zaterdag 8 december 2012

De Media Top 100. Joepie!


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Beste communicatieprofessional,

Dit jaar wordt voor de tweede keer DeMedia100 vastgesteld; de lijst van de 100 meest invloedrijke mensen in de Nederlandse media. Er is een longlist samengesteld van ruim 300 media professionals en aan jullie de keuze om daar je eigen shortlist in aan te geven. DeMedia100 is een initiatief van het Nederlands MediaNetwerk. Het onderzoek wordt uitgevoerd door Bureau MediaTest.

Tot nu toe zijn er ruim 600 stemmen uitgebracht. Mocht jij je stem nog niet hebben uitgebracht dan zouden we het zeer op prijs stellen als je dit vandaag alsnog wilt doen.

Meedoen aan het onderzoek duurt niet langer dan 2-3 minuten. 
 

Rob Does - MediaTest
Bas Vlugt - Nederlands MediaNetwerk



P.S.
Deze mail wordt éénmalig gestuurd naar alle leden van het Nederlands MediaNetwerk.

Zionist Terror 88


Zionist fingerprints all over U.S. led Iran sanctions


Israeli Espionage and the New Senate Iran Sanctions

  Originally published on PressTV December, 3rd, 2012


               … by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor                           … and Press TV


Why does our Senate let Israeli Intel Assets Write Legislation?

