Panetta Slams Israeli Isolation; Is Israeli Policy Destabilizing US Allies?

Posted on 10/03/2011 by Juan

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta , on a visit to Israel and Palestine before heading to Egypt, publicly upbraided the Likud government of Israel for having become isolated diplomatically in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring, and warned direly that brute military force would not be enough to provide for Israel’s security.

Panetta said,

“It’s pretty clear, at this dramatic time in the Middle East when there have been so many changes, that it is not a good situation for Israel to become increasingly isolated. And that is what has happened…”

Panetta added,

“The important thing there is to again reaffirm our strong security relationship with Israel, to make clear that we will protect their qualitative military edge… As they take risks for peace, we will be able to provide the security that they will need in order to ensure that they can have the room hopefully to negotiate.”

Panetta said he was aware of that Israel had more and better weapons than its neighbors… “but the question you have to ask is – is it enough to maintain an military edge if you are isolating yourself diplomatically?”

“Real security can only be achieved by both a strong diplomatic effort as well as a strong effort to project your military strength…” he said.

Panetta is clearly concerned at the bad relations between Israel and Turkey, and the increasingly rocky relationship between Israel and revolutionary Egypt, where angry demonstrators invaded the Israeli embassy and chased the ambassador out of the country. The Israeli ambassador to Jordan also had to leave briefly, because of the threat potentially posed by anti-Israel demonstrations in Amman.

The Obama administration, for which Panetta is speaking, is deeply frustrated with blustery Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his far right cabinet, including thuggish foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman (a former Moldovian club bouncer).

But it is most likely that the Obama administration has other reasons for pressuring Netanyahu at this juncture. Pro-American Arab allies throughout the region are facing widespread protests and even revolutionary movements– in Bahrain and Yemen most prominently, and to a lesser extent in Jordan and Morocco. The closeness of those governments to Washington (and by implication to Tel Aviv) is among the strikes against them in Arab public opinion, because of the execrable treatment by Israel of the stateless, often homeless Palestinians. While pro-American oil states like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have tried to bribe their populations into quiescence, so far with some success, the Obama team must be frantic that Netanyahu’s provocations will help produce even more turmoil in the Arab world.

If Saudi Arabia blew up over the royal family’s close ties to Washington, the price of petroleum would rise astronomically. Saudi Arabia produces 9.7 million barrels a day of the 88 million barrels a day of petroleum pumped globally. Take that off the market (the revolution in Libya took its entire oil production offline) and there would be a global crisis of Depression-era proportions. Although oil futures prices and supplies have softened in the past quarter (down 17%) on expectation of Libya’s production coming back online and continued weak economic growth in Western Europe and North America, supplies are still tight by historic standards. You take 11% of world production off the table, and the price rise wouldn’t be serial, it would be exponential. (I.e., the price wouldn’t go up 11%, it would go up to like $500 a barrel, compared with $79 now for West Texas Crude).

The stability of pro-American Arab regimes in this time of enormous instability depends in some important part on public anger about treatment of the Palestinians. So to have Netanyahu and Lieberman caroming around making inflammatory statements and adopting belligerent policies, and blowing off Obama’s peace process is rather inconvenient. An announcement by the Palestine Authority that there was a prospect of progress on Palestinian rights through negotiations with Israel would be very, very helpful right about now.

But what does Obama (and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia) get? Announcements of settlement expansions on the West Bank, and Israeli air strikes on Palestinians in Gaza.

Netanyahu has refused to negotiate with the Palestinians in good faith, and his adventurism against the Gaza aid flotilla of 2010 created a diplomatic crisis that continues today. After twisting the arms of Western European allies like Germany to oppose the Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, the Israelis deeply angered Germany and others by cheekily announcing that they will expand settlements yet again. The ostensible argument for opposing the Palestinian UN gambit was that it would make bilateral negotiations more difficult. But wasn’t that precisely what settlement expansion would do?

