This is not a controversial political policy. It is an empirical truth.

But beyond empirical truth, there is historical truth: almost 4000 years during which the Jewish People were born in the Land of Israel, while developing the corpus of ethical and intellectual treasures that have been instrumental in giving rise to Western Civilization. 2000 years of forced exile, and interim conquest by Byzantines, Arabs, Mamelukes, Ottomans and others, cannot, and never will, impair the unbreakable bonds of the Jewish People to its homeland. Israel is not only where we are. It is who we are.

In other ways is Israel behaving as the racist settler state it is?

1)

Israel court jails West Bank barrier protest leader (BBC)

An Israeli military court has sentenced a Palestinian protest leader to a year in prison for incitement and riot.

Abdallah Abu Rahma, 39, was one of the organisers of the weekly demonstrations against the barrier being built by Israel in the West Bank.

Protests are regularly attended by hundreds of Palestinians and foreign supporters.

Israeli forces fire stun grenades, tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and, sometimes, live rounds at the protesters. Several demonstrators have been killed and hundreds injured.

Abu Rahma was also fined US $1,200 (£760). He has already served 10 months in jail.

‘Human rights defender’

The prosecution of Abu Rahma has been widely criticised by human rights groups.

And the European Union’s foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton has issued a statement in August saying: “The EU considers Abdallah Abu Rahma to be a human rights defender committed to non-violent protest… The High Representative is deeply concerned that the possible imprisonment of Mr Abu Rahma is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a non-violent manner.”

Israel says the barrier was established to stop suicide bombers entering from the West Bank.

But Palestinians point to its route, winding deep into the West Bank around Israeli settlements – which are illegal under international law – and say it is a way to grab Palestinian territory.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory ruling that the barrier was illegal and should be removed where it did not follow the Green Line, the internationally recognised boundary between the West Bank and Israel.

2)

Palestinians counter Israeli offer on settlements (Washington Post)

Responding to an offer by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to extend a freeze on building in West Bank settlements if Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, a top Palestinian official said Wednesday that such recognition could be granted to Israel within its 1967 borders, without the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

In media interviews, Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior official of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, countered Netanyahu’s offer in another volley of the verbal ping-pong that has taken the place of direct negotiations.

The talks that began last month ran aground after an Israeli moratorium on new construction in West Bank settlements expired Sept. 26 and Palestinians said they would not resume negotiations unless settlement building stopped.

Netanyahu’s offer, made in a speech to the Israeli parliament Tuesday, was instantly dismissed by the Palestinians.

In an interview with Israel Radio on Wednesday, Abed Rabbo made a barbed offer of his own. He suggested that the Israelis present the Palestinians with “a map of the state of Israel along the 1967 borders, so that we can recognize it with any formula it likes.”

“We will recognize it according to what Israel declares, on condition that it will be along the 1967 borders,” he said.

Israel has long rejected a return to the 1967 boundaries and has sought to retain large settlement blocs in the West Bank as part of a future peace agreement with the Palestinians.

3)

Israel Should Respect Rights of Migrant Workers (HRW)

The Israeli Interior Ministry says it is about todeport between 1,000 and 1,200 children of foreign workers. Prime Minister Netanyahu justified the deportations – which would include children who are not enrolled in school, do not speak fluent Hebrew, or are less than five years old, among others – as a deterrent to “illegal immigration that could flood the foundation of the Zionist state” with non-Jewish immigrants.

The prospect of deporting children outraged many Israelis, including some cabinet ministers, and set off protests in Tel Aviv. But the children’s plight is merely one consequence of Israel’s policies to limit migrant workers’ ability to claim residency rights. These harsh policies break families apart and leave workers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

Under Israeli regulations, migrant domestic, agricultural and industrial workers are “bound” to individual Israeli employers. If a worker’s employment ends for any reason – even if she quits because of abuse or non-payment of wages – her visa is cancelled, leaving her in Israel “illegally” and at risk of deportation.

Even when workers are abused, many cannot afford to quit. Most foreign workers incurred sizable debts to arrange their visas. Israeli law sets legal limits on these fees, but the law is rarely enforced. In reality, most migrant workers pay between $3,000 and $30,000 to agents in their home countries, who then split the fees with Israeli agencies, according to Israeli rights groups.

The majority of Israel’s estimated 200,000 foreign workers entered the country legally, according to rights groups, as Israel has sought to replace the Palestinian work force since the second intifada, or uprising, began in 2000.

As with the “sponsorship” or kifala system of many other Middle Eastern countries, Israeli policies make foreign workers extremely vulnerable to exploitation. In 2006, Israel’s Supreme Court found that the “binding” policy “has created quasi, modern-version slavery” where “the foreign worker had become a serf of this employer,” and gave the government six months to cancel it.

Four years on, it hasn’t.

Other policies, purportedly to discourage foreign workers from any activity that could strengthen their claims to Israeli residency, make it impossible for many foreign workers to have any form of family life.

An Interior Ministry regulation forbids migrant workers from entering Israel with “first-degree” (i.e. close) family members, like a spouse or a child, since that could indicate an intention to settle in the country. But the ministry interprets this regulation to apply even if the worker marries or has children in Israel. Virtually all children of migrant workers in Israel are present here illegally.

These policies have been merciless to families. In June, for example, immigration police arrested Charlene Ramos and Judser Maclenda, legal migrant workers, two days after their marriage. The police “allowed” the Filipino couple to choose which of them would be deported. Israeli non-profit groups appealed Ramos’ subsequent deportation order. A court decision is pending.