This past week the U.S. Senate, at the absolute low ebb of American influence in the world, exposed themselves morally as a toothless bully.
Israeli agents drafted the new Iran sanctions for an America the world voted against at the UN, partially due to our protecting Israel’s weapons of mass destruction threat. How I wish this were not true.
Netanyahu’s revenge began with an attack on Obama’s rear, with the U.S. Congress as the cavalry. The 94 to 0 Senate sanctions vote frankly caught me by surprise, which I first read about on PressTV.
I just had to find out who had organized this ‘Congress coup’ while the UN vote was going on.
The story source everyone online was using was Foreign Policy magazine, the Cable. Strangely, virtually none of the American TV networks or major newspapers had anything showing up on the Google search.
Foreign Policy magazine is run by the  Council on Foreign Relations and is VERY close to Israel. I smelled a orchestrated media event on this, and I was right.
We saw a major shift in the Iran news with the heads of the UN and IAEA, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all stating that they were going to focus on a negotiated settlement to the Iran nuclear issue, but of course never the Israeli nuclear issue which never seems to be an issue to them.
The Obama administration did not want new sanctions muddying up the waters while trying to begin direct new talks. Getting people to the table is hard enough to begin with. Shooting their dog before you ask never helps.
Why does our Congress let Israeli espionage agents write legislation, and to serve whose interest, really?
The Senate vote went down 94 to 0, with a few abstentions. Even the Democratic Senators were all on board. I smelled fear.
Only one group can make Congress act like trained circus animals. That is AIPAC and the Israeli Lobby, including those that work with Israeli Intelligence, and there are plenty.
I smelled an orchestrated press roll out here, tightly controlled with the rest of our media being quiet.
This usually means there are key elements to the story that they are hiding, so the Sunday afternoon digging began.
No one writing about the new sanctions had mentioned anything about who drafted the legislation. Again, I smelled a rat. They were hiding that.
Israelis always have their proxies draft legislation. It is their way of reminding everybody in Congress who runs the show on their issues, a public display of power.
I finally found Jim Lobe’s article on AntiWar.com and he actually did some real journalism. Our thanks to Jim for salvaging a little journalistic honor in this sordid story. Here was the his big quote:
“What the sanctions say to Iran is that we’re going to bring down your economy …and we’re going to do it fast,” Mark Dubowitz, director of the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) who has drafted much of the sanctions legislation, told ‘Congressional Quarterly’ this week.
Mark Dubowitz – Testifying
I knew I was only a few keystrokes away from the Israeli connection. The FDD is one of numerous front groups set up to push Israeli policies in America.
They pick out high sounding names like the one above and recruit big name ex-administration people, in this case ex-CIA director James Woolsey, to make themselves above reproach as a cover. It’s a good one, and it works very well.
They often recruit these people while they are in government where they can be assets for them, and pay them later with these think tank jobs. It is very common unfortunately. Even Congressman do it.
If you look through the FDD people at their website you find some of the old Iran-Contra gang, hardliners like Richard Perle, Michael Leeden, Bud McFarlane, etc.
These are the people who brought us the pre-emptive strike defense doctrine. They mix the old guys up with the younger ones, and those who are active espionage people have a smokescreen around them.
The pathway I have just described is just one of the fingers of Israel’s offensive political espionage against America. But it is the least known as our media and academia are afraid to whisper a word about it. They have strings on them, also.
Our counter intelligence people are humiliated by being reduced to only trying to monitor what they are doing. But they are not allowed to take espionage cases to a grand jury because these organizations have what we call ‘protected entities’ on their boards.
They simply can’t be prosecuted. This is an American national scandal, just one slice of it.
Ex-CIA James Woolsey is despised by the Intel old timers. His most recent disgrace was becoming a front man for the Free Jonathan Pollard movement. Pollard was an Israeli spy, working for Israeli who was tasked mainly with getting material for Israel to sell to the Soviets.
If you were a counter intelligence officer, and true to your oath, what would you think is going on here?
With another spy in the White House steering him he passed on the CIA’s entire East European network, where eventually over a 1000 agents and assets were killed. This disaster has always been hidden from the American people, and only ever published in Veterans Today.
The Israelis also had Pollard get what we call ‘first strike’ material, which would have put the Soviets in a position to more safely launch an initial nuclear strike on America. That was our friend Israel. Woolsey must know all this, and shamed the agency by wanting Pollard freed. He should have been executed.
Jonathan Pollard on the day of his arrest
The justification pitch with the Senate move was that the new sanctions would put Obama in a better position to negotiate with the Iranians. But they did not seem to care that the Obama and Hillary disagreed entirely.
The Israeli agents who hand carried this legislation to sweeping passage do not want a settlement. They want to aggravate the conservatives in Iran to the extent that a negotiated settlement cannot be reached so they can be in a better position to push for the war option.
They can then say that they gave Iran their last chance, and left them no choice.
But there is a sub plot in play here. The sanctions are not working as presented to us and that is not being covered in American media. They are actually hurting American and European long term interests.
PressTV has been publishing for many weeks how they have an intense domestic effort ongoing to internally produce most of the critical things that they need, starting with defensive weaponry.
They have have also been diversifying their energy development for export, with major expansions on their electricity exports, even to American allies like Iraq and Afghanistan. They will also be completing major pipeline expansions to Pakistan.
Another gas pipeline project is in the works to go through Iraq, into Syria, and Lebanon to an export port, and one branch through Turkey up to Austria so the Europeans will not be so dependent on the Russian supplies.
These accomplishments are not being curtailed or stopped by sanctions, but are directly the RESULT of the sanctions. As Iran is forced to maximize its internal production, their markets will be lost to for those product formally imported from Western countries.
Other countries and trading blocks will follow suit in protecting themselves from sanction abuse by the bully brigade. To use an old phrase, ‘those jobs will be gone forever’, and Americans can thank their war monger elements and the Israeli 5th column for that. Europe will also lose export jobs permanently.
Counter productive sanctions have shown Asian countries that they need to protect themselves from having the ‘sanction weapon’ used against them. These markets will be lost to the West forever, thanks to Israeli Intel penetration into Western governments to have them gamble their own long term interest for Israel’s.
The other revelation in the new sanctions penalized individuals selling or supplying commodities such as graphite, aluminum and steel to Iran that is needed for ship building and nuclear operations.
But of course these items are used in thousands of other products. Will they sanction the air next, because that can be used for nuclear purposes?
These items are key to one of the real purposes of these new sanctions , other than to make a negotiated settlement harder.
They were passed to disrupt the energy export diversification exports to nearby countries who will become long term customers and close those markets off to U.S. and Israeli business interests, forever.
So we are back to WWI days where the elites are playing all the rest of us like pawns. The use these hyped up and fake external threats to have us all fall in line to save our skins, when our own people are skinning us alive.
And yes, Israeli companies are very involved with some of the Caucuses pipeline deals and hoping to lay claim to Mediterranean petro fields which they plan to steal and use their WMD to do so if necessary.
It’s not the phony nuclear threat that really concerns them. They just want to keep Iranian energy off the market to keep prices high while they are developing other sources that they profit from. They are robbing us while robbing the Iranians.
Americans are going to have to wake up to all of this and quickly. Israeli espionage penetration of our Congress is in it’s late stage. As long as our Congress is occupied by the Israeli Lobby shills, traditional Americans will be second class citizens in their own country.
Mr. Jamal Abdi knows, and shares the following with us:
“With every new sanctions bill that Congress passes, the president’s flexibility is reduced, and doubts solidify about whether sanctions can ever be leveraged for a diplomatic deal,” noted Jamal Abdi, policy director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).
“This is what we saw happen with Iraq in the 1990s. Unbending sanctions do not buttress negotiations; they make diplomacy impossible and war inevitable.”
It is time for Americans to use the sanctions weapon on the real enemy of America, the militant Zionists of Israel and their supporters wherever they can be found. The War on Terror mantra of ‘we will seek you out wherever you are’, has not been applied to our biggest threat due to their successful political espionage.
We have similar laws for aiding and abetting, which also have not been used to punish those attacking America inside the Israeli 5th column here. More than a few are right up on Capitol Hill. The fox is definitely in the chicken coup.
Americans cannot rely on their leaders to fix this problem. It will take direct action to force them. No one is going to save us but ourselves as Mike Harris says so often to his radio audience.  And time is not on our side, folks

