Ann Wright on WikiLeaks and Accountability
November 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Col (ret.) Ann Wright discusses cablegate on GritTV with Laura Flanders.
“We were told as diplomats, ‘Don’t ever put anything in a cable you wouldn’t want on the front page of a newspaper.’ It shows that they’re a lot of arrogant people, that the system itself wasn’t checking itself,” says Ann Wright, Retired United States Army Colonel and former State Department official, of the latest documents released from WikiLeaks. Meanwhile, several of the diplomatic cables released depict possibly illegal actions by the U.S. government, and Wright notes that the chances of anyone being held accountable are slim.
Ann Wright joins Laura in studio to discuss the latest releases from WikiLeaks, what they tell us about the Defense and State departments, and what should happen–but probably won’t–to the people implicated therein.
Wilkerson on the significance of Wikileaks and Israeli Apartheid
November 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson on Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss Wikileaks.
How to Disappear a Coup in 3 Easy Steps
November 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Isis Obed Murillo: democratic collateral damage (Photo: AP)
The reaction of the U.S. State Department to last year’s coup d’état against Honduran President Mel Zelaya provides an instructive example for governments worldwide who may wish to thwart democracy in their own backyards.
Interested parties are invited to internalize the following three simple steps:
- Spend as many months as possible debating whether the coup was really a coup or military in nature, and ignore cables from your embassy in the country in question stating that “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on [INSERT DATE] in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. [See WikiLeaks release regarding Honduras]
- Cause your ambassador to the country in question to forget his/her previous cable and to declare elections conducted under an illegal government “free, fair, and transparent”. Ignore fabrications of voter turnout and assassinations of local citizens who continue to regard the ousting of their president as illegal and unconstitutional.
- Restore any aid that might have been suspended while you were debating whether or not the coup was a coup, and plead to have the country in question reinstated to all regional organizations from which it was banished due to undemocratic behavior.
Repeat.
The Money and Media Election Complex
November 29th, 2010 § 1 Comment
John Nichols joins Bob McChesney on this week’s Media Matters to discuss their recent article published in The Nation magazine, November 29th, 2010 edition. Call and comment or ask a question this Sunday, November 28th on WILL AM580.
Nichols are McChesney are authors of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.
Prolonged occupation, a new type of crime against humanity
November 29th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Statement of Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories on the International day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people:
Geneva, 29 November 2010
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 wishes to express sympathy for the Palestinian people who continue after more than 43 years to live under Israeli occupation that daily violates many of their fundamental and inalienable human rights.
Shahid Alam’s Destabilising Logic of Zionism
November 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
This review of Shahid Alam’s indispensable book was written for Holy Land Studies.
M. Shahid Alam’s latest book “Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilising Logic of Zionism” is a fascinating historical analysis, densely detailed and referenced, of the nature and trajectory of Jewish nationalism. It is bracingly honest, dispensing with the usual Western pieties to describe three elements of what Edward Said called Israel’s “ideology of difference.” These are, firstly, the notion of Jewish chosenness and divine right to Palestine; secondly, the ‘miraculous’ creation and survival of the state; and thirdly, the uniquely tragic history of the Jewish people.
Many studies have deconstructed the first two myths. Less attention has been lavished on countering the third, the “lachrymose historiography” of the Jews (in Salo Baron’s words) and its employment to neutralise criticism of the Zionist project. Alam argues persuasively that Zionism was not simply a response to virulent anti-Semitism but also, crucially, the result of Jewish power.
Until the rise of fascism, the trend of Jewish involvement in modern Europe was one of phenomenal success. This is despite recurring episodes of anti-Semitism, particularly in the east. The European Jewish population increased more than tenfold in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the general population increase was by a factor of 3.3). In the same period, Jews moved into the West’s urban power centres. Ironically, anti-Semitic discrimination had “endowed the Jews disproportionately with those assets that would give them vital advantages in Europe’s emerging capitalist societies.” By the early 19th Century, Jews owned 30 of 52 private banks in Berlin. In Vienna in 1900, 62% of lawyers, half the doctors and over half the journalists were Jews. An important strata of Jews now had both money and access to political and cultural elites.
The real danger of WikiLeaks
November 29th, 2010 § 5 Comments
The US’s response to the release of their diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks is expected: national security has been endangered and WikiLeaks should be censored. Most disturbing is the fact that the majority of the US mainstream press is pushing this line. Fortunately, some journalists are offering an alternative to this tired type of fear-mongering. Writes Simon Jenkins in The Guardian (emphasis is mine):
America’s foreign policy is revealed as a slave to rightwing drift, terrified of a bomb exploding abroad or of a pro-Israeli congressman at home. If the cables tell of the progress to war over Iran or Pakistan or Gaza or Yemen, their revelation might help debate the inanity of policies which, as Patterson says, seem to be leading in just that direction. Perhaps we can now see how catastrophe unfolds when there is time to avert it, rather than having to await a Chilcot report after the event. If that is not in the public’s interest, I fail to see what is.
Clearly, it is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets. Were there some overriding national jeopardy in revealing them, greater restraint might be in order. There is no such overriding jeopardy, except from the policies themselves as revealed. Where it is doing the right thing, a great power should be robust against embarrassment.
Similarly, Greg Mitchell of The Nation who has been blogging about “cablegate” points out an interesting comment made by Scott Shane of the New York Times during an interview with an Australian publication. (Australia has banned certain pages on Wikileaks’s website and is reportedly being pressured by the US to cancel Assange’s passport.)
Perhaps if we had had more information on these secret internal deliberations of governments prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we would have had a better understanding of the quality of the evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Secrecy is not always in the interests of governments or people.
Thousands Protest Irish Nightmare Economy
November 29th, 2010 § 1 Comment
TheRealNews – Leo Panitch on how the US created financial crisis and European banks have turned the Irish Miracle into a nightmare.
Illegal Africans prepare to party in Israel
November 28th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Pre-party
Today’s report on the Al Jazeera website entitled “Israel to build migrant centre” quotes Eyal Gabai, director-general of the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as declaring:
Israel is trying to fight a situation in which the state, its citizens, are vulnerable to infiltrators who enter with economic motives”.
The economically-motivated infiltrators threatening the Israeli state and its citizens might be more succinctly described as illegal immigrants. Arriving primarily from Africa, they now have a detention facility to look forward to, which according to Al Jazeera “is expected to be built at or near the site of a former prison camp for Palestinians”.
Islamophobia in UK towns
November 27th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Exeter University’s European Muslim Research Center will launch its new report on the rise of Islamophobia on Saturday 27th November 2010 at the London Muslim Centre, on Sunday 28th November in Birmingham and on Friday, 10th December in Glasgow.
A report published by a UK university has found that since the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, arson, criminal damage, violence and intimidation against Muslims in Britain has increased dramatically.
In particular, the authors found that since Muslim communities in small towns are more polarised than in cities, they are more vulnerable to attack and this accounts for higher Islamophobia-related incidents.
The study, Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Hate Crime: UK Case Studies, was published by the University of Exeter and is part of a ten- year academic research project undertaken by its European Muslim Research Centre.
Shamim Chowdhury reports from Bishop’s Stortford, England.