A migrant worker who becomes pregnant faces an even more wrenching choice. The Interior Ministry will cancel her work visa when the baby is born and give her three months to leave the country. So she must decide whether to have an abortion, or have the baby and either face deportation or send the baby home. In fact, Israeli rights groups said that employers frequently fire pregnant migrant workers, contending they won’t be able to do their job.

One domestic caregiver from China told Human Rights Watch that she sent her baby boy back to China shortly after he was born in 2009 in an attempt to retain her work visa.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” the 29 year old said. “But I thought it would be worth spending two years paying off my debt so that I could go home and have the financial means to care for him.”

Then the Interior Ministry revoked her work visa because of her continued relationship with her husband, a Chinese construction worker in Israel legally. So far, she remains in Israel.

Israel can lawfully control whom it allows into the country to work and restrict their ability to claim permanent residency, but its abusive policies are far from necessary to that end. Instead of deporting workers who quit, Israel should ensure migrant worker rights to seek a remedy against abusive employers.

Instead of deporting migrant workers who quit, Israel should ensure they have access to a remedy against abusive employers. Instead of deporting women for having children or the children themselves, Israel should prohibit employers from the discriminatory practice of firing pregnant women. Instead of penalizing marriage and childbirth, Israel should respect the right to a family. If Israel wants to continue to benefit from the labor of migrant workers, it should ensure their fundamental rights.

4)

Israeli settlement building surges as US pushes for a new freeze (Christian Science Monitor)

In the two and a half weeks since Israel’s settlement freeze expired, there’s been a surge in construction on new West Bank homes, dimming prospect the Palestinians will agree to resume peace talks.

“The resumption at this scale makes it more complicated to make arrangement that will allow a resumption of talks,” says Palestinian government spokesman Ghassan Khatib. “They are putting more sticks in the wheels.”

In Beitar Illit, one of the biggest and fastest growing settlements, construction crews have started working on 100 new units previously stifled by the moratorium. As iron rods sprout up amid newly poured cement foundations, bulldozers are carving an entry road to an empty hill slated as a new housing development.

Monitors who toured dozens of building sites throughout the West Bank over the past week estimate work has begun on about 500 housing units – one-fourth the number of housing starts for all of 2008.

“A few hundred in two weeks is a lot,” says Dror Etkes, a housing monitor who opposes expanded building, as he navigates from memory the construction sites at the perimeter of settlements. “Obviously [the settlers] felt that they had to start fast to have facts on the ground again in case there will be a new freeze so they’ll have enough construction. This is the game.”

The pace of the new building significantly dilutes the impact of a US proposal to defuse tensions over settlement expansion and get peace talks moving again. The US and Israel have discussed a two- to three-month extension of the moratorium on housing starts that expired on Sept. 26. But a new freeze will have no significance for the Palestinians if the hundreds of new units begun in the last two weeks aren’t stopped as well.

“This 60-day extension is basically nonsense,” says Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli Consul General to New York, who sees little prospect of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reaching common ground on a peace deal. “Logic dictates if you are going to delineate a border, you stop building now, or at an early stage in the negotiations, you agree on a border” – and thus agree on where it is permissible to build.

Ideological settlements see surge in construction

The freeze is also having an unintended consequence: building in the West Bank is slowly shifting from large settlements near Israel’s border to smaller far-flung settlements that Israel is expected to evacuate if a peace deal is reached.

In the rush to build both before and after the 10-month moratorium, settler construction has surged on medium- and small-sized projects overseen by ideologically driven builders. Those require less bureaucracy than large-scale building.

“Cover-up” Alleged Over U.K. Aid Worker’s Death

American security forces in Afghanistan were on Monday facing accusations of a “cover-up” after it emerged that a young woman British aid worker who was earlier alleged to have been killed by her Taliban captors may have “accidentally” died in a grenade attack by U.S. forces during a botched rescue operation.

It had been earlier claimed that Linda Norgrove (36), who was seized by militants in Kunar province on September 26, died when one of her captors detonated a suicide vest as western security forces tried to rescue her.

But, on Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron said new details had emerged suggesting that she may have been killed in a U.S. grenade attack. Describing the development as “deeply distressing”, he said he was told by General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander leading the NATO forces in Afghanistan, that the original claims were highly likely to have been incorrect.

The BBC quoted British officials as saying they were “dumbfounded” and that it raised “questions about the manner of the assault”.

“It raises questions about the way in which the American media operation has disseminated this suggestion that she died at the hands of her captors quite unequivocally for 48 hours,” said its correspondent in Kabul.

Mr. Cameron, however, defended the rescue mission and said it had full British support. He said an investigation had been launched to “get to the bottom of what happened” and its findings would be made public.

Given the military’s history of outright lies, it is a wonder that anyone ever assumes any of its representatives are telling the truth:

1)

US special forces ‘tried to cover-up’ botched Khataba raid in Afghanistan (The Sunday Times)

US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.

“Despite earlier reports we have determined that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Nato spokesman. The coalition continued to deny that there had been a cover-up and said that its legal investigation, which is ongoing, had found no evidence of inappropriate conduct.

The Kabul headquarters of General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces, claimed originally that the women had been “tied up, gagged and killed”.

A senior Afghan official involved in a government investigation told The Times: “I think the special forces lied to McChrystal.”