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/12/07/zionist-fingerprints-all-over-u-s-led-iran-sanctions/ 

'Deskundigen' 52



Rogue State by William BlumGeert Mak in Reizen zonder John:

De Amerikaanse houding jegens het buitenland heeft echter iets ongemakkelijks, alsof het land zichzelf telkens tegenspreekt. Amerika heeft tegelijk een voortdurende neiging om zich naar binnen te keren, in een gouden isolement…

En:

Het was Amerika dat de de West-Europese landen inspireerde en aanzette tot hun eigen grootse vredesproject, de Europese Gemeenschap. Iets soortgelijks gebeurde tijdens de reconstrctie van Japan… een succes dat de Verenigde Staten verleidde om later ook nog eens zoiets te proberen in Vietnam en Irak met desastreuze gevolgen.

En hoewel de VS dit natuurlijk deed ‘om er zelf beter van te worden: als volwassen grootmacht had het immers alle belang bij een zekere orde en stabiliteit in de wereld,’ toch ‘speelde idealisme ook een rol: Amerikanen hadden altijd weer een missie te vervullen.’

Maandag 23 januari 2006 schreef ik op deze weblog:

In 2003 interviewde ik voor het VPRO-radioprogramma Madiwodo de Amerikaanse historicus William Blum in zijn appartement in Washington, niet ver van het Witte Huis. Blum is een voormalig functionaris van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken en auteur van Rogue State en Killing Hope, twee onthullende en uitgebreid gedocumenteerde boeken over de door de Amerikaanse regering georganiseerde terreur in vooral de Derde Wereld. De nieuwe wereldorde is een uitstekende tijd voor 'the Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex and their global partners in crime, the World Bank and the IMF,' zei Blum tegen me. Vanochtend bericht de Britse krant de Independent over hem

Book 'endorsed' by Bin Laden storms US chart. Oprah Winfrey's book club has boosted the careers of many an author, but in Osama bin Laden she may have an unlikely new rival. A book by an obscure American historian has shot into US best-seller lists after the elusive leader of al-Qa'ida endorsed it in an audio message aired last week. Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum had languished below 200,000 on Amazon's top-seller list but stormed to 21 yesterday, with the online retailer struggling to meet demand. After issuing new threats to attack the US and calls for President George Bush to withdraw American troops from Iraq, Bin Laden then found time to 'plug' Mr Blum's book. 'If Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, it would be useful for you to read the book Rogue State,' he announced in his message relayed to a potential audience of billions via Arab satellite television.


Overigens: Schurkenstaat van William Blum (Rogue State) met een voorwoord van Aart Brouwer (redacteur De Groene Amsterdammer) is in het Nederlands vertaald en uitgegeven door Lemniscaat (Rotterdam) ISBN: 90 563749 66.
Mijn interview met William Blum is te beluisteren via:

Dat was begin 2006. Donderdag 24 februari 2011 schreef de bekende filmmaker en onderzoeksjournalist John Pilger onder de kop ‘Behind the Arab Revolt Is a Word We Dare Not Speak’ het volgende:

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 40 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In ‘Operation Cyclone,’ the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bankrolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a ‘priority UK market,’ according to Britain's official arms ‘procurers,’ join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

‘Iets ongemakkelijks.’ De Amerikaanse geleerde Noam Chomsky:

De VS is de enige staat ter wereld die door het Internationaal Gerechtshof veroordeeld is voor wat het hof noemde ‘onwettig gebruik van geweld tegen een land,’ oftewel internationaal terrorisme, in dit geval tegen Nicaragua. Het Gerechtshof gebood Amerika met de terreur te stoppen en veroordeelde het tot het betalen van een aanzienlijke schadevergoeding, maar de VS maakte het hof belachelijk door het te negeren en reageerde ogenblikkelijk met een escalatie van de oorlog tot een nog gewelddadiger niveau. De Amerikaanse regering gaf officieel het bevel om de aanvallen uit te breiden tot zogeheten ‘zachte doelen,’ zijnde de onverdedigde civiele doelen als landbouwcooperaties (scholen en klinieken svh) van de boerenbevolking. Dankzij de totale beheersing van het luchtruim en het leveren van geavanceerde wapens aan het huurlingenleger kon het openbare leven in Nicaragua worden ontwricht. Dat was onze reactie op de uitspraak van het Internationaal Gerechtshof... Als gevolg van het Amerikaans beleid in Nicaragua zijn misschien wel 30.000 mensen om het leven gekomen. Het is niet eens de ergste zaak, zelfs niet in Centraal-Amerika. Door de interventies van de VS was de situatie in Guatemala en El Salvador in datzelfde jaar nog gruwelijker.

