Amazon Uprising More Urgent Than Iran's: The Planet Depends on It

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A Fight for the Amazon that Should Inspire the World

Johann Hari
June 24, 2009 - The Independent/UK

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While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed - yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies - and, for today, they have won.

Here's the story of how it happened - and how we all need to pick up this fight. Earlier this year, Peru's right-wing President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 per cent of his country's swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon's trees: "There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle."

There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia's plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn't bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?

But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block (12A)B, said in 2007: "My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests." The company denies liability, saying they are "aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts".

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, according to an independent report, toxic waste allegedly dumped after Chevron-Texaco's drilling has been blamed by an independent scientific investigation for 1,401 deaths, mostly of children from cancer. When the BBC investigator Greg Palast put these charges to Chevron's lawyer, he replied: "And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?... They have to prove it's our crude, [which] is absolutely impossible."

The people of the Amazon do not want to see their forests felled and their lands poisoned. And here, the need of the indigenous peoples to preserve their habitat has collided with your need to preserve your habitat. The rainforests inhale massive amounts of warming gases and keep them stored away from the atmosphere. Already, we are chopping them down so fast that it is causing 25 per cent of man-made carbon emissions every year - more than planes, trains and automobiles combined. But it is doubly destructive to cut them down to get to fossil fuels, which then cook the planet yet more. Garcia's plan was to turn the Amazon from the planet's air con into its fireplace.

Why is he doing this? He was responding to intense pressure from the US, whose new Free Trade Pact requires this "opening up", and from the International Monetary Fund, paid for by our taxes. In Peru, it has also been alleged that the ruling party, APRA, is motivated by oil bribes. Some of Garcia's associates have been caught on tape talking about how to sell off the Amazon to their cronies. The head of the parliamentary committee investigating the affair, Rep. Daniel Abugattas, says: "The government has been giving away our natural resources to the lowest bidders. This has not benefited Peru, but the administration's friends."

So the indigenous peoples acted in their own self-defence, and ours. Using their own bodies and weapons made from wood, they blockaded the rivers and roads to stop the oil companies getting anything in or out. They captured two valves of Peru's sole pipeline between the country's gas field and the coast, which could have led to fuel-rationing. Their leaders issued a statement explaining: "We will fight together with our parents and children to take care of the forest, to save the life of the equator and the entire world."

Garcia responded by sending in the military. He declared a "state of emergency" in the Amazon, suspending almost all constitutional rights. Army helicopters opened fire on the protesters with live ammunition and stun-grenades. More than a dozen were killed. But the indigenous peoples did not run away. Even though they were risking their lives, they stood their ground. One of their leaders, Davi Yanomami, said simply: "The earth has no price. It cannot be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very important that white people, black people and indigenous peoples fight together to save the life of the forest and the earth. If we don't fight together, what will our future be?"

And then something extraordinary happened. The indigenous peoples won. The Peruvian Congress repealed the laws that allowed oil company drilling, by a margin of 82 votes to 12. Garcia was forced to apologise for his "serious errors and exaggerations". The protesters have celebrated and returned to their homes deep in the Amazon.

Of course, the oil companies will regroup and return - but this is an inspirational victory for the forces of sanity that will be hard to reverse.

Human beings need to make far more decisions like this: to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and to leave rainforests standing. In microcosm, this rumble in the jungle is the fight we all face now. Will we allow a small number of rich people to make a short-term profit from seizing and burning resources, at the expense of our collective ability to survive?

If this sounds like hyperbole, listen to Professor Jim Hansen, the world's leading climatologist, whose predictions have consistently turned out to be correct. He says: "Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know. We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with a sea level 75 metres higher. Coastal disasters would occur continually. The only uncertainty is the time it would take for complete ice sheet disintegration."

Of course, fossil fools will argue that the only alternative to burning up our remaining oil and gas supplies is for us all to live like the indigenous peoples in the Amazon. But next door to Peru, you can see a very different, environmentally sane model to lift up the poor emerging - if only we will grasp it.

Ecuador is a poor country with large oil resources underneath its rainforests - but its president, Rafael Correa, is offering us the opposite of Garcia's plan. He has announced that he is willing to leave his country's largest oil reserve under the soil, if the rest of the world will match the $9.2bn in revenues it would provide.

If we don't start reaching for these alternatives, we will render this month's victory in the Amazon meaningless. The Hadley Centre in Exeter, one of the most sophisticated scientific centres for studying the impacts of global warming, has warned that if we carry on belching out greenhouse gases at the current rate, the humid Amazon will dry up and burn down - and soon.

Their study earlier this year explained: "The Amazonian rainforest is likely to suffer catastrophic damage even with the lowest temperature rises forecast under climate change. Up to 40 per cent of the rainforest will be lost if temperature rises are restricted to C, which most climatologists regard as the least that can be expected by 2050. A 3C rise is likely to result in 75 per cent of the forest disappearing while a 4C rise, regarded as the most likely increase this century unless greenhouse gas emissions are slashed, will kill off 85 per cent of the forest." That would send gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere - making the world even more inhabitable.

There is something thrilling about the fight in the Amazon, yet also something shaming. These people had nothing, but they stood up to the oil companies. We have everything, yet too many of us sit limp and passive, filling up our tanks with stolen oil without a thought for tomorrow. The people of the Amazon have shown they are up for the fight to save our ecosystem. Are we?

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Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world.

Documents Back Saudi Royal Link to Extremists

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Eric Lichtblau
June 23, 2009

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Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers' copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity.

Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.

But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.

Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed "support for terrorist organizations" at least through 2006.

A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s and hired militant operatives like himself.

Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban leader.

And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that was suspected of financing militants' activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda.

Only a fraction of the documents have been entered into the court record, and much of the new material is unknown even to the Saudi lawyers in the case.

The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups.

Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

"In looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have not seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks," Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview.

He and other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. "It's an absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger," Mr. Kellogg said of the victims' families. "They want to find those responsible, but I think they've been disserved by their lawyers by bringing claims without any merit against the wrong people."

The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an appeal, but the families' prospects dimmed last month when the Justice Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the court not to consider the appeal.

The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted that "potentially significant foreign relations consequences" would arise if such suits were allowed to proceed.

"Cases like this put the U.S. government in an extremely difficult position when it has to make legal arguments, even when they are the better view of the law, that run counter to those of terrorist victims," said John Bellinger, a former State Department lawyer who was involved in the Saudi litigation.

Senior Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday with 9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has been outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have helped to finance terrorism.

Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity.

And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so.

Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims' families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public.

But she said she had not heard from the White House since then.

The other evidence that may not be admissible consists of classified documents leaked to one of the law firms representing the families, Motley Rice of South Carolina, which is headed by Ronald Motley, a well-known trial lawyer who won lucrative lawsuits involving asbestos and tobacco.

Lawyers for the firm say someone anonymously slipped them 55 documents that contained classified government material relating to the Saudi lawsuit.

Though she declined to describe the records, Jodi Flowers, a lawyer for Motley Rice, said she was pushing to have them placed in the court file.