“Why did the special forces collect their bullets from the area?” the official said. “They washed the area of the injuries with alcohol and brought out the bullets from the dead bodies. The bodies showed there were big holes.”

2)

BBC documentary exposes Pentagon lies: The staged rescue of Private Jessica Lynch (World Socialist Web Site)

A BBC Correspondent documentary, “War Spin” broadcast in Britain on Sunday 18 May, presented a devastating account of how US and British government and military forces set out to mislead and misinform the public during their war against Iraq—aided by hundreds of compliant “embedded” journalists.

Presented by BBC war correspondent John Kampfner the documentary was subtitled Saving Private Jessica: Fact or fiction? because it focused initially on how the widely circulated account of the US navy seals rescue of Private Jessica Lynch owed more to Hollywood myth making than reality.

Lynch, a 19-year-old army supply clerk, was captured on March 23 when her 507th Maintenance Company convoy was ambushed after taking a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah. Nine other US soldiers were killed in the attack.

Having discovered that Lynch had been taken to hospital in Nasiriyah, US Army Rangers and Navy Seals staged an early morning rescue operation on April 2, storming the building and whisking the badly injured Private away to safety.

Within two hours, journalists at the media headquarters in Doha, Centcom, were summoned for an emergency press briefing, where the Pentagon released a five-minute video film of the rescue, captured on the military’s night vision camera.

…

Michael Wolff, from New York magazine, told of his treatment by Wilkinson when he raised critical questions during one press briefing. “He said, ‘this is war, (bleep) hole’. He said, ‘don’t (bleep) around with things you don’t understand’. And then finally it was; ‘no more questions for you, why don’t you just go home?’”

Where the embeds were not enough, the military would simply write their own reports, or shoot and edit their own films, Kampfner explained, and distribute it to news channels that would lap it up.

Or they would simply lie.

Following the bomb explosion at a street market in Baghdad, during which 14 people were killed, US and British forces at first obfuscate, and then deny any involvement. Even after a second market bombing two days later, where US missile parts were recovered, US and British sources briefed that the Iraqi military were responsible. UK Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon asserted that journalists’ reports could not be trusted, unless they had been officially blessed. “What is important about this is all of us should look very sceptically at these kinds of reports, relying only on known and agreed facts,” he said.

3)

New witness account shows Khadr charges should be dropped: lawyers (CBC)

Lawyers for Omar Khadr called on U.S. authorities Monday to dismiss a murder charge against the Canadian, saying a newly revealed eyewitness account that had been covered up by the Pentagon casts doubt on the official version of events.

Khadr, now 21, is charged with hurling a grenade that killed American Sgt. Christopher Speer during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. He’s been in custody at a U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since then.

According to the original U.S. military version of events, Khadr ambushed American soldiers with a grenade following a four-hour fight at a mud compound in Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials later backtracked slightly after it was revealed nobody witnessed Khadr throw the grenade. Pentagon officials said an eyewitness wasn’t needed, because Khadr was the only al-Qaeda fighter left alive and the only person who could have thrown the grenade.

However, a classified document, inadvertently released to reporters at the military prison by a Pentagon official Monday, provides a different eyewitness account of the events.

A U.S. soldier at the battle said in sworn testimony that two al-Qaeda fighters were alive after the fatal grenade attack.

The unidentified soldier says he killed the first al-Qaeda fighter before spotting Khadr, whom he said was wounded, on his knees and facing away from him. For reasons he does not go into, he says he shot him in the back twice.

The Pentagon says American soldiers fired on Khadr in self-defence after he tried to attack them.

Khadr’s military lawyer Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler suggests that the U.S. military may have been involved in a coverup.

“The U.S. government had a problem on its hands when it found that it had a 15-year-old Canadian on its hands with two gaping bullet holes in his back that had been facing away from the fight,” said Kuebler.

4)

Harrowing video film backs Afghan villagers’ claims of carnage caused by US troops (Times Online)

The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.

Sources close to one of the investigations said that a video film was shot by Afghan officials the morning after the attack. It corroborates the doctor’s footage but has not been made public.

In a statement released on Saturday, the commander of Nato forces, General David McKiernan, appeared to back away from previous US accounts. He said: “Following the recent operation in Azizabad, Shindand district, we realise there is a large discrepancy between the number of civilian casualties reported by soldiers and local villagers. I remain responsible to continue to try and account for this disparity in numbers, but above all I want to express our heartfelt sorrow to all families that lost loved ones in this firefight.”

A Human Rights Watch report due to be published today is highly critical of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan for the number of civilians killed in airstrikes. It gives warning that repeated instances of Western forces killing Afghan civilians have led to a collapse in popular support for the international presence.

Taking what it says are the most conservative figures available, Human Rights Watch has calculated that civilian deaths as a result of Western airstrikes tripled between 2006 and 2007 to 321. In the first seven months of this year the figure was 119. In the same period, 367 civilian deaths were attributed to Taleban attacks. It accuses US officials of routinely denying reports of civilian deaths.

Maulavi Gul Ahmad, an Afghan MP who was part of a government delegation that investigated the Nawabad attack, told The Times: “We are not only blaming America – this is destroying the reputation of the international community and undermining their presence in Afghanistan.”

