TOON

Gas Pump Thievery: Who's Really Behind the Rising Prices at the Pumps?

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Jim Hightower 
June 25, 2009 - AlterNet

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Like a Fourth of July crescendo of fireworks, our gasoline prices are rising higher and higher. While this is tough on consumers, we're assured by a covey of tongue-clucking industry analysts that nothing can be done about it, for it's simply the law of supply and demand in action -- so suck it up, and pay up.

But hold your BPExxonMobilShellChevron horses right there. Supply and demand? The supply of crude oil has risen this year to its highest level in nearly two decades, even while the demand for gasoline has dropped dramatically, having fallen this month to a 10-year low. Let's see -- supply up, demand down. That's a classic market formula for cheaper prices at the pump. Yet our prices have steadily moved up, rising by two-thirds since the beginning of the year (and by 60 cents a gallon in the past two months alone).

What's going on here is not the "magic of the marketplace," but some hocus-pocus by brand-name dealers. What might surprise you, though, is that the wheeler-dealers now jacking up our pump prices don't operate under the BPExxonMobilShellChevron brands -- but the logos of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street traders that have been placing vast, unregulated, secretive bets on the future price of oil. They're playing an electronic casino game in a global "dark market" of exotic derivatives and credit swaps.

If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it's because this is the same game that Wall Street played with subprime mortgages, leading to the present crash of our economy. And, yes, these are the exact same banksters that you and I are presently bailing out with our trillions of tax dollars.

Yet, there they go again. By pooling money from sheltered hedge funds, sovereign state funds, offshore accounts and other super-wealthy investors, speculators like Goldman and Morgan have quietly been buying trillions of dollars worth of oil derivatives -- which essentially are bets that oil prices will rise to a certain level by a certain date.

Unlike those investors who actually purchase contracts for future delivery of oil, there is no limit on how much money these gamblers can put into the oil market. Nor do they have to report to anyone how much they have bet, even though their massive infusion of money is totally and artificially distorting the real value of petroleum.

As CNBC television's top energy correspondent, Sharon Epperson, reported last month, "It's this money flow -- rather than the fundamental supply-demand data -- that's driving oil prices higher."

Why is this allowed? Because the Commodity Futures' Modernization Act of 2000 included a provision that was quietly tucked into the law by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, specifically prohibiting any regulation of such commodity-based derivatives. Among the enthusiastic backers of this legalized thievery were Robert Rubin, the Wall Streeter who was Bill Clinton's treasury secretary, and his protege, Larry Summers, who is now Barack Obama's chief economic advisor.

This bipartisan cabal created a speculative mechanism that's presently sucking money out of your pocket with every gallon of gas you pump. Meanwhile, every dollar that Goldman, Morgan and the rest use to inflate oil prices is a dollar they are not investing in real economic activity that could create middle-class jobs.

Of course, Wall Street culprits are trying to keep their involvement hush-hush. When a McClatchy newspaper reporter approached Goldman Sachs about it, the response was terse: "Goldman Sachs declines to comment for your story."

As Woody Guthrie wrote in a song about outlaws: "Some'll rob you with a six-gun/Some with a fountain pen." It's time to regulate Wall Street's gas-pump thievery -- and to put a few of the perpetrators in jail.

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Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow."

Operation Enduring Folly: US Kills 60 More in Pakistan Air Strike

Slick and deadly: Most of the victims in at least 22 unmanned "drone" missile attacks in Pakistan have been civilians. (US Air Force)

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Pierre Tristam
June 24, 2009 - About.com

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"Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely," the Indian writer Arundhati Roy wrote in 2001, in "The Algebra of Infinite Justice." Roy took a lot of grief for that piece from American public opinion, hijacked at the time by a blind desire for violent revenge (and the silencing of dissenters) that would prove to be far worse than 9/11's mass murders. Far worse, because we're living its consequences still, though far less in the West than in the Middle East: Iraq, Iran (yes, even Iran), Afghanistan and Pakistan as Roy's words have been unfortunately and terribly vindicated many times over, with no end in sight.

Yesterday there was this headline in The Times: "U.S. Tightens Airstrike Policy in Afghanistan," over a Dexter Filkins story quoting the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, saying that "Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use it responsibly," and pledging, "Even in the cases of active firefights with Taliban forces," in Filkins' paraphrase, that "airstrikes will be limited if the combat is taking place in populated areas - the very circumstances in which most Afghan civilian deaths have occurred. The restrictions will be especially tight in attacking houses and compounds where insurgents are believed to have taken cover."

Then this headline, barely 24 hours later: "Suspected U.S. Strike Kills at Least 60 in Pakistan." The attack was carried out by a CIA or Pentagon drone--killing people attending a funeral in South Waziristan. Dawn, the Pakistani newsper, puts the death toll at 50 and describes most of the victims as "militants." The Times is less categorical:
Details of the attack, which occurred in Makeen, remained unclear, but the reported death toll was exceptionally high. If the reports are indeed accurate and if the attack was carried out by a drone, the strike could be the deadliest since the United States began using the aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles at members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The United States carried out 22 previous drone strikes this year, as the Obama administration has intensified a policy inherited from the Bush administration.
It begs the question. What's Stanley A. McChrystal doing differently? What's the Obama administration doing differently? McChrystal's words sounded strangely similar to those of Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who told a congressional committee in September 2008, "We can't kill our way to victory." Only to let the killing continue.
Sometime this summer, the United States will register its 5,000th American soldier killed as a result of wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The media, if there's still any interest in casualties of any sort Stateside, will write the mournful editorial or two, missing, as always, the larger problem: the day-in-and-day-out devastation visited on local populations by the very forces ostensibly dispatched to protect them, at a price far, far heavier than the one sustained by Americans.

