Bill Van Auken

Chinook helicopter upon completion of an air assault operation
in Monari village and nearby Omar Khel, Kushamond District,
Paktika Province, Afghanistan, June 25. (U.S. Army Photo)

In assuming formal command of the US-led war in Afghanistan over the weekend, Gen. David Petraeus reiterated his indications that the military will alter its rules of engagement, allowing a more unrestricted use of air strikes and artillery bombardments in support of American ground troops.

Such a shift will inevitably mean a major escalation in the slaughter of Afghan civilians. The killing of civilians by foreign occupation troops has fueled the insurgency in Afghanistan, which is now stronger than at any time since the US intervened in the country nearly nine years ago.

At a “change of command” ceremony July 4, Petraeus took over the post formerly occupied by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who had been removed by the Obama administration ten days earlier, ostensibly over insubordinate remarks he and his aides made that were reported in an article published in Rolling Stone magazine.

While reflective of the contempt for civilian authority that is endemic in the officer corps, the article was at best a subordinate factor in the decision to relieve McChrystal of his command. Far more significant was the failure to suppress the growing popular resistance to the US occupation, reflected both in the inconclusive offensive in Marjah last February and the recently announced decision to postpone a long-planned siege of Kandahar.

There had also been growing public criticism of McChrystal for implementing new rules of engagement in Afghanistan designed to reduce civilian casualties by limiting the use of American firepower.

More »

Rebel Kazimir / POPULISCOOP

Des régimes de plus en plus émancipés de l’impérialisme américain comme la majorité des Etats sud-américains, sont exposés à des manœuvres de déstabilisation par le biais des réseaux sociaux. Un acharnement inégalé prend forme chaque jour, mais sans créer des implications vraiment actives. Dans certains cas, c’est même l’effet contraire, des distances et des ripostes sont prises des essais américains.

Ces espaces numériques de mise en relation et de diffusion d’informations et de certains contenus culturels, sont aussi un véritable champ politique. Les USA qui gardent l’initiative en matière de la toile avec Microsoft, Google, - Facebook, - Twitter et bien d’autres plateformes, ont choisi de propager leur endoctrinement via ces systèmes électroniques, illimités et s’en passant des frontières.

Avec l’avènement des forums de discussion de la fin des années 90, qu’a précédée et stimulée la généralisation offensive de l’utilisation d’Internet, la chose a été prise au sérieux par les champs de confrontation idéologiques. Ceux qui s’en servent le plus, sont ceux qui ont facilité à les introduire publiquement et de la manière informelle. Grâce surtout à la teneur des débats qui se tenaient lors et dans ces échanges, c’est même une majeure préoccupation pour les autorités américaines d’être présentes et d’orienter les participants prédisposés à jouer le jeu.

Depuis 2008 l’effet politique du virtuel sur la vie réelle a été constaté très plausible. Du fait de l’éclatement des interconnexions entre personnes, par la magie des réseaux dits « sociaux », le champ d’action se déplace continuellement sur la toile. Puisque ces derniers entretiennent de sérieuses discussions, en mesure d’influencer le quotidien et même d’être à l’origine de mouvement sociaux comme en Iran... Qui ne songerait pas d’en faire, de ses rencontres virtuelles, sa boîte à outils pour influencer le monde ? Les individus s’y sont mis jusqu’à l’addiction pathologique et les Etats ne sont pas en reste.

More »

The American Dream

Is freedom of speech dead in America? Well, if not, it is rapidly dying. The most recent example to illustrate this comes out of Dearborn, Michigan. On June 18th, two Christians decided that they would peacefully pass out copies of the gospel of John on a public sidewalk outside a public Arab festival in Dearborn, and within 3 minutes 8 policemen surrounded them and placed them under arrest. Remember, these Christians were on a public sidewalk and were only very quietly handing out literature. Even their cameraman was arrested for simply filming what was taking place. The cameraman was not even involved in handing out the literature. Yet the police arrested him. At least two people claim that some bystanders cried out "Allahu Akbar!" as the Christians were being led away in handcuffs. Later, the group was told that they would have to go at least five blocks away to hand out their copies of the gospel of John. Freedom of speech has always been a big part of the American Dream, but as this incident and many others like it demonstrate, freedom of speech is rapidly being destroyed in the United States. And the American people are just standing around and letting it happen.