The Netanyahu government has unnecessarily set a course toward worsening relations with Turkey by refusing to apologize for killing 9 Turkish aid workers (one an American citizen) on the Mavi Marmara in late May of 2010. United Nations investigators found disturbing evidence of the use of excessive force by Israeli commandos. Turkey also objects to the Israeli economic strangulation of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, such that it prevents them from exporting any of their products and so has reduced them to poverty, with 56 percent being food insecure. Such blockades of staples imposed on non-combatants, including children, in an occupied territory are illegal in international law, not to mention inhumane and just plain creepy. I mean, what kind of a person keeps children living on the edge or prevents their parents from putting a roof over their heads? (An Israeli blockade to keep weapons from coming into Gaza would be legal and understandable, but since 2007 they’ve gone way beyond that policy into a very dark area of the soul.)

Turkey wants the blockade on Palestinian civilians dropped, and so does the vast majority of the world (talk about diplomatically isolated!) After the fall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who may have gotten kickbacks to do favors for Israeli policy, the new foreign minister, Nabil Alaraby, called the Gaza blockade “shameful.” (Alaraby has gone on to become secretary-general of the Arab League). Egypt shares the Israeli concern about weapons being smuggled into Gaza, but 99 percent of Egyptians object to the rest of the blockade.

The increasingly hostile rhetoric directed at Israel by the Turkish government over these issues, along with the popular protests against it in Egypt (where, if public opinion becomes important, relations are likely to turn even more chilly than those with Turkey– though likely the peace treaty is not in doubt).

Avigdor Lieberman’s response to Erdogan’s criticisms has been to implicitly threaten to ally with the PKK Kurdish terrorist group against Turkey, which is about the most explosive thing you could implicitly threaten Ankara with.

Throwing fuel on the flames has been the Netanyahu government’s arrogant refusal to freeze settlements on territory in the West Bank and around Jerusalem claimed by the Palestinians, while negotiations proceed as to their ultimate disposition. In short, Israel is determinedly gobbling up the West Bank lands it militarily occupied in 1967, and the Palestinian Authority now says it just isn’t going to bestow legitimacy on this vast land-grab by engaging in mock negotiations that are doomed to leave the Palestinians with less and less territory– even while the negotiations are going on!

It is illegal for an Occupying power to flood the occupied territory with its own citizens, under the Geneva Convention of 1949. While an occupation can be legal, the extent of the violations Israel has committed against the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1949 Geneva Convention are so extensive as to have rendered their continued occupation of the Palestinians criminal at its core.

While the Baath government of Syria has been hostile to Israel and has supported small local anti-Israel paramilitaries like those of Hizbullah and Hamas, it hasn’t taken military action against Israel since 1973 and it intervened in Lebanon in 1976 and after to prevent the Palestinians and their allies from coming to power there. In short, because it is invested in order, the Baath has probably been less dangerous to Israel in recent decades than would be a populist regime of the sort that might emerge if President Bashar al-Asad is overthrown. And a revolution in Syria is not impossible, though it faces an uphill battle.

Even Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq has taken a hard rhetorical line against Israel recently, warning that it might find ways of benefiting from Arab turmoil. The popular political forces in Arab Iraq, whether Sunni or Shiite, are virulently anti-Israel, contrary to what the Neoconservatives used to promise Tel Aviv. Denunciations of Israel are now issuing almost in tandem from Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut.

And that’s another thing. Netanyahu’s and Lieberman’s obstreperousness are an opportunity for Iran to gain influence in the Arab world, and helps bolster Iran’s defense of the Bashar al-Asad government from its domestic critics.

Israel’s weird policy of illegally colonizing the West Bank and of keeping the Palestinians of Gaza under civilian blockade is damaging to Israelis. But they can probably get away with it.

My guess is that the Obama administration’s fear is that pro-American Arab regimes can’t get away with it.

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Posted in Egypt, Israel/ Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen | Leave a Comment

New York and Cairo Protests Show Egyptian 1% more Responsive than the American

Posted on 10/02/2011 by Juan

In two protests thousands of miles away from one another on Saturday, a similar spirit of demand for government responsiveness to the people was made. In both cases there was a police crackdown and some clashes broke out. But in one case, the government showed flexibility and attempted to take steps to calm the anger of the people. In the other, the government was silent and no changes were envisioned.

In New York, a group of protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement marched off to the Brooklyn Bridge, and many marched on the road, blocking traffic. The New York police cordoned off both sides of the bridge and then arrested some 700 persons. The protesters have many demands, but a central one is that the Federal government should be representing the lower 99% of income earners, and not just the top 1 percent. They also want re-regulation of the bank and finance industries.