"We wouldn't be fighting this hard, and we wouldn't have turned the material over to the judge, if we didn't think it was really important to the case," she said.

Hall of Shame

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Gingrich comments on Uighurs don't sit well with some in GOP

Grace Chung
Jun 18, 2009 - McClatchy News

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich got into a public spat with fellow Republicans this week after he denounced the 17 Chinese Muslims who're being released from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , military prison as "terrorists" who should be sent back to China , where they're likely to face persecution.

Gingrich, the Republican party's most prominent spokesman, is "in the Hall of Shame" for his remarks, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher , R- Calif. , said in his opening statement during a Tuesday hearing of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Human Rights. Democrats and other Republicans also piled on Gingrich for "fear-mongering" and allegedly peddling Chinese propaganda.

The Uighurs are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in the northwest part of China . According to the 2008 State Department Human Right's report, they've been the target of human rights abuses in China .

Rep. Bill Delahunt ,D- Mass., the committee's chairman, said that Gingrich is either misinformed or intentionally circulating false information about the 17 Uighurs to "appease the Communist Chinese," who've repeatedly asked the U.S. to return the Uighurs to China . He said the Chinese "brutally persecute and oppress the Uighur minority."

Gingrich, who heads a communications and consulting firm, couldn't be reached to comment. His office in Washington said he was on a cruise in the Baltic with his wife.

This is the latest in a series of disputes to beset the GOP in its search for a new figurehead. Although Gingrich remains the most popular leader among Republicans, his outspoken comments — such as calling Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a "racist" — have given some in his party heartburn.

Gingrich and other Republicans, as well as some Democrats, have staunchly opposed the settlement of former Guantanamo detainees, including the Uighurs, in the U.S., making it more difficult for the Obama administration to carry out its pledge to close the prison by January.

The administration has asked at least 100 countries to take the Uighur prisoners, but so far, only Bermuda and Palau have offered to accept them.

Gingrich has staked out his position both in a television appearance, in his regular column in the Washington Examiner, a free newspaper handed out at transit stations, and on his blog.

In a Fox News interview on May 10 , Gingrich spoke critically of the Obama administration's decision to try to find a location in the U.S. for the Uighurs, and said they should be sent home. Asked by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace whether Uighurs would face a hostile reception there, Gingrich retorted: "Why is that our problem? Why are we protecting these guys? Send them to China ."

Writing in the Washington Examiner on May 21 , Gingrich said the Uighurs had been trained in "weapons, explosives and ideology of mass killing" and "instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 ."

Rohrabacher, who'd been a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan , is generally credited for writing the speech defining the "Reagan Doctrine" and of supporting groups that fight communism. He's been one of the most focused members of Congress on the developments in Afghanistan and issued warnings about the threat from the Taliban rule in the 1990s when few others were paying attention.

"Many if not all of the negative allegations against the Uighurs can be traced back to Chinese intelligence, whose purpose is to snuff out an independence movement that challenges the communist bosses in China ," Rohrabacher said at Tuesday's hearing.

Although Gingrich didn't respond to repeated requests for comment, his communications director, Joe DeSantis , expressed surprise at the attacks and posted a response dated June 17 on Gingrich's blog.

"A lot of disinformation and spin is being hurled about. There is no question that the human rights record of China is deplorable. The question is whether the United States should release any of these Uighur detainees into the United States ," he said.

Rohrabacher said that Gingrich had misled the public and stirred popular opposition to receiving the Uighurs on American soil.

"No one on the Republican side was arguing facts. They were arguing what was presented to them by people like Newt Gingrich ," Rohrabacher said in an interview. "I am ashamed of the leadership of my party."

Iran Charging Bullet Fee

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Farnaz Fassihi
June 23, 2009 - Wall Street Journal

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TEHRAN — The family, clad in black, stood at the curb of the road sobbing. A middle-aged mother slapped her cheeks, letting out piercing wails. The father, a frail man who worked as a doorman at a clinic in central Tehran, wept quietly with his head bowed.

Minutes before, an ambulance had arrived from Tehran's morgue carrying the body of their only son, 19-year-old Kaveh Alipour.

On Saturday, amid the most violent clashes between security forces and protesters, Mr. Alipour was shot in the head as he stood at an intersection in downtown Tehran. He was returning from acting class and a week shy of becoming a groom, his family said.

The details of his death remain unclear. He had been alone. Neighbors and relatives think that he got trapped in the crossfire. He wasn't politically active and hadn't taken part in the turmoil that has rocked Iran for over a week, they said.

"He was a very polite, shy young man," said Mohamad, a neighbor who has known him since childhood.

When Mr. Alipour didn't return home that night, his parents began to worry. All day, they had heard gunshots ringing in the distance. His father, Yousef, first called his fiancée and friends. No one had heard from him.

At the crack of dawn, his father began searching at police stations, then hospitals and then the morgue.

Upon learning of his son's death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a "bullet fee"—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back, relatives said.

Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn't amount to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in Tehran. Kaveh Alipour's body was quietly transported to the city of Rasht, where there is family.

Everyone in the neighborhood knows the Alipour family. In addition to their slain son, they have two daughters. Shopkeepers and businesses pasted a photocopied picture of Mr. Alipour on their walls and windows. In the picture, the young man is shown wearing a dark suit with gray stripes. His black hair is combed neatly to a side and he has a half-smile.

"He was so full of life. He had so many dreams," said Arsalan, a taxi driver who has known the family for 10 years. "What did he die for?"

Zenb Momenent of the Bay

These Peeple Are Insane

For a refreshing break from the real world, consider the latest antics of the GOP. Under a misspelled banner for a conference to revitalize the GOP, right-wingers talked up English-only initiatives and said Obama will force Americans to speak Spanish; despite a vow to give a "fair and respectful" hearing to Sonia Sotomayor, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) blew off a meeting with her because she was 10 minutes late, no doubt due to the cast on her leg; and State Rep. Cynthia Davis (R-MO) argued against a summer food program for low-income kids by saying hunger is good for us.

"Bigger governmental programs take away our connectedness to the human family, our brotherhood and our need for one another...Hunger can be a positive motivator."

- Abby Zimet, Common Dreams

Israeli 'Settlements': Fictions on the Ground

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Tony Judt
June 22, 2009 - The New York Times

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I am old enough to remember when Israeli kibbutzim looked like settlements ("a small village or collection of houses" or "the act of peopling or colonizing a new country," Oxford English Dictionary).

In the early 1960s, I spent time on Kibbutz Hakuk, a small community founded by the Palmah unit of the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish militia. Begun in 1945, Hakuk was just 18 years old when I first saw it, and was still raw at the edges. The few dozen families living there had built themselves a dining hall, farm sheds, homes and a "baby house" where the children were cared for during the workday. But where the residential buildings ended there were nothing but rock-covered hillsides and half-cleared fields.

The community's members still dressed in blue work shirts, khaki shorts and triangular hats, consciously cultivating a pioneering image and ethos already at odds with the hectic urban atmosphere of Tel Aviv. Ours, they seemed to say to bright-eyed visitors and volunteers, is the real Israel; come and help us clear the boulders and grow bananas - and tell your friends in Europe and America to do likewise.

