Justin Raimondo

A new documentary series created by Stephen Hawking posits the mathematical certainty of extraterrestrial life – but the brilliant theoretical scientist recommends against trying to establish contact. “To my mathematical brain, the numbers [of planets] alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” Hawking says. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” That’s where the sense of caution sets in, because if they’re anything like us – rapacious warlike predators – then perhaps keeping a certain amount of distance is the better part of valor. As Hawking puts it:

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

Hey, wait a minute: is he talking about the aliens – or us? Untethered from solid ground – and from reality – rampaging across the known universe, plundering everything in their path. That sounds like our ruling class, all right, and it’s certainly no surprise they’re extending their hubris into outer space, as the Times of London reports:

“The mysterious X37B, launched successfully by the US Air Force from Cape Canaveral on Thursday … is officially described as an orbital test vehicle. However, one of its potential uses appears to be to launch a surge of small satellites during periods of high international tension. This would enable America to have eyes and ears orbiting above any potential troublespot in the world.”

Oh, those troublesome “troublespots” – like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Texas.

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Thomas Fuller

The world of renewable energy, as with so many new initiatives in the past, is currently characterized by a lot of government money being eagerly sought by many sources--some of them not very clean.

When the University of East Anglia decided to investigate itself, they could have chosen from a wide variety of scientific or legal figures. They decided on Lord Oxburgh, despite questions about his independence. As chairman of a windfarm manufacturer, could he really impartially decide on fundamental questions of the probity of climate science?

Would Lord Oxburgh have been appointed to his position as head of the panel investigating Climategate if it had been known that his employer was a subsidiary controlled by an Italian company enmeshed in scandals involving Sicilian waste? Let me hasten to add that I am not making any accusations of either Lord Oxburgh or Falck Renewables, the company he chairs. But was he really the best choice for this inquiry?

Lord Oxburgh is chairman of Falck Renewables, a builder of windfarms with six projects in operation or under construction in the UK alone. Falck Renewables is a subsidiary of Falck Group, a Milan based company that has built windfarms in Calabria and Sicily that have been part of an anti-Mafia investigation. Some of the windfarms, including one near Corleone, were completed quite some time ago, but haven't been connected to the grid. However, generous EU subsidies were forthcoming nonetheless. One project in Minervino Murge was the subject of an anti Mafia investigation (link in Italian, but Google will translate) that led to several arrests.

Italian and EU subsidies for the building of wind farms and the world’s highest guaranteed rates, €180 ($240, £160) per kwh, for the electricity they produce have turned southern Italy into a highly attractive market exploited by organised crime.

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Stephen Lendman

One of the fences that form a “no-man’s land” on the border
near Tijuana. (Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images)

On April 20, Reuters headlined, "Arizona passes tough illegal immigration law," saying:

State lawmakers "passed a controversial immigration bill on Monday (April 19) requiring police in the state (to) determine if people are in the United States illegally, a measure critics say is open to racial profiling."

Called "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act," the Arizona House and Senate passed it, sending it to Governor Jan Brewer who signed it on April 23 to make it Arizona law.

The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) works for "a just immigration and refugee policy in the United States (for) all immigrants, regardless of immigration status....advocating for their full labor, environmental, civil and human rights."

"We are ALL Arizona," it said before the bill became law. "Stop the Criminalization of Immigrants, End Racial Profiling! Tell AZ Governor to Veto (this) Anti-Immigrant Bill," saying:

"The Arizona State Legislature just passed a law (SB 1070) that legalizes unchecked racial profiling by police of anyone they 'suspect' is undocumented. It would criminalize all undocumented immigrants as 'trespassers' and subject them to misdemeanor or, in some cases, felony charges for a new 'trespass' crime."

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Patrick Seale

Barely a week goes by without news of some act of violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By any definition, what settlers and other religious activists do to Palestinians is terrorism. But it goes unpunished.

Time and again, Muslim graves and mosques are desecrated, harvests torched, sheep rustled, cars stoned and damaged, homes and shops forcibly occupied. Palestinians are chased off their own land by gunfire. Just last week, settlers cut down 300 olive trees.