Russia Today has video

Across the world in Cairo Egypt, police cleared protesters from Tahrir Square on Saturday, provoking some rock-throwing. The square has been repeatedly occupied and cleared since the revolution began on January 25. I was there on August 1 when the fasting month of Ramadan began and most protesters went home, and the police were emboldened to move against the few who were left.

The protests started back up recently because of the election law. Parliamentary elections will be held in several rounds starting November 28. The election law specified that one third of seats would be filled by independents. At the same time, unlike the situation in Tunisia, the interim government has not banned politicians close to the former regime from running. The fear is that Hosni Mubarak cronies, because of their name recognition, money and networks of cronies, will run especially well for the independent seats. Other activists are angry that the state of emergency declared in 1981, suspending key civil liberties, has still not been abolished, and that a military junta directs the government, keeping power close to its medalled chest.

Aljazeera English reports on protests last week

In response to the renewed round of protests, and to a threat by two big coalitions of political parties to boycott the polls if the law was not changed, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) appears to have backed down, and will rewrite the election law so that all seats are apportioned on a party basis.

The SCAF also set out a timetable leaving office, with presidential elections set for next year this time after a new constitution is approved by referendum.

The military also agreed to stop sending civilians to military trials, a major complaint of democracy activists in Egypt.

On the other hand, there does not appear to be movement on abrogating the emergency laws, a major demand of the protesters, though chief of staff Sami Anan says that the SCAF will study the issue.

Every time the protesters and the parties mount a campaign over a set of issues, the military seems to back down and give them some of what they want. The July protests, mostly spear-headed by the New Left, resulted in half of the civilian cabinet being changed out for figures more acceptable to the protesters, and resulted in the trial of Hosni Mubarak and his sons, on which the SCAF had dragged its feet.

American government is often a kind of elective dictatorship, where politicians and bureaucrats feel that once they cast their ballots, the people should sit down and shut up and let those elected run everything and make all the decisions (even if those decisions clearly run counter to what the electorate was signalling it wanted). Thus, who could have imagined that by fall of 2011 there still had been no significant reform of Wall Street so as to forestall effectively a repeat of the 2008 crash? Surely such reforms were part of the change people voted for in 2008? But ‘legislative capture,’ the process in American politics whereby the industries and corporations regulated by Congress tend to ‘capture’ the legislators through campaign contributions, and then write the legislation themselves that regulates their industry, ensures that very little change can be enacted by Congress.

Since elected government is in the back pocket of the top 1%, and since the top 1% is using derivatives and sharp practices to speculate with the public’s money and is throwing people thereby out of their jobs and their homes, it is only strange that more people weren’t on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday.

When will American government show the flexibility and willingness to compromise on issues with an engaged democratic public that the generals in Cairo are showing?

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Posted in Egypt, US Politics | 7 Comments

Al-`Awlaqi Should have been Tried in Absentia

Posted on 10/01/2011 by Juan

A CIA drone operator killed the notorious proponent of radical terrorism against the United States, Anwar al-`Awlaqi, on Friday. The killing has provoked some controversy because al-`Awlaqi was a US citizen and was simply assassinated without any due process. Ron Paul has protested, as has the American Civil Liberties Union. Being a terrorism expert myself who knows something serious about al-Qaeda, I can only quote Clarence Darrow here, “All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” Personal satisfaction apart, one is still left with the question of law raised by Paul and the ACLU.

Here’s a troubling thought: do you really think it would be a good idea to give a President Michele Bachmann or a President Rick Perry the authority to kill American citizens at will and with no due process?

Being a historian, I try to understand these issues by looking at how we got where we are. As a civil libertarian, I am concerned that whatever is done be done within the law.

The two possibilities are that al-`Awlaqi was an enemy combatant on the battlefield in a war on the US, in which case obviously the US government has a right of self-defense and can kill him with impunity; or that he is a civilian terrorist, in which case the US constitution would give him certain prerogatives, such as trial by jury before execution.