Hakuk is still there. But today it relies on a plastics factory and the tourists who flock to the nearby Sea of Galilee. The original farm, built around a fort, has been turned into a tourist attraction. To speak of this kibbutz as a settlement would be bizarre.

However, Israel needs "settlements." They are intrinsic to the image it has long sought to convey to overseas admirers and fund-raisers: a struggling little country securing its rightful place in a hostile environment by the hard moral work of land clearance, irrigation, agrarian self-sufficiency, industrious productivity, legitimate self-defense and the building of Jewish communities. But this neo-collectivist frontier narrative rings false in modern, high-tech Israel. And so the settler myth has been transposed somewhere else - to the Palestinian lands seized in war in 1967 and occupied illegally ever since.

It is thus not by chance that the international press is encouraged to speak and write of Jewish "settlers" and "settlements" in the West Bank. But this image is profoundly misleading. The largest of these controversial communities in geographic terms is Maale Adumim. It has a population in excess of 35,000, demographically comparable to Montclair, N.J., or Winchester, England. What is most striking, however, about Maale Adumim is its territorial extent. This "settlement" comprises more than 30 square miles - making it one and a half times the size of Manhattan and nearly half as big as the borough and city of Manchester, England. Some "settlement."

There are about 120 official Israeli settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank. In addition, there are "unofficial" settlements whose number is estimated variously from 80 to 100. Under international law, there is no difference between these two categories; both are contraventions of Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which explicitly prohibits the annexation of land consequent to the use of force, a principle re-stated in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter.

Thus the distinction so often made in Israeli pronouncements between "authorized" and "unauthorized" settlements is specious - all are illegal, whether or not they have been officially approved and whether or not their expansion has been "frozen" or continues apace. (It is a matter of note that Israel's new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, belongs to the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, established in 1982 and illegally expanded since.)

The blatant cynicism of the present Israeli government should not blind us to the responsibility of its more respectable-looking predecessors. The settler population has grown consistently at a rate of 5 percent annually over the past two decades, three times the rate of increase of the Israeli population as a whole. Together with the Jewish population of East Jerusalem (itself illegally annexed to Israel), the settlers today number more than half a million people: just over 10 percent of the Jewish population of so-called Greater Israel. This is one reason why settlers count for so much in Israeli elections, where proportional representation gives undue political leverage to even the smallest constituency.

But the settlers are no mere marginal interest group. To appreciate their significance, spread as they are over a dispersed archipelago of urban installations protected from Arab intrusion by 600 checkpoints and barriers, consider the following: taken together, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights constitute a homogenous demographic bloc nearly the size of the District of Columbia. It exceeds the population of Tel Aviv itself by almost one third. Some "settlement."

If Israel is drunk on settlements, the United States has long been its enabler. Were Israel not the leading beneficiary of American foreign aid - averaging $2.8 billion a year from 2003 to 2007, and scheduled to reach $3.1 billion by 2013 - houses in West Bank settlements would not be so cheap: often less than half the price of equivalent homes in Israel proper.

Many of the people who move to these houses don't even think of themselves as settlers. Newly arrived from Russia and elsewhere, they simply take up the offer of subsidized accommodation, move into the occupied areas and become - like peasants in southern Italy freshly supplied with roads and electricity - the grateful clients of their political patrons. Like American settlers heading west, Israeli colonists in the West Bank are the beneficiaries of their very own Homestead Act, and they will be equally difficult to uproot.

Despite all the diplomatic talk of disbanding the settlements as a condition for peace, no one seriously believes that these communities - with their half a million residents, their urban installations, their privileged access to fertile land and water - will ever be removed. The Israeli authorities, whether left, right or center, have no intention of removing them, and neither Palestinians nor informed Americans harbor illusions on this score.

To be sure, it suits almost everyone to pretend otherwise - to point to the 2003 "road map" and speak of a final accord based on the 1967 frontiers. But such feigned obliviousness is the small change of political hypocrisy, the lubricant of diplomatic exchange that facilitates communication and compromise.

There are occasions, however, when political hypocrisy is its own nemesis, and this is one of them. Because the settlements will never go, and yet almost everyone likes to pretend otherwise, we have resolutely ignored the implications of what Israelis have long been proud to call "the facts on the ground."

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, knows this better than most. On June 14 he gave a much-anticipated speech in which he artfully blew smoke in the eyes of his American interlocutors. While offering to acknowledge the hypothetical existence of an eventual Palestinian state - on the explicit understanding that it exercise no control over its airspace and have no means of defending itself against aggression - he reiterated the only Israeli position that really matters: we won't build illegal settlements but we reserve the right to expand "legal" ones according to their natural rate of growth. (It is not by chance that he chose to deliver this speech at Bar-Ilan University, the heartland of rabbinical intransigence where Yigal Amir learned to hate Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before heading off to assassinate him in 1995.)

THE reassurances Mr. Netanyahu offered the settlers and their political constituency were as well received as ever, despite being couched in honeyed clichés directed at nervous American listeners. And the American news media, predictably, took the bait - uniformly emphasizing Mr. Netanyahu's "support" for a Palestinian state and playing down everything else.

However, the real question now is whether President Obama will respond in a similar vein. He surely wants to. Nothing could better please the American president and his advisors than to be able to assert that, in the wake of his Cairo speech, even Mr. Netanyahu had shifted ground and was open to compromise. Thus Washington avoids a confrontation, for now, with its closest ally. But the uncomfortable reality is that the prime minister restated the unvarnished truth: His government has no intention of recognizing international law or opinion with respect to Israel's land-grab in "Judea and Samaria."

Thus President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress. But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond.

Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill. He could also remind Israelis that the illegal communities have nothing to do with Israel's defense, much less its founding ideals of agrarian self-sufficiency and Jewish autonomy. They are nothing but a colonial takeover that the United States has no business subsidizing.

But if I am right, and there is no realistic prospect of removing Israel's settlements, then for the American government to agree that the mere nonexpansion of "authorized" settlements is a genuine step toward peace would be the worst possible outcome of the present diplomatic dance. No one else in the world believes this fairy tale; why should we? Israel's political elite would breathe an unmerited sigh of relief, having once again pulled the wool over the eyes of its paymaster. The United States would be humiliated in the eyes of its friends, not to speak of its foes. If America cannot stand up for its own interests in the region, at least let it not be played yet again for a patsy.

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Tony Judt is the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University and the author of "Postwar" and "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century."

Are Mind-Enhancing Drugs a Dangerous Fad or a Great Way to Get Ahead?

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Jeremy Laurance
June 23, 2009 - Independent UK

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Advocates say they are an irresistible way of improving students' performance. Critics argue they are a dangerous fad.

In the middle of the exam season, the offer of a drug that could improve results might excite students but would be likely to terrify their parents. Now, a distinguished professor of bioethics says it is time to embrace the possibilities of "brain boosters" -- chemical cognitive enhancement. The provocative suggestion comes from John Harris, director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Ritalin is a stimulant drug, best known as a treatment for hyperactive children. But it has also found a ready black market among students, especially in the US, who are desperate to succeed and are turning to it in preference to the traditional stimulants of coffee and cigarettes. Users say it helps them to focus and concentrate, and this has been confirmed in research studies on adults.