The settlers have a new and brutal policy. They have declared that, for every attempt by the authorities to rein them in, they will exact a price in violence against the Palestinians -- a “price tag,” they call it.

In the Arab world, Islamic extremists such as al-Qaida are pursued, jailed or killed. Two of Al-Qaida’s top leaders were killed in Iraq this week. In Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has no wish or will to confront his home grown terrorists. Indeed, representatives of the religious settlers sit in his government.

In the Arab world, militants who fight to create an Islamic state are generally considered the enemy. In Israel, the armed underground movement which aims to create a Torah state is treated with kid gloves. The government dares not confront it -- or is secretly complicit with it.

Unless Israel’s fanatical settlers -- both religious-nationalist and ultra-orthodox -- are confronted, and their messianic ambitions tamed, there will be no peace in the Middle East.

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Alice Embree

Went AWOL seeking help for PTSD: Eric Jasinski released from Texas jail

Eric Jasinski is being released from the Bell County Jail in Belton, Texas, tomorrow morning, April 24. He will have served 25 days of a 30-day sentence.

Jasinski, 23, who is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, went AWOL in 2009 to seek help for his PTSD. His story was reported on by Dahr Jamail in The Rag Blog.

Eric Jasinski enlisted in the Army in 2005, and deployed to Iraq in October 2006 as an intelligence analyst. He collected intelligence used to direct air strikes. After his return to the U.S., Jasinski suffered from severe PTSD resulting from what he did and saw in Iraq. He felt remorse and guilt for the way he contributed to loss of life. He went through a divorce and had friends killed and maimed in combat.

He tried to get treatment for PTSD and finish out his military contract. “In late 2008,” Jasinski said, ”they stop-lossed me [an involuntary extension of contract], and that pushed me over the edge. They were going to send me back to Iraq.” Jasinski went AWOL until December 11, 2009, when he turned himself in to authorities at Fort Hood.

The Army scheduled a Summary Court Martial for March 31. Jasinski was sentenced to 30 days in the Bell County Jail. Laura Barrett, Jasinski’s mother, told the Temple Herald Telegram, “This has been a total outrage. I cannot believe my son who is diagnosed with PTSD from his deployment to Iraq would be sent to jail.”

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Ahmed Moor

"To the extent that Israel must exist exclusively for the Jewish
people, the enfranchising of the roughly four million Pale-
stinians living under Israeli occupation today does pose a
threat to its existence." (Yotam Ronen/ActiveStills)

Washington insiders are now touting a misguided Obama-dictated plan to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Most recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stephen Solarz took to the pages of The Washington Post to float the idea of an imposed peace, which largely undermines non-negotiable historic Palestinian rights. The authors call for the annulment of the Palestinian right of return, and the creation of a "demilitarized Palestinian state."

The trial balloon avoids any talk of Israeli parliamentary dynamics and the incapacity of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cede anything without sowing the seeds of its own dissolution, something Netanyahu probably realized while negotiating the composition of his coalition government. But its most glaring failure is the presumption that Palestinians will meekly accept American dictates regarding the right of return. As a Palestinian, I believe that any plan that seeks to sacrifice our inalienable human rights to ensure race-based majorities in Israel will fail.

Brzezinski and Solarz begin their piece by paraphrasing a statement made by Israel's current defense minister, Ehud Barak. They write that the "absence of the two-state solution is the greatest threat to Israel's future." Presumably, Barak is indirectly referring to the one-state solution, or the growing call by Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews to create a democratic state in all of historic Palestine. It is telling that the Israeli defense minister -- and Brzezinski and Solarz -- appears to view a growing movement in the Holy Land for equal rights and enfranchisement as "the greatest threat to Israel's future."

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Stuart Littlewood

Archbishop of Westminster And Patriarch's Delegation Visit Bethle-
hem. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Dr Rowan
Williams first from the right. (LIFE)

Stuart Littlewood views the silence of the head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, over Palestinian suffering, especially in Gaza, which he had promised to visit but had not been heard to mention since. He contrasts this with Mr Rowan’s fawning over Israel and the Holocaust.

My ears pricked up when I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury was planning a visit to Gaza last February, and Lambeth Palace (his headquarters in London) was "actively engaged in humanitarian relief and advocacy".