5)

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand (NY Times)

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice PresidentDick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

6)

Rumsfeld’s Abu Ghraib Cover-Up Revealed (AlterNet)

According to Taguba, when first confronted with the extensive, documented evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib (including the story of a father and son forced to perform lewd acts on one another), all Rumsfeld and his lackeys appeared to be concerned with was how the story had been leaked to the press.

Taguba has told Hersh his story because, like many Americans, he was appalled by Donald Rumsfeld and the entire Bush Administration’s early stubborn refusal to address torture in their military’s midsts and then their pathetic attempt to plead ignorance and cover up their involvement in said torture when it became public.

Also, on a personal level, Taguba became something like a Serpico figure amongst his fellow soldiers, a pariah because he gave an honest, thorough accounting of military misdeeds. At one point, Taguba was cryptically warned by General John Abizaid. “You and your report will be investigated,” he said. When Rumsfeld first met Taguba in May of ’04 he made no attempt to disguise his contempt:

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba–of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

Taguba was discouraged every step of the way during his investigation. He knew no one in their right mind could really, truly believe that this was all the work of a few sadistic grunts. The leashes and other instruments of torture were provided by someone, most likely military intelligence, who got their torture mandate from guess who. Yet the White House took the stand that this was a small problem and the majority of the media eventually fell in line.

Only seven soldiers were convicted on charges relating to the torture, while one of its ringleaders, Specialist Charles Graner, got ten years in prison. Gen. Taguba was pushed into retirement earlier this year after over thirty years of dedicated, unassailable military service. The man put in charge of cleaning up the Abu Ghraib mess, Major General Geoffrey Miller (who has his own torture legacy back in Guantanamo), never even met with Taguba.

7)

Pat Tillman’s Father To Army Investigator: ‘F— You… And Yours’ (Huffington Post)

There always was a dark cinematic thread to the story of Pat Tillman: the football star imbued with post-9/11 patriotism who was killed in a friendly-fire incident in the Afghan mountains and the allegations of a massive bureaucratic cover-up involving the highest levels of the U.S. Army in the wake of the tragedy.

So it wasn’t terribly shocking when word broke this past winter that “The Tillman Story,” a documentary film, was being purchased by the powerhouse Weinstein Company. The story, even without a director applying his artistic license to the script, obviously had many elements of a political thriller.

As the release date approaches — the film will premiere in Los Angeles and New York on August 20 — those elements are becoming a bit clearer and more intriguing. The Weinstein Company sent the Huffington Post two previously unseen letters written by Tillman’s father at the peak of frustration with the army’s investigation into his son’s death. The notes, penned to Brigadier General Gary M. Jones (the man spearheading the investigation) as well as the Senate Armed Services Committee (which oversaw Jones’s work), paint a picture of a man increasingly convinced that a massive conspiracy was emerging around the death of his son.

“You are a General,” Tillman’s father writes Jones after being presented with a briefing book of his findings. “There is no way a man like you, with your intelligence, education, military, experience, responsibilities (primarily for difficult situations), and rank… believes the conclusions reached in the March 31, 2005 Briefing Book. But your signature is on it. I assume, therefore, that you are part of this shameless bullshit. I embarrassed myself by treating you with respect [on] March 31, 2005. I thought your rank deserved it and anticipated something different from the new and improved investigation. I won’t act so hypocritically if we meet again.”

“In sum: Fuck you… and yours.”

The two letters are worth a read, if only for the insight they provide into how haphazard and mismanaged (deliberately or not) the investigations were. Tillman’s father comes off as emotional, for good reason. But the questions he raised — while conspiratorial in tone — offer compelling drama (both real life and for the upcoming movie). Take, for instance, the notion that the shooters of his son may have been blinded by the glare of the sunset.

“The shooters were always looking North or Northwest,” Tillman’s father writes. “Even in Afghanistan, the sun sets in the West – Southwest. How on God’s green earth can you add in a “glare factor” looking away from the sun that has set? (P-16) Immediately after the sunset , facing the wrong direction (North vs. Southwest), the glare impaired their vision? Don’t you need sun to have glare?”

8 )

Barack Obama accused of exaggerating terror threat for political gain (Guardian)

A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told the Guardian.

The non-specific US warning, which despite its vagueness led Britain, France and other countries to raise their overseas terror alert levels, was an attempt to justify a recent escalation in US drone and helicopter attacks inside Pakistan that have “set the country on fire”, said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the high commissioner to Britain.

Hasan, a veteran diplomat who is close to Pakistan’s president, suggested the Obama administration was playing politics with the terror threat before next month’s midterm congressional elections, in which the Republicans are expected to make big gains.

He also claimed President Obama was reacting to pressure to demonstrate that his Afghan war strategy and this year’s troop surge, which are unpopular with the American public, were necessary.

“I will not deny the fact that there may be internal political dynamics, including the forthcoming midterm American elections. If the Americans have definite information about terrorists and al-Qaida people, we should be provided [with] that and we could go after them ourselves,” Hasan said.

“Such reports are a mixture of frustrations, ineptitude and lack of appreciation of ground realities. Any attempt to infringe the sovereignty of Pakistan would not bring about stability in Afghanistan, which is presumably the primary objective of the American and Nato forces.”

Dismissing claims of a developed, co-ordinated plot aimed at Britain, France and Germany, European intelligence officials also pointed the finger at the US, and specifically at the White House. “To stitch together [the terror plot claims] in a seamless narrative is nonsensical,” said one well-placed official.