This video tells the story of what just happened a few days ago in Dearborn. Nabeel Qureshi, David Wood, Paul Rezkalla and Negeen Mayel attended the 15th annual Dearborn Arab International Festival on June 18th with the intent of peacefully passing out copies of the gospel of John outside the festival on a public sidewalk. The festival covers 14 blocks and was free and open to the public. Qureshi and Mayal are former Muslims who have now become Christians. Wood is a former atheist. All of them are from a group called Acts 17 Apologetics. What happened to them literally minutes after they started passing out copies of the gospel of John will have your jaw on the floor.

More »

Stephen Lendman

When economic stimulus and productive investment are most needed, public spending cuts are coming, G20 governments agreeing to cut deficits and balance budgets, what economist Michael Hudson calls "fiscal suicide, (months into) a carefully orchestrated financial war against the 'real' economy."

Begun in Washington, Obama, in his first State of the Union address, announced plans to "freeze government spending for three years," starting in 2011, and said he'll establish a bipartisan fiscal commission by executive order, to cut the deficit by imposed austerity - social spending cuts, including Medicare, not defense, banker bailouts, or other handouts to corporate favorites, how Washington works under both parties, anti-populist by any standard, anti-productive when large stimulus is needed to revive the cratering economy.

Yet on February 18, 2010, a White House press release announced the commission's establishment - a "bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform," co-chaired by two deficit hawks, former Republican Senate Whip Alan Simpson and former Clinton administration White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, heading an 18-member team stacked with like-minded members, Democrat and Republican austerity advocates against Medicare, Social Security, and other social spending.

More »

The American Dream

Are we really a free nation? The truth is that it is really hard to argue that we are "free" when our currency system and our economy are run by an unelected privately-owned central bank. You see, the truth is that the U.S. government does not "print money" whenever it wants. Under the current system, in order to get more U.S. currency, the U.S. government has to borrow it. The Federal Reserve creates the new currency out of thin air and then either keeps the "U.S. Treasury bonds" they get in return from the U.S. government or they sell them off to others. But what kind of sense does that make? Why does a "free government" have to go into debt to print its own currency? It is the U.S. government that should be printing U.S. currency - not a privately-owned bank called the Federal Reserve. The truth is that the Federal Reserve is about as "federal" as Federal Express is. And no unelected private central bank should be "running" our economy. Actually the free market should be running our economy, but if anyone is going to run it, it should at least be the government that we have elected. But instead we have a group of unelected bureaucrats making our interest rate decisions, determining our money supply levels and deciding which of their friends get big bailouts. That isn't the American Dream! What kind of "democracy" and "freedom" is that? The sad truth is that as long as we allow an unelected privately-owned central bank to run our economy we will not be truly free.

The reality is that the Federal Reserve desperately needs to be audited. The Federal Reserve has never undergone a true comprehensive audit since it was created back in 1913. The truth is that we have very little idea of what is really going on inside that institution. And yet they control our currency and our economy.

More »

Stephen Lendman

[Detailed information about him can be accessed through THIS link.]

He's the 1967-founded Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's (PFLP) General Secretary, one of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, sentenced in 2002 to 30 years in prison "for a range of 'security-related' political offenses,' " including his prominence in a prohibited organization, a 1993 document stating that:

"The strategic aim of the PFLP's struggle alongside the other forces of the Palestinian revolution is to liberate Palestine from Zionist colonial occupation. The PFLP aims for the establishment of a democratic state on the entire Palestinian land, with its capital in Jerusalem. This state would guarantee legal rights and equality of opportunity to all citizens, without discrimination on the grounds of religion, sex, belief or color. It would oppose Zionism and imperialism and be oriented towards democratic unity with other Arab countries."