I asked for more information. Whom would he meet? Would he see the health minister? Would he sit down and talk with elected Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, man of God to man of God, Mr Haniyeh being an imam? I’d like to be a fly on the wall at such a meeting.

Would he "do Gaza proud by spending a generous amount of his time with senior members of the Islamic faith"?

And would he look up Fr Manuel Mussallam, the redoubtable old priest who was a mainstay of the Christian community throughout Gaza's darkest hours and tells it straight? His office didn't reply.

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Alan Caruba

Whether it’s on television or in the newspapers or the endless stream of news releases I receive, the message over and over again is that people believe such stupid stuff about the planet and their environment that I keep asking, where do they come from?

People who think they can save the planet by bringing a cloth bag to the supermarket instead of using a plastic one, even though plastic is part of just about everything they will use that day, from their car to their kitchen’s countertop,

People who insist that turning corn into fuel instead of building more refineries to process more oil makes no sense at all because wasting corn in this way forces up the cost of food,

People who think that Green jobs are anything other than temporary, low paying menial work, entirely dependent on government subsidies and handouts,

People who think that it’s wrong to eat meat even though they have a mouth full of teeth whose purpose down through the millennia of mankind is to chew meat,

People whose ancestors survived by hunting long before agriculture was developed, yet think it is cruel to hunt or to cull a population of animals that endanger people or property,

People who think solar or wind energy can even begin to compete with coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy when both require traditional plants to back up “alternative” energy sources. Why? Because the sun doesn’t shine 24 hours a day and the wind doesn’t blow all the time,

People who think that polar bears are going extinct when, in fact, the polar bear population has been growing for twenty years or more,

People who believe “global warming” is real even though the “theory” was based entirely on seriously flawed, often deliberately false computer models,

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Stephen Lendman

Launched in October 2003, Cageprisoners is a human rights organization dedicated to raising the "awareness of the plight of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay" and other War on Terror victims. As a "comprehensive resource," six words explain its mission: "education, campaign, support, motivation, co-operation (and) prevention" for its efforts to educate the public, campaign for Guantanamo and other detainee repatriations or their asylum, and have prisoner rights guaranteed under international law, including humane treatment not to be:

-- tortured;
-- indefinitely detained;
-- disappeared; or
-- denied proper legal representation, due process, judicial fairness, and access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), medical personnel and families.

In April 2009, its report titled, "Fabricating Terrorism II: British Complicity in renditions and torture" followed its same-titled 2006 report. Part I covered 13 cases with evidence based on detainee testimonies, interviews with security service officials, and other research.

Part II updated it (including 16 other cases - 29 in all), focusing on Britain's claim to be a human rights leader. Stating it ratified the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) in 2003, its practices belie its commitment.

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Mike Whitney

Schadenfreude. The pleasure derived from watching someone else suffer. It’s human natur, and it’s what’s what’s driving the Goldman pile-on. SEC Enforcement director Robert Khuzami had barely uttered his statement on Friday before the the yelps of joy arose from every corner of the country. “Fraud!” What a happy noise. Revenge is sweet. Suddenly the prospect of subpoenas, indictments, and long prison sentences didn’t seem so remote. But don’t get your hopes up. Goldman was picked for a reason, and that reason has nothing to do with its shady business transactions. It’s politics.

Don’t get me wrong; Goldman is guilty as hell. They slapped together a Kamikaze CDO that was designed to blow up, and then they schluffed it off on their clients without filling them in on the details. It’s called “withholding material information”, and its no-no. It’s like wrapping smelly fish in yesterday’s paper and pawning it off as fresh-caught Blackmouth. You can’t do that. According to former regulator William Black, “Goldman did not just withhold information, they told people, ‘Hey, the investment decisions are being made by experts who would only choose good quality stuff’, when. in fact, the stuff that was put in was chosen because it was considered the most likely to suffer near-term downgrades.”

So Goldman was minting its own roadside bombs and getting input from notorious hedge fund short-seller, John Paulson, who planned to bet against the same CDO. But what’s most shocking, is that Goldman was caught schtuping its own clients just to make a buck. That’s going to haunt them for a very long time. Trust is important, even on Wall Street. Goldman’s reputation is shot.