That one strike today killed more people in Pakistan than the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq since March. That many, maybe most, of the victims may turn out to be "militants" won't diminish the ripples of the attack in Pakistan, precisely the kind of ripples McChrystal was claiming to want to control from here on.

It's no longer the American Way of Life American deployments are fighting to preserve. The wind went out of that shameless bit of flag-waving years ago. But it hasn't been clear for years, either, what the deployments are fighting for. Or against. Except for the one recurrent target that never fails to take a hit, even when all else fails: civilians.

Cooking in a Coffee Pot and Other Useful Tips for the Homeless

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David Glenn Cox
June 23, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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I write this for the millions who, like myself, are holed up in basements, garages, empty houses, fields, culverts and what have you. Guilty of being Americans and homeless, trying to make it through just one more day in the land of Fuck You and the home of the slave. I am at the top of the homeless pyramid; I still have internet access and a toilet.

The one thing to remember about the homeless is that they never have a day off. They are homeless every day; it's easy to forget and difficult to understand, but the homeless face the world without a buttress. They are toe-to-toe with the heat and the humidity, the rain, the mud, and the bugs.

They have lost their basic building block of society, a home, a place to lay down their heads. A place to lie in comfort, a simple retreat from the world. I consider myself among the lucky; I have a leaking air mattress and a roof to keep myself dry and a box fan to keep me cool. I don't sleep in a bed but on a floor, and eat on a table salvaged from a dumpster. But it is not a home, it is a garage. It is a refuge and I am a refugee in modern America.

Brought up in another place, I feel myself an alien in this land. This is not the land of my birth. Where did it all go? How can we get back there? Our goals, motives and principles become polluted and reverse reclamated, blurred and obscured by the lack of a home. We live like cave men and women, targeted and dodging the monsters in squad cars or just avoiding the looks of disgust from those who believe themselves invincible.

But we know better and we look back with "see you soon eyes," and we dream a dream of beds with clean linen or a hot bath or a shower. A job with decent wages and maybe even a front door and a window with a screen. But if I had one wish it would be to play the movie "The Grapes of Wrath" on every TV channel for twenty-four hours, because I am living every line of it every day. "Don't take no nerve to do something when you ain't got no other choice."

"It's my dirt, it ain't no good but its mine!"

We are looking for our California, our promised land, a place to start again. Because, just like Tom Joad, we are getting angry. "They're working away at our spirit, trying to make us crawl" feeding us promises, programs that, like the rain, sound good but never reach us here on the ground.

I laugh myself through the want ads each day at jobs that make promises that are either sucker gambits or flat out frauds. Come work for free! Learn Grant Writing, only $200. "I never should have come on this trip. You remember that coupon in the spicy Western stories magazine? Learn to be a radio expert." Jobs that aren't jobs at all, promising good work and good wages but paying a nickel a box when they promised a dime. "An' you fellas will have to take it cause you'll be hungry."

I traded my truck for a 1992 Paseo and $1,500, but I don't drive; it is merely a vestige of who I once was. I don't drive because I don't have insurance, but it is like an escape pod. Just knowing that I could go if I had somewhere to go, it is my last redoubt. I'm down to about $250 dollars and still looking for work, foolishly, pointlessly. I applied to a popular website that was seeking in depth journalism on the subject of homelessness but they never replied. Typical American media, they just want anecdotes about homelessness, they want to hear about it but don't want to know about it.

I watch the body shop next door meandering towards oblivion as their work dries up. Friday, they had six body men working on three cars and you can't keep the doors open like that. The cabinetry shop on the other side is working four and a half days a week.

I buy groceries according to what I can keep in a mini fridge, more like an icebox really. It keeps food cool, not cold. For soup you measure a cup of water in a plastic cup and place the soup in the coffeepot. Then you let the water pour through and wait for the warmer to warm the concoction. It's not piping hot, but it's hot enough and beggars can't be choosers now, can they? Because of my culinary limitations I buy the same foods each week; two months ago it cost $45.00 and last week it was $65.00.

The money is rapidly loosing its value, which also explains why gas prices are rising even as demand sinks. I know that more of you are coming to join us in the time that the land forgot and you will have questions just as we had questions. But there are no answers for them, you just do and try and make the day. You wait anxiously for the Georgia sun to go down to offer some relief from the heat. As the sky turns red, the box fan again begins to offer some relief, the only relief available.

The kitties, Moxie and Blackie, still visit me each night and it is peculiar because I've joined their society more than they mine. When I wrote about them before, some people, well-intentioned I'm sure, suggested that I capture them and turn them over to the humane society. You don't understand, we are equals in this life. I don't rat them out and they don't rat me out. If I turned them over maybe they'd have a better life; maybe they'd get gassed.

But, like the Joads, "We had meat tonight, not much but we had it." The kitties are free and for the time being happy. I feed them and welcome them but they are free to go as well. They are not mine, merely night visitors who befriended me without qualifications. It would be too hard on my conscience to turn them in without knowing the outcome. Maybe you understand, maybe you don't. Tom said it like this, "Seems the government has more interest in a dead man than a live one." Or in this case they have more interest in picking up kitties than in finding them homes. Besides, the government has done nothing to help me; why should I expect more for cats that will never vote?

The cool and the stillness of Sunday night are a comfort to me and I must take my pleasure where I can, because the air mattress still leaks and the hot sun will return again tomorrow. So I will lay my head on the floor and dream.

"Fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken … fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe."

I dedicate this posting to citizensue, DGC

US, Israel, Russia Absent at Cluster Bomb Talks

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June 25, 2009 - Agence France Presse

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BERLIN  - Delegates from over 80 countries pledging to destroy their cluster bombs started a two-day conference in Berlin to assess progress since a 2008 agreement banning the weapons.

Absent however were the United States, Israel, Russia and Georgia -- countries which have used cluster bombs in recent years and which refuse to sign up the agreement. China, India and Pakistan also stayed away.

