Do you believe that the U.S. Civil War ended?

This is the part that our northern and western compatriots do not get. 

The South is a defeated land, but it has never given up on the beliefs that were the foundation for the Confederacy. That's not to say that all southerners feel this way. Many of us are grateful that the South lost the war or we would be forced to move the hell out of here.

But here's the rub..... the problems today are not coming just from the South. The Obama haters are all over America where guns are beloved and the Bible is understood literally, except when it is inconvenient to do so..

It is a national disgrace!

If You Think the Civil War Ever Ended, Think Again

Friday 09 April 2010

by: Adele Stan  |  AlterNet

But the larger issue is the notion that a Confederate History Month should be celebrated at all, with or without an overt mention of slavery.

When I first moved to Washington, D.C., I had hardly a stick of furniture, so I boarded a bus to take me to the nearest Ikea, which was in a Virginia mall. Quite unfamiliar with the territory, I watched out the window with curiosity as the bus traveled along the chain-store lined route.

Soon I noticed we were traveling along a road called the Jefferson Davis Highway. I was stunned, and a bit sick to my stomach. How could it be that a highway was named after a man who made war against the United States, all so the citizens of his region could continue to hold human beings in chains? All so slave masters could continue to rape the women they claimed to own. The children of these unions were usually enslaved by their own fathers, often acting as servants to their white half-brothers and -sisters.

That throughout a significant swath of the nation, men who committed treason for the sake of maintaining chattel slavery are lauded as heroes speaks to a terrible illness in the American psyche -- one that continues to fester 145 years after the last shot was fired in the War Between the States.

African-Americans know that the Civil War never ended: as the descendants of the slaves freed by the war's outcome, they've been subjected to continuous stream of terrorism and discrimination, whether they live in the South or the North.

But in the South, black people, for 100 years after the war, faced orders of terror higher than elsewhere in the country. Chattel slavery in America was reserved primarily for those of their race (although, in some areas, Native Americans were also traded as slaves), marking them by skin color as the living legacy of the Confederacy's final humiliation.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's proclamation this week naming April as "Confederate History Month" raised eyebrows for its omission of a mention of slavery. That is indeed telling, of a piece with the trope about the Civil War being fought merely over the constitutional provisions concerning states' rights. Even though I grew up in the North, my schoolbooks perpetrated this idea.

It's a twisted argument, one that leaves out what the states were demanding the right to do: maintain slavery.

But the larger issue is the notion that a Confederate History Month should be celebrated at all, with or without an overt mention of slavery. If anything, the era of the Confederacy should be regarded as a dark and shameful episode, as should Sherman's burning of Atlanta -- a war crime if there ever was one.

In America, we don't like to look at our history, and this veneration of the Confederacy in the states of the South only feeds the "America, right or wrong" ethos that imbues our notion of patriotism. We, as a people, maintain willful ignorance of what our government does to other nations, allowing us a stream of righteous indignation when our more lethal interventions blow up in our national face.

The election of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, has energized the Confederacy-lovers and others bent on defying his legitimacy as the nation's leader. The cause of states' rights is again on fire, with 10th Amendment groups sprouting up around the country.

Although Obama has initiated no change to existing gun laws, gun-rights advocates tout him as a far greater threat than any president before him. On April 19, a "Second Amendment march on Washington" will take place, somewhat hampered by the District of Columbia's gun laws. But on the outskirts of the capital, gun-owners from the group, Restore the Constitution, will gather at a park in Northern Virginia, where the gun laws are far more lenient, even allowing the carrying of concealed handguns if the bearer has a permit. (A permit is not required to walk about with a firearm in a holster.) Virginia has reciprocity on its conceal/carry law with all but three of the states that formed the Confederacy.

April 19th marks the date in which the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775. It is also the date on which the FBI burned the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, to the ground in 1993. And it is the date on which Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, including 19 children.

It's easy to make fun of the wing-nuts. But there's a storm brewing, egged on by the veneration of the Confederacy.

CORRECTION: This article originally stated that only Africans and people of African descent were enslaved under the chattel system in the U.S. (Chattel means that they were deemed a piece of property, owned outright, to be bought or sold.) Native Americans, too, were captured and traded as slaves. The correction has been made in the body of the text.