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Debbie Menon

Debbie Menon argues that Washington’s support for Israel is tragic, immoral and extremely damaging to Americans given that US “congressional representatives continue to put Israel’s interests before the interests of Americans”.

In a recent article in the journal Foreign Policy entitled “Petraeus wasn’t the first”, Mark Perry describes succinctly the opposition to US support for Israel, the rationale for this support and how American publishers cover it up.

The article is extremely valuable reading, recommends Alison Weir, the executive director of the website If Americans Knew. “It corrects misconceptions that so many Americans have on the causation of US support for Israel, including even some who are otherwise well informed on Palestine,” she asserts.

Mark Perry is correct in all respects. He quotes Joe Hoar, who remind him that it’s all old history. “What’s the news here? Hasn’t this been said before?” and hasn’t it all been done before?

Indeed, have humans ever learned from history? I think it says something about the nature of our species when you reflect that Albert Einstein once said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Key elements of the US government have always opposed the concept of a Zionist Israel, ever since the state and defence departments advised President Harry Truman not to sign up to the Zionist project, which he nevertheless did but with reservations, qualifications and conditions that were immediately ignored.

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David Lindorff

Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal had a lead story about Israeli planning to possibly “go it alone” in an attack on Iran if the US were not to “succeed” in its diplomatic efforts to get Iran to “stop” its alleged attempts to develop a nuclear weapon capability.

Aside from the fact that there is no hard evidence that Iran is trying to make a nuclear bomb or even to refine uranium to obtain nuclear-grade material, the paper ignored one crucial point: Israel cannot “go it alone” in any strike on Iran, since its key weapons--American fighter-bombers--are supplied to it, and kept flying, thanks to the equipment and spare parts provided by the United States. Indeed the entire Israeli military machine is largely financed and armed by the US.

No Israeli military effort can go forward without the full backing of the US, and to say otherwise is to simply perpetrate a fraud on the American public, implying that Israel is an independent actor on the world stage. It is not.

Another example of media warmongering came in an interview by Terri Gross on her program “Fresh Air,” which I believe is the most widely syndicated and popular program on National Public Radio, produced here in Philadelphia at the studios of NPR affiliate WHYY. Listening to “Fresh Air” this week, which featured an interview with New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins, a generally excellent reporter who distinguished himself for his reporting on the Iraq War, and particularly on the brutal US assault on the city of Fallujah, I heard Filkins refer casually to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as “America’s arch-enemy.”

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David Swanson

Franz Kafka's book "The Trial" begins "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." There follow many thousands of words describing the ordeal of someone denied the right to know the charges against him, to face his accusers, to be given a fair and speedy trial by a jury of his peers, and so forth. We have read thousands of stories of such "Kafkan" experiences since the advent of the Global War of Terror. But we need a different kind of story now.

What if the beginning read like this: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was killed one fine morning." With that kind of beginning, there can be no second sentence, unless the story jumps backward in time. With assassinations and drone strikes, night raids, and check point shootings replacing disappearances, imprisonments, renditions, and torture as tools of the imperial trade, we need stories that begin a lot earlier and end the moment the abuse starts. We need people's childhoods, adolescences, friends, loved-ones, hobbies, and careers. We need to know what they were doing that week, the previous evening, and the moments before they were annihilated. We need to know their last words, the last letter they wrote, the last person they kissed, the last child they cared for (or were they a child?). We need to understand who they were as that obvious and tautological but so elusive and all-decisive thing: human beings, fellow creatures whom we could imagine as parts of our own lives. We need to be able to picture that person in the instant that the explosion rips their flesh apart.

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Stephen Lendman

For many years, Israel's open secret is that it's one of eight known nuclear powers, including America and Russia with about 97% of the world's arsenal according to Helen Caldicott in her book "Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer." The others are Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel - North Korea a declared but unverified one.