David Green, a student at the University of Harvard, told The Washington Post: "In all honesty, I haven't written a paper without Ritalin since my junior year in high school."

Matt, a business finance student at the University of Florida, claimed a similar drug, Adderall, had helped him improve his grades. "It's a miracle drug," he told The Boston Globe. "It is unbelievable how my concentration boosts when I use it."

Some experts have condemned the trend and accused students of gaining an "unfair advantage" by doping, without explaining why it is any more unfair than hiring a private tutor or paying for exam coaching.

Professor Harris says that the arguments against the drugs "have not been persuasive" and that society ought to want enhancement.

"It is not rational to be against human enhancement," he writes. "Humans are creatures that result from an enhancement process called evolution and moreover are inveterate self improvers in every conceivable way."

Although no drug can be guaranteed safe and free of all side-effects, Ritalin has been judged safe enough for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and has been widely used to treat them over many years, he says.

The drug is a stimulant which was introduced in 1956 and appears to influence the way the brain filters and responds to stimuli. It increases energy as well as confidence and has been compared to cocaine. Possible side-effects are typical of stimulants and include insomnia, loss of appetite, dizziness and depression on withdrawal.

Other drugs investigated for their mind-enhancing properties include donepezil, a treatment for dementia and modafinil, used in narcolepsy, the condition in which sufferers repeatedly fall asleep.

Both drugs are thought to boost highly skilled performance, where concentration and alertness are prerequisites. One study found commercial pilots who took donepezil for one month performed better than pilots on a placebo when dealing with emergencies on a flight simulator. A study of modafinil found that it boosted the performance of helicopter pilots flying on simulators who had been deprived of sleep.

Writing in the online British Medical Journal, Professor Harris says the use of cognitive enhancing drugs should be seen as a natural extension of the process of education. Drug regulatory agencies should assess the benefits and risks in the same way as they would for any other medical intervention.

"Suppose a university were to set out deliberately to improve the mental capacities of its students. Suppose they further claimed that not only could they achieve this but that their students would be more intelligent and mentally alert than any in history. We might be sceptical but if the claims could be sustained should we be pleased?"

His answer is an unequivocal yes. He concludes that it is unethical to stop healthy people taking Ritalin to enhance their mental performance.

But in total disagreement, Professor Anjan Chatterjee from the University of Pennsylvania argues in the BMJ that there are too many risks. In the US, the drug carries a "black box" warning, the most serious, because of its high potential for abuse, serious adverse risks on the heart and the risk of sudden death.

He adds that there are cognitive trade-offs in taking Ritalin, with a loss of creativity, and points out that "being smarter does not mean being wiser." He raises the spectre of children at top preparatory schools taking Ritalin in "epidemic proportions" and pilots, police and doctors being pressurised to take it when on-call.

Progress often carries risk, says Professor Harris. The development of "synthetic sunshine" (firelights, lamplight and electric light) could have forced people to work through the night. The answer was not to ban it but to introduce laws to regulate working hours. "The same is or will be true of chemical cognitive enhancers," he concludes.

A stimulating debate: The pills in question

Ritalin

A stimulant drug introduced in 1956 for the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children, it has become increasingly widely used, especially in the US. In recent years, reports have emerged of it being abused by students seeking aids to help them through their exams.

Amphetamines

The stimulant was first synthesised more than a century ago and has been used and abused to boost energy, increase wakefulness and prolong endurance. Its users have been as diverse as long distance lorry drivers wanting to ward off drowsiness and women trying to lose weight. Today it is prescribed for ADHD and narcolepsy, and has been investigated for its role in helping stroke victims re-learn motor skills.

Donepezil

Scientists in aviation medicine and in the military have been examining medicines which might increase alertness and concentration to minimise risk of pilot error and maximise endurance. Donepezil, used to treat of dementia, has been shown to boost the performance of pilots on flight simulators, especially in emergencies.

Modafinil

Modafinil, a drug used to treat the sleep disorder narcolepsy, has also been tested on pilots and other members of the armed forces. While commercial pilots have strict rules governing flying time and rest periods, fighter pilots may be called to action at a moment's notice. Tests on helicopter pilots flying on simulators who had been deprived of sleep showed the drug boosted performance.

Health Care Showdown: The Alleged 'Center' Must Not Hold

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Paul Krugman
June 22, 2009 - The New York Times

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America's political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.

The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it's 1993.

And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.

The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What's more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as "socialized medicine" — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.

Or to put it another way, in effect voters support the health care plan jointly released by three House committees last week, which relies on a combination of subsidies and regulation to achieve universal coverage, and introduces a public plan to compete with insurers and hold down costs.

Yet it remains all too possible that health care reform will fail, as it has so many times before.

I'm not that worried about the issue of costs. Yes, the Congressional Budget Office's preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that they have to pass a health care bill for the sake of their own survival. One way or another, the numbers will be brought in line.

The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by "centrist" Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around "centrist," by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.

What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.

Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don't seem able to explain their reasons in public.

Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a "deal-breaker." Why? Because he didn't think private insurers could compete: "At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day." Um, isn't the purpose of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?

Mr. Nelson softened his stand after reform advocates began a public campaign targeting him for his position on the public option.

And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can't have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won't get the votes of senators like him. "In a 60-vote environment," he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), "you've got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, I don't believe, is possible with a pure public option."

Honestly, I don't know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn't? If I had to guess, I'd say that what's really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.

But this fantasy can't be allowed to stand in the way of giving America the health care reform it needs. This time, the alleged center must not hold.

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Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Obama’s Right Turn

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William Fisher
June 22, 2009 - Inter Press Service

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Human rights and open government advocates were heartened by President Barack Obama's pledge during his first week in office to create "an unprecedented level of openness in government" and "establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration".

But now, well into Obama's second 100 days in office, many are expressing outrage and disappointment that many of the president's decisions have followed the path of his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

The Obama administration has invoked the "state secrets" privilege several times to prevent lawsuits dealing with "extraordinary renditions" and warrantless wiretapping from ever being heard in court. Justice Department lawyers have argued that detainees at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan have no right to challenge their detention.

The government has also caved to Democrats and Republicans in Congress to keep any of the Guantanamo Bay detainees from ever entering the U.S., even though the Defense Department has cleared these men for release and declared that they present no threat to U.S. national security.

Reliable reports suggest that Obama is considering "indefinite detention" for GITMO detainees who cannot be tried in U.S. courts because the evidence against them was obtained through torture.

The government has gone to court to appeal a court ruling ordering the release of a 2004 report from the Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) describing the harsh treatment of prisoners in the agency's secret prisons. And the new president has refused to make public photographs reportedly depicting abusive interrogations at these and other government detention centers.

Obama recently rejected a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies because the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged "presidential communications".

On the issue of electronic surveillance, the new president has not repudiated the Bush-era executive orders supporting warrantless wiretapping and the legal opinions used to support them. Obama has resisted a "truth commission" to investigate former officials who allegedly broke the law and committed crimes, saying he would rather look forward than back.