‘Gouden Isolement.’ Het CIA handboek Psychological Operation in Guerilla Warfare uit 1984 adviseert de gewapende Contra’s van de VS in Nicaragua

to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges, mesta judges (justices of peace), police and State Security officials, CDA (Sandinista Defence Committes) chiefs, etc.

Een hitlijst die de Contra's gehoorzaam afwerkten. En als het voor hen te moeilijk was:

If possible, professional criminals will be hired to carry out specific slected ‘jobs’... Shock Troops. These men should be equipped with weapons (knives, razors, chains, clubs bludgeons) and should march slightly behind the innocent and gullible participants.



De historicus William Blum meldt dat het Internationaal Gerechtshof in Den Haag, het hoogste rechtscollege ter wereld

found that in producing and disseminating this manual, the United States ‘encouraged the commission by them (de Contra’s svh) of acts contrary to general principles of humanitarian law,’ including the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

En ook een deskundige op het gebied van humanitair volkenrecht, de Nederlandse jurist Frits Kalshoven, wees er op dat volgens het Internationaal Gerechtshof de VS het internationaal recht schond ‘by producing a guerilla manual which encouraged’ het Amerikaanse huurlingenleger terrorisme te bedrijven en daarmee  oorlogsmisdaden te plegen.

De uitspraak van het Internationaal Gerechtshof is een duidelijke veroordeling van wat in de politiek vandaag de dag ‘een schurkenstaat’ heet. ‘Maar idealisme speelde ook een rol.’  Het Amerikaans imperium moet in toenemende mate met geweld zijn hegemonie  veiligstellen, waarbij de huidige ‘frontier’ inmiddels is verschoven naar de ruimte. Wie de moeite neemt om de website van de US Space Command te bezoeken kan daar in ‘Vision for 2020’ onder de titel: ‘Het domineren van de ruimte dimensie door militaire operaties om de belangen en investeringen van de VS te beschermen’ onder andere lezen dat ‘tijdens de westwaartse expansie van het continentale VS’ legers noodzakelijk waren. Maar voor de overzeese expansie moesten Westerse naties op de marine vertrouwen om ‘hun commerciële belangen te beschermen en te bevorderen,’ al was het maar omdat er -zoals bekend- overal ter wereld volkeren leven die niet zonder slag of stoot hun natuurlijke rijkdommen aan een neokoloniale macht willen overdragen. Het spreekt voor zich dat in het moderne tijdperk met zijn massavernietigingswapens niet alleen de marine de hegemonie in stand kan houden en daarom moet dit eveneens vanuit de ruimte gebeuren, waar de VS superieur is. Vandaar dat de Amerikaanse ‘commerciële belangen’ verdedigd zullen worden met, ik citeer opnieuw, ‘in de ruimte gestationeerde aanvalswapens,’ met raketten die elk moment overal ter wereld kunnen inslaan. Volgens Space Command zal de noodzaak van dergelijke precisiewapens toenemen als gevolg van ‘de globalisering van de wereld economie,’ omdat de ‘globalisering’ zo voorspellen deze militaire planners ‘een groeiende kloof tussen de “have” and “have-nots”’ veroorzaakt.’ Ze erkennen dat de ‘groeiende economische kloof’ zal uitlopen op een ‘toenemende economische stagnatie, politieke instabiliteit, en culturele vervreemding,’ en daaraan gekoppeld een steeds massaler wordende sociale onrust en gewelddadig verzet onder de ‘have-nots,’ geweld dat logischerwijs vooral gericht zal zijn tegen de VS. Door het monopoliseren van het heelal moet Amerika klaar zijn om massale onrust te beheersen middels ‘het gebruik van ruimte systemen en planning voor een precisie aanval vanuit de ruimte om de wereldwijde proliferatie van massavernietigingswapens te beantwoorden.’ Volgens Noam Chomsky is het ‘fundamentele principe’ achter deze strategie de overtuiging onder Amerikaanse machthebbers dat ‘hegemonie belangrijker is dan overleven.’ Om de alleenheerschappij te garanderen heeft de VS al onder Bush junior talloze verdragen en VN-resoluties opgezegd dan wel onmogelijk gemaakt. Tezamen met grote vriend Israël weigert Washington als enige het ‘Ruimte Verdrag’ uit 1967, waarin bepaald wordt dat de ruimte gereserveerd blijft voor vreedzame doeleinden, opnieuw te bevestigen dan wel te versterken. Januari 2001 blokkeerde de VS de VN Conferentie over Ontwapening en verwierp het de oproep van secretaris-generaal Kofi Annan om samen te werken aan een alomvattend akkoord om de militarisering van de ruimte te verbieden. Reuters berichtte destijds dat ‘de VS de enige van de... lidstaten was die zich verzette tegen formele onderhandelingen over de ruimte.’ Dezelfde obstructie wordt gepleegd bij de controle op massavernietigingswapens. De VS is het enige land dat erop staat vrijgesteld te worden van bepaalde inspecties van chemische wapens.