While Abdul Jabbar, a Briton, and others killed by an American drone strike on 8 September in North Waziristan, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, were heard discussing co-ordinated plots, including possible “commando-style” attacks on prominent buildings and tourist sites in European capitals, security and intelligence officials said the plots were nowhere near fruition.

9)

Anti-war activists refuse to testify (Chicago Tribune)

A Chicago couple whose home was searched last month by FBI agents said Tuesday that they will refuse to answer questions before a grand jury believed to be investigating possible links between U.S. anti-war groups and foreign terrorist organizations.

Stephanie Weiner and her husband, Joe Iosbaker, spoke to several dozen supporters outside the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse on a day they were supposed to testify before the grand jury. They had received the subpoenas Sept. 24 when FBI agents searched their Logan Square home for hours and removed boxes of documents.

The couple said their grand jury appearance had been postponed by federal investigators after they notified authorities that they would assert their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The couple could then be given immunity from prosecution, forcing them to testify or risk jail time for contempt if they continue to refuse to answer questions, according to their lawyer, James Fennerty.

10)

Target of FBI terror-support raid visited W.H. (Politico)

Last Friday, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Abudayyeh’s Chicago home as part of a coordinated series of raids involving at least one other Chicago site, along with the homes of anti-war activists in Minnesota. A copy posted on the web of a grand jury subpoena served on one target of the raids in Minneapolis demands “all records of any payment provided directly or indirectly to Hatem Abudayyeh, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (“PFLP”) or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (“FARC”).”

A search warrant served on a Minneapolis anti-war activist, Michael Kelly, ordered agents to seize records relating to Kelly’s travels to “Palestine, Colombia, and … within the United States.” It also mentions possible connections to Hezbollah.

The warrant and subpoena suggest the probe, which is being run by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, is focusing on illegal support for terrorist organizations, particularly by a Minnesota-based group called the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. PFLP, FARC and Hezbollah are designated as terrorist groups by the U.S. government. A spokesman for Fitzgerald’s office declined to comment on the probe.

Abudayyeh has not been charged with any crime, nor do the court documents made public by targets of the searches make any explicit allegation of ties between the Chicago activist and any of the groups.

11) See also the discussion by Franklin “Chuck” Spinney in Chapter 7 of God and Whose Army?

Gates: US Military Not Ever Leaving Afghanistan

Though the comments were made several months ago and only became public today, Defense Secretary Robert Gates had a moment of shocking honesty during a May dinner for Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

“We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely,” Gates insisted during comments at the dinner, “in fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.” The comments serve as a shocking contrast to his repeated comments over the summer, in which he insisted there was “no question” in his mind that the drawdown from Afghan would start in July 2011.

Gates continued with this public position even after President Obama disavowed the date, and at this point Gen. David Petraeus insists the war could easily last another decade, while NATO countries are disavowing a possible 2014 date to end the war.

Gates’ comments came in the context of his complaints about having “abandoned” Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation ended. With the US now firmly on the side of the former Soviet allies, it seems Gates’ answer is to continue the occupation forever.

1)

Food Stamps Slashed to Pay for Teacher Jobs Bill (CBS News)

Democrats are poised to pass a bill today that will provide $26 billion in additional funding to help states cover Medicaid expenses and teacher salaries. To pay for the bill, however, they are accelerating the scale-back of food stamp payments — at a time when a record number of Americans are relying on food stamps.

In an unusual move, the House of Representatives interrupted its August recess this week to return to Washington to pass this aid bill. The legislation, whichpassed in the Senate last week, extends programs enacted in the stimulus package, with $16 billion for state health care programs and $10 billion to help school boards avoid teacher layoffs.

Democrats convinced two Republicans in the Senate to support the measure in part by ensuring it would not add to the deficit. That was in part accomplished by cutting food stamp payments beginning in 2014 by $12 billion. The cut would bring funding for the food stamp program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, back to pre-stimulus levels ahead of schedule.

2)

Food Stamp Recipients at Record 41.8 Million Americans in July, U.S. Says (Bloomberg)

The number of Americans receiving food stamps rose to a record 41.8 million in July as thejobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government said.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 18 percent from a year earlier and increased 1.4 percent from June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in a statement on its website. Participation has set records for 20 straight months.

Unemployment in September may have reached 9.7 percent, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts in advance of the release of last month’s rate on Oct. 8. Unemployment was 9.6 percent in July, near levels last seen in 1983.

An average of 43.3 million people, more than an eighth of the population, will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1, according to White House estimates.

3)

The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand (New York Times)

As the Obama administration prepared to spend $80 billion in education aid as part of the economic stimulus program, Duncan and Schnur diverted $4.3 billion to the contest aimed at encouraging cash-strapped states to overhaul their public schools. Schnur came up with the name and pushed the overall spin of the contest, and it was clear from conversations with people in the school-reform movement that he is the one person who seems to know everything happening on all fronts, from the White House to legislative chambers in Albany or Sacramento to charter schools in New Orleans. Joel Klein, for example, said he talks to Schnur about once a week.

The winners of the Race would be those states that submitted the best blueprints for fulfilling the reform agenda, which includes allowing school districts to take over failing schools, improving curriculum standards and encouraging school innovation (which means, in part, allowing charter schools to flourish).