A cluster bomb is a weapon fired by artillery or dropped by aircraft that splits open and scatters multiple -- often hundreds -- of smaller submunitions, or bomblets, over a large area.

Often many of these bomblets fail to explode immediately and can lie dormant for many years, killing and maiming civilians -- many of them children -- long after the original conflict is over.

First employed by the German Luftwaffe on the English town of Grimsby in 1943 and by the Red Army the same year, their use really took off in the US bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s.

Most recently they were deployed by both sides in Georgia's war with Russia in 2008, and in Israel's bombardment of southern Lebanon in 2006, rights groups say, and by the United States and allies in Iraq in 2003 and in Afghanistan in 2001-02.

They were also put to deadly effect by NATO in Serbia in 1999, by the British in the Falkland Islands in 1982, during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, by Ethiopia and Eritrea, by Morocco and by Sudan, these groups say.

According to a 2006 report by Handicap International, there have been at least 11,000 recorded and confirmed post-conflict casualties and that the actual number -- levels of reporting being low -- may be as high as 100,000.

Around 98 percent of these are civilians, Handicap International says. A quarter of these are children, who often tragically mistake the bomblets for a toy.

Last year around 100 countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Australia and Japan, agreed to ban their use, development, production, transfer and stockpiling, creating the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM).

Ten countries have since ratified the CCM. Once 30 have done so -- as campaigners hope they will by the end of 2009 -- the treaty comes into force, giving the 98 signatories eight years to destroy their stockpiles.

It also requires clearing areas of unexploded submunitions within 10 years, and establishes a framework for assistance to victims.

But the United States, which has as many as one billion cluster munition bomblets, rights groups say, has not signed up. And nor have China and Russia, both of which are thought to have around the same amount.

The US has argued that destroying its stockpiles would put the lives of its soldiers and those of its coalition partners at risk, and that cluster bombs often result in less collateral damage than bigger bombs or larger artillery.

Other notable non-signatories include Israel, India, Pakistan, South Korea and North Korea, as well as Turkey, Georgia, Iran, Libya, Syria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Sri Lanka.

Thomas Nash from the Cluster Munition Coalition, a coalition of non-governmental organisations, said he hoped the Berlin conference would encourage some to drop their opposition.

"Our main focus is to get as many countries to ratify as soon as possible, get more countries to sign on so that we remove the stigma from the treaty," Nash told AFP.

"And that means telling the US, telling other allies that haven't signed the treaty, that they need to get rid of it, that this weapon is a thing of the past. It is no longer a legitimate or morally appropriate weapon to have in your arsenal."

US senators call for Chinese drywall probe

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Peter J Brown
June 24, 2009 - Asia Times

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In early June, four prominent United States senators notified the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) that firm action needs to be taken by the CPSC over mounting evidence that drywall imported from China is causing damage to thousands of US homes and adversely impacting the health of thousands. The CPSC has acknowledged that the commission had received 360 complaints by the time the letter arrived.

Drywall is known by many names, including gypsum board, plasterboard, and wallboard. In homes around the world, it is used to form interior walls and ceilings. Drywall is manufactured by placing gypsum, a very soft mineral, between two sheets of paper and then drying it in a kiln.

Approximately a week after the letter arrived at the CPSC, 10 separate class action lawsuits in three states involving drywall imported from China were combined into a single legal proceeding under a US federal judge in New Orleans. The case is known as "Chinese-Manufactured Drywall Products Liability Litigation" and it brings together eight lawsuits from Florida, one from Ohio, and one from Louisiana.

In addition to these lawsuits, more than 60 other similar lawsuits have been identified and will ultimately be included as well.

A Chinese company, Knauf Plasterboard (Tianjin) Co Ltd (KPT) is named in three of these 10 lawsuits, and Knauf Gips KG is named in four of the lawsuits. Both are part of Knauf, a German conglomerate. Various US builders and drywall distributors are also named.

However, another Chinese company which has been linked to this tainted drywall phenomenon stands out from the rest. It is state-owned Beijing New Building Material PLC (BNBM) which holds a controlling interest in Taishan Gypsum Co Ltd, also known as Taian Taishan Plasterboard and Shandong Taihe Dongxin Co Ltd, according to the Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune.

Not only is BNBM conducting its own investigation, but the CPSC and China's General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) are also exchanging information about what is happening, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. There are reports that a mine in Shandong province is the source of the problem, but this has not been verified. [1]

In their letter, the four US senators make it clear that they are not going to stand by and await the outcome of the complex legal battle shaping up in New Orleans. These senators want something to happen now, and they have "directed" the CPSC "to expedite its investigation and testing "of the drywall products in question ... and to carry out the Chinese drywall investigation without delay".

The senators wrote:
Since 2006, more than 550 million pounds of drywall have been imported from the People's Republic of China. On May 21, 2009, the Commission's Director of the Division of Health Sciences testified that since December 22, 2008, the Commission has received over 320 complaints about problems associated with drywall from China. The Director stated that these complaints include: structural effects on homes, such as metal corrosion in air conditioning units, copper pipes and electrical wiring; as well as health effects on homeowners, such as unexplained nosebleeds, insomnia, skin irritation and asthma. These complaints have been lodged by homeowners in 16 states and the District of Columbia.
Last Thursday, a one-day conference was held in New Orleans entitled, "Chinese Drywall Litigation". Dozens of lawyers and experts were in attendance. One of the speakers, Dr Patricia Williams, is a leading toxicologist and president of Louisiana-based Environmental Toxicology Experts, LLC. She is also an associate professor at the University of New Orleans, and she has been hired by two law firms to help represent their clients who are plaintiffs in the above-mentioned lawsuits.

Williams finds many things unusual with the drywall imported from China.