‘Amerikanen hadden altijd weer een missie te vervullen.’ Een missie die neerkwam op bijvoorbeeld het destabiliseren van Afghanistan in de jaren tachtig. Robert Dreyfuss in Devil’s Game:

‘In Aghanistan, we made a deliberate choice,’ says Cheryl Benard, a RAND Corporation expert on political Islan, who is married to Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as U.S. ambassador in Kabul. ‘At first everyone thought There’s no way to beat the Soviets. So what we have to do is to throw the worst crazies against them that we can find, and there was a lot of collateral damage. We knew exactly who these people were, and what their organizations were like, and we didn’t care,’ she says. ‘Then, we allowed them to get rid of, just kill all the moderate leaders. The reason we don’t have moderate leaders in Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all. They killed the leftists, the moderates, the middle-of-the-roaders. They were just eliminated, during the 1980s and afterward.’


Het was in de allereerste plaats het militair-industrieel complex dat profiteerde van het Amerikaanse politieke beleid ten koste van de machteloze bevolkingen. Via grootschalige terreur kon Washington de rest van de mensheid de stuipen op het lijf jagen, zoals deze doctrine nog eens treffend geformuleerd werd door James Woolsey, de voormalige directeur van de CIA en lid van de Policy Board van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie toen hij een dag na Kerst 2001 tegeover de Washington Post opmerkte dat ‘only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S.’ William Blum besluit zijn 470 pagina’s tellende boek Killing Hope. US Military & CIA Interventions since World War II met de volgende woorden:

From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair. ‘The idea is to build an antiterrorism global environment,’ a senior Defense Department official told the New York Times in 2003, ‘so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited. The world can only wonder this: When will American wars of aggression, firing missiles into the heart of a city, and using depleted uranium and cluster bombs against the population become completely discredited? They already have become such, but the United States, which wages war on the same scale other nations apply to mere survival, does not yet know it. Instead, it practices perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Deze door Amerikaanse academici beschreven werkelijkheid staat diametraal tegenover de versie van Geert Mak wanneer die het heeft over de drijfveer van de VS om ‘een zekere orde en stabiliteit in de wereld,’ te scheppen, niet alleen voor eigen gewin, maar tevens uit ‘idealisme,’ immers ‘Amerikanen hadden altijd weer een missie te vervullen.’ Het is ‘een zekere orde, die de afgelopen halve eeuw ertoe heeft geleid dat de kloof tussen arm en rijk in de wereld is verdubbeld. Het is ‘een zekere orde’ die ertoe heeft geleid dat ondanks de enorme productiviteitsstijging van degenen die werken er in het Westen nu meer armen zijn dan voorheen. Het is ‘een zekere orde’ die ertoe heeft geleid dat sinds 1978 het gemiddelde inkomen in de VS niet is gestegen. Het is ‘een zekere orde’ die heeft geleid tot de kredietcrisis in 2008 die een diepe economische crisis op gang bracht. Het is ‘een zekere orde’ die decennialang corrupte dictators in de wereld aan de macht hielp of en hield. Het is ‘een zekere orde’ die het zionistische regime steunt in zijn terreur tegen de Palestijnse bevolking en zijn agressie tegen de buurlanden van de ‘Joodse staat.’ Het is ‘een zekere orde’ die de afgelopen vijf decennia heeft geleid tot een vervoudiging van het deel dat de rijken opstrijken. Kregen de Amerikaanse plutocraten in 1960 van elke tien dollar ‘slechts’ 1 dollar, nu is dat 4 dollar, aldus Mak zelf. Het is ‘een zekere orde’ die de klimaatverandering heeft gecreerd, waarvan de gevolgen onoverzienbaar zijn. En tenslotte, het is  ‘een zekere orde’ die alle wezenlijke problemen waar we mee geconfronteerd worden heeft genegeerd en verergerd, waardoor de mensheid nu aan de rand van de afgrond staat. Geert Mak noemt dit ‘een zekere orde.’ In werkelijkheid is er sprake van wanorde. Het opmerkelijke is dat zelfs CIA-functionarissen het over een volstrekt andere ‘missie’ hebben dan het vestigen van ‘een zekere orde.’  Neem bijvoorbeeld de oud CIA-functionaris Ray McGovern.