It is, however, difficult to see in what way al-`Awlaqi could be configured as a soldier in an enemy army with which the US is actively at war. He was an American citizen of Yemeni extraction (and dual citizenship), living in Yemen. That he was an American is not very relevant to this issue. You can be an American and still be an enemy combatant, as with the German saboteur born in the US, who was sentenced to death as an enemy combatant after WWII for sabotage in the early 1940s. But the United States is not at war with Yemen, and al-`Awlaqi is not in the Yemeni military anyway. The idea that, legally speaking, the US could be at war with small terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda strikes me as a non-starter. A rhetorical flourish such as the “war on terror” is not a legal statute or article in the constitution. The killing of al-`Awlaqi differs from that of Usamah Bin Laden because in the latter case a US expeditionary force was confronted with someone who appeared to be going for a weapon, whereas al-`Awlaqi was simply targeted.

If people want the United States to be able to declare war on non-governmental organizations that maintain private armies and so are para-statal, we need new statutes or perhaps a constitutional amendment.

So, although US courts tend to defer to the executive on military actions abroad, I just can’t understand under what constitutional provision al-`Awlaqi was killed. If it wasn’t done constitutionally, then it was wrong.

If al-`Awlaqi was a civilian, could he have legally been killed in this way? It has been pointed out (by Newt Gingrich and Salman Rushdie) that he was a traitor and a terrorist.

Such a position hearkens back to the idea of the “outlaw” in common law. A person declared an outlaw by the king was deprived of all rights and legal protections, and anyone could do anything to him that they wished, with no repercussions. (The slang use of “outlaw” to mean simply “habitual criminal” is an echo of this ancient practice, which was abolished in the UK and the US). There is a similar idea in Islamic law, of the mahdur al-dam, someone whose blood can be shed at will. Muslim legal authorities can give a fatwa or legal ruling that an individual falls into this category because he committed an offense such as blasphemy, in which case any Muslim may kill him with impunity. Ironically, this is the category into which Salman Rushdie himself was put by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988. Likewise, the Baha’i religious minority in Iran is often considered by conservative Shiite clerics to be mahdur al-dam or outlaws, resulting in their persecution. The same forces in US society so worried about sharia being enacted in the United States seem actually to want to adopt the medieval Islamic legal notion of the outlaw in this case, and apply it to an American citizen abroad.

The problem with declaring al-`Awlaqi an “outlaw” by virtue of being a traitor or a terrorist is that this whole idea was abolished by the US constitution. Its framers insisted that you couldn’t just hang someone out to dry by decree. Rather, a person who was alleged to have committed a crime such as treason or terrorism had to be captured, brought to court, tried, and sentenced in accordance with a specific statute, and then punished by the state. If someone is arrested, they have the right to demand to be produced in court before a judge, a right known as habeas corpus (“bringing the body,” i.e. bringing the physical person in front of a judge).

The relevant text is the Sixth Amendment in the Bill of Rights:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

By simply blowing al-`Awlaqi away, the US government deprived him of his sixth amendment rights to trial before a judge and habeas corpus. Note that the German saboteur with American citizenship executed after WW II was tried first. Likewise, enemy combatants in US custody, such as those at Guantanamo, were declared by the US Supreme Court to have the right of habeas corpus. So that Newt Gingrich thinks al-`Awlaqi was a traitor or a terrorist (and this a rare case where I agree subjectively with the Newtster) is irrelevant to his legal status. Unless a judge has pronounced him to be those things after a trial, he was not as far as the US constitution and the US government is concerned.

Some observers have suggested that al-Qaeda is analogous to a band of pirates and that the laws of piracy could be adapted to deal with them. But the US Code says,

TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 81 > § 1651

§ 1651. Piracy under law of nations

Whoever, on the high seas, commits the crime of piracy as defined by the law of nations, and is afterwards brought into or found in the United States, shall be imprisoned for life.

So even if al-`Awlaqi were declared a pirate because of involvement in the attempt to blow up an airplane, US law would not support dealing with him by drone strike.

It is desirable that the US have some way of defending itself against an al-`Awlaqi. Most legal frameworks for action seem to assume that he should have been arrested. But obviously, capturing al-`Awlaqi in rugged, tribal Yemen would have been a tall order. Is there any way in which he could have been legally killed by drone instead?

Well, let us think this thing through. He could have been tried in absentia.. This step may require a change in the US civil code to allow trial in absentia of someone who was never arrested. The US government could have initiated proceedings against him as an accomplice or as a RICO conspirator in connection with the attempted crotch bombing over Detroit or in connection with the shootings by Nidal Hassan. Nowadays with the internet, we could be reasonably assured that if the US government appointed a court date and publicized it in the Yemeni newspapers in Arabic, al-`Awlaqi could be sure to hear about it. A message might also have been gotten to him via his family.