Adele Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief. © 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146366/ 

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Is The Supreme Court Moving to the Right.....

Under Obama?

I doubt it matters much whom he nominates, there will be a fight with this GOP.

 Supreme Court Shift to the Right?

Friday 09 April 2010

by: Ruth Marcus, Op-Ed

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Khaz, Hayley Austin)

Washington - Here is an unsettling thought for those who waited eight years to have a Democratic president appointing judges: Barack Obama could well end his first term with a more conservative Supreme Court than the one he inherited.

This is, I hasten to admit, premature speculation -- even with the not-so-surprise announcement that Justice John Paul Stevens, the anchor of the court's liberal wing, is retiring.

First, the president's only nominee so far, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, has not even finished her first term. Where she turns out to be on the ideological spectrum in comparison to the justice she replaced, David Souter, is unknown.

Second, the accuracy of this conjecture will depend hugely on who the president selects to fill the vacancy.

Finally, as the examples of Souter (named by President George H.W. Bush) and Stevens (selected by President Gerald Ford) demonstrate, predictions about a new justice's future performance can make weather forecasting look like an exact science.

Nonetheless, it's entirely possible that a more conservative court could be Obama's paradoxical legacy -- particularly if he only serves a single term. The likelihood of the court shifting to the right is greater than that of its moving leftward.

In part, this could have been predicted even before Obama took office. It reflects less about him than it does the identity of the departing justices, one liberal followed by another. The next oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 77. Conservatives are reaping the benefits of Bush father and son having selected justices who were relatively young. Justice Clarence Thomas was 43 when tapped, Chief Justice John Roberts was 50, and Justice Samuel Alito was 55.

It would likely only be in the case of a departure by 74-year-old Justice Antonin Scalia -- not likely to occur voluntarily during Obama's presidency -- or Justice Anthony Kennedy, 73, that the president would have an opportunity to dramatically alter the court's ideological makeup.

But there's little in Obama's record as president to suggest that he would expend enormous capital to secure the most liberal possible justice. From the point of view of liberal groups, Obama's nominees to the lower federal courts have been, overall, disappointingly moderate.

In selecting Sotomayor, Obama acted with an eye less to ideology than to ethnicity; the selection does not offer much of a clue into what the president is looking for, as a matter of constitutional interpretation, in future justices. The conservative howling about Sotomayor's alleged radicalism had as little basis in reality as do the parallel assertions about Obama.

As Tom Goldstein of ScotusBlog put it after analyzing Sotomayor's appellate record, "Our surveys of her opinions put her in essentially the same ideological position as Justice Souter." From her conduct on the bench so far, there's no reason to change that assessment.

By contrast, it's likely, although not certain, that a Stevens replacement will be more conservative than the retiring justice. If so, this would be largely in line with history. In an interview with Jeffrey Rosen for The New York Times Magazine in 2007, Stevens noted, "including myself, every judge who's been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell (chosen by Richard Nixon in 1971) has been more conservative than his or her predecessor." Stevens excepted Ginsburg, who replaced the more conservative Byron White.

In any event, Stevens' replacement is almost certain not to be as influential a player on the left as the departing justice. As the court's senior associate justice, Stevens spoke immediately after the chief justice during the court's discussion of cases; he had the power to assign opinions and some influence with swing justices such as Kennedy and, before her departure, Sandra Day O'Connor.

I'm not arguing, by the way, that Obama would go wrong by picking a Stevens successor likely to edge the court to the right. Indeed, there is a plausible argument that a justice viewed as more centrist might have more chance of bringing along conservative colleagues on a particular issue. Two of those mentioned as possible replacements, Judge Merrick Garland of the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, are viewed as more moderate than Stevens. Either would be a superb choice.

But my prediction stands: The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now.

Ruth Marcus' e-mail address is marcusr@washpost.com.

(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group 

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Top Bush Administration Officials Knew.....

That they were holding innocent people indefinitely and lied to the American people and the world. But this will, no doubt, go nowhere. It seems that no one will ever pay for the crime that was Bush administration policy.

