The great Ralph Nader. He calls the attacks on Helen Thomas a ‘political execution’.
TheRealNews — 12 June 2010 — Nader: Helen Thomas apologized – she was attacked with such ferocity because she always asked ‘why’
Category: US Foreign Policy
George Galloway announces new Viva Palestina convoys to break Gaza siege
George Galloway on the flotilla massacre, the changing political climate, and the new Viva Palestina sea and land convoys scheduled for later this year. (via Counterfire)
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US Drones and the Politics of Body Count
News organizations need to be careful about their sources. They appear to report as fact claims made by any entity that calls itself an ‘institute’ or a ‘foundation’. This otherwise commendable report from Russia Today on the murderous US drone attacks is no exception. Like many other media outlets (including, oddly, Democracy Now and Al Jazeera) it reports as fact a dubious report produced by the New America Foundation (NAF), a leading cheerleader for the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has transmuted the drones 98% failure rate into a 67% success rate. None of these media outlets it appears has taken a minute to study the report’s methodology or question the motivations of the organization behind it. The conflicts of interest are serious.
The NAF report is based exclusively on English language media reports, which rely solely on official claims. The officials, both American and Pakistani, for their reasons have an interest in inflating the success rate. Two studies produced by Paksitan’s The News and Dawn (the latter a supporter of the war) show that that the actual success rate is near 2 percent. This estimate has also been endorsed by David Kilcullen, the former senior advisor on counterinsurgency to Gen. David Petraeus. (In response NAF’s ‘Afpak Channel’ published this airy assessment by Christine Fair challenging Kilcullen which relies on yet another ‘institute’, the ‘Aryana Institute’, a sectarian paper organization which actually claims that Pakistanis are thrilled by drone attacks!)
NAF’s ‘Afpak Channel’, which produced the report, discredited itself long ago with its overly rosy assessment of the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And while it has been featuring commentary which is frequently at odds with reality, it has been reluctant to publish anything that might undercut its sanguine support for the war. It sat on a grim assessment of developments in Afghanistan by IPS’s excellent investigative journalist Gareth Porter before informing him that it won’t be published. Its Twitter frequenlty features juvenile commentary, breathlessly sanguine about US successes in Afghanista and Pakistan. Over all, it is a highly questionable source. I’d urge journalists to show more caution.
UPDATE: Don’t miss this important interview with Kathy Kelly who has just returned from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
US Congressman: Prosecute US Citizens involved with Gaza Flotilla
by Ali Gharib
On a press call hosted by a pro-Israel organization, Rep. Brad Sherman, Democrat of California, told reporters that he intends to seek the prosecution of any U.S. citizens who were aboard or involved with the Freedom Flotilla.
“The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 [PDF] makes it absolutely illegal for any American to give food, money, school supplies, paper clips, concrete or weapons to Hamas or any of its officials,” Sherman said on the Israel Project call, conflating Hamas and Gaza’s civilian population. “And so I will be asking the Attorney General to prosecute any American involved in what was clearly an effort to give items of value to a terrorist organization.”
Sherman also said that he plans on working with the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that any non-U.S. citizen involved with or aboard the Flotilla are excluded from entering the U.S.
Hamas, considered a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and has held de facto rule over the Gaza Strip since it took the area by force in 2007 in anticipation of an impending U.S.-backed coup d’etat by the rival Fatah faction.
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Demonstration in Burlington, Vermont, USA
Here is a video of yesterday’s action in Burlington, VT, my home state. The second speaker is Yonatan Shapiro, a former IDF pilot who was in the same squadron that conducted the atrocious raid on the Mavi Mamara.
The activists took their message beyond the streets. They walked into a department store and the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream store. I’m sure you’re all familiar with Ben & Jerry’s. Given Ben & Jerry’s economic and social justice activism, I’m hoping this will wake them (and all Vermonters) up to the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Another rally will take place tomorrow. I’ll update this post when I get new information.