Government lawyers asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought on behalf of a couple who were placed on a terrorist watch list.

And when watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Justice Department seeking records related to former vice president Dick Cheney's interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the "outing" of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the Justice Department declined to turn over the records.

IPS interviews with human rights and open-government advocates produced few explanations of the president's actions, beyond calls for him to live up to his promises.

But some have offered insights as to the "why" of what they see as Obama's u-turn.

Among them is Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois law school. He told IPS, "After winning the Democratic Party against Senator Clinton by appealing to its progressive wing, Obama immediately veered far to the right and co-opted all of the Clinton people into his campaign and then administration. So what we are seeing now is a third Clinton term with a continuation of many of the same foreign and domestic policies pursued by the Bush Jr. administration."

He added, "This has little to do with personnel and personalities. It has to do structurally with the preservation and further extension of the American empire abroad that necessarily requires the further consolidation of an American police state at home," he said.

"Hence the Obama administration has continued to ratify the illegal and unconstitutional policies of the Bush administration in court cases across the board, while escalating the Bush admistration's imperialist intervention into Afghanistan and now expanding it into Pakistan."

Another explanation came from Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which has mobilised dozens of pro-bono lawyers to represent Guantanamo prisoners.

"Why did Obama make promises about less secrecy, transparency and a narrowed state secrets privilege and proceed to have his administration assert positions and back legislation that was directly contrary to those promises?" he asked rhetorically in response to an IPS question.

"In the U.S., we complain about Chile hiding the crimes of the Pinochet regime, or Germany hiding the Nazi crimes or Russia the crimes of the KGB, yet where is the screaming when President Obama hides the war crimes of the Bush administration?"

His answer: "In part, the recent blatant assertions of secrecy are to hide crimes of former and some current officials. That is why President Obama is keeping the torture photos hidden. That is why he is continuing to assert broad state secret claims to try and hide the rendition program."

"That is why the 2004 CIA report on the secret site interrogations will be released with heavy redactions. Not only would the photos and documents implicate the Bushies, but remember some of those abuses were apparently committed by units under the command of the recently appointed commander in Afghanistan, General (Stanley) McChrystal," Ratner noted.

"Some of the crimes were allegedly approved or committed by the current deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, who is keeping his job," he added. Chip Pitts of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee offers another perspective. He told IPS, "There are undoubtedly elements of truth in each of the theories - or excuses - I've imagined or heard for the president's broken January promise."

"But the hedging and retaining litigation and other exceptions, instead of restoring the full presumption of transparency and openness in interpreting FOIA, are as disappointing as the hedging and retaining exceptions on other core planks of the rule of law, such as the prohibition on torture, military commissions, preventive detention, and maintaining ubiquitous surveillance."

He added, "The free information flows and social networking technologies in the Iranian protests are only the latest indication of transparency's new historical power. Obama himself recognized in that context the new meaning for Martin Luther King's injunction that 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice'."

"Obama would be better advised to be on the right side of that history than on the side of darkness and cover-up," he said.

A more hopeful note comes from Peter M Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University. He notes that the Bush administration "had the most ambitious view of executive power in history. Bush sympathizers see little difference in the Obama administration. Bush's detractors, in some respects, agree."

But the truth, he says, is probably closer to the Obama administration casting aside some of the Bush administration's more audacious claims while "still struggling to find a consistent stance with regard to its philosophy of executive power."

How the new administration will ultimately resolve its conflicts between secrecy and open government remains to be seen. But, as President Obama said over the weekend in relation to the current Iranian conflict, "the world is watching".

Will Congress Put Useless Fighter Jets Above America?

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Jon Soltz
June 22, 2009 - Huffington Post

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Let me get this straight. The latest polls say three-quarters of the American people want a public option in health care, yet it's in question. But, Congress is about to throw $369 million (on a down-payment of $2 billion) for a dozen F-22 fighter jets that even the Pentagon doesn't want. Oh, and the money for it? It's coming out of funds that were set aside to clean up dangerous nuclear waste in the U.S.

Only in Washington.

For those not familiar with the F-22 and why it's a waste, let me explain. It's one of the most - if not the most advanced air-to-air fighters in the world.... To fight the Soviet Union's next generation fighters. That's right, that's why it was developed. The fighter has limited air-to-ground capabilities, which renders it pretty much useless in the wars we're fighting right now, and might be fighting well into the future. President Obama and Secretary Gates have rightly decided to shift our procurement to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which we could actually use, because of its air-to-ground and stealth capabilities.

Nevertheless, to play it safe, we've got 187 of the obsolete F-22s on-hand or in the pipeline already, just in case the Soviet Union ever comes through with their next-generation fighters. Secretary Gates asked for only four more, to complete what the Pentagon said it could use. After that, the military doesn't want any more of them. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz have publicly withdrawn support for it saying, "The time has come to move on."

Apparently not those looking out for defense contractors, though.

And so, Congress is about to use the Defense Authorization Bill to pay for fighters we don't need from Lockheed-Martin, while taking money from cleaning up nuclear waste. Six decades of U.S. nuclear weapons research, testing, and production activities have left dozens of Department of Energy sites contaminated by radioactive and hazardous waste. The contamination threatens workers, communities, and the environment, including major water supplies.

Now, other veterans and I aren't for cutting the Pentagon budget in a way that would hurt our troops in the field, or hurt our ability to defend America now or in the future. But, our money is best spent on equipment that is so desperately needed in Iraq and Afghanistan - items like the Stryker armored vehicle, which the troops and veterans of VoteVets.org have almost unanimously raved about, for its ability to maneuver while protecting them from IEDs. That helps us a lot more than planes sitting idle somewhere.

So, a warning. To any in Congress who vote to keep this money for the F-22 in, don't try to present it as a pro-military vote. The military doesn't want it. Troops can't use it. Most veterans would say they're not for it. And none of us are for letting dangerous nuclear waste continue to seep into our land and water. So don't try to tie this pork to troops and veterans.

In fact, those who really care about the military, troops, veterans, and America will vote to strip the money for the F-22 out. We'll be watching.

Obama's Health Reform Waterloo

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Dave Lindorff
June 21, 2009 - ThisCantBeHappening.net

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The Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of the president's congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because of the party's toxic decades-old decision to betray its working class New Deal base in favor of wholesale corporate whoredom.

The wall is health care reform, which both Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had hoped would be the ticket for them to ride to victory in the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential election.

But you cannot achieve the twin goals of reducing health care costs and providing access to health care to 50 million uninsured people, while leaving the profit centers of the current system--doctors, hospitals and the health insurance industry--in charge and in a position to continue to reap profits.

Watching President Obama address the American Medical Association was a cringe-inducing experience as he assured the assembled doctors he was not going to expand Medicare payments "broadly" to cover all patients, or end the current "piece-work reimbursement" system that has so enriched physicians, or as he told them that savings would "not come off your backs." It was particularly cringe-inducing when he told the AMA that he knew that making money was not why its members were in the profession, saying, "That is not why you became doctors. That is not why you put in all those hours in the Anatomy Suite or the O.R. That is not what brings you back to a patient's bedside to check in or makes you call a loved one to say it'll be fine. You did not enter this profession to be bean-counters and paper-pushers. You entered this profession to be healers--and that's what our health care system should let you be."