"Chinese drywall generates a continuous release of particles. Residents complain of copious amounts of dust that when removed from surfaces reappears in a few hours. Smoke alarms are set off frequently in the same houses due to the dust particles that circulate in the ambient air," said Williams.

Another problem, according to Williams, is that "Chinese drywall has a filler that contains concentrated heavy metals from a coal source. Analytical chemists are evaluating the filler and possible coal sources are coal mining wastes and/or coal fly ash. These heavy metals are toxic and when inhaled can concentrate in the body. Strontium is one of the concentrated heavy metals."

"Strontium is believed to be responsible for the release of the sulfurous gas emissions. The most commonly detected sulfur compounds that are emitted include: carbon disulfide, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide. The concentration of strontium is two-10 times greater in Chinese drywall samples that have been tested by our analytical chemist than in US drywall," added Williams. "US drywall is free of sulfur compounds and does not emit these gases."

Besides the CPSC, which has been named as the lead US federal agency for this investigation, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is also active, working with both the CPSC and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (CDC-ATSDR). According to an EPA analysis conducted earlier this year at the request of the CDC-ATSDR, "sulfur was detected at 83 parts per millions (ppm) and 119 ppm in the Chinese drywall samples. Sulfur was not detected in the four US-manufactured drywall samples ... Strontium was detected at 2,570 ppm and 2,670 ppm in the Chinese drywall samples. Strontium was detected in the US-manufactured drywall at 244 ppm to 1,130 ppm."

What concerns Williams is that the general public does not have a good understanding of the threat posed by this drywall.

"The general public as well as some of the residents in the houses with the drywall do not understand the acute and chronic health effects of the gases and particles released by the drywall as well as the safety risks of the sulfurous erosion of electrical wiring," said Williams. "The health effects range from acute exposure irritation effects to chronic exposure systemic effects such as asthma attacks, stroke, neurological damage, Parkinson disease, lung damage, and much more."

Williams points to other possible toxicants that are known to occur in incinerated coal sources that have not yet been tested for in the Chinese drywall. These include Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), and radioisotopes such as Radium 226, which are known to occur in coal mine waste and coal fly ash.

"The bleaching process, as well as uncontrolled incineration of coal sources, can generate chlorinated compounds, such as dioxins or chlorinated PAHs. These chemicals have not yet been fully investigated," said Williams.

In November 2006, a team from the Arkansas-based Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH), conducted its own analysis of air samples taken from homes in Florida where Knauf Tianjin gypsum plasterboard had been used to see if "the measured compounds posed an unacceptable public health risk".

"The testing revealed that the Knauf Tianjin product released low levels of certain naturally-occurring sulfur-containing compounds. Testing of the bulk material revealed the likely source of these compounds was a sulfur-containing mineral known as iron disulfide. One of the other two products manufactured in China presented a similar odor and also contained the iron disulfide mineral," reported the CTEH team.

However, the team concluded that, "measured concentrations of the detected chemicals in air were not present at levels that present a public health concern". This finding came despite the fact that, "certain naturally-occurring sulfur-containing compounds can be emitted from the Knauf Tianjin product at concentrations higher than present in background air".

The looming legal battle is likely to be a protracted and hotly contested showdown. Attempts by Asia Times Online to reach both German and Chinese company were unsuccessful.

According to Jack Landskroner, a managing partner of the Cleveland law firm Landskroner Grieco Madden, which is representing one of the plaintiffs, nobody has any idea as to the actual number of homes that might be affected, let alone how much money is involved.

"We know that some of the builders are estimating that a minimum remediation effort will cost at least $75,000 per home with an approximate square footage of 2,000. The cost will go up from there based on square footage and the adequacy of the remediation being suggested," said Landskroner.

Some observers see this base estimate as extremely conservative, and do not rule out the possibility that a figure twice as big may emerge over time. This possibility cannot be dismissed entirely given the fact that this estimate simply includes materials, fittings and certain items in the home. It does not include health care costs and other expenses incurred by the people living in the homes.

Although all the class action lawsuits have now been consolidated for the purposes of preliminary management in front of one judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana, it is too early to discuss any timetable or schedule as this case was just assigned to the judge in New Orleans.

"He will likely be holding a hearing in the next few weeks to discuss with the lawyers how the case will proceed," said Landskroner.

Scheduling aside, Landskroner contends that "the claims of our clients are meritorious and that we will obtain a fair and adequate recovery on their behalf by way of an agreed to settlement with the defendants or by way of judgment should the builders and manufacturers choose not to adequately address their culpability to these homeowners. Our clients paid premium prices to purchase their dream homes and instead they are now suffering the effects of bargain basement materials used by the builders which continue to [affect] their property and may also have long term effect on their health."

One resident of Fort Myers, Florida, described the Chinese drywall affair as "huge", but went on to add that while many builders and small businesses in the US would end up in very bad shape - if not out of business entirely - as a result of this situation, "the big guys" overseas named in the lawsuits would likely emerge without a scratch. Others wonder how US homeowners might be compensated for all the damages they may have suffered as a result. Can the foreign companies in question be compelled to mail checks to US homeowners? Many think not.

"The Chinese company involved in this matter as well as the German company have both been named as defendants in our lawsuits. We are in the process of having them served with copies of the lawsuits and expect that they will be party to this litigation," said Landskroner.

One Republican Louisiana state senator said what is unfolding here is tantamount to Chinese companies dumping "toxic waste" between two sheets of paper and exporting it to the US as drywall. Still, an effort during the latest session of the Louisiana state legislature to provide some form of relief to the state's affected homeowners went nowhere.

The consolidation of the lawsuits and the mounting pressure from the US Congress on the CPSC will no doubt bring additional publicity. Yet there are no assurances that demonstrations of concern and greater media scrutiny will bring any relief to thousands of irate US homeowners.

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Peter J Brown is a freelance writer from the US state of Maine and a frequent contributor to Asia Times Online.