If he declined to appear in court, he would have waived his right of habeas corpus and the trial could have proceeded in his absence. He could in that way have been sentenced to death if found guilty.

Would it then be all right to send a drone rocket down on him? Only if he was an immediate and concrete danger to others. But signals intelligence is such that the US government might well have been able to make the case that only by killing him could an imminent and specific threat to innocent civilians have been forestalled. At least we’d be beyond some key constitutional issues and in the area of police procedure in dealing with dangerous fugitives already sentenced to death.

By the way, it wouldn’t be appropriate for the action to be taken by a CIA operative. They’re not law enforcement and shouldn’t be killing American citizens. I suppose al-`Awlaqi should have been taken out by the FBI under the above scenario.

The government should only be allowed to imprison or kill American citizens within the framework of the constitution and of US statutes. The problem with the assassination of al-`Awlaqi is that it was lawless. If the president is allowed to act lawlessly, he is not a president but a king. We are taken back to the medieval age, with star chambers, bills of attainder, outlaws, and no habeas corpus or due process. Those bastions of arbitrariness were highly objectionable to the founding generation of Americans and the point of the US constitution was to abolish them in favor of a rule of law. If we surrender the latter, we may as well just all strap on swords and descend into barbarism. Or perhaps we already have.

Ironically, it is a professor of constitutional law who has been the loudest and most effective advocate for a return to the law of the jungle.

On these issues, Barack Obama has been as bad as, and probably worse than, George W. Bush. If he wants the authority to behave in this way, why not get legislation passed?

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Posted in al-Qaeda, Uncategorized, US Politics | 96 Comments

Al-Qaeda Brands Ahmadinejad a Conspiracy Theorist!

Posted on 09/30/2011 by Juan

The al-Qaeda-linked magazine “Inspire” has reprimanded Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for indulging in “stupid” “conspiracy theories” because of his stance, repeated at the recent United Nations meeting, that 9/11 was a Bush administration inside job.

When al-Qaeda accuses you of being a conspiracy theorist, you’re really a space cadet.

Incidentally, a far rightwing Muslim fundamentalist and former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, Hamid Gul, has alleged that al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has moved from Pakistan to Yemen, and that that country is now the center of gravity of al-Qaeda:

“Former Pakistani intelligence Chief Says Al-Qa’ida, Al-Zawahiri Moved To Yemen
Interview with Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, former director of the Pakistani intelligence Service; by Umar Faruq; in Islamabad –…
Al-Sharq al-Awsat Online
Sunday, September 11, 2011 …
Document Type: OSC Translated Text…

(Faruq) Will the attempt to achieve reconciliation in Afghanistan succeed?

(Hamid Gul) The Americans are making efforts to drive the Taliban Movement to join a coalition government. I think that this is impossible because the Americans want the Taliban Movement to isolate itself from Al-Qa’ida Organization, and this is a wrong idea at present. Al-Qa’ida Organization has a different objective. Al-Qa’ida has set a trap for the Americans in Afghanistan , and now they moved to the Middle East. A broad-based government can be formed in Afghanistan immediately after the Americans leave Afghanistan.

(Faruq) Is there still something hidden from the public concerning the Abbottabad operation in which Usama Bin Ladin was killed?

(Hamid Gul) Certainly. Usama Bin Ladin has died and they have closed the unit that was pursuing Bin Ladin at the CIA headquarters. During the three years in which George Bush (name as published) was in office he did not even mention Usama Bin Ladin. Obama wanted to put an end to the war. He wanted to be a president of peace. They have worked out a plan for our Pakistani people. When they knew that some family members of Usama Bin Ladin were living in Abbottabad, the issue of Raymond Davis (the American CIA agent who killed two Pakistani citizens in Lahore) surfaced, which led to tensions between the CIA Director Panetta and Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha, director of the Pakistani Intelligence Service. This has forced the CIA to announce that it does not trust the Pakistani Intelligence Service, and later, the Americans carried out that unilateral operation.

(Faruq) Have you read the statements of daughters and wives of Usama Bin Ladin that they saw the Americans shooting Bin Ladin at a close range. They made these confessions during the interrogations by the Pakistani Intelligence officials, and the information was then leaked to the media.
(Hamid Gul) These allegations do not deserve comment since I do not believe them at all.