Oh please. I know there are plenty of wonderful doctors who are dedicated to their patients and to patient care. But I also know plenty of doctors who have told me how half their classmates in medical school were mainly in it for the money, and that study halls and cafeterias of American med schools echo with the conversations about what can be made working in particular specialties. Not to mention the corrupt and insidious profit-sharing arrangements doctors enter into with labs, CAT-Scan and MRI test centers, pharmaceutical companies and other businesses, to earn profits by sending patients for unnecessary tests and treatments.

One can only imagine what he would be saying to insurance industry executives about his "reform" plans.

Because Obama and Congressional Democrats are unwilling to cut themselves off from the lucrative campaign-funding bonanza that is the health care industry, they cannot address seriously either the cost or the access crisis that plagues health care in the US, and that makes health care in this country cost 20 percent of GDP--twice what it costs in any other modern nation on a per capita or GDP basis, and that still leaves one in six Americans without ready access to even routine health care.

The answer to this crisis is obvious: a single-payer "socialized" system, in which you still have private doctors, and private or publicly run hospitals, but where the government sets the payment rates for treatment, and provides all compensation to health care providers.

If Democrats in Congress were serious about health care reform, they would immediately order the Congressional Budget Office to conduct a cost study of instituting such a program--a study that would include an estimate of the savings to individuals and employers if health care costs were lifted entirely off their backs (because obviously it would require considerable new government revenue to fund a single-payer program, but that's only half the equation--the other half, the savings, is simply ignored by critics and doomsayers on the right and in the health care industry). Instead, Obama and the Democratic Congress are studiously avoiding even allowing any mention of the single-payer option. (A New York Times report today on the various health care plans working their way through Congress, and coming out of the White House, completely blacked out any mention of a single-payer bill in the House authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee, which the House leadership has prevented from even getting a token hearing.)

Obama's unwillingness to lead on this issue will doom his health care plan. There is obviously no way Congress is going to shake off its corrupt leech-like attachment to corporate sponsors and their cash-spreading lobbyists, but had the new president wanted to make a historic mark and cruise to victory in 2012, he could have, like President Lyndon Johnson before him in his campaign for Medicare in 1965, put himself solidly behind a single-payer plan and made the case that it could cut America's collective health bill in half while opening the door to every American.

Instead, he's likely to end up with worse than nothing--that is with even more uninsured Americans come 2012, and with health care costs moving up as a share of GDP--and could well find himself out of a job. The policy that his handlers, like White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, had conceived of as Obama's ticket to re-election, health care reform, could well prove instead to be his Waterloo.

That is if his adoption of a policy of expanded war in Afghanistan--another example of a failure to lead--doesn't prove to be this president's bigger policy disaster.

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Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains, and his latest book "The Case for Impeachment". His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Barack the Zionist

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Why President Obama's approach to settlements is better for Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu's is.

Gershom Gorenberg
June 17, 2009 - Slate

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It took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 10 days, but he has finally responded to President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo. On June 4, Obama challenged both Israelis and Palestinians to work toward a two-state solution. On Sunday, Netanyahu responded with an assent wrapped in so many preconditions as to render it virtually meaningless. Obama also demanded that Israel freeze the growth of its settlements in the West Bank. To this Netanyahu responded with defiant rejection.

Diplomatic entreaties over the two-state solution will continue in closed rooms. The dispute over the settlements, however, is likely to remain public. In that dispute, Obama is working for the classic Zionist goal of a thriving democratic state with a Jewish majority. Netanyahu is undercutting that strategic goal by sticking to a Zionist tactic that became obsolete decades ago.

A look at the history of settlement shows why. Before 1948, settling the land was one method used by Zionists in building a new Jewish society and working toward independence. "Settlement" normally referred to an agricultural community. The idea was that Jews must return not only to their homeland, but to the soil itself. The intellectuals sent themselves to the countryside. Most settlements were either communes—kibbutzim—or cooperative farming villages—moshavim. Both were intended to be the foundation of a socialist society.

Settlement was also—perhaps primarily—a tool in the struggle between two national movements, Jewish and Palestinian Arab, over one homeland. Particularly after the first proposal to partition Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, in 1937, the placement of new settlements was intended to stake a claim to more of Palestine and to determine the borders of the Jewish state-to-be. In the 1940s, kibbutzim also served as the base for the Palmah, the nascent Jewish army. Settlement was the tactic of a revolutionary movement.

In 1948, the revolution succeeded, and the state of Israel was established. Settlement, like the secret weapons caches under kibbutz cowsheds, became an anachronism. The state had an army. Its borders were set by armistice agreements. Romantic ideals notwithstanding, Israel developed as an urban, industrial society. The elected government set economic policy and eventually left socialism behind. The state's pressing challenge was not to extend Jewish hegemony over the land but to integrate the Arab national minority into its democracy.

And yet, in the words of Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed, "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those … that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs." Diamond's dictum was born out after Israel's conquests in the unexpected war of June 1967.

Israeli leaders deadlocked on what to do with the newly occupied territories, especially the West Bank. They regarded it as part of the Jewish homeland and valued it for making Israel more defensible. Yet some officials warned from the start that giving citizenship to the Palestinians of the West Bank would turn Israel into a binational state—and that ruling them without giving them rights would be seen as colonialism. "My government has decided not to decide," Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told President Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

In the absence of considered policy, leaders and activists fell back almost reflexively on the obsolete tactic of settling the land. With no agreed overall plan, each new settlement asserted a permanent claim to rule a bit more territory. Initially, Labor Party governments established kibbutzim and moshavim. When the right-wing Likud party took power in 1977, it jettisoned that approach. Instead, it subsidized bedroom communities in the West Bank.

Thus did the suburban dream replace the socialist dream. Some politicians opposed settling in a particular area, but virtually none rejected settlement as such. It was, after all, a Zionist value.

This time, though, settlement did not build the state. It undermined the state. In October 1967, the government stopped printing maps with the prewar borders. In the countryside portrayed by those maps, settlements blurred the border between Israel and occupied territory. Legal changes allowed settlers to live under Israeli law while Palestinians lived under the law of military occupation. Whatever it is called, this two-tiered legal system undercuts democracy.

The settlements became Israel's largest ongoing public project. But the costs are scattered through the national budget, woven into outlays for the ministries of Defense, Housing, Education, Interior, and others. There is no overall total available. The lack of transparency not only prevents informed debate of the costs, it is another blow to democracy.

From the start, settlement activists and supportive officials have put their cause above the law. A Cabinet minister funded the very first settlement in occupied territory—in the Golan Heights in 1967—with money designated to give jobs to the unemployed. A recently leaked Israeli army database shows that more than 30 government-approved settlements are built partly on privately owned Palestinian land. Since the mid-1990s, in a massive rogue operation, more than 100 so-called "outpost" settlements have been established without legally required government approval—but with funding and other assistance from multiple government agencies.

