Stephen Lendman

On May 14, 2008, New York Times writer Lynnley Browning headlined, "Ex-Banker from UBS Is Indicted in Tax Case," saying:

"The one-count conspiracy indictment, unsealed in federal court, accuses the former banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, of helping (a wealthy American real estate developer) evade taxes on $200 million held in bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein."

According to the indictment, "fictitious trusts and bogus corporations (were created) to conceal the ownership and control of offshore assets. They also advised clients to destroy bank records and helped them file false tax returns...."

National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) covers his case on whistleblowers.org, saying:

"Bradley Birkenfeld commenced serving a three-year and four-month sentence in federal prison on January 8, 2010, a direct result of blowing the whistle on one of the largest tax fraud schemes in US history."

On April 15, he filed an appeal for clemency.

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Patrick Martin

Henry Kissinger (left) and Augusto Pinochet (center)

Documents released last week by the National Security Archive, which has played a valuable role in uncovering evidence of the crimes of American imperialism in Latin America, provide new details on the role of top US officials in facilitating the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier.

These documents add to the overwhelming case for the prosecution of then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger, then-CIA director George H. W. Bush and other top officials for their role in these and other murders perpetrated by military juntas allied with and backed by the US government.

The September 21, 1976 murder of Letelier and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt, was the most spectacular act of international terrorism on US soil up to that time. The two were killed, and Moffitt’s husband Michael wounded, when a bomb detonated underneath their car as they rounded Sheridan Circle in northwest Washington D.C., barely a mile from the White House.

Letelier, who had served as foreign minister and then defense minister in the reformist government of Salvador Allende, was arrested and tortured in the September 11, 1973 military coup lead by General Augusto Pinochet. He was eventually sent into exile, but became a thorn in the side of the Chilean junta because of his political activities abroad, exposing the savagery of the junta’s repression and campaigning for an international boycott.

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Jay Barr

This is the reality. This what the 76 senators are supporting.

The Boxer-Isakson "Israel Support Letter" [.pdf] addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and currently signed by 76 senators [.pdf] answers a question no one needed to ask: Does the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have the support of the United States Senate? However, unlike the proverbial napkin former AIPAC bigwig Steven Rosen boasted that he could have signed by 70 senators within 24 hours, this particular piece of paper contains a slew of Likud talking points, few of which are supported by reality. Some read an implicit rebuke of the Obama administration in the letter for the administration’s alleged spat with Israel, though despite the new conventional wisdom that there’s a major schism between the two, it would be hard to point to on-the-record words or actions taken by the Obama administration that translate into substantive criticism of Israeli policies.

The letter states, "Despite your [Clinton's] best efforts, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have been frozen for over a year." If Clinton were truly making her best efforts to restart the peace process, she would wield the considerable U.S. leverage of aid to tiny Israel in order to rein in their increasingly extreme activities that violate even their own lukewarm prior commitments. One commitment, the so-called settlement freeze, involves the seemingly self-evident notion that if you are serious about good-faith negotiations over borders you do not continue to expand your territory into the ever shrinking piece that is well-established as belonging to the other side. Instead, Clinton bragged at her recent speech to AIPAC about the increase in U.S. aid to Israel in 2010 and the planned increase for 2011.

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Marc W. Herold

A child killed in recent airstrikes, western Afghanistan

“The American public is conditionally tolerant of [military] casualties and consistently indifferent to collateral damage.” ~Dr. Karl P. Mueller, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base

"General McChrystal’s data provided an opportunity to reveal Pentagon lying (or incompetence) to all, but only the libertarians rose to the occasion. The mainstream U.S media, Obama cultists, and much of the U.S antiwar movement persist in blithely quoting UNAMA and consuming Pentagon and embedded “patriotic” U.S reporters’ characterizations of America’s War in Afghanistan."

The Politics of Counting Dead Afghan Civilians: Responses by the Libertarian Right and Obama Liberals to McChrystal’s Numbers.

The ever-so-faithful stenographer of Pentagon truths, USA Today, printed numbers put forth by General McChrystal on Afghan civilians who perished at the hands of NATO.[1] The article headlined “NATO Strikes Killing More Afghan Civilians,” noted that such deaths rose from 29 during the first three months of 2009, to 72 during 2010.