Zen (sniff) Moment of the Day

Sanford's infidelity admission adds to an ever-growing list of woes for the out-of-power Republican Party as it looks to rebound against President Barack Obama and his emboldened Democrats. The episode is another distraction for a party seeking a turnaround after disastrous losses in consecutive national elections as it confronts a stark reality: its less than diverse ranks are steadily shrinking, its regional heft is limited to the South and it lacks a leader of stature to guide the party back to power.

- Fox News

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/25/sanford-scandal-latest-blow-republicans/

Afghan farmers ditch opium for saffron

Saffron, the world's most expensive spice, is derived from the stigmas of the saffron crocus.

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Farooq Faizi
Jun 25, 2009 - Asia Times

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HERAT, Afghanistan - Abdul Samad has given up growing poppies. The farmer from Gulmir, from a village in Pashtun Zarghon district of Herat province, has found monetary and spiritual benefits in switching to saffron.

"I always felt sinful when I was growing poppies," he said. "The money brought me no joy, and did not allow me to change my life."

In 2007, Afghanistan supplied more than 90% of the world's opium poppy, the raw material for heroin.

Abdul Samad grew the illegal crop for five years until a new

government program helped him make the switch to saffron, the world's most expensive spice.

"I make more money than I used to," he said. "With poppy, I got between US$400 and $600 for each jerib of land. Now I make more than US$5,000." A jerib is approximately half an acre.

Saffron is prized for its taste and color, and is used in food and dyes. People in Herat use it to brew tea when they can afford it. Even locally, a small five-gram knot of the substance costs close to US$25, a bit pricey for villagers making no more than $200 per month.

But saffron is catching on. Bashir Ahmad Ahmadi, head of the marketing department for Herat's Department of Agriculture, estimates that the province now has 212 hectares planted in saffron, with annual production approaching 50-70 tonnes. This may be miniscule compared to the 7,700 tonnes of opium that Afghanistan produced from 157,000 hectares in 2008, but it is a start.

The nation's naturally conservative poppy farmers say they need more secure international markets for saffron before they make the switch in bigger numbers.

The world price of saffron has skyrocketed over the past few years, and is now running at about US$3,000 per kilogram. Rumors that it may prove therapeutic in cancer treatment has caused demand to spike even further.

This is good news for Afghan farmers, who are looking for an alternative to poppy. The banned opium plant is expensive to harvest, and there is the risk of police involvement and possible legal destruction. Worst of all, it is bringing in much less money than it used to. The price of black tar opium has fallen precipitously over the past three years, mainly due to overproduction.

Experts say that saffron is being grown in 16 provinces of Afghanistan, including the northern provinces of Balkh and Kapisa, but the bulk of the product comes from Herat, in the west of the country on the border with Iran.

Saffron has a history in Herat stretching back more than 80 years. The first plants were cultivated in the Hauz-e-Karbos area of the province, and in 1973-74 the government conducted experiments in saffron cultivation.

But war intervened, and the project was dropped. Not until 1991-92, with the influx of returnees from Iran, was saffron reintroduced. Iran, jealously guarding its near-monopoly on saffron in the region, did not allow saffron bulbs to be exported. The enterprising Afghans smuggled them in.

"The returnees from Iran brought bulbs with them, illegally, and began to grow saffron in Ghoreyan district [in Herat]," said Ahmadi.

When the Taliban took over in 1996, they encouraged farmers to grow poppy, said Abdul Qader, a farmer from Pashtun Zarghon.

"The Taliban were buying our harvest for a very high price," he explained. "Many saffron farms were destroyed, and converted to poppy."

Poppy cultivation rose quickly, said Qader, as drugs were the main funding source for the Taliban. But in 2000-2001, the Taliban banned poppy. Some see savvy marketing behind the prohibition.

"When the price of opium dropped on world markets in 2000-2001, [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar issued a decree banning poppy," said Ahmadi. "They wanted to boost the price of poppy in world markets."

After the Taliban were routed in the 2001 United States-led offensive, farmers returned to the now lucrative poppy trade, joining an Afghanistan-wide movement that made the country the number one opium producer in the world.

Drug money funds the insurgency and fuels government corruption, hindering development and threatening to turn Afghanistan into a pariah state. The search for an alternative to poppy has been going on for several years, and some think that saffron might be the answer.

The government of Herat, with assistance from the local, Italian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team, began to distribute saffron bulbs free of charge to those willing to make the switch. Saffron grows well in Herat's hot, dry climate, say farmers. It is also easier and cheaper to grow and harvest than poppy.

"Saffron does not need a lot of water," said Abdul Qader. "It does not need a lot of fertilizer, and you need fewer people to harvest it." Also, he added, the bulbs, once planted, are productive for six years.

Like Abdul Samad, Qader said that his life had improved dramatically since he began to grow saffron.

"This plant has brought blessings to our land," he said. "During the first three years I was making one kilogram of saffron per jerib of land. But by the fifth year I was getting three kilograms."

The value of his land has also increased, he explained. Before farmers began growing saffron in the area a jerib of land sold for 70,000 afghani ($1,400). The price has now more than doubled to 150,000 afghani.

According to Mohammad Hashem Aslami, a saffron expert and head of the agriculture section of the Danish organization DACAAR in Herat, Afghan saffron, particularly the Herati variety, is the best in the world.

"There are three reasons for our high quality," he explained. "First, we have the right climate; second, we harvest by hand; and third, we have a very great capacity for production."

Ghafar Hamidzai, director of Afghanistan's largest saffron company, Afghan Saffron, agrees. "If the farmers use the right methods of cultivation and harvesting, Afghanistan's saffron will be the best," he said. "We are attracting a lot of attention from Western markets."

Saffron could be a boon to Afghanistan's agricultural export industry if it is properly managed, according to the agriculture department's Ahmadi.