Through settlement, the state of Israel has reverted to an acre-by-acre struggle between Jews and Palestinians for control of land. The settlement enterprise has reversed history, turning Israel from a state into a national movement. And the dilemma remains: Israel cannot be a democracy with a Jewish majority and at the same time rule the West Bank. The solution today, as it was when the United Nations debated the Palestine question in 1947, is partitioning the land between two states.

Netanyahu, looking backward, does not see this. Settlers, he said Sunday, are a "pioneering, Zionist community with values." His choice of language is revealing: It was during the pre-independence struggle that "pioneering" was the highest ideal. Obama, looking forward, recognizes that an end to settlement growth is an essential step toward division of the land. When that division takes place, it will not only bring the establishment of a Palestinian state. It will bring the re-establishment of Israel.

Whale meat trade increases, despite ban

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Jun 21, 2009 - AFP

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Oslo, Norway – Despite being officially illegal, the international trade in whale meat between the whale-hunting nations is quietly picking up again, say enviromental campaigners.

The issue has already become one of the flashpoints between pro- and anti-whaling campaigners in the run-up to the five-day annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, which opens Monday.

Delegates at the conference, which this year will be in the Portuguese island of Madeira, will also debate the issue.

Japan, Norway, Iceland -- the main whaling nations -- all want to lift the ban on the trade, which is outlawed under the terms of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Despite the 1986 international moratorium on whale-hunting, Norway and Iceland have resumed whaling, having reserved their position on the moratorium. Japan uses an opt-out that allows whaling for scientific purposes.

After a gap of two decades, Japan started importing whale meat in 2008: a few tens of tonnes of Iceland whalemeat and less than 10 tonnes from Norway.

This year, the Nordic nations want to increase that amount. One Norwegian firm, Lofothval, has obtained export licences for 47 tonnes of whale meat.

Iceland plans on exporting half its quota of 100 small Minke whales or 150 Fin whales.

For Truls Gulowsen, the head of environmental campaigners Greenpeace in Scandinavia, it is a sign of their desperation.

"That shows the despair of the whaling industry, that can't sell its products in Norway and so is trying to get rid of them abroad at any price," he said.

"But the Japanese eat less and less whale meat and their warehouses are alreday full of products that the local hunters can't get rid of."

Industry professionals reject that argument. For them, the Japanese market is a promising new market offering higher prices -- even if they will not discuss the precise figures.

"Japan, that's more than 120 million inhabitants," said Rune Froevik of Lofothval.

"Certainly, some of them still have to get their palates accustomed to a product that they haven't all tasted, but they are receptive because a large part of their diet already comes from the sea.

And the Japanese consume the fat of the whale, which in Norway is considered a waste product.

"Each catch becomes more profitable because a small Minke whale contains 1.5 tonnes of meat and 500 kilos of blubber," said Froevik.

As well as their reservations over the 1986 whaling moratorium, Japan, Iceland and Norway have also questioned the need for having whales on the CITES list of endangered species.

That position leaves them free to trade among themselves in the meat.

"We have certainly tried to get the whale off this list but we have come up against political obstruction," said Oeystein Stoerkersen, who heads up Norway's Directorate for Nature Management.

"The experts, including those abroad, agree that the species we are hunting are not under threat, but certain decision-makers in the United Sates, Britain and in Germany or France are trying to scrounge votes by pandering to ill-informed public opinion," he said.

According to the International Whaling Commission's scientific committee, the North Atlantic has 30,000 Fin whales and 174,000 Minke whales.

For Norway that is enough to all the harpooning of about 1,000 whales a year.

Neo-Zen Moment of the Day

Confidential Memo Reveals US Plan to Provoke an Invasion of Iraq

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Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff and Mark Townsend
June 21, 2009 - The Observer/UK

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A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam's WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

The five-page document, written by Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK's ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war.

Paraphrasing Bush's comments at the meeting, Manning, noted: "The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin."

Last night an expert on international law who is familar with the memo's contents said it provided vital evidence into the two men's frames of mind as they considered the invasion and its aftermath and must be presented to the Chilcott inquiry established by Gordon Brown to examine the causes, conduct and consequences of the Iraq war.

Philippe Sands, QC, a professor of law at University College London who is expected to give evidence to the inquiry, said confidential material such as the memo was of national importance, making it vital that the inquiry is not held in private, as Brown originally envisioned.

In today's Observer, Sands writes: "Documents like this raise issues of national embarrassment, not national security. The restoration of public confidence requires this new inquiry to be transparent. Contentious matters should not be kept out of the public domain, even in the run-up to an election."

The memo notes there had been a shift in the two men's thinking on Iraq by late January 2003 and that preparing for war was now their priority. "Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," Manning writes. This was despite the fact Blair that had yet to receive advice on the legality of the war from the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, which did not arrive until 7 March 2003 - 13 days before the bombing campaign started.

In his article today, Sands says the memo raises questions about the selection of the chair of the inquiry. Sir John Chilcott sat on the 2004 Butler inquiry, which examined the reliability of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, and would have been privy to the document's contents - and the doubts about WMD running to the highest levels of the US and UK governments.

Many senior legal experts have expressed dismay that Chilcott has been selected to chair the inquiry as he is considered to be close to the security services after his time spent as a civil servant in Northern Ireland.

Brown had believed that allowing the Chilcott inquiry to hold private hearings would allow witnesses to be candid. But after bereaved families and antiwar campaigners expressed outrage, the prime minister wrote to Chilcott to say that if the panel can show witnesses and national security issues will not be compromised by public hearings, he will change his stance.

Lord Guthrie, a former chief of the defence staff under Blair, described the memo as "quite shocking". He said that it underscored why the Chilcott inquiry must be seen to be a robust investigation: "It's important that the inquiry is not a whitewash as these inquiries often are."

This year, the Dutch government launched its own inquiry into its support for the war. Significantly, the inquiry will see all the intelligence shared with the Dutch intelligence services by MI5 and MI6. The inquiry intends to publish its report in November - suggesting that confidential information about the role played by the UK and the US could become public before Chilcott's inquiry reports next year.

Closing the Farm to Plate Knowledge Gap

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Rob Smart
June 19, 2009 - Civil Eats

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In the battle for the hearts and minds (and pocket books) of everyday Americans, the large corporate players in today's industrial food system must be pleased.

Consumer advocates for sustainable, healthy food are fighting with farmers, not because either picked a fight with the other, but because the knowledge gap between them has grown so expansive that misunderstandings rule the day. Credit the gap to industrial specialization and consumer marketing, which I will return to in a moment. Often times, these misunderstandings turn personal, further driving apart two groups that have much to gain by working together.

How this benefits the industrial food players may not be obvious, but by fighting amongst ourselves, we are paying less attention to the mechanized system generating massive amounts of unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly food and unprecedented concentrations of profits.

For the average consumer, and likely many farmers, the "black box" of industrial food is a mystery. There is little to no transparency, except through increasingly common investigative journalism and documentaries, which industrialists and their associations quickly line up to discredit.  Keeping us in the dark allows industrial food processors and large food retailers to paint an idyllic picture of grassy fields and red barns backed annually by an estimated $33 billion1 spent on advertising to reinforce a desired, yet highly inaccurate image of where our food comes from.