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Stephen Lendman

The status applies to all Wall Street giants, none, however, the equal of Goldman, the Grand Master. Like the fabled comic book Superman hero, it's:

-- faster than its competitors, thanks to its proprietary software ability to front run markets (illegal, but no matter);
-- more powerful than the government it controls; and
-- able to leap past competitors, given its special status.

Founded in 1869, GS calls itself "a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of services worldwide."

Since going public in 1999, the same year Glass-Steagall ended letting banks, insurers and securities companies combine, GS became a giant hedge fund trading against the advice given clients with the full faith and blessing of Washington - the same thing other Street giants did and profited handsomely.

In his April 17 article headlined, "Goldman Sachs Vampire Squid Gets Handcuffed," L. Randall Wray noted SEC laxity for years, "managing to sleep through every bubble and bust in recent memory," and saying Goldman acts above the law "since it took over Washington during the Clinton years." Their criminal behavior is nothing new. It's their established business model, the reason it's been immersed in nearly all financial scandals since the 19th century.

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Christopher King

Christopher King considers the evidence which indicate that murder of civilians and state-sponsored terrorism are tools of US policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and argues that unless Britain leaves Afghanistan immediately, it will not recover morally or economically and will not be on the path to control its destiny.

You have probably seen the Wikileaks collateral murder video of an American helicopter gunship crew killing 12 Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, the details of which had been concealed by the Pentagon. It’s something that everyone should see, particularly those British politicians who voted for the Iraq war and are now, before an election, attempting to persuade us that they are fit to govern our country.

Gordon Brown in particular is trading our soldiers’ lives for the sort of multi-million dollar payoff that Tony Blair got by backing America’s adventures in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like most of our Members of Parliament, he also voted to invade Iraq and enthusiastically supported Barack Obama in Afghanistan. What our politicians call “re-engaging” with the public, something they only attempt at election time, is futile because we know them to be self-serving liars without morality. Incompetent too, but what else would one expect? Enough of them for the moment.

We should note that the occasional cross-border US drone attack into Pakistan has gradually escalated to regular attacks, and a respectable-sized local war, US ground involvement and a CIA presence in Pakistan. Surely the Pakistanis have wondered what the US plans are for their country and nuclear stockpile?

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Stephen Lendman

In June 2009, Defence for Children International (DCI)/Palestine Section published a report titled, "Palestine Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalized ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities."

DCI/Palestine "is a national section of the international non-government child rights organisation and movement (dedicated) to promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children," according to international law principles.

Each year, about 700 West Bank children, under 18, are arrested, detained, interrogated, and prosecuted in Israeli military courts, in total about 6,500 since 2000. DCI lawyers represent 30 - 40% of them. The report focuses on their torture and abuse in custody.

Since the 1967 occupation, an estimated 700,000 Palestinian men, women, and children passed through Israel's judicial system, over 150,000 tried in military courts from 1990 - 2006, the remainder handled through plea bargains for lighter sentences. On average, over 9,000 Palestinians a year are affected, including 700 children treated the same as adults.

For nearly 43 years, Israeli military justice operated "almost completely devoid of international scrutiny," giving authorities license to violate human rights and humanitarian law with impunity. As a result, due process and judicial fairness don't apply under a system denying them.

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Ronald Aronson

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus

The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus first met in June 1943, at the opening of Sartre's play The Flies. When Sartre was standing in the lobby, according to Simone de Beauvoir, "a dark-skinned young man came up and introduced himself: it was Albert Camus." His novel The Stranger, published a year earlier, was a literary sensation, and his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus had appeared six months previously. The young man from Algiers was marooned in France by the war. While convalescing from an exacerbation of his chronic tuberculosis in Le Panelier, near Chambon, Camus had been cut off from his wife by the Allied conquest of French North Africa and the resulting German invasion of unoccupied France in November 1942. He wanted to meet the increasingly well-known novelist and philosopher—and now playwright—whose fiction he had reviewed years earlier and who had just published a long article on Camus's own books. It was a brief encounter. "I'm Camus," he said. Sartre immediately "found him a most likeable personality."

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Stephen Lendman

Terry Kupers is a practicing psychiatrist, an expert on long-term isolated prison confinement, author of numerous articles on the subject as well as his book titled, "Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It." He's also a frequent expert witness in related cases, serves as a consultant, and is currently Institute Professor in the Graduate School of Psychology at Wright Institute, Berkeley, CA. More on his work below.