During his 27-year CIA career, McGovern personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials. Upon retirement in 1990, McGovern was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medallion and received a letter of appreciation from then President George H. W. Bush. However, McGovern returned the award.

September 2012 schreef McGovern:
Obama Ruling Shields Torturers
When Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu said last week that the ex-leaders of the U.S. and U.K. should be made to ‘answer for their actions’ in attacking Iraq on the basis of lies, Western savants and pundits greeted the remarks from the retired archbishop of South Africa with an all-too-familiar knowing, dismissive shrug.
It was the same condescending shrug with which U.S. media dismissed the undisputed documentary evidence in the Downing Street Minutes of July 23, 2002, clearly showing that the ‘intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy’ plan to attack Iraq.
But in his op-ed of Sept. 2 in London’s Observer, Tutu pulled no punches: ‘Those responsible for this suffering and loss of life [in Iraq] should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague.’
Tutu noted that shortly before George W. Bush and Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, he called the White House urging that the U.N. inspectors be given more time to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice ‘demurred, saying there was too much risk and the President would not postpone [the attack] any longer.’
Mincing few words about the fraudulent ‘justification’ for the attack, Tutu wrote, ‘The then-leaders of the US and UK fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies. … They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of [new conflicts in] Syria and Iran before us.’ Tutu continued, ‘If it is acceptable for leaders to take drastic action on the basis of a lie, without an acknowledgement or an apology when they are found out, what should we teach our children?’ […] What effect, I wonder, will the exoneration of all those ‘dark-side’ CIA officials have on the agency’s efforts to recruit new employees? What kinds of recruits are likely to be attracted at the prospect of engaging in this kind of work with ‘no worries?’ And what will it be like eating in the CIA cafeteria, wondering whether the folks at the next table have had blood on their hands. […] Bottom line? Nothing will be done about it anyway, so why take any risk at all? That is the message intelligence officials are likely to take from the announcement of our chief law enforcement official, Attorney General Eric Holder, that no one is to be prosecuted for grievous crimes of state.
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2012/09/07/obama-ruling-shields-torturers-3/

Gezien de inzichten van deskundige Amerikanen zouden de lezers van Reizen zonder John zichzelf de volgende vraag kunnn stellen:

Why is it easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life on Earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relations?

Het is deze vraag die beter dan al het andere illustreert waar wij op dit moment staan. Duidelijk is in elk geval dat de VS niet niet in staat is een – in de terminologie van Mak --  ‘eigen grootse vredesproject’ te ontwikkelen, wat de opiniemakers van de mach took mogen beweren. Hun ‘conspiracy of silence’ is een element van de intellectuele corruptie in Nederland. ‘La trahison des clercs’ die in de polder leven. Het is exact wat de Franse filosoof Julien Benda in de jaren twintig schreef over het verraad door  westerse intellectuelen van hun unieke rol om permanent de officiele versie van de waarheid tegen het licht te houden, om de leugen te bestrijden die het leven verstikt, om door scpesis het geestelijke leven in stand te houden. Juist de intelligentsia zou haar ijdelheid moeten bedwingen en zich niet door de schijn laten afkopen. Zonder tegenstand geen frictie, zonder frictie geen ontwikkeling en als er geen ontwikkeling is blijft de Keizer in zijn onderbroek pronken, terwijl het volk langs de kant juicht. En ook dat is ‘een zekere orde.’



 


P.S.




Hoi Stan

Jij citeert Mak: ‘De Amerikaanse houding jegens het buitenland heeft echter iets ongemakkelijks, alsof het land zichzelf telkens tegenspreekt. Amerika heeft tegelijk een voortdurende neiging om zich naar binnen te keren, in een gouden isolement.’ 

Kijk eens naar dit artikel van Alfred McCoy over de hyperagressieve high tech plannen van het Pentagon en dan weet je (opnieuw) wat een enorme leuteraar die Mak is: Overigens maakt zo'n artikel tegelijk ook duidelijk hoezeer de piëteiten van Brzezinski over de onrust in de wereld niets dan dat zijn: piëteiten...




Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Super Weapons and Global Dominion

Posted by Alfred McCoy at 9:32am, November 8, 2012.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Cold War was commonly said to have partially plunged “into the shadows” as a secret, off-the-grid, spy-versus-spy conflict fought between the planet's two superpowers. No one caught this mood better than John le Carré in his famed Smiley novels which offered a riveting portrait of Soviet, British, and American spies locked in mortal combat, yet with more in common with each other than with either of their aboveground societies.  So many decades later, with the Soviet Union long gone, it’s strange to discover that, in the case of the United States at least, those “shadows” have only lengthened.  Increasingly, as the Iraq War fades into history (and out of memory) and the Afghan War winds down, the American way of war itself is being drawn into those shadows. 
Admittedly, since World War II, control over war -- who to fight, when to wage it, and how to fight it -- has been on a migratory path into the White House and the national security bureaucracy, leaving Congress and the American people out in the cold. In the last decade, however, a high-tech, privatized, covert version of war has become presidential property, fought at the White House’s behest by robots, warrior corporations, and two presidentially controlled “private” forces (a paramilitarized CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command).  With this transformation has gone a series of decisions that have plunged American-style war ever further into darkness.  In the last few years, for instance, two presidents, enveloped in a penumbra of secrecy and without the knowledge of the American people or possibly much of Congress, deployed the latest in experimental weaponry -- weapons that could someday unravel our world -- in the first cyberwar in history.  They wielded what someday will undoubtedly be reclassified as weapons of mass destruction against Iran, paving the way for future global cyberwars which could devastate this country.
In the same years, the same two presidents took control of another new form of conflict, drone warfare.  Across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, they launched massive, high-tech campaigns of assassination (“targeted killings”) that may have no equivalent in history.  These have involved hundreds of air strikes and thousands of casualties.  Enfolded in secrecy, a complex, increasingly codified panoply of national security processes (including “terror Tuesday” meetings to decide just who to kill), the president has turned himself into our first assassin-in-chief
As the Washington Post recently reported in a three-part series, he has also overseen a process by which ad hoc killing has morphed into a codified, bureaucratic, normalized killing machine deeply embedded in the White House, a “disposal matrix” or “kill list” that will be handed off to future presidents in a “war” (once known as the Global War on Terror) with at least “a decade” to go and possibly no end in sight.  In a language that used to be left to Hollywood’s version of the Mafia, the White House, as judge, jury, and executioner, now regularly puts out hits around the world, while discussing “the designation of who should pull the trigger when a killing is warranted.”
In one Post piece focused on Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti as the key base for presidential war in Africa, a detail caught my eye.  It seemed to capture the ever-darkening nature of this war-making moment.  Speaking of the hundreds of elite special operations forces there, Craig Whitlock wrote, “Most of the commandos work incognito, concealing their names even from conventional troops on the base.”  Put another way, this new form of warfare is far enough into the shadows that the names of a major part of the U.S. military, tens of thousands of elite troops whose command has just gotten its own “secret targeting center” in Washington 15 minutes from the White House, can’t even be known to other U.S. military personnel who work with them. 
Imagine, then, what our world might be like once future techno-versions of presidential war now being developed come online.  What will it mean when, in the third decade of this century, in pursuit of the same Global War on Terror, drone war has morphed into a “triple canopy space shield” and “robotic information system,” as described today in chilling detail by Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch regular and lead author of the new book Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline?  Imagine when, from outer space to the spreading Camp Lemonniers of planet Earth, the White House can make secret war in a myriad of high-tech and robotic ways without even a nod to you and me.  By then, in at least one possible future, our whole world may lie in those shadows. Tom
Beyond Bayonets and Battleships Space Warfare and the Future of U.S. Global Power 
By Alfred W. McCoy
It’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere.  A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances.  Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century.  It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.
They are still operating in another age.  “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” complained Republican candidate Mitt Romney during the last presidential debate.
With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed... the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.”
Obama later offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “What I did was work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe?... We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space.”
Amid all the post-debate media chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president’s sparse words. Yet for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided over a technological revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale weaponization of space. In the face of waning economic influence, this bold new breakthrough in what’s called “information warfare” may prove significantly responsible should U.S. global dominion somehow continue far into the twenty-first century.
While the technological changes involved are nothing less than revolutionary, they have deep historical roots in a distinctive style of American global power.  It’s been evident from the moment this nation first stepped onto the world stage with its conquest of the Philippines in 1898. Over the span of a century, plunged into three Asian crucibles of counterinsurgency -- in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Afghanistan -- the U.S. military has repeatedly been pushed to the breaking point.  It has repeatedly responded by fusing the nation’s most advanced technologies into new information infrastructures of unprecedented power.
That military first created a manual information regime for Philippine pacification, then a computerized apparatus to fight communist guerrillas in Vietnam.  Finally, during its decade-plus in Afghanistan (and its years in Iraq), the Pentagon has begun to fuse biometrics, cyberwarfare, and a potential future triple canopy aerospace shield into a robotic information regime that could produce a platform of unprecedented power for the exercise of global dominion -- or for future military disaster. 
America’s First Information Revolution…

