Stephen Lendman

Katrina Anniversary. People hold up a banner with names of
those Killed in Hurricane Katrina in front of the Industrial Canal
flood wall during a public commemoration of the fifth anniversary
of Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans
Sunday, Aug. 29, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

[Hurricane Katrina Pictures] August 29, 2005, a day of infamy remembered less for the storm, catastrophic floods and destruction, and more as a metaphor for disaster capitalism, exploiting security threats, "terror" attacks, economic meltdowns, and "natural" disasters like Katrina.

It turned this aging senior into a writer and radio host, furious over federal, state and local authorities using it to reward business at the expense of New Orleans' poor Blacks. Five years later, their lives remain in disarray through no fault of their own.

Levies protecting their neighborhoods were left weak, vulnerable to fail as they did, then Congressman Richard Baker (R. LA) saying, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it but God did," with considerable willful negligence help.

Malik Rahim, (New Orleans) Common Ground Relief (CGR) co-founder said:

"They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain't had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that's just the bottom line."

Blank is beautiful. Ethnic cleansing was long-planned, the scheme, of course, to erase poor neighborhoods, replacing them with upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice city land, New Orleans developer Joseph Canizaro saying, "we (now) have a clean (slate) to start (over and take advantage of) big opportunities."

Bill Van Auken
WSWS

U.S. President Barack Obama meets with General Ray Odierno in
Baghdad, April 7, 2009. (Reuters)

"With unemployment at its highest level since the 1930s and wages and social conditions under relentless assault, Obama and the financial aristocracy that he represents have good reason to see the military as the steel within their ship of state. In the end, they know they can sustain a system that piles up immense wealth for a tiny minority and growing poverty for working people in the US and around the world only by means of armed force. This is why President Obama feels obliged to continuously assure the military of his devotion."

With its extraordinary reference to troops as “the steel in our ship of state,” the speech delivered by President Barack Obama from the Oval Office Tuesday night reflected an administration that cowers before the ever-expanding power of the US military.

The address, with its glorification of a war of aggression that has claimed the lives of over a million Iraqis and its gratuitous praise for the author of this war crime, will unquestionably go down as one of the most cowardly and duplicitous moments in Obama’s political career.

Perhaps the President’s most telling remark, however, was the phrase with which he ended his 19-minute address:

“Our troops are the steel in our ship of state,” he said. “And though our nation may be traveling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.”

Like every other attempt at a rhetorical flourish in this leaden speech, the concluding phrase rang false, largely because it represented an attempt to evoke American traditions that are totally at odds with the policies pursued by the White House.

David Walsh
WSWS

[...] the facts as reported by the Daily Mail in Britain become even more peculiar when it comes to how the two women, involved independently with Assange, according to their lawyer, got together to press charges. According to the newspaper, “The drama took a bizarre and ultimately sensational turn after she [the second woman] called the office of Woman A, whom she had briefly met at the seminar. The two women talked and realised to their horror and anger that they had both been victims of his charm.” Pardon us, if we don’t believe a word of this.

The WSWS calls for a campaign in defense of Assange and WikiLeaks, and the dropping of all charges against Private Bradley Manning, accused of leaking the documents to WikiLeaks. Top officials in Washington will stop at nothing to prevent the truth from emerging about their crimes in Afghanistan.

The decision by a senior Swedish prosecutor to reopen the rape charges against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange is a transparently political decision. There is every reason to believe this is part of a “dirty tricks” operation, originating in Washington, aimed at discrediting or destroying Assange and WikiLeaks. The World Socialist Web Site denounces the smear campaign and demands that it be halted.

On July 25 WikiLeaks posted some 92,000 US military documents covering the period January 2004 to December 2009, helping to expose the criminal and brutal nature of the conflict. The release infuriated the White House and the Pentagon, who have threatened the organization with criminal charges. The ultra-right in the US has called for Assange’s assassination.

WikiLeaks claims it has another 15,000 secret documents, which it intends to release in the near future. It is likely the campaign against Assange is directed toward pressuring WikiLeaks into turning over the files or undermining their ultimate release. Everything about the affair in Sweden stinks to high heaven.

Stuart Littlewood
Redress

West Bank Archipelago...Map designed by French carto-
grapher Julien Boussac. It might look like Indonesia or the
Caribbean at first glance. -The map is a fanciful reworking
of what is actually happening in the West Bank with the
blue/water areas representing areas illegally settled by Israel
with the dark and light green ‘islands’ representing areas
where the Palestinian Authority still exerts some control.

For real peace he must bang heads together at the United Nations to finish their unfinished business

On the eve of the silliest peace talks in history, the big question is this. What makes Obama’s envoy George Mitchell, a negotiator of high repute, say there is “no role” for Hamas?

Unequal partners, partisan auspices

The talks are silly because they seek to overturn what the United Nations has already decided for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict and drive a bulldozer through the building blocks of justice.

It might be music to Zionist ears, but to people of good will it’s a cruel, futile and immensely damaging ploy.

The talks are also silly because they bring together two people who by no stretch of the imagination could qualify as partners for peace. And they sit down under the auspices of a third party with an appalling track record in the Middle East and whom no-one trusts to act fairly.

So Mitchell has been dealt a crap hand. The former US senator, we’re told, has had an illustrious career in politics. Honours have been heaped upon him for his part in the Northern Ireland ‘Good Friday’ agreement.

Accepting one of those awards – the Liberty Medal in 1998 – Mitchell said: “I believe there’s no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended… No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail. But only if those who stand for peace and justice are supported and encouraged, while those who do not are opposed and condemned. Seeking an end to conflict is not for the timid or the tentative. There must be a clear and determined policy not to yield to the men of violence…”

How about that? Conflict can be ended only by supporting those who stand for peace and condemning those who don’t. But does he know – has he really taken the trouble to find out – who actually stands for peace and justice in the ever-escalating obscenity of the Israeli occupation of Palestine? And is he absolutely clear who “the men of violence” are? Get it wrong and matters are made worse.

Mitchell is such an awesome peace-monger that he has become a visiting Professor at Britain’s Leeds Metropolitan University’s School of Applied Global Ethics, and the University is developing a new Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution bearing his name.

If Mitchell is so clued up you have to wonder why he took the job – a veritable poisoned chalice.

William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report

Iraq

"They're leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their hearts," declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq. [1]

It's enough to bring tears to the eyes of an American, enough to make him choke up.

Enough to make him forget.

But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured ... the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ... More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up ... an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight the American invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia ... a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again.

"It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003," reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter ... drum roll, please ... Stand tall American GI hero! And don't even think of ever apologizing. Iraq is forced by the United States to continue paying reparations for its own invasion of Kuwait in 1990. How much will the American heroes pay the people of Iraq?

"Unhappy the land that has no heroes ...
No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes."
– Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

"What we need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved to be incompatible."
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Perhaps the groundwork for that heroism already exists ... February 15, 2003, a month before the US invasion of Iraq, probably the largest protest in human history, between six and ten million protesters took to the streets of some 800 cities in nearly sixty countries across the globe.

Iraq. Love it or leave it.