"Achieving this aim presupposes a radical solution for the Palestinian national cause and readiness to wage a prolonged, complicated and difficult struggle (against Zionism), a racist, aggressive, expansionist, settler-colonial entity which aims at elimination of our people." Great sacrifices are needed to prevent it."

More »

Mohamed El-Moctar El-Shinqiti

Aggression immersed in victimhood is a striking reality of the Israeli
discourse [Getty]

An American academic once told me: "Many people in the Islamic world think America does not believe in human rights, but they are wrong; America believes in human rights indeed, the problem is the American definition of human."

In other words: the American definition of 'human' is not a universal one. This is not purely an American characteristic; every culture faces the challenge of broadening its cultural limits and universalising its moral norms.

But among all human cultures and ideologies, the Israeli case is unique in its double standard.

Criminality wrapped in self-righteousness and aggression immersed in victimhood are a few striking characteristics of the Israeli reality and discourse.

More »

Larry Pinkney

“You must be the historians who keep this lesson alive because this story isn’t about one day, one event, one person, or even one lifetime… Pass this knowledge. Don’t forget. Not ever.” ~ Leonard Peltier

A vast amount of this nation’s populace is as addicted to media hype as they are to oil. In this instance however, it is the government and the corporate media who are the kingpin pushers and the U.S. populace who are their hooked junkies.

Corporate government media spin, subterfuge, diversion, and outright lies are the continuing hallmarks of this nation’s institutions and of this present dishonest and insidiously pathetic Barack Obama presidency of unmitigated disaster. The Government and corporate media would not tell the truth even if their lives depended on it. Unfortunately, it is not their lives but those of everyday Black, Red, Brown, White, and Yellow peoples in this nation and throughout the world, who daily are being sacrificed on the bloody alter of chicanery and political expediency, on behalf of the wealthy elite.

Pertaining to the election and installment of Barack Obama as U.S. president almost a year and a half ago, a recent article disingenuously lamented that “we voted for a [hybrid Toyota] Prius but instead got a tank.” However, the fact is that the instant that virtually the entire U.S. corporate media and corporate / military establishment began throwing their support behind the then U.S. presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, even a dead man could have smelled a rat. In yet another recent article, a so-called ‘progressive’ bemoaned the lack of serious coverage of the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan, by the “mainstream” media, totally disregarding the obvious reality that this nation does not have a “mainstream” media. It has an embedded corporate-stream one.

More »

Ryan Dawson

When in the Course of inhumane events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with a plutocratic fascist state, with a massive lobby which is routinely caught in espionage and openly ignores international laws in order to set up its dogmatically supported racial police state, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that we should declare the causes which impel them to the separation between us. End all aid to Israel. Force AIPAC to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that all of humanity has unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among People, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, from the irresponsible and disastrous environmental damage as well as the inexcusable horrors from the use of depleted uranium to the use of collective punishment, torture, domestic spying, and networking and financing the largest terrorist organizations on earth: the CIA and the Mossad, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce the People under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of the US; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present leadership is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

More »

Jeff Gates

We declared ourselves free from those who would govern us based on what we could be deceived to believe. A generation weaned on the Age of Enlightenment insisted on government under the rule of law. And governance based on facts, not beliefs.

How’s that working out?

Remember Iraqi WMD? Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda? Iraq’s yellowcake uranium from Niger? Iraqi meetings in Prague? Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories?

All those facts are now known to be false. Yet Americans were deceived to do what? Believe. Ground Zero of the True Believers was Washington, DC where those sworn to protect us instead took us to war in Iraq—relying on false beliefs.

If waging war on false beliefs is not proof certain of a Dark Age, what is? It gets even better.

Do you believe money is smarter than people? Of course not, right? Or do you?

I did. As counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance (1980-87), I helped craft federal legislation that grew funds under management (largely pension funds) from $800 billion in 1980 to $16.6 trillion by April 2007. The annual subsidy tops $150 billion.