Unfortunately, they have most of us fooled, which is why it is critical that we - consumers and farmers alike - find a shared set of priorities to unite our voices in securing safe, healthy, tasty food for generations to come. Let us abandon overused stereotypes and language that divides us, and instead concentrate on educating consumers about where the food they eat comes from, including industrial and "alternative" food systems.

Closing the farm-to-plate knowledge gap won't be easy. With the earliest advances in agriculture resulting in food surpluses, people, no longer physically needed on the farm, moved to urban centers to pursue non-agricultural careers. As the years passed and the complexity of the food system increased, people came to rely, exclusively in most cases today, on food processors and retailers to provide for them. In effect, we traded knowledge for convenient, cheap food.

On the surface, this seems like a great tradeoff, and for most of agriculture's history it has been. Civilizations prospered. Farmers made a decent living. Consumers readily found fresh produce, meats, and other ingredients to prepare wholesome, nutritious, tasty meals. But things started to change. Industrialization intensified. Corporate consolidation accelerated. Seeds became intellectual property (protected by patents). High-paid lobbyists proliferated. Politicians bowed. And, most important, people stopped paying attention.

Take a snap shot of today's food system. Study the details. What you find are a number of increasingly dramatic side effects that most people are not aware of, most of which are getting worse.

  •Today's average farmer makes about 55 percent less money for the food they grow than they did 50 years ago. According to the USDA, farmers' share of consumer food expenditures dropped from about $0.40 per dollar in 1950 to around $0.19 in 2006. The balance of consumer expenditures, termed the Marketing Bill, goes to "value-add" (i.e., industrial food companies).

  •While farmers' financial situations have deteriorated, food manufacturers' fortunes have skyrocketed to the tune of $3.1 trillion in revenues per year with above average profit margins. Judging by the fact that the Top 50 Food Processors and Top 50 Supermarket & Grocery Chains all have over $1.0 billion in annual sales, with Wal-Mart topping the list at nearly $100 billion, increasing concentrations of power are clear.

  •One billion people are obese, thanks in part to value-add convenience foods (e.g., fast food, prepared meals, snacks, sodas), massive advertising campaigns, and time-constrained lifestyles (e.g., two income households with kids). This, while another one billion people go hungry, bypassed because they are unable to provide profit margins required by industrial food.
 
•According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, obesity (one of the "western diseases" attributed to diet) accounted for $75 billion in extra medical costs in 2003. The Journal of the American Medical Association attributed some 112,000 premature deaths in 2000 to obesity. These additional health care costs, half of which are paid for by taxpayers, have all but erased the cost-of-living savings claimed by the makers of cheap, convenient food. And it's going to get worse before it gets better.
 
  •Analysis by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization reports that agriculture contributes 14% of human-released greenhouse gases each year, through methane from livestock and rice paddies, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, and fossil fuel use during production. In an era where controlling carbon emissions is critical, the industrialized food system must change or give up market share to environmentally friendly alternatives.

We have turned our food over to a system that doesn't have our best interests in mind, despite what billions of dollars of advertising tell us. Power is concentrated, not by farms or consumers, but by multi-national corporations. Increasing complexity rules the day, making it harder for even those in industry to keep food safe. And the halls of Congress are jammed with food system lobbyists fighting for more power, or, at a minimum, maintaining the status quo.

It's up to us - farmers and consumers - to take back control of the food we eat. At a minimum, we need to fight for the checks and balances needed to ensure safe, affordable, and environmentally-friendly food for generations to come. It won't be easy given the stacked deck industry is playing with. But by thoughtfully considering each other's perspectives, while separating ourselves from the complex, concentrated, industrial food system, we will find the common ground necessary to drive the change we seek.

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Rob Smart is a food entrepreneur focusing on regional food systems and consumer retail experiences. He blogs on alternative food systems at Every Kitchen Table.

Neo-Nazis are nothing new on American scene

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Ed Tant
June 20, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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He was an American naval officer who became an American Nazi. He claimed to regret having "fought on the wrong side" in World War II. His hatred for Jews, black people and anyone else who was not part of his "Aryan America" brought shame and sadness to his family members, who also were victims of his mad obsession.

He was George Lincoln Rockwell, and until he was gunned down by one of his own men in 1967 he served as the model, template and evil inspiration for later American Nazis such as James von Brunn, who fatally shot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington earlier this month.

Like Rockwell, von Brunn is a former military man who hates blacks and Jews and embraces the deadly doctrines of the Third Reich. Like Rockwell, von Brunn's militant madness claimed family members as its first victims. Rockwell's parents had been vaudeville performers with many Jewish friends in the entertainment world, including Groucho Marx. They were heartbroken by their son's hatred. Von Brunn's murderous hatred caused emotional distress and embarrassment for his long-suffering wife and son.

Commander Rockwell, as he liked to be called, began his neo-Nazi crusade in the America of the late 1950s. He railed against the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and, despite the laughably small size of his American Nazi Party, Rockwell had a vaudevillian's ability to garner publicity with speeches and appearances on television, radio and college campuses.

In "American Fuehrer," his biography of Rockwell, author Frederick James Simonelli says the neo-Nazi "never commanded more than a few hundred loyalists and never rose above the status of a curiosity to most Americans. Yet his influence on the racist right in American politics is lasting and profound. ... Within the racist right, Rockwell holds a place of honor and homage." Though he was deservedly disdained by the vast majority of Americans during his life, today he is championed by racists and reactionaries such as James von Brunn, who have gone even more crazy than usual now that a black man resides in the White House.

Nazis are nothing new in America. Two decades before Rockwell agitated for an Aryan America, the German-American Bund gained thousands of members during the Great Depression. The Bund packed New York City's Madison Square Garden with a throng of thousands who rallied for homegrown Hitlerism here in the land of the free that is fertile soil for the growth of fascism during uncertain economic times.

In 1984, members of a neo-Nazi group called The Order shot and killed Alan Berg, a liberal, Jewish radio host whose talk show broadcast from Denver reached listeners in more than 30 states. Several years before right-wing radio's Rush Limbaugh had a national stage, Berg was informing and entertaining large and growing audiences with liberal lambastings of the reactionary right-wingers until he was killed by the cowardly curs and neo-Nazi nutcases of The Order.

Today, such hate groups as American Nazis are once again at work sowing their poison seeds of domestic terrorism and discord. One does not have to look far to read sentiments like those voiced by James von Brunn and his ilk who howl that President Obama is a Muslim or a socialist who was not born in America.

Back in 1950, nearly 60 years before the Department of Homeland Security would infuriate conservative TV talkers and online right-wing squawkers with warnings of terrorism from the reactionary wing of politics, journalist George Seldes was prescient and correct when he wrote, "The main threat to democracy comes not from the extreme left but from the extreme right, which is able to buy huge sections of the press and radio, and wages a constant campaign to smear and discredit every progressive and humanitarian measure."