Category: USA

Khmer Rouge & Cambodia

An interview with Noam Chomsky on the UN-sponsored war crimes tribunal in Cambodia. While much of the Western media hail the trials as a “landmark genocide tribunal” holding out “hope” for justice for the Cambodian people, the genocidal crimes of the Nixon-Kissinger administration are dispatched down the Memory Hole.

March27, 2009 — Top Khmer Rouge (KR) leaders are going on trial in Cambodia. You have some history with Cambodia and have written extensively on the KR. Do you believe a United Nations trial is the best way forward, or should it be left to the Cambodian people?

I think it should be left to the Cambodian people. I can’t imagine a UN, international trial. But then it shouldn’t be limited to the Cambodians – after all, an international trial that doesn’t take into account Henry Kissinger or the other authors of the American bombing and the support of the KR after they were kicked out of the country – that’s just a farce – especially with what we now know about the bombing of Cambodia since the release of the Kissinger-Nixon tapes, and the release of declassified documents during the Clinton years. There has been a very different picture of the scale and intensity of the bombing and the genocidal scale of it. For an international trial to omit this would be scandalous.

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Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald on Bill Moyers Journal

Bill Moyers talks with alternative media heavyweights Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman about what can and can’t be addressed in big corporate media. Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald are the first recipients of the Park Center for Independent Media Izzy Award (named for I.F. Stone).

Resist or Become Serfs

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is overseeing the use of billions of taxpayer dollars to protect Wall Street financiers from their bad investments. (AP photo / Susan Walsh)

‘If we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate,’ writes Chris Hedges. ‘The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them.’

America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs. Continue reading “Resist or Become Serfs”

US Delivers Massive New Weapons Shipment to Israel

The Following from Amnesty International USA:

Amnesty International today revealed that the United States has sent a massive new shipment of arms to Israel — about 14,000 tons worth — despite evidence that U.S. weapons were misused against civilians in the Gaza attacks. The unloading of the shipment in Israel was confirmed by the Pentagon. The human rights organization called on President Obama to suspend future arms shipments to Israel until there is no longer substantial risk of human rights violations.

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Riz Khan – Chas Freeman and the Israeli lobby

Charles “Chas” Freeman was selected last month by the administration of Barak Obama, the US president, for one of the country’s top intelligence jobs, chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

Within hours, pro-Israel advocates launched a major offensive to make sure Freeman’s appointment did not stand.

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Kafka Era Double Standard

Edward S. Herman’s article published in Zmag on Israel-Palestine, the ‘right to self-defense’ and the double standards to which the crimes of official allies and enemies are held.

The U.S. political class and those of the EU and the new “hope” and “change” leader of the United States, Barack Obama, justify Israel’s attack on Gaza as based on its “right of self-defense.” There is, of course, the question of whether it is acceptable to defend yourself by a massive attack on a civilian population when this is not the only route to self defense—the Israelis could withdraw from an illegal occupation, they could stop starving the Gaza population, and they could abide by negotiated ceasefires (in this case, effectively and almost surely deliberately ended by their November 6 killing of six Gaza Palestinians). There is also the problem that the Israeli action violated the UN Charter. Article 51, the self-defense exception, requires immediate notification of the Security Council and, after any immediate attack is contained, giving over remedial action to the Security Council. There is also the problem that this “self-defense” operation was planned six months in advance and is widely believed in Israel to be linked to Israeli politics, with the two ruling parties seeking an improved standing—which they achieved—by military action.

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Canadian gov’t bars George Galloway from entering

The Canadian government has basically latched on its foreign policy to the United States and Israel. Around the world Canada is closing down consulates and offices (the latest one is a commercial/consulate in Milan, Italy) — there is no need for these if Canada merely aims to ape the US. At the United Nations, Canada’s votes are the same as those of the United States. It used to be only the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, and Israel that voted with the US, but now Canada joins this august gang. The US tells Canada to “jump!”, the Canadian lackeys merely ask how high. The latest sordid demonstration of the Israelization of Canada is the recent declaration that Canada would bar the entry of George Galloway, the British MP who just returned from Gaza. Prof. Cook explains the significance of this.

Banning Galloway Mocks Canada’s Criminal Code

by William A. Cook

Canada’s border security officials and Jason Kenny, the immigration minister, banned George Galloway, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, from Canada where he was scheduled to speak in Toronto on the 30th. “A spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Canada said the decision … was based on a ‘number of factors’ in accordance with section 34 (1) of the country’s immigration act” (Guardian.co.uk 20 March 09). This action denies Galloway entrance as a foreign national on security grounds for one or more of six reasons including “engaging in terrorism,” and “engaging in acts of violence that would or might endanger the lives or safety of persons in Canada.” The CJC, the Canadian Jewish Congress, supporting the decision, noted that it should be seen as an “issue of security law, not a dispute over free speech” (27 Mar. 2009, Montreal Gazette). Indeed, other Jewish organizations like the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith, not only supported the action but took some credit for the banning of Galloway.

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You know, fiction!

I am stealing Glenn Greenwald’s characteristically brilliant post on the incestuous relationship between the elite media and the political class. Bear in mind that Howard Kurtz is the same hack who led the government counteroffensive against Gary Webb (see here and here) — the journalist who had exposed a CIA operation, later confirmed by an internal investigation, that showed that the agency had been funding its covert ops in Central America by aiding the smuggling of crack cocained into California — by destroying his career. Here Greenwald destroys Kurtz and all that he represents.

Howard Kurtz: government and media need a “cease-fire” now and then

(updated below – Update II – Update III – Update IV)

Howard Kurtz makes an extremely funny joke today, showing why he is the “media critic” for both The Washington Post and CNN:

I know the [DC media/political] dinners may project an image that we’re all just a bunch of cozy Washington insiders, but I don’t think they’re that big a deal. There’s such a built-in adversarial relationship between the press and the pols that spending a couple of evenings in a kind of light-hearted cease-fire doesn’t strike me as a terrible thing.

That is some very penetrating media criticism there.  The media and political leaders are at each other’s throats so viciously, they have such sharply conflicting interests, that it’s a wonder they can even be in the same room together without physical confrontation.  For instance, it was the same Howie Kurtz who, in 2004, wrote this about what happened at his own newspaper:
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A Confederacy of Dunces

John Mearsheimer on The dumbing down of US economic and foreign policy elites.

Frank Rich had an excellent column in the Sunday New York Times in which he suggested that President Obama’s economic team is unsuited to deal with the financial crisis. “I fear,” he wrote, “that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.” Let’s hope his fears are proven wrong.

But Rich’s column points to a larger and possibly more disturbing feature of our predicament: very few of the country’s economic experts foresaw the tsunami that is now upon us. Indeed, most of them thought that the global economy was working well and needed nothing more than some tweaking here and there. This is why Obama ended up appointing a team of economic experts who not only failed to see the storm coming, but in the case of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, promoted policies that helped cause it. Simply put, there were hardly any sagacious business people, economists, or policymakers who he could have turned to for help.

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