(Faruq) Is Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of Al-Qa’ida Organization, present in Pakistan or in a tribal area?

(Hamid Gul) I think that he left for Yemen. I do not think that he is in Pakistan. He got married in Bajaur, but I think that the center of gravity of Al-Qa’ida Organization has shifted to the Middle East, to Yemen. We do not have an extensive presence for Al-Qa’ida Organization in Pakistan. We only have 24 persons.

(Description of Source: London Al-Sharq al-Awsat Online in Arabic — Website of influential London-based pan-Arab Saudi daily; editorial line reflects Saudi official stance. URL: http://www.asharqalawsat.com/)”

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Arab Spring Roundup

Posted on 09/30/2011 by Juan

A pro-Baath mob in Damascus attacked the convoy of US ambassador Robert Ford, pelting his and other vehicles with tomatoes and eggs. Ford has visited dissident cities as they protested the regime of President Bashar al-Asad, and been denounced by the government for interfering in Syrian politics. The regime has consistently attempted to paint the protesters as agents of sneaky foreign intelligence services. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the regime of Bashar al-Asad for the incident, calling it “intimidation.” Euronews has video:

Meanwhile, in the small Syrian town of Rastan in Homs Province, loyalist troops appear to have run into heavy fire from defectors to the rebels, leaving 7 Syrian troops dead and at least 3 civilians, maybe 7 according to Aljazeera Arabic. Homs Province had been a recruiting ground for the Baathist Regime seeking to bring Sunnis into the military, and it is so far unusual in seeing significant defections and consequently a militarization of the political conflict there.

Two broad coalitions of Egyptian political parties have threatened to boycott the elections set for November 29 if the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) does not ban high officials and politicians of the old National Democratic Party of Hosni Mubarak from running for parliament. In nearby Tunisia, the interim government forbade some 16,000 persons closely associated with deposed president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from participation in politics. The Egyptian parties appear to want something of this sort. At the moment, not only can NDP poobahs run for parliament, they have some advantages and could well end up dominating it. Parties are effectively excluded under the current electoral law from running for one third of seats reserved for independents, many of which may well be NDP members who can exploit being well known and well-connected, as compared to the unknowns in most of the new political parties. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, earlier the military’s teacher’s pet, has joined in the boycott call, though they are not supportive of the demonstrations called for today at Tahrir Square by the New Left organizations.

Heavy fighting broke out again on Friday in Yemen around the southern city of Taizz and in the north, between rebels and forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who returned to the country last Friday. In the past week, Yemeni security forces have killed 100 protesters, so that the Saleh regime is now displaying a brutality similar to that of the Baath in Syria. Tom Finn reports for VOA from the ground in Sanaa, arguing that the conflict in Yemen is becoming more violent.

Interim Tunisian Foreign Minister Mouldi Kefi tells AP that the Tunisians are ready for parliamentary elections on October 23. He said that unrest has subsided through September as groups begin putting aside sectional demands and focusing on the upcoming polls. Campaigning begins October 1, with some 100 parties contesting for seats. He maintained that Tunisia’s elections less than a month from now will be a bellwether for the whole region. Secularists in Tunisia are afraid that the fundamentalist al-Nahda Party, banned under Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s dictatorship, will dominate the elections. But the leftist Progressive Democratic Party is convinced that the fundamentalists can be held to only 20 percent of seats, and that you could well see a leftist majority.

The Bahrain government covered itself in further shame by sentencing 20 physicians on trumped up charges. The real reason they are being targeted is that they treated dissidents during last spring’s protests, which were crushed by the Sunni monarchy. Punishing physicians for treating people is barbaric.

The forces of the new Libyan government claimed to have made some progress toward taking the hold-out city of Sirte, announcing that they had retaken the city’s airport. They made a similar claim two weeks ago, only to be pushed back by Qaddafi loyalists, but this time say they have a stronger position. The Transitional National Council forces also said that they had cleared a corridor allowing two wings of their forces to link up. Most Libyans live along the Mediterranean in a string of small cities, along with the metropolises of Tripoli and Benghazi. The TNC has authority in 97 percent of Libya now, with a couple towns of 100,000 each yet to fall. As might be expected in a revolutionary situation, it has been difficult for the TNC to arrive at a consensus about the shape of a new interim government, and it has decided instead to hold elections sooner than originally envisaged.