Social scientists have studied the effects for years, social psychologist Hans Toch coining the term "isolation panic" to describe symptoms he observed in men he interviewed, including panic, rage, a sense of total loss of control, emotional breakdown, regressive behavior, and self-mutiliation. He distinguished between difficult but tolerable incarceration and intolerable long-term isolation.

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Chris Floyd

Fallujah child victim. Attack on Fallujah by US troops, April 2004,
seven months before the war crimes committed by US military high
command in November 2004. (albasrah.net / thewe.cc)

The other day I was reading the New York Review of Books in a bookstore café. I saw a large ad in the bottom corner of a page; it began with this quote, in bold capitals:

"WHY IS IT A CRIME FOR ONE MAN TO MURDER ANOTHER, BUT NOT FOR A GOVERNMENT TO KILL MORE THAN A MILLION PEOPLE?"

My first reaction, before I read further, was a feeling of surprise that someone had articulated the case against the Iraq war so clearly – and had bought expensive space in the magazine to bring this unpunished, unrepented – indeed, unacknowledged – war crime to the national consciousness again.

A moment later, I saw that it was actually an ad for an exhibition in New York City about Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish exile and U.S. government advisor who first coined the term and developed the concept of "genocide." Under a picture of Lemkin's wartime government ID card, the ad goes on: "Before Raphael Lemkin, that kind of killing had no name. Today we know it as genocide."

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På Høyden
En diskusjon

[Denne diskusjonen begynte den 8.4.2010. Alle innleggene vil bli publisert her på den samme URL.]

25.5.2010
Klimaskepsis på tynn is
Helge Drange, Tor Eldevik, Tore Furevik og Eystein Jansen, Bjerknessenteret

Kvalheim og Sletten (K&S) har i det siste hyppig søkt til Bjerknessenteret for hjelp til å forstå sammenhengen mellom CO2 og global oppvarming (På Høyden 8.4, 19.4 og 7.5). De har tydeligvis ikke funnet våre svar (På Høyden 12.4 og 11.5) hensiktsmessige. I sitt siste innlegg har de derfor gått bort frå å spørre til selv å konkludere: Klimamodellene har for høy ”klimafølsomhet” (På Høyden 19.5).

Dette gjør de med henvisning til et kommende arbeid av Spencer & Braswell (2010). Som K&S burde kjenne til, også etter siste tiders brevveksling med Bjerknessenteret, er det en omfattende faglitteratur som viser det motsatte. K&S velger ikke å anerkjenne denne.

Overnevnte omgang med faglitteraturen følger samme praksis som leserinnlegget Hvorfor feiler klimamodellene? av Kvalheim i Teknisk Ukeblad 16.11.2009 (med påfølgende tilsvar fra Bjerknessenteret). I Kvalheims innlegg ble blant annet en studie av Lindzen & Choi (2009) brukt for å illustrere klimamodellenes svakheter. Allerede da Kvalheims innlegg ble publisert, var det allment kjent at det var metodiske svakheter ved Lindzen & Choi.

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Stephen Lendman

The Law Offices of Richard I. Fine & Associates (richardfinelaw.com) web site says he established the firm in 1974. His credentials include a Doctor of Law from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D in International Law from the London School of Economics, a Certificate from the Hague Academy of International Law, among his many other awards, including Lawyer of the Decades 1976 - 2006.

He's also been widely published in legal journals with regard to antitrust, comparative and international law. Fine's resume is long and impressive.

Before entering private practice, he "founded and was chief of the first municipal antitrust division in the United States, for the City of Los Angeles." He was also Special Counsel to the Government Efficiency Committee of the LA City Council, and a member of the US Department of Justice Antitrust Division.

In addition, he practiced law in London and with another firm before establishing his own. He was also Norway's Southern California Consul General.