…

One frustration centered on charter schools. Charters are publicly financed schools open to any child by lottery but run by entities other than the conventional local school district. Typically they are operated by nonprofit organizations that rely on donations to provide seed money but then use the same per-pupil money doled out to the public schools for ongoing operations. Those who run charters are accountable for the school’s performance, but they are free to manage as they wish. That includes the freedom to hire teachers who are not union members. A law allowing charter schools in New York was passed in 1998 over intense opposition from the teachers’ union. It survived because there was a Republican governor, George Pataki, and then only because Pataki attached it to a bill giving a pay raise to legislators. Moreover, to placate the union, legislators capped the number of charters to be issued statewide.

The Race to the Top reopened the charter debate. Although other reform criteria count for much more, the contest measured a state’s amenability to charters, giving up to 40 of the 500 points to charter-friendly states. With New York State 12 charters away from hitting its 200 cap (and likely to hit it with new charters to be issued this year), not lifting the cap threatened the state’s application.

Charter schools are not always better for children. Across the country many are performing badly. But when run well — as most in Harlem and New York’s other most-challenged communities appear to be — they can make a huge difference in a child’s life. So by the time the Race rules were issued, the charter cap had become something that many New York parents, particularly in neighborhoods with underperforming schools, cared a lot about. In Harlem, for example, about 20 percent of all age-eligible children are now enrolled in charters, and in April, 14,000 other children submitted applications in the lottery for next year’s 2,700 open seats. This means that more than 11,000 kids just in Harlem were turned away. Across the city applications were up 25 percent, and 43,000 students were turned away.

4)

Tennessee County’s Subscription-Based Firefighters Watch As Family Home Burns Down (Think Progress)

As ThinkProgress has noted, there are currently two competing visions of governancein the United States. One, the conservative vision, believes in the on-your-own society, and informs a policy agenda that primarily serves the well off and privileged sectors of the country. The other vision, the progressive one, believes in an American Dream that works for all people, regardless of their racial, religious, or economic background.

The conservative vision was on full display last week in Obion County, Tennessee. In this rural section of Tennessee, Gene Cranick’s home caught on fire. As the Cranicks fled their home, their neighbors alerted the county’s firefighters, who soon arrived at the scene. Yet when the firefighters arrived, they refused to put out the fire, saying that the family failed to pay the annual subscription fee to the fire department. Because the county’s fire services for rural residences is based on household subscription fees, the firefighters, fully equipped to help the Cranicks, stood by andwatched as the home burned to the ground:

Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight. A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late.They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning. Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay. The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck. [...]

We asked the mayor of South Fulton if the chief could have made an exception. “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t,” Mayor David Crocker said.

5)

Hungary toxic sludge spill an ‘ecological catastrophe’ says government (Guardian)

Hungary today declared a state of emergency in three western counties after a dam holding back a vast reservoir of toxic red sludge, from an alumina plant, burst, killing four people and injuring 120 others in what officials said was an “ecological catastrophe”.

An elderly woman, a young man and a three-year-old child died in the deluge and six others were reported missing. Two of the injured were in a serious condition.

The sludge, which is waste produced during aluminium manufacture, swept cars off roads and damaged bridges and homes, forcing the evacuation of 400 residents. About 7,000 people are thought to have been directly affected by the spill.

Local environmentalists said the plant, which had been privatised several years ago, should have been modernised but that the company put profits first.

Robert Fidrich, of Friends of the Earth in Hungary, said: “Now we, the public, will have to pay the real bill. You can forget about cleaning up those villages … nobody will be able to live there for 10 years or more. It has affected the lives of hundreds of people.”

6)

Bank Changes Locks on Occupied, Foreclosed Homes (Herald Tribune)

U.N. Report finds Israel “summarily executed” U.S. citizen on flotilla

Last week, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights released a comprehensive reportdetailing its findings regarding the May, 2010, Israeli attack on the six-ship flotilla attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Israel-blockaded Gaza.  The report has been largely ignored in the American media despite the fact (or, more accurately:  because) it found that much of the Israeli force used “was unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers”; that “at least six of the killings can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions“; and that Israel violated numerous international human rights conventions, including the Fourth Geneva Conventions (see p. 38, para. 172).

Even more striking in terms of U.S. media and government silence on this report is the fact that one of the victims of the worst Israeli violations was a 19-year-old American citizen.  As Gareth Porter documents in an excellent article at The Huffington Post, the report “shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.”  In particular:

The report reveals that Dogan, the 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground.

The report says Dogan had apparently been “lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time” before being shot in his face.

The forensic evidence that establishes that fact is “tattooing around the wound in his face,” indicating that the shot was “delivered at point blank range.” The report describes the forensic evidence as showing that “the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back.”

Needless to say, the Israeli Government — as it virtually always doeswhen confronted with well-documented, official findings of its severe human rights violations – attacked the source, accusing the report of being ”biased and distorted.”  The U.N. investigators interviewed 112 witnesses and consulted with numerous forensic and medical experts, while Israel refused to speak with its investigators (though Israeli officials are cooperating with a separate group investigating the attack).  There’s no reason to take the findings of this report as Gospel:   like everything, it’s subject to reasonable dispute, but it’s clearly well-documented, consistent with documentary evidence and overwhelming witness tesitmony, and is entitled to be taken seriously.

To this day, I’m still amazed by how the American media and U.S. Government responded to this incident, given the fact that it waspainfully obvious from the start that the Israelis’ conduct was the behavior of a guilty party.  The Israelis immediately seized all documentary evidence from the passengers showing what actually happened, blocked all media access to witnesses by detaining everyone on board (including journalists) for days, and then quickly released its own highly edited video — spliced to begin well into the middle of the Israeli attack — that was dutifully and unquestioningly shown over and over by the U.S. media to make it appear that the flotilla passengers were the first to become violent.  That was a lie from the start, and it was an obvious lie.