Lees verder:
http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/2012/11/tom-engelhardt-15.html

Maandag meer.

vrijdag 7 december 2012

The Neoliberal Religion 56


A Sign That Obama Will Repeat Economic Mistakes

Please don’t tell me that these reports in the business press touting Sallie Krawcheck as a front-runner for chairman of the SEC or even a possible candidate to be the next Treasury secretary are true. Who is she? Oh, just another former Citigroup CFO, and therefore a prime participant in the great banking hustle that has savaged the world’s economy. Krawcheck was paid $11 million in 2005 while her bank contributed to the toxic mortgage crisis that would cost millions their jobs and homes. Sallie Krawcheck. (AP/Mark Lennihan)
Not that you would know that sordid history from reading the recent glowing references to Krawcheck in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News that stress her pioneering role as a leading female banker—a working mother no less—but manage to avoid her role in a bank that led the way in destroying the lives of so many women, men and their children. Nor did her financial finagling end with Citigroup, as Krawcheck added a troubling stint in the leadership at Merrill Lynch and Bank of America to her résumé. 
A woman who would be an excellent choice as the most experienced as well as principled candidate to head the SEC or Treasury is Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC, who labored to protect consumers rather than undermine them. Indeed, her outstanding book “Bull by the Horns,” chronicling her fight in the last two administrations to hold the banksters accountable, should be required reading for the president and those who are advising him on selecting his new economic team. 
The SEC is supposed to supervise the banks rather than abet them in their chicanery. And although the Treasury Department has been a captive of Wall Street lobbyists for most of the modern era, one would expect something better from the second coming of Barack Obama. Those are key appointments in determining whether the president can turn around the still-moribund economy by channeling the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Or will he continue to plod along on the course set by George W. Bush, bailing out the banks while ignoring beleaguered homeowners and the many other victims of this banking-engineered crisis? 
Obama was given a pass on the economy by voters only because Mitt Romney was an even more craven enabler of Wall Street greed. But the outlines of the Bush Wall Street payoff remain in place, with the Federal Reserve continuing to bail out the banks with virtually free money and the purchase of $40 billion in toxic mortgage-based bonds every month to add to the more than trillion dollars in that junk that the Fed previously had taken off the banks’ books.
The money printing by the Fed is at the heart of the massive debt crisis. But it has been great for the bankers, with compensation at the 32 largest banks slated to hit an all-time high of $207 billion this year, according to a Wall Street Journal estimate. This reward for ripping off the public is almost three times the amount the federal government spends on education. Once again the bankers are blessed for their failures, receiving such wildly excessive compensation despite the fact that banking revenue is down 7.2 percent over the last two years. 
A prime example is Krawcheck’s old bank, Citigroup, whose new CEO this week announced that the company has been forced to engage in a major retrenchment, eliminating 11,000 jobs and closing 84 branches. The bank has been deeply troubled ever since the housing meltdown it helped trigger first began, and it was saved from bankruptcy only by a direct infusion of $45 billion in taxpayer money and a commitment of an additional $300 billion in underwriting of Citigroup’s bad paper.
The ugly tale of America’s Great Recession is inextricably entwined with the deplorable practices of Citigroup, the too-big-to-fail bank made legal by Bill Clinton’s signing off on reversing the Glass-Steagall law that prevented the merger of investment and commercial banks. The first beneficiary of the revised law was the newly created Citigroup, saved from bankruptcy a decade later by the taxpayers. 
I shouldn’t be surprised that Krawcheck would be considered a viable nominee for a central position in managing our economy. After all, her colleague in the top ranks at Citigroup during the years of financial depravity, Robert Rubin, is considered a significant adviser to the Obama administration, and his protégés, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, are still directing policy. It was Rubin who pushed through the reversal of Glass-Steagall, an act of betrayal of the public interest that was rewarded with obscene amounts of money when he ultimately took the job of leading the bank he made legal.
The very fact that these folks remain influential, as witnessed by Krawcheck being considered to head the SEC rather than being the subject of one of its much-needed investigations, gives further evidence of the enduring but ultimately terminal illness of crony capitalism.