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Socialistisk Information
Innsendt av Patrick Mac Manus/Foreningen Oprør

For et år siden blev firmaet Figthers+Lovers dømt. For nylig blev talsmanden for Foreningen Oprør dømt. Efter straffelovens bestemmelser om, at støtte til terrorister ikke er tilladt. Imens deltager Danmark i en krig i Afghanistan, under ledelse af amerikanerne, som blandt andet indebærer, at de udenlandske styrker samarbejder med grupper blandt afghanerne, der i andre sammenhænge ville blive betegnet som terrorister! Er De forvirret? Ikke underligt, for der arbejdes her med to standarder: én for folk, som vil afprøve grænserne for demokratiet og friheden, og en anden for, hvad en stat må gøre, når den udråber sig som repræsentant for demokratiet og friheden.

I øjeblikket forberedes en anden retssag, hvor terrorparagrafferne tages i anvendelse. En ung mand er sigtet for at have overvåget og registreret organiserede nazister.

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The Economist

Two compelling documentaries illuminate the dilemmas facing Africa’s dwindling white tribes. One is set in Zimbabwe, the other in Kenya. The Zimbabwean film, “Mugabe and the White African”, is the more straightforward and should be shown as widely as possible to help end one of Africa’s great tragedies: the ruin of one of the continent’s most successful countries and the moral bankruptcy of the governments of the nearby states (bar plucky Botswana) for failing to isolate and oust a vile dictator.

It shows how a brave film company, embedding itself with a beleaguered family of white farmers off and on for a year, can bring to life the horrors that have befallen an entire country. Like the large majority of the 5,000-odd white farmers who stayed on after Robert Mugabe became prime minister in 1980 and later president, Mike Campbell and his son-in-law Ben Freeth acquired their farm and the regulation government certificate showing that no black citizen also sought to buy the same farm, which then became Zimbabwe’s largest producer of mangoes and employed 500 locals. When a man with ministerial connections claimed the property for himself a few years ago, Messrs Campbell and Freeth refused to go, prompting a campaign of intimidation, arson and assault, including the beating up not just of the two farmers but also their wives, all horrifically shown on screen.

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Ray McGovern

NSA Servers

According to a draft memo by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the nominee to head up the new US Cyber Command will be current NSA Director Keith Alexander. Alexander is a three-star General and is expected to earn a fourth star after his appointment. The creation of the US Cyber Command comes amid rising concerns over computer attacks on our nations networks. [I Watch Obama]

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander may well be harboring the proverbial thought attributed to prevaricator Oliver North upon being spared punishment -- and instead getting rewarded handsomely -- for lying about the Iran-Contra Affair: “Is this a great country or what!”

Gen. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency since August 2005, is about to become what the Army describes as “dual hatted.” The Senate is about to confirm him to a new, highly sensitive leadership position requiring the utmost integrity and fidelity to the Constitution when he has shown neither.

Yet, after sizing up the enormous challenge of running the new U.S. cyber-warfare command, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, looked at Gen. Alexander and added, “And you’re the right person for it.”

Not for the first time, neither Inhofe nor his colleagues seem to have done their homework. Or maybe it is simply the case that Congress now accepts being lied to as part of the woodwork in the Capitol.

Alexander, you see, has a publicly established record of lying about NSA’s warrantless wiretapping. Call me naïve or obsolete, but when I was an Army officer it was understood that an officer did not lie — and especially not to Congress. Gen. Alexander seems to have missed that block of instruction.

And the same can be said for so many other very senior Army officers. It becomes easier to understand why Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba compared some of his colleagues during the Bush administration to the Mafia.

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Stephen Lendman

"Instead of recommending an equitable end to a 62 year conflict, Reut Institute (RI) advises sabotage and subterfuge against growing global forces it fears, ones effectively undermining Israel's legitimacy, so to prevail they must be subverted and stopped."

Working pro bono for Israeli government agencies, the Tel Aviv-based Reut Institute (RI) provides "real-time strategic decision-making" support in areas of national security and socioeconomic policy.

Saying global peace and justice groups threaten Israel's legitimacy, its recent series of articles, policy papers, and presentations counterattacked - a combination of damage control and rethink despite legitimate criticism showing Israel delegitimizes itself, and no amount of policy paper makeover will change it. Only Israel can do that, but in its 62 year existence never tried.

In a January 28 brief, RI said Israel:

"face(s) a dramatic assault on the very legitimacy of its existence as a Jewish and democratic state. While the ideological framework for this delegitimacy was solidified after the first Durban" World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, "the trend (got) a boost by the perceived lack of (political) progress, coupled with Operation Cast Lead in Gaza," followed by the damning Goldstone Report.