On the other hand, Daniel Serwer reports from Tripoli on the fastest post-war recovery he has ever seen. A month ago Tripoli lacked water, food and services and there were fears of turmoil. Now, it has provisions and public order is passable. The achievement of the Libyans in this regard is astonishingly little recognized in the world press, which for some reason has a bias against the revolution and against the TNC, having decided that it likely will fail. The Libyans have put the lie to such pessimism repeatedly,including when they made a popular uprising against dictator Moammar Qaddafi in Tripoli itself, even before rebel troops could enter the city. The country faces severe challenges, but give it a little credit for these achievements so far.

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Posted in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Uncategorized, Yemen | 2 Comments

Why we Need a Palestinian State: (Cole at Truthdig Podcast)

Posted on 09/30/2011 by Juan

In my interview by podcast for Truthdig this week, I discuss Palestinian statehood and how foolish the US government is in sptopping this movement. I also describe the demonstrations at Wall Street

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Visiting Liberty Square (Occupy Wall Street)

Posted on 09/29/2011 by Juan

I spent the summer going to rallies and demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt, and was even in Barcelona during their protest.

Tahrir Square, July 2011

Tahrir Square, July 2011

(Nighttime Protest at Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, July 2011)

I was in New York city to give at talk at NYU on Wednesday, and I wanted to follow up on the impact of this year of protests on the US. So I went to see the folks at Occupywallstreet.org. in Liberty Square (i.e. Tahrir Square). They are inspired by the Egyptian and Spanish protests this past summer. It was hard to walk there from Wall Street because there were police barricades around all the buildings and you had to make detours. The easier way would have been just to go on Broadway. There were probably three hundred people there, some visiting, some camping out (it is not a big square, and was pretty packed). Some say that last Saturday, several thousand people rallied in the vicinity, so the numbers clearly fluctuate enormously.

occupywallstreet0016

I asked them what they wanted, and they admitted that probably everyone there wanted something different. It isn’t an organization. But they said one thing they wanted was a voice, so they could be heard. They wanted to know why the corporations and the top 1% of American income earners are represented in Congress, but they are not. I asked them whether changing all that would not require campaign finance reform, and pointed out that the Supreme Court had made the latter almost impossible by defining giving money to politicians as a form of protected speech. They said, that’s bullshit, man. Money is not speech. They said that anyway first they had to gain a voice, and then they could discuss concrete reforms.

But not everyone there was anti-business. One woman had a sign saying that she liked business and she liked freedom and she wanted to find a way to combine the two. I was told that the square was visited by a man who said he had been worth $120 million, but had been victimized by some sort of shorting scheme. He was angry and bitter, convinced that the game he once played so successfully was ultimately rigged. Has that really changed since 2008?

occupywallstreet0003

They were generally in agreement that the top 1% of income earners had benefited unfairly in the past couple of decades from tax cuts and government favors, and maintained that the rest of Americans– the 99% or almost everyone — had been deeply harmed by corporate corruption and sharp practices of the sort that produced the 2008 downturn. They said many of them had friends who had lost jobs or homes or both.

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At 2 pm they had a general assembly. This meeting is a form of housekeeping for the protesters camping out. The city won’t let them use microphones, so they speaker has to shout. To make sure the message gets across, others repeat each sentence. I heard this practice described on NPR as a bit strange, but they appear not to have known that it is an innovation in response to the prohibition on using a mike. Interestingly, in medieval madrasahs or seminaries in the Muslim world, the same practice was deployed, of groups repeating what the speaker said so that they message reached the back of a large class.

At one point the speaker mentioned that the protesters needed specific goods (they are trying to serve meals in the square). They also have practical problems like where to use the bathroom or shower. I don’t know if there is a reliable way to get them donations or find ways for friendly local small businesses to help them with these issues.

They are eager for people to visit them, join them and support them. Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore have been by, which has helped. But given the largely unprosecuted crimes committed by some financiers on Wall Street and given the way in which millions of Americans have been harmed by the deregulation of finance and by sheer criminality, it is amazing that more such protests, and larger ones, have not been staged.