"Over the next six years, if farmers receive help from the government and non-governmental organizations, the production of saffron will increase to 50-70 tons per year," he told IWPR. "This is a very positive step for the development and prosperity of this country and the region."

But help from the Afghan government has been slow in coming, complain the farmers.

"The Ministry of Agriculture encouraged us to plant saffron, and promised us lots of assistance," said Qader. "But they have not done anything for us yet."

Not true, says Ahmadi. His office has distributed saffron bulbs to the farmers free of charge, he insisted. They sponsored some of them to go to Kabul for training, and they are working on getting Afghan saffron into international markets.

Hajji Toryalia Rausi, an official of the Herat chamber of commerce, told IWPR that farmers had not asked his organization for help.

"The farmers have not told us about problems with marketing of saffron," he said. "If they provide information on their rate of production, we can approve a specific and stable rate for their product."

But still, says DACAAR's Aslami, Afghanistan's farmers require more substantive support.

"It would be difficult for Afghanistan to compete with Iran on saffron production," he told IWPR. "We still lack a comprehensive plan."

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Farooq Faizi is an IWPR trainee in Herat.

Israel stunned by Obama's tough love

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Seema Sirohi
Jun 24, 2009 - Asia Times

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JERUSALEM - United States President Barack Obama's bold new rulebook for the Middle East attempts a much-needed balance in a US foreign policy that has long tilted in favor of one against the region's many.

Israel is no longer more equal than others, the Palestinians no longer a mere backdrop and all evil does not emanate from the Arab world. Obama has changed language and tone to break through the tough mythologies of the region, calcified in years of failure to make peace.

He seems to want an honest engagement with the Muslim world and an honest accounting of the Israeli conduct. Obama is sending signals to all the regional players - from Syria to Iran, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, even Hamas - to begin afresh and "unclench" fists. The new policy tries to level an uneven playing field on which Israel has always won, no matter the contest or context.

Obama's decision to plunge headlong into the world's toughest region, to resolve its most difficult conflict, is farsighted because success here can multiply into success wherever Muslims live. To try to remove the most persistent agenda item from the long list of grievances is a move laden with possibilities, most of them positive.

By addressing the Middle East problem early in his administration, unlike his two predecessors who paid attention to the festering wound only towards the end of their terms, shows his seriousness and resolve to resuscitate the peace process. Depending on how his partners - the Israelis, the Palestinians and certain Arab countries - translate his plan, relations between the West and the Islamic world could improve with wider implications on other fronts.

Obama's speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, advocating a separate state for Palestine was a dramatic opening salvo, a frank admission of what needs to be done. He equated Palestinian and Jewish suffering, speaking of the two peoples in the same breath, something no other American president has done. He humanized and elevated the Palestinians who have long languished in the netherworld of neglected priorities of both the West and the Arab world.

Obama also loudly demanded an end to Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank as a prerequisite to restarting the peace process. A future Palestine weighed down by illegal Jewish settlements is a recipe for more, not less, conflict. It is also an issue where Israel has no cover - international law bars any demographic changes in the occupied territories.

No wonder Washington's new stance has rattled the Israeli government, lit up the Jewish blogosphere and made the religious right angry. Posters calling Obama "anti-Semitic" and wearing the kaffiyeh (scarf) are being waved at rallies in Jerusalem while YouTube videos filled with anti-Obama hate speech are multiplying.

That his middle name is "Hussein" has suddenly become a potent cry in Israel. A recent poll indicated that 51% of Israelis think he is pro-Palestinian. Many say he is pushing Israel to score "points with the Muslim world".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, heading a right-wing coalition, replied to Obama with his own "speech" trying to put limits on this new American enterprise. Full of conditions and caveats, his short answer was "No, you can't" to Obama's campaign pledge of "Yes, we can."

Netanyahu has been cold to the idea of Jerusalem as a shared capital of two separate states. He refused to freeze settlements and referred to the occupied territories by their Biblical names of Judea and Samaria. Although Netanyahu uttered the word "Palestine" for the first time, he envisioned it as a state without sovereign power, one that can not buy arms or control its own air space. He demanded many promises and assurances from the Palestinians even before negotiations began.

"He persuaded no one that he really intends to fight for peace. He did not lead Israel to a new future. He only collaborated with its old, familiar anxieties," wrote David Grossman, an Israeli author and peace activist on the front-page of Ha'aretz, a liberal newspaper. Palestinians have derided the speech as a non-starter. Mustafa Barghouti, a moderate Palestinian MP, said Netanyahu's speech endorsed "a ghetto", not a state. But Netanyahu's right-wing support has remained intact.

While a future state is still down the line, the most immediate test for Obama is the question of settlements. Will he compromise and allow what Israelis call "natural growth" - expansion of already existing settlements? Palestinian leaders and Arab governments say it is a litmus test for Obama.

According to researchers, nearly 300,000 Israelis live in 121 settlements in the West Bank, occupying 35% of the land through an intricate system of separate jurisdictions, security zones, schools, industrial areas and roads. Palestinians are not allowed to enter these settlements or use the road network.

Former US president Jimmy Carter and others have called this apartheid, but successive Israeli governments have encouraged, connived at and supported the settlements.

So far, the US Congress and the American Jewish community are behind Obama in his attempt to invigorate the process. The Europeans support him as do liberal Israelis who want a two-state solution.

If Obama gains momentum on this thorny issue, he can legitimately ask the Arab states to make gestures towards peace - such as low-level trade with Israel and tourism. He would also gain support for his policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan if he could heal rifts with the Muslim world.

But equally, a public spat with Israel, if prolonged, could erode his own base and unleash the power of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Can Obama and his advisers realize their vision?

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Seema Sirohi is a correspondent based in Jerusalem.