In no other situation would a party to a conflict who steals all of the evidence, withholds it from the world, and then selectively releases its own blatantly distorted, edited version of a fraction of the evidence be trusted.  The opposite is true:  that party would immediately be assumed to be guilty precisely because of that very behavior of obfuscation; that behavior is the behavior of a guilty party.  But with Israel, the opposite happens (at least in the U.S.).  The IDF video was shown over and over to propagnadize Americans into believing that the passengers were the first to engage in aggression, even though the video — and the Israelis’ withholding of all the rest of the evidence — begged the glaringlyobvious question:  what happened before the commandos descended onto the ship?  Based on smuggled video and forensic evidence, this new report documents what countless flotilla witnesses tried to tell the world once they were finally released:  ”live ammunition was used from the helicopter onto the top deckprior tothe descent of the soldiers” (p. 26; para. 114 — emphasis added).

Last Wednesday night, I spoke at Brooklyn Law School on this event, and with me on the panel were Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi and Iranian-American lawyer Fatima Mohammadi, who was on the Mavi Marmara.  I’m trying very hard to obtain the video of that event because Mohammadi’s narration of what happened — all documented by smuggled video from passengers’ cell phones — leaves little doubt as to who the guilty aggressors were here.  I would really like as many people as possible to hear what she has to say and view the video evidence and make their own assessments as to her credibility and persuasiveness.  Suffice to say, there is no doubt that the Israelis used force against the passengers long before the commandos descended onto the ship — which is precisely why Israel prevented the world from seeing any evidence showing what happened before the events in the IDF video, and why the U.N. Report so conclusively found Israel at fault.  I’d be willing to venture that a tiny percentage of the American public, whose perceptions were shaped by American media coverage, have any clue that this is the case.

The fact that a 19-year-old American citizen was one of the dead — among those whom the report concluded was “summarily executed” by the Israelis — makes the U.S. Government’s silence here all the more appalling.  One of the prime duties of a government is to safeguard the welfare of its own citizens.  It’s inconceivable for most governments in the world to remain silent in the face of formal findings that a foreign nation “summarily executed” one of its own citizens.  One of the reasons Turkey was so emphatic in its condemnation of Israel was because the dead were Turkish citizens; that’s what governments do when a foreign nation kills its own citizens.  Yet not only does the U.S. Government sit silently, but its prior statements defending Israel were disgustingly cavalier.  Virtually the entire world — literally – vehemently condemned Israel for what it did here, yet the U.S. refused and continues to refuse to do so, notwithstanding these findings that one of its own citizens was essentially murdered.

Perhaps most illustrative of all is how inconceivable it is to imagine the U.S. Congress doing anything at all in the face of this report . . . . except passing a Resolution condemning the investigators themselves while defending Israeli actions, including the actions that resulted in the death of an American teenager.  Is there any doubt that such a Resolution would pass with overwhelming bipartisan support, approaching unanimity — as happens each and every time there is a controversyinvolving Israel?   Thus far, the U.S. media and Government are largely silent about this U.N. Report, but if they are prodded into responding, the response will almost certainly be to condemn the report itself while defending and justifying Israeli actions even in the face of overwhelming evidence as to what really happened here, which managed to emerge despite the Israelis’ very telling efforts to keep it suppressed.

* * * * *

In not unrelated news, a new Gallup survey of numerous Middle Eastern and North African nations finds that public opinion of the U.S. and its political leadership has collapsed back to Bush-era levels.  That is consistent with prior polls in the Muslim world finding the same thing.  One of the central, stated goals of the Obama campaign and his presidency was improving how that part of the world perceives of the United States, on the ground that widespread anti-American sentiment is what fuels Terrorism and endangers Americans around the world.  That effort is clearly failing.

Israel’s flagrant brutality is nothing new, but it is rarely practiced against its benefactor (see the USS Liberty incident, “the only maritime incident in U.S. history where [U.S.] military forces were killed that was never investigated by the [U.S.] Congress”).

Other signs that Israel is an out-of-control aggressor and should be dealt with as such:

1)

Israel ‘Probes’ W Bank Mosque Blaze (Al Jazeera)

Israel says it has launched a ‘widespread’ investigation into an attack on a West Bank mosque blamed on Jewish settlers.

According to witnesses, parts of the Al-Anbiya mosque in the Palestinian town of Beit Fajjar was set ablaze by five Jewish settlers early on Monday morning. The arsonists also damaged prayer rugs and copies of the Quran, besides spraying anti-Arab graffiti on the walls.

Following the attack, Avital Leibovitch, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said authorities will bring the guilty parties to justice.

“The Israeli police … have opened a very widespread investigation; the other security forces in Israel will be a part of [it], as well as Palestinian information that has some contribution to this investigation,” she said.

“We see this incident in a very severe manner. We will do the utmost to find these lawbreakers and bring them to court.”

Primary investigations, she said, showed Hebrew graffiti and burnt carpets at the mosque.

Scepticism

However, Al Jazeera’s Mika Hanna, reporting from Jerusalem, said the Israeli announcement has been met with “a degree of scepticism”.