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Last Saturday the New York police tried to crack down on the protest, though it is hard to see on what grounds, since the right of peaceable assembly is in the US constitution. Notoriously, one officer is alleged to have used pepper spray on a peaceful protester, and it is now emerging that there were more such incidents. See “Why I was maced at the Wall Street Protests.”

The pepper spray and other incidents brought more protesters out, and the way video experiences circulated to create sentiments of sympathy is apparent in this account by Nicki Angelo of the impact watching one such short film on youtube had on her:

The protest movement is explicitly transnational and takes inspiration from Egypt and Tunisia. Unsurprisingly, the Green Movement of Iran, which was crushed in 2009, was represented:

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The protesters are a diverse bunch. There were lots of young people, and while I was there a group of them started playing guitars and singing progressive Beatles’ songs (A Hard Day’s Night, with its lyrics about hard work, and John Lennon’s “Imagine.”)

But an older folk singing duo, Ed and Robin Mahonen, who had composed an anthem in honor of the protests (Let’em Eat Cake) were also there, Ed with his banjo. (Robin’s facebook page is here.

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Now that a massive political movement to elect Barack Obama as a way of fixing the abuses of the Bush era has largely failed, with Obama coddling Wall Street, unwilling to prosecute the crimes of his predecessors, and taking disappointing positions on our civil liberties and on domestic surveillance, it is hard to see where we can go but to the streets. In a two-party system, which is highly undemocratic, those dissatisfied with an incumbent really only have one alternative, which makes people move to the right when they might actually want to move further to the left.

Moreover, my own question to the protester about how you could get around a Supreme Court that is in the back pocket of the rich and which has defined the buying of our politicians by the 1 percent as “protected free speech” does not have an easy answer. Maybe we should make opposition to this interpretation a litmus test for confirmation, the way the Right has in a coded way tried to get Roe V. Wade overturned over time.

But likely you’d have to go outside the Establishment system to get this change, and non-violent mass protest may be the only way to make our dissatisfaction with our Corporatocracy known effectively.

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What should have been Headlines in the Corporate Media: Today’s Best of the Blogosphere

Posted on 09/28/2011 by Juan

Talking Points Memo: Michele Bachmann’s latest batsh*t crazy conspiracy theory has Lebanon’s Shiite Hizbullah hooking up with Castro’s Communist Cuba.

Tomdispatch: A State Department official is being threatened with losing his job for linking to a Wikileaks cable at his blog. Perhaps not coincidentally, he blew the whistle on the SNAFU that was the American administration of provincial Iraq. The growing US government doctrine that for government employees to see or cite or link to leaked classified documents is illegal or actionable is stupidly stupid and is also a dire threat to the US first amendment. The settled law on these issues is that the US government has a right to try to keep documents secret. But once it fails to do so, they are public documents (paid for by the US public, which has a right to see more of them anyway).

Daily Kos: In a new poll, 73% of Americans agree with the ‘Buffett Rule’ proposed by billionaire Warren Buffett, that people making over a million dollars a year should have to pay taxes at at least the same percentage rate as people who make less than that. We’ve long known that a majority of Americans favors higher taxes on the rich, but this polling result is huge. Even two-thirds of Republicans polled agreed with the proposition, against only 16% who disagreed!

Sandy Tolan nails it at Tomdispatch: The very fact that the Palestinian West Bank is occupied has been successfully covered up for the American public.

Len Levitt looks at the evidence unearthed by AP that the NYPD has illegally placed Muslim-Americans under domestic surveillance, and wonders if anyone cares. He can’t find much evidence of newspaper coverage of the abuse, but does locate a couple of supportive editorials! What I can’t understand is that they targeted Moroccans. Moroccans? I say what is behind this is that the rice lobby is afraid of couscous becoming more popular.

Former NYT journalist Chris Hedges of Truthdig joins the Occupy Wall Street protests. Some brokerage firms are well run, but there were those that did illegal things and others that did very unwise things, and there has never been much accountability for either.

P.Z. Myers: In a new book, Stephen Pinker argues that human violence is declining rapidly over time.

A survey of 54 countries finds that a more progressive taxation system(where the rich pay higher tax rates than workers and the poor) actually makes the general population happier and more satisfied. Lowering taxes on the rich makes them increasingly wealthy at the expense of the rest of society, causing psychological pathologies.

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