Israeli Leader Reveals Why Israeli Shuns Negotiation

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Ira Chernus
June 24, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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Israeli government officials are experts at finding excuses to avoid negotiating with Palestinians. Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs, Moshe Ya'alon, pulled out an old one the other day: "There is no partner on the Palestinian side, we just give, and we get nothing."

Others have now come up with a new one: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in his recent speech, "Let us begin peace negotiations immediately without prior conditions"; but the Palestinians, backed by the Obama administration, are demanding a halt to settlement expansion as a precondition to talks.

Either way, it seems, the Palestinians (as usual) must take all the blame.

But now, in a rare moment of unguarded honesty, Israel's second ranking leader, Ehud Barak -- Defense Minister, former Prime Minister, former head of the military -- has let the truth slip out. According to Israel's premier newspaper, Ha'aretz, Barak told reporters: "In negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel is the 'only one that can give, the Palestinians are the underdog and the talks are asymmetrical.' But in regional talks, Barak said, it becomes clear that Israel is the isolated party."

Israel has to look like the isolated underdog to keep up the myth that it is the innocent, virtuous, aggrieved party. That has always been a fundamental principle of Israeli strategy: Someone else must take all the blame for the conflict that keeps Israelis as well as their neighbors insecure. The only difference now is that a top Israeli leader has admitted it in public.

Barak knows perfectly well that the other excuses for avoiding direct negotiations with the Palestinians are bogus.

Take the "no partner" ploy. For many years the Israelis had a universally-accepted Palestinian partner, Yasser Arafat. Arafat could not embrace Barak's so-called "generous offer" at Camp David in 2000 because it was actually an offer to create a state of Palestine that was bound to fail. The New York Times recently called it, quite rightly, an "archipelago" of small clumps of land separated by Israeli settlements, security roads, and check points. The Israelis continue to offer only variants on the same impossible plan.

When Arafat turned down the offer, knowing that his people would never tolerate it, the Israelis launched a calculated plan to make him "irrelevant" and then proclaim that they had "no partner for peace." Unfortunately, the plan worked all too well.

After Arafat's death and the electoral victory of Hamas, the Israelis' great fear was that the two major Palestinian parties, Hamas and Fatah, would create a unified government, whose head would obviously be a partner for peace. So they torpedoed every effort in that direction, exacerbating (with U.S. help) the conflict between the two parties that continues to the present day.

Palestinian unity efforts continue, too. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has just ordered the release of all Hamas prisoners held by his security forces, in a goodwill gesture aimed at speeding the formation of a single Palestinian government. We can expect some kind of high-profile Israeli violence to break up that effort any day now, to make sure there is "no partner for peace."

The other Israeli argument against negotiations -- the claim of Palestinian preconditions -- is equally bogus. It was Netanyahu who recited, in his major address, a litany of conditions the Palestinians would have to accept in any settlement, many of them so painful that he can be quite sure they're impossible for his foe to swallow: no capital in Jerusalem, no right of return (not even a symbolic one), no withdrawal from or even freeze on settlements, and a state at some vague future date with no army, no control of their air space, no right to sign treaties unless Israel approves them.

As Barak rightly pointed out, Israel is in a position to demand such preconditions because it has all the power. It is "the only one that can give," and that leaves it in a position to dictate the outcome of negotiations from the beginning. Against all that, the Palestinian negotiators have to come up with some way to shift the power balance a tiny bit in their direction. Otherwise, they will sit down at the negotiating table powerless. And then, why should they bother to talk at all?

So against all of Israel's preconditions they've come up with this one, relatively minor precondition of their own: freezing expansion of the settlements immediately, which means only that Israel should begin complying with international law. Full compliance with Article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention would mean removing all the quarter-million or so Jewish settlers from the occupied territories, as Tony Judt recently pointed out. However, as Judt noted, Netanyahu has made it painfully clear that the settlements will stay: "His government has no intention of recognizing international law or opinion with respect to Israel's land-grab in "Judea and Samaria."

That makes it all the more important for the Israelis to find some way to avoid direct talks with the Palestinians while keeping up their image as the innocent underdogs. Hence, as Barak said quite plainly, they will resist two-way talks with the Palestinians and demand a regional peace conference -- which can be dragged on for years, with the settlement issue lost amid the vast complexities of regional matters, while the settlements themselves continue to grow quite unnaturally. Thank you, Mr. Defense Minister, for that rare moment of honesty.

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Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea and the forthcoming book "Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin."

Bush Assails Those Who Offer Terrorists 'Therapy'

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Though His Administration Sent Detainees to Saudi Counseling Center

June 18, 2009 - ABC News

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At a speaking engagement last night, former President George W. Bush defended his administration's counterterrorism policies, including Guantanamo Bay, the Washington Times reports.

"The way I decided to address the problem was twofold: One, use every technique and tool within the law to bring terrorists to justice before they strike again," Mr. Bush said.

Refraining from directly criticizing President Obama, Mr. Bush said, "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

Interestingly, it was the Bush administration that sent some Gitmo detainees to a Saudi jihadi rehabilitation camp -- called the "Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre for Care and Counseling."

To decidedly mixed success.

Earlier this year the Saudi government published a list of 85 wanted terrorism suspects. Eleven of them had been prisoners at Guantanamo put through the Saudi rehabilitation program.

Said Ali al-Shihri, transferred to Saudi Arabia from Guantanamo during the Bush administration in 2007, is currently the deputy leader of al Qaeda's Yemen branch.

The Bush administration also released Gitmo detainee Ghulam Rasoul into the Saudi rehabilitation program. Now known as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, he's a leader against U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan, according to military and intelligence officials.