Pile up that much money in one place and flies will gather. Akin to the casino skim, those massive sums were skimmed at least four times over the past two decades.

Remember the Savings & Loan fraud of the late 1980s? That fraud featured Arizona Senator John McCain and the infamous “Keating Five.” At a cost of $153 billion, that was just a warm-up. Then came the Enron scam and the dot.com crash. WorldCom alone was a $50 billion fraud. Now we’re talking real money.

Then came the subprime mortgage fraud enabled by the “financial creativity” that Fed Chief Alan Greenspan applauded as a sign of good old American ingenuity. What a guy.

Anything goes, he said. Let money do what money does best. After all, money is smarter than us, right? Believe it or not, that consensus belief is now enshrined in federal law. I had a True Believer hand in putting it there.

So did you. “Show me the money” you learned to insist. Why should you care about fiscal foresight, civil cohesion, environmental sustainability and such? That’s not your job, right? Just manage those funds to maximize your returns and fahgeddaboutit. You too could be chairman of the Federal Reserve.

More »

Yousef Munayyer

Last week the government of Israel announced the launch of an investigation into the events surrounding the deadly Memorial Day flotilla raid which left nine activists dead. Many international bodies including the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), as well as human rights groups like Amnesty International, are calling for an independent and impartial, international investigation into the incident. In fact, the UN Human Rights Council has already called for an investigation and chosen a principle investigator. Turkey too has decided to launch its own investigation. The Mahmoud Abbas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, which can in no way be construed as a pro-Hamas entity, also slammed the Israeli investigation.

There are obvious questions that arise when an alleged perpetrator, in this case the government of Israel, is left in charge of investigating themselves. To mitigate such concerns, Israel has allowed two international observers to participate. One of them, David Trimble, raises questions on his own. He has a Nobel Peace Prize on his resume, but he is also known for having antipathy towards human rights groups whom he has accused of aiding terrorists, and was recently part of an initiative to launch a pro-Israel campaign in his native land. The other observer, Ken Watkin, is the former head of Canada's military judiciary.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the international observers can keep any biases they may have out of their deliberations. Will they be able to come up with an accurate assessment of the events? It's not likely, since any information "almost certain to cause substantial harm to [Israel's] national security or to the State's foreign relations" will not be made available to the international observers. Basically, the international observers, hand-picked by the state of Israel, are only permitted to observe what the state of Israel wants them to observe. A farce, if there ever was one.

Despite this, and a vast international outcry for an impartial, international investigation, the United States has come out in support of Israel's commission, calling it an "important step" and stating that Israel's "independent public commission can meet the standard of a prompt, impartial, credible, and transparent investigation."

More »

Stuart Littlewood

The Guardian: Nick Clegg: The Liberal Democrat leader is forcing
the Tories to rethink. (Photograph: Murdo MacLeod)

Stuart Littlewood explains why the hope that UK Liberal Democratic Party leader Nick Clegg’s presence in the governing coalition would have a moderating effect on the rabid Conservative Zionists is misplaced. Following a recent exchange with Clegg, he concludes that the junior coalition partner has fallen in with the Tory Zionists.

Nick Clegg is British deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party.

A month ago, while reports were coming in that Israeli gunboats had "intercepted" the Free Gaza flotilla 90 miles out to sea and told the humanitarian workers they would be boarded and towed to an Israeli port, I emailed Clegg: "Where is the Royal Navy when it's needed to protect life and limb of the 30-odd British nationals?"

Ministers received advanced warning of Israel's threats to stop the flotilla "by any means". What was needed was firm intervention. Just for a change the British people wanted their government to do them proud on the international stage and protect those brave souls on their peaceful mission to bring relief to Palestinians whose lives have been made a living hell by the bully-boys of the Middle East.

They were, after all, only doing the right thing, doing what the West's cowardly governments wet their pants at the very thought of doing.