In her January 20, 2009 Canadian Medical Association Journal article titled, "Obama and the opportunity to eliminate nuclear weapons" Caldicott wrote:

"The Cold War is over, but the threat of nuclear war is not. Little progress has been made since 1989 when the Berlin Wall collapsed. In fact, the threat of nuclear annihilation has escalated. In 1972, when 5 nuclear nations....signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they agreed to rapidly disarm. They have done the opposite," resulting in a greater than ever threat, the Pentagon's new Nuclear Posture Review and US-Russia deal doing nothing to reverse it. (See Obama's Brave Nuke World.)

In his 1991 book, "The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and America Foreign Policy," Seymour Hersh discussed its strategy to launch a massive nuclear counterattack if it felt its existence threatened, the stark message being the next regional war may be nuclear.

In his 1997 book, "Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies," Israel Shahak said that, helped by the Israeli Lobby (and Christian Zionists), "Israel (is) clearly prepar(ing) itself to seek overtly a hegemony over the entire Middle East (with no) hesitati(on) to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones."

Shahak also explained that Israel regards "the launching of missiles (onto its territory) as 'nonconventional' regardless of whether they are equipped with explosives or poison gas." In turn, Israel's nuclear doctrine dictates that a "nonconventional" attack requires one in response, meaning a nuclear one, the foundation of its grand strategy, according to Shahak.

According to Hebrew University's Professor of Military History Martin Van Creveld, "We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you (it) will happen before Israel goes under."

Israel maintains a double standard. It won't let another Middle East state acquire nuclear weapons, but will never give up its own or the right to use them preemptively.

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Jeremy Scahill

As the Obama Administration continues the military privatization
agenda, a CIA-connected firm and an Israeli-run company named
Instinctive Shooting International are looking to cash in

The Obama administration has continued the Bush-era reliance on private contractors to sustain the US occupation of Iraq and the US operations in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Obama has surpassed Bush’s reliance on contractors with current contractor levels surpassing 100,000 Defense Department contractors deployed. In Iraq, Obama has maintained the long-standing ratio of one contractor to every US soldier.

General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan/Pakistan, said recently that he believes the US has “created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be.” He added: “I think it doesn’t save money. I actually think it would be better to reduce the number of contractors involved, increase the number of military if necessary.”

Despite such proclamations, the pattern of dependence on contractors is continuing unabated—and not just within the Department of Defense.

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Stephen Lendman

A July 2008 Fact Sheet Series titled, "Behind the Bars: Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons" was jointly prepared by the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Palestinian Counseling Center (PCC), and Mandela Institute. Along with background information, it covered Israel's obligations under international law, prison conditions where they're held, medical neglect, and their educational rights restricted or denied.

Relevant International Laws Protecting Prisoners and Civilians in Times of Conflict, Including Women

The 1949 Third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war, replacing the 1929 Prisoners of War Convention. It broadened the categories of persons entitled to prisoner of war status and precisely defined the conditions and places of their captivity - especially with regard to allowed labor, financial resources, required treatment, and rules of judicial proceedings.

It specifically prohibited acts of:

-- "Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
-- Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;" and
-- judicial guarantees "recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

The 1955 UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners requires "no discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."

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Joshua Kors

On Honor: To the people of our Nation, particularly our elected officials and VA bureaucrats: We, your Military Veterans, ask that you honor neither our service nor our sacrifice. We ask only that you honor your promise to us as we have honored ours to you. ~ Disposable Warriors

The mortar shell that wrecked Chuck Luther's life exploded at the base of the guard tower. Luther heard the brief whistling, followed by a flash of fire, a plume of smoke and a deafening bang that shook the tower and threw him to the floor. The Army sergeant's head slammed against the concrete, and he lay there in the Iraqi heat, his nose leaking clear fluid.

"I remember laying there in a daze, looking around, trying to figure out where I was at," he says. "I was nauseous. My teeth hurt. My shoulder hurt. And my right ear was killing me." Luther picked himself up and finished his shift, then took some ibuprofen to dull the pain. The sergeant was seven months into his deployment at Camp Taji, in the volatile Sunni Triangle, twenty miles north of Baghdad. He was determined, he says, to complete his mission. But the short, muscular frame that had guided him to twenty-two honors--including three Army Achievement Medals and a Combat Action Badge--was basically broken. The shoulder pain persisted, and the hearing in his right ear, which evaporated on impact, never returned, replaced by the maddening hum of tinnitus.