Daring to Dream

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David Sirota
June 18, 2009 - Truthdig

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Most of the great advances we remember involve reimagination and dreams, not merely tweaks and tinkers. The Wright Brothers' plane wasn't a newfangled horse and buggy, Einstein's theories weren't a simple update of old physics, and Edison's creations didn't aspire to make a brighter-burning wax candle. It's been the same thing in politics. The Founding Fathers' Constitution didn't replicate monarchy, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal wasn't just tinkering with Hooverism, and Ronald Reagan's revolution didn't merely dismantle the welfare state.

All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories or societies that never before existed. And that's why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama's America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things must work.

Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don't reach for "a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business," as Paul Krugman said we once had—they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.

On health care, even as the Obama administration pushes to create a public health care option for consumers to buy into, most of the proposals for universal health care being debated in Washington still imagine a health care system integrally involving private insurance companies. In fact, the one proposal that sees a new health care system without those companies—a single-payer system—has been shoved to the side by both parties as too radical.

Same thing, again, for efforts to address global warming. Bills compelling companies to cap their carbon pollution and then trade it for credits are positive steps. However, they still embrace an energy system that relies on fossil fuels—and they don't strive for a day when we power our economy primarily with clean renewable energy.

I could go on, but you get the point. We are suffering from a lack of imagination—a failure of "the vision thing," as George H. W. Bush once called it.

Part of that is a product of a money-dominated political system whose most powerful forces don't want anything reimagined because they have a vested interest in the no-imagination status quo.

Another part of that shortsightedness, however, stems from our president's natural disposition. When I interviewed him in 2006, he acknowledged that the difference between reimagining institutions and aiming only to tinker with them is always the question that determines a political era. "Are you a revolutionary or are you a reformist?" as he put it before firmly stating which one he is.

"I think within the institutional structures we have, we can significantly improve the life chances of ordinary Americans," he said.

There's certainly merit to that line of thinking. We can, in fact, improve things for a lot of people by simply making many existing institutions work better. Patch a few banks, revamp the private insurance system and fiddle with our existing energy policies and we can prevent hundreds of financial industry bankruptcies, thousands of unnecessary deaths, and millions of tons of carbon emissions. Those would be no small achievements.

However, if that's all we aim for, then we will have passed up this historic opportunity to structurally transform the country for the long haul. In short, we will have missed the chance not just to tweak, but to dream again.

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David Sirota is the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover"  and "The Uprising".

Iran: It's Not About *You,* People

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RJ Eskow
June 24, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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Some Westerners have been driving themselves into a narcissistic frenzy over events in Iran, blind to the contradictions in their own behavior. John McCain's outrage over the tragic death of "Neda," a young woman who might have died under American bombs in his alternate reality, is merely one case in point. Suddenly the "clash of civilizations" crowd is finding new enthusiasm for an Islamist political party.

The President's remarks yesterday went as far as they could wisely go, but the opportunists and fantasists will both say it wasn't enough.

Why are the people who've been insisting there's a monolithic evil called "Islamofascism" suddenly backing one Iranian faction over another? As Prime Minister in the early days of the Islamic Republic , Mir-Hossein Mousavi helped orchestrate anti-American acts in Lebanon. Yet the crowd that's been demonizing the entire Muslim world is suddenly wearing green, which was adopted by Mousavi's party because it is the color of Islam. What's behind this seeming change of heart?

The behavior of pols like Lindsay Graham comes off as political expediency of the most cynical kind. They exploit American support for the brave demonstrators of Tehran by insisting the President isn't doing enough, knowing full well that to express more support than he has done would be counterproductive. It's the unattractive face of politics as usual.

For others, like McCain, it seems more genuine but no less misguided. He perceives no inconsistency as he careens from "bomb Iran" "jokes" to eulogies for those he might have bombed. He, like many Americans, is caught up in the emotions of the moment. And who can fail to be moved by the courage of the Iranian resistance? But let's not pretend that this moment is about us.

For some of us, people only become human and real when they give us an opportunity to play out our own ambitions or fantasies. That covers public figures like McCain. But it also includes bloggers who think they're commando superheroes because they're coloring their websites green and cut-and-pasting Tweets from Teheran.

To the virtual barricades, comrades!

That's exactly the kind of fantasy projection that allowed people to enthusiastically support an invasion of Iraq, against all reason. At last! A war of our own! A cause we can support, a flag we can wave, a battle that will make us the "greatest generation"!

But we're dealing with human beings, not figurines to be moved here and there on the maps of our own egos. Overzealous talk from narcissistic foreigners can get people killed. And Americans aren't the only offenders. Bernard-Henri Lévy's unsubstantiated assertion that this uprising is the "end of the Islamic republic" is equally irresponsible, playing directly into Ahmadinejad's hands by equating dissent with subversion. He may or may not be right about the outcome. Neither he nor anyone else can know right now. But either way, the Iranian people aren't helped by these sorts of grandiose pronouncements from the West.

There are several possible outcomes. Ahmadinejad and Khamenei could prevail. Or Mousavi and Rafsanjani could win out, thereby saving the Islamic Republic. Or this could be the beginning of a newly democratized Iran, with Mousavi as its Gorbachev figure.

Want to help the people of Iran reach that third outcome? Then why not start by seeing them as they are? They're people who adopted a very centrist candidate as the symbol, rather than the reality, of change. (Did I just hear some progressives mutter "that sounds familiar"? Now, now ...) In supporting a more moderate candidate they've been given a chance, but just a chance, to transform their country. Let's hope that history is with them.

Whatever the outcome, however, this is their battle. We can support the Iranian people and the principles of democracy without becoming partisans in an internal political struggle. That's a less melodramatic stance, and perhaps a less emotionally satisfying one. But it's wiser.

As much as we might like to wear green and dream that we and not they are on the front lines of history, that doesn't help anybody. Their movement is brave and important and real. But it's their movement, not ours. This is not our feel-good moment. Our play-acting is, in the end, a selfish act.

We all need to look in the mirror and remind ourselves: This isn't about you.

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."