Back in December, when the parties were warming up for the general election, Clegg wrote in the Guardian:

...And what has the British government and the international community done to lift the blockade? Next to nothing. Tough-sounding declarations are issued at regular intervals but little real pressure is applied. It is a scandal that the international community has sat on its hands in the face of this unfolding crisis.

No doubt the febrile sensitivities of the Middle East have deterred governments, caught between recriminations from both sides. No doubt diplomats have warned that exerting pressure on Israel and Egypt may complicate the peace process.

But surely the consequences of not lifting the blockade are far more grave?

He certainly talked the talk. Would he walk the walk if given the chance? Well, he now has the chance, and his reply has just arrived.

More »

Stephen Lendman

In their June 28 article headlined, "In Ordinary Lives, US Sees the Work of Russian Agents," Scott Shane and Charlie Savage said they "lived for more than a decade in American cities and suburbs from Seattle to New York, where they seemed to be ordinary couples working ordinary jobs, chatting to their neighbors about schools and apologizing for noisy teenagers."

The next day, Times writers Shane and Benjamin Weiser headlined, "Spying Suspects Seemed Short on Secrets," saying:

"The only things (absent in this case) were actual secrets to send home to Moscow." In fact, none of the 11 were charged with espionage because they weren't "caught sending classified information back to Moscow, American officials said."

More »

Denis G. Rancourt

G20-Toronto participatory inquiry in full swing

The 2010 G20 police state mass aggression in Toronto has led to unprecedented alternative and popular media coverage. Photos, raw video footage, video reports, Indy media articles, independent radio reports, documented testimonies, and social media commentaries are pouring in.

Taken together, this spontaneous and autonomously produced information is the evolving factual, interpretative, and recommendation parts of a self-organized participatory inquiry into the police state crimes of G20-Toronto. It will be more complete and more true than any official report from a government-appointed inquiry or than any ruling from a group action lawsuit.

We don’t need daddy to tell us what happened or that “mistakes” were made. We need daddy to be subjected to the consequences of having designed and allowed this mass aggression. A few of those consequences are and should be the lawsuits, the official inquiries, the human and civil rights organization condemnations, the negative media coverage, demotions and firings, the loss of credibility and legitimacy, and much more.

One of the most disturbing results of the participatory inquiry, at a systemic level, is that these cops aren’t just pigs.

The targeting, intimidation, and terrorizing of protestors - treated like “the enemy” in a war – was, like with all recent anti-globalization protests, systematic. The patterns described by the thousands of victims (from psychological intimidation to broken skin and rape, e.g., HERE, HERE) are identical. These are no ordinary pigs. These thugs had to be trained to execute these manoeuvres against civil society.

More »

Chris Floyd

"The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords." -- F.E. Smith, Earl of Birkenhead

Another day, another glittering prize for one of the great war criminals of our day. We speak of course of that tanned and gurning jackanapes, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

It was announced this week that Blair would be receiving a great big bushel basket of simoleons -- a hundred thousand of them -- from some U.S. outfit called The National Constitution Center. It seems the sinister twit has been awarded the Center's "Liberty Medal" for, among other things, his "steadfast efforts to broker peace" in the Middle East, as the BBC reports.

This is of course most appropriate; for there are currently in excess of one million human beings enjoying eternal peace thanks to the war of aggression that Blair was instrumental in unleashing against Iraq. Oddly enough, just as the Liberty award was being announced, the Chilcot Inquiry into the war's origins was disgorging even more confirmation of Blair's adamant determination to march "shoulder to shoulder" with George W. Bush into the annals of Nurembergian perfidy.

More »

Sonja Karkar

Welcome to Palestine! (Carlos © Latuff)

Setting the scene

A drive through the West Bank quickly dispels any notions one might have of Israel’s beneficent intentions. There are none. The first ugly blight on the horizon are gleaming white structures clumped together on hilltops. They jut out treeless, naked and unashamed as below them the green valleys continue to gently undulate in their menacing shadows. A shimmering sliver cuts through the land or over it, every now and then brought to life by cars that speed along these highways towards Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Haifa: and below them, life barely moves at all. A looming watchtower confirms the feeling of something very wrong. Grey and threatening with cavernous windows, behind which shadows watch and aim at things that move, this is one of hundreds of such towers overseeing the mass of humanity waiting endlessly at yet another checkpoint that makes every journey torture for every Palestinian.