San Francisco Protests Flotilla Massacre
Rise of the Flexians
By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
May 26, 2010 (IPS) – In 2005, ahead of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Irish rock star and philanthropist Bono dedicated a concert to Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs for his services to global poverty alleviation. Time magazine twice named Sachs one of its 100 Most Influential People. His 2005 book “The End of Poverty” was a New York Times bestseller. He has served as a special advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals. In 2007 Vanity Fair was moved to declare him the “savior of Bolivia”.
From the fawning sobriquets it would be hard to tell that Sachs was the architect of the “economic shock therapy” which in Russia during the transition years (1991-1994) contributed to a 42 percent rise in male deaths, and 56 percent in unemployment. His Bolivian “reforms” brought inflation under control but unemployment, inequality and the cost of living soared.Following a decade of unrest, Russia was only saved by an authoritarian nationalist leadership and Bolivia by economic populism. The neoliberal experiment was a failure.
If Sachs has today recanted his extreme free-market views, it is only because of a personal epiphany. At the peak of his power, he was constrained by neither public censure nor official accountability.He is an exemplar of a new breed of influencers who operate in the interstices of official and private power and exploit the ambiguity of their multiple overlapping roles to evade both public oversight and market competition. It is this emerging power that is the subject of social-anthropologist Janine Wedel’s indispensable “Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market”.
I Want to Live with my Family
by Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier
May 24, 2010
Islamabad–Abir Mohammed, a refugee from Bajaur, says that the battles which raged in his home province since 2008 have dramatically changed his life. We met him in a crowded Islamabad café where he politely approached customers, offering to shine their shoes. He isn’t accustomed to shoeshine work. But, he needs to earn as much money as possible before reuniting with family members who await him, near Peshawar, in a tent encampment for displaced people.
Formerly, he lived with his wife, his five children, his mother and four brothers in a home near the Afghanistan border. “We were very satisfied with our life,” says Abir Mohammed. “My brothers and I cultivated wheat crops and maintained orchards.” His land is full of rich soil. “But, in these days,” says Abir, “due to disasters and lack of water and electricity, there is no chance of cultivating crops.”
Drones and Democracy
by Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier
Islamabad: On May 12th, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes.
One is a journalist, Safdar Dawar, General Secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists. Journalists are operating under very difficult circumstances in the area, pressured by both militant groups and the Pakistani government. Six of his colleagues have been killed while reporting in North and South Waziristan. The other man, who asked us not to disclose his name, is from Miranshah city, the epicenter of North Waziristan. He works with the locally based Waziristan Relief Agency, a group of people committed to helping the victims of drone attacks and military actions. “If people need blood or medicine or have to go to Peshawar or some other hospital,” said the social worker, “I’m known for helping them. I also try to arrange funds and contributions.”
From Prayer to Paralysis
by Joshua Brollier
May 17, 2010, Islamabad — Through the Soviet invasion and occupation, the Afghan civil war and now the United States war and occupation, a young man named Zainullah, around 25 years of age, has seen war his whole life. But you’d never know it by his engaging smile and his relaxed countenance. Zainullah currently lives at a paraplegic center in Hayatabad, Pakistan, a suburb of Peshawar, the capital city of the North-West Frontier Province. He is originally from the Helmand province of Afghanistan, which has been one of the most intense battlegrounds during the “war on terror” launched by the United States in 2001.
Zainullah was paralyzed about nine months ago after being struck with shrapnel from a U.S. cruise missile. On the day of the attack, Zainullah was getting ready to start his prayers. He heard a bomb blast, and before he had a chance to realize that he was the target, Zainullah was laying prostrate on the ground with a piece of metal lodged in his spinal cord. Two men from his village carried him to the nearest clinic. There he was given an injection and then taken to the International Commission of the Red Cross (ICRC) facility in Helmand. Now paralyzed from the waist down, Zainullah spent one month at the ICRC , and then decided to seek more extensive rehabilitation treatment in Pakistan.
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