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Charles E. Carlson

This writer left the Gaza Strip on March 10th. During the preceding week over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds were wounded and a number of Israelis died. I interviewed Muslims and Christians Arabs, including evangelicals; a co-ed college English class; a PLO officer and a United Nation aid worker--both off the record; the chairman of a mental health organization treating traumatized children; a businessman resident of a refugee camp; a young Muslim woman named Shireen who wanted to talk to America on the record; a number of workers and numerous youths in several Internet cafés and several Israeli travelers and businessmen. I also witnessed and photographed from my rooftop an Apache helicopter raid that killed four Palestinians and wounded 30 more. The edition(s) to come will lay the blame for the 52-year slaughter and suggest a low-cost, no-lives-lost solution to the problem and a humane course for Americans to follow.

Two friends accompanied me when I walked out of Gaza, the same way I had walked in --through a 600-meter barricaded gauntlet at Ares gate. As before, no one but me entered or left this crowded non-country of more than a million persons during the half hour that it took to process out. Consider this one incredible fact there is virtually no human traffic in or out of Palestine. At the only border crossing where people are allowed to pass through not one human soul went in or came out.

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Glen Whitman

"New paternalist policies, and indeed the intellectual framework of new paternalism itself, create a serious risk of slippery slopes toward ever more intrusive paternalism."

For as far back as memory reaches, people have been telling other people what’s good for them — and manipulating or forcing them to do it. But in recent years, a novel form of paternalism has emerged on the policy stage. Unlike the “old paternalism,” which sought to make people conform to religious or moralistic notions of goodness, the “new paternalism” seeks to make people better off by their own standards.

New paternalism has gone by many names, including “soft paternalism,” “libertarian paternalism,” and “asymmetric paternalism.” Whatever the name, it arose from the burgeoning field of behavioral economics, which studies the myriad ways in which real humans — unlike the agents who populate most economic models — deviate from pure rationality. Real people suffer from a variety of cognitive biases and errors, including lack of self-control, excessive optimism, status quo bias, susceptibility to framing of decisions, and so forth. To the extent such imperfections cause people to make choices inconsistent with their own best interests, paternalistic interventions promise to help them do better.

What sort of interventions? To the casual reader, the new paternalism might seem to have little to do with government at all. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge[1] and Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational[2], for instance, often read more like advice manuals than policy manifestos. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find a wide-ranging policy agenda at work.

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Stephen Lendman

On April 9, Justice John Paul Stevens delivered a letter to President Obama stating:

"Having concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court's next Term, I shall retire from regular active service as an Associate Justice."

NBC anchor Brian Williams called him a "liberal lion," a "lawyer's lawyer." UPI's Michael Kirkland said he led the Court's "four-member liberal bloc." AP's Mark Sherman and Calvin Woodward said he "carved a liberal legacy on the high court." Clinton's acting Solicitor General, Walter Dellinger, called him "the Chief Justice of the Liberal Supreme Court." Writing in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin said he was a "liberal leader (who's) views suggest a sensibility more than a philosophy."

Others remember him both ways:

-- voting to reinstate the death penalty in 1976 and against "affirmative" preferences in the 1978 Bakke case; and

-- for his scathing 2000 Bush v. Gore dissent, support for reproductive rights, and the separation of church and state, among his other liberal and conservative decisions.

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Jonathan Cook

An Arab member of the Israeli parliament is demanding that a newspaper be allowed to publish an investigative report that was suppressed days before Israel attacked Gaza in winter 2008.

The investigation by Uri Blau, who has been in hiding since December to avoid arrest, concerned Israeli preparations for the impending assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead.
 
In a highly unusual move, according to reports in the Israeli media, the army ordered the Haaretz newspaper to destroy all copies of an edition that included Mr Blau’s investigation after it had already gone to press and been passed by the military censor. The article was never republished.
 
Mr Blau has gone underground in London after the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, demanded he return to Israel to hand back hundreds of classified documents they claim are in his possession and to reveal his sources.  

He published several additional reports for Haaretz in 2008 and 2009 that severely embarrassed senior military commanders by showing they had issued orders that intentionally violated court rulings, including to execute Palestinians who could be safely apprehended.

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