Soldiers, machine guns, tanks make up the rest of the set pieces as does the razor wire which coils around the kilometres of fencing before it comes up against the Wall – mammoth in size and structure and even more monstrous in the reason for its existence.

More »

Johann Hari

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world, just so they could make a fatter profit.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis like they were hit by a tsunami. "It was very painful," a woman my age called Abeba Getaneh, told me. "My children stopped growing. I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either. We were told the swelling Chinese and Indian middle classes were pushing it up, but as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand from those countries for them actually fell by 3 percent over this period.

There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It's true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land - but that was a gradual process that wouldn't explain a violent spike. It's true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food - but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn't the biggest factor.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Rusting T-62 Soviet battle tanks sit in a battle tank graveyard.

A May 30 Delaware County Times editorial headlined, "Is US fighting unwinnable war in Afghanistan" asking:

"Why should America (believe) it can (accomplish what the) Soviet Union (and) Britain couldn't....? Public sentiment against it is growing, and "Many pundits say the war....can never be won militarily...." How many more "US service member" deaths are tolerable?

On January 21, 2010, Britain's New Stateman sounded the same theme calling the Afghan war "unwinnable," recent events showing intensified fighting, rising casualties, and a popular resistance determined to prevail. Britain should be making plans to withdraw, the publication concluded. So should America with no right to be there ethically, morally or legally, the war clearly in violation of US and international law like all others US forces waged since WW II.

On June 26, the UK Spectator, published since July 1828, was just as unequivocal, calling US and Kabul leadership

"fractious, confused and contradictory, a sure sign that the war is being lost....Yes, the war in unwinnable. History and time are on the Afghans side."

Other publications voice the same sentiment, but not American ones, misreporting and backing lawless, losing bet despite souring public sentiment. A new Rasmussen poll shows nearly 60% of US voters believe American forces can't win or they're not sure, and 53% said the war isn't worth the cost. In Britain, nearly two-thirds of the public call the war unwinnable, saying UK forces shouldn't be there.

More »

Khalid Amayreh

A few days before his scheduled visit to Washington on 7 July, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appears as deliberately thwarting American efforts to push forward indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

This week, an Israeli government body was set to approve "an unprecedented master plan" for an all-out expansion of Jewish settlements that would effectively -- using the words of one Palestinian official -- "decapitate" East Jerusalem's Arab identity.

The plan would see the building of tens of thousands of Jewish-only apartments in East Jerusalem to be constructed on Arab owned land.

The Jerusalem Municipal Council, controlled by fanatical Jewish radicals advocating ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in the city, is trying to enforce the plan with a discernible green light from the government.

In essence, the plan would leave a zero room for future expansion of Arabs in Jerusalem, as virtually all remaining open space or "green areas" would be used for "Jewish development".

More »

Patrick Martin

Senate approves Petraeus nomination by 99-0

The US Senate voted by 99-0 to approve the nomination of Gen. David Petraeus as the top US-NATO commander in Afghanistan. The vote Wednesday demonstrates the complicity of both big business political parties in the war crimes being perpetrated in this imperialist war.

The swift confirmation of Petraeus demonstrates the priorities of the politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The US Senate has failed to act for an entire month on the extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. Extensions have been repeatedly blocked, sometimes by a single senator’s objection.

But an appointment which signals a new and even more bloody escalation of the violence in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of innocent civilians and more than a thousand American soldiers have been slaughtered, speeds through the Senate in barely 24 hours. Petraeus appeared before a Senate committee Tuesday morning, his nomination was rubber-stamped on Wednesday, and he was on a plane out of Washington before nightfall.

More »