Monday’s vandalism was the fourth attack on a West Bank mosque in the past year. Last May, Palestinians accused settlers of setting fire to a mosque in the village of Libban al-Sharqia. Israel said the blaze was probably caused by a spark during building work.

No charges have been brought for any of the previous incidents.

2)

Drunken Diplomacy: New Settlement (Al Jazeera)

“Disappointed.”

That’s the best the US could do.

The Israeli government ends a 10-month suspension on settlement construction – it was, in fact only a partial freeze, but that’s another story – and cement and bulldozers immediately start to spread across the West Bank. Did anyone really expect better?

As I watched this depressing spectacle unfold, an interesting morality tale came to me. A saga that well-summarises the American response to Israel’s open renewal of settlement expansion.

Imagine you are a celebrity of the stature of Tom Cruise. One of your fellow celebrities – a close friend – has a long history of alcohol abuse. Finally, he decides to sober up, declaring that he won’t touch a drink for the next ten months. He claims to want to become a bit healthier and gain back some respectability among his peers and the wider public.

When he stops, however, he declares that this was just a short-term self-help campaign. At the end of his drinking hiatus, he intends on pouring himself another drink and going back to his old ways. Yet his old ways of constant drunkenness and fighting have gotten both of you into heaps of trouble.

The public and media routinely question why you fail to cut him loose, but you brush off the matter in the name of loyalty and his well-being. “He’s got some issues,” you declare, “But who doesn’t?”

As the period of relative sobriety ends, you try to talk to him about staying straight and changing his abusive ways towards his neighbours. But as soon as the day comes, he reaches for the nearest bottle of bourbon to pour himself a drink.

What are you supposed to do in this situation?

The correct answer is pretty obvious (unless, of course, you’re also an addict, behaving increasingly the same way he is).

Drunken diplomacy

So why can’t Barack Obama, by all accounts a fairly sober fellow, see that “friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” never mind allow them to rob the corner liquor store over and over again?

If you read the mainstream press in the US and many European countries, Israel comes off as the semi-reformed alcoholic: determined to throw away months of sobriety to chase a dream that can only end in ruin. And the US, well, no one even thinks to question why the US is standing by frozen in place, allowing for alcohol to be poured down Israel’s metaphoric gullet with reckless abandon.

Not a single piece of mainstream reporting or commentary has thought to challenge this ludicrous narrative of impotence: as Israel’s most important benefactor, patron, and, in fact, supplier, the Obama administration could quite simply “just say no”.

It could – and should – declare that as a good friend and a party to the conflict whose very security is threatened by Israel’s actions, it will suspend its support until Israel decides to sober up.

Sure, congress will cry bloody murder at the thought of threatening to cut off aid. But it’s hard to think of a simpler, more logical equation with which to justify a seemingly controversial policy.

3)

Two Israeli soldiers guilty of using human shield in Gaza (BBC)

The soldiers were found guilty of reckless endangerment and conduct unbecoming for forcing the nine-year-old boy to check suspected booby-traps.

It is reportedly the first such conviction in Israel – where the use of civilians as human shields is banned.

The sentencing will be decided at a later date, the court said.

No protection

On Sunday, the southern command military court found the two Israeli soldiers guilty of “exceeding their authority to the point of endangering life” and conduct unbecoming in the incident in Gaza City’s suburb of Tel al-Hawa on 15 January 2009.

A summary of the verdict said that – when rounding up residents of Tel al-Hawa – the soldiers came across bags in a home and ordered the Palestinian boy to search for suspected booby-traps.

“The boy, who feared for his fate and was under the stress of the situation, wet his pants,” the three-judge panel wrote in the summary of the verdict.

“The court has noted that, unlike the soldiers, the child was, naturally, bereft of any form of protection.”

However, the court acknowledged that at the time the soldiers – whose names have not been released – had been under “difficult and dangerous conditions”.

The bags that the boy – identified only as Majd R – had checked did not have any hidden explosives and the child was later returned to his family unharmed.

4)

Israel Approves Loyalty Oath (Al Jazeera)

The Israeli cabinet has approved a proposal requiring new immigrants to pledge loyalty to the “Jewish and democratic” state.

The language has triggered charges of racism from Arab politicians who see it as undermining the rights of the country’s Arab minority.

It has raised tensions with Palestinians at a time when peace talks are deadlocked over Israel’s refusal to extend a moratorium on new building in West Bank Jewish settlements.

The amendment was backed by Yisrael Beitenu, an ultra-nationalist party whose leader, Avigdor Lieberman, has been a vocal critic of Israel’s settlement freeze.

Sunday’s cabinet vote may be a way to soften Lieberman’s opposition to extending the slowdown, though officials have denied there is any connection.

Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Jerusalem, said the bill would become law once approved by a simple majority in the Knesset [parliament].

The Israeli supreme court would then have to adjudicate whether the new language is at odds with the country’s basic law, he said.

Cabinet divided

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, had expressed his support for the proposal before the vote.

“The state of Israel is the national state of the Jewish people, and it is a democratic state for all its citizenship,” he said. “There is no other democracy in the Middle East. There is no other Jewish state in the world. Unfortunately, there are many today who tried to blur not only the unique connection of the Jewish people to its homeland, but also the connection of the Jewish people to its state.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera shortly after the cabinet vote, Shmuel Sandler, a professor at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, said: ”You can stay whichever religion you want, whichever nationality. But if you want to become a citizen, you have to take the oath.”