Then came the headaches. "They'd start with a speckling in the corner of my vision, then grow worse and worse until finally the right eye would just shut down and go blank," he says. "The left one felt like someone was stabbing me over and over in the eye."

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Chris Floyd

Arthur Silber is back, with piercing insights that rip the veil which even self-proclaimed dissenters still draw across the blood-soaked reality of what Silber aptly calls the "Death State" that has long "wrapped the world in flames" (to quote the preferred method of resolving diplomatic conflicts famously voiced by Abe Lincoln's secretary of state) from its mephitic base on the Potomac.

As always with Silber, you must read the whole piece (and follow the links) to get the full force of the argument, which is nuanced, multifarious and deeply considered, but here is just the briefest excerpt to send you on your way:

I repeat a few words I first wrote at the beginning of 2009...:

>

For more than a hundred years, the foreign policy of the United States government has been directed to the establishment and maintenance of global dominance. To this end, violence, overthrow, conquest and murder have been utilized as required ... More and more, oppression and brutalization have become the bywords of domestic policy as well. Today, the United States as a political entity is a corporatist-authoritarian-militarist monstrosity: its major products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a huge scale.

I repeat the fundamental point to make certain there is no misunderstanding as to where I stand on this question: as a political entity, the United States is an endlessly destructive monstrosity. The overwhelming majority of people -- including, I regret to say, even many of those who are severely critical of the United States government -- fail to understand this point in anything close to the thorough and consistent manner required. This failure is the result of an earlier one: an inability to grasp fully what it means to revere the sacred value of a single human life.

There is more, much more in the original post -- "An Evil Monstrosity: Thoughts on the Death State"; excerpting it actually does it an injustice. So go there now and read it.

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Thomas Elholm, Juridisk Institut, Syddansk Universitet
(Innsendt av Patrick Mac Manus / Foreningen Oprør )

Er de senere års nye regler unødigt vidtgående indgreb i borgernes retsstilling?

Virkning af sortlistning

En dag i 2002 opdagede Hr. Sison pludselig, at alle hans finansielle midler var blevet indefrosset. Han opdagede det ved, at købmandsregningen ikke var blevet betalt som normalt via banken. Banken forklarede, at staten havde krævet alle hans finansielle midler indefrosset pga. mistanke om forbindelse til terrorisme. Sison var derfor frataget enhver råderet over sine bankkonti og alle øvrige finansielle midler, inklusive den månedlige socialhjælp på ca. 200 euro. Senere blev han – ligeledes på grund af sortlistningen – bedt om at fraflytte lejligheden, som han havde fået tildelt af kommunen. Familien fik dog lov til at blive.

Sidenhen har Sison flere gange fået EF-domstolenes ord for, at sortlistningen af ham strider mod grundlæggende retsgarantier, senest ved dom af 30. september 2009 (sag T-341/07). I dag – 7 år efter sortlistningen – har Sison stadig ikke fået en tilstrækkelig begrundelse for, hvorfor han optræder på listen. Retten i Første Instans finder ikke, at de beviser, som ligger til grund for sortlistningen, knytter Sison til terror. Derfor er det heller ikke godtgjort, at EU-rettens betingelser for at sortliste Sison, er opfyldt.

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Stephen M. Walt

Back when I started writing this blog, I More hype about warned that the idea of preventive war against Iran wasn't going to go away just because Barack Obama was president. The topic got another little burst of oxygen over the past few days, in response to what seems to have been an over-hyped memorandum from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and some remarks by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, following a speech at Columbia University. In particular, Mullen noted that military action against Iran could "go a long way" toward delaying Iran's acquisition of a weapons capability, though he also noted this could only be a "last resort" and made it clear it was not an option he favored.

One of the more remarkable features about the endless drumbeat of alarm about Iran is that it pays virtually no attention to Iran's actual capabilities, and rests on all sorts of worst case assumptions about Iranian behavior. Consider the following facts, most of them courtesy of the 2010 edition of The Military Balance, published annually by the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies in London:

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