Ex-Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent

Friday 09 April 2010

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report 

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: amarine88, Bebopsmile, ImageAbstraction, JoesSistah...)

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the "worst of the worst."

During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, "all of whom were captured on a battlefield," are "terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden's] body guards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th hijacker, 9/11 hijacker."

"We're learning a great deal of information about how al-Qaida operates, and able to stop other terrorist attacks," he added.

But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.

And so did then Vice President Dick Cheney when he said, also in 2002 and in dozens of public statements thereafter, that Guantanamo prisoners "are the worst of a very bad lot" and "dangerous" and "devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort."

Now, in a sworn declaration obtained exclusively by Truthout, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush's first term in office, said he would be willing to state, under penalty of perjury, what top Bush officials knew and when they knew it.

He claims that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others knew the "vast majority" of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.

"By late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review," Wilkerson's declaration says. "Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantánamo. By that time, I also understood that the deliberate choice to send detainees to Guantánamo was an attempt to place them outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system."

He added that it became "more and more clear many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military."

For Cheney and Rumsfeld, and “others," Wilkerson said, “the primary issue was to gain more intelligence as quickly as possible, both on Al Qaeda and its current and future plans and operations but increasingly also, in 2002-2003, on contacts between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s intelligence and secret police forces in Iraq."

"Their view was that innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader war on terror and the capture of the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks, or other acts of terrorism," Wilkerson added. "Moreover, their detention was deemed acceptable if it led to a more complete and satisfactory intelligence picture with regard to Iraq, thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country."

Documents have been released over the past year that showed how in 2002 several high-value detainees were tortured and forced to make statements that linked Iraq to al-Qaeda and 9/11, which the Bush administration cited as intelligence to support its invasion of the country in March 2003. But the confessions were utterly false.

Wilkerson's declaration was made in support of a lawsuit filed by Adel Hassan Hamad, a 52-year-old former Guantanamo detainee who is suing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Joint Chief of Staff Richard Myers, and a slew of other Bush administration officials for wrongfully imprisoning and torturing him.

Hamad was arrested in his apartment in Pakistan in July 2002, rendered to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan for three months, where he says he was tortured, and then transferred to Guantanamo, where he was interrogated daily and subjected to even more torture by US military personnel.

At Bagram, according to Hamad's lawsuit, "dogs were set upon [him] while watching United States military personnel laughed and mocked him." Moreover, he was forced to stand for three days without "sleep or food" and eventually collapsed. He was then sent to a hospital where it took him two weeks to recover.

"Mr. Hamad was not given notice of the basis for his detention until more than two years after first being detained, when a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) was convened in November 2004," according to the lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle earlier this week. "Not until March 2005, nearly three full years after initially being detained, was Mr. Hamad officially labeled an 'enemy Combatant' by the flawed CSRT process," according to the lawsuit.

"However, this determination drew a rare dissenting opinion that acknowledged his enemy combatant status determination was unwarranted and, as such, would have 'unconscionable results,'" the lawsuit states. "The basis for Mr. Hamad's enemy combatant determination was simply because of his association as an employee of two organizations for whom he had done humanitarian and charity work (one of which he had left years before), and nothing more.

"In fact, a second CSRT was ordered for Mr. Hamad in November of 2007, one month before he was ultimately released to the Sudan. This was unusual, and indicates that the government recognized that the initial CSRT determination of Mr. Hamad was not accurate."

While Hamad was detained, his wife gave birth to a daughter who died some time later because the family did not have any money to pay for medical care. He has five other children.

Since he has been released, Hamad says he suffers from emotional, physical and psychological injuries and he is seeking undisclosed compensatory and punitive damages. Similar lawsuits against former Bush administration officials, however, have been dismissed in other jurisidictions.

Wilkerson said he “made a personal choice to come forward and discuss the abuses that occurred because knowledge that I served in an Administration that tortured and abused those it detained at the facilities at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere and indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons has marked a low point in my professional career and I wish to make the record clear on what occurred."

“I am also extremely concerned that the Armed Forces of the United States, where I spent 31 years of my professional life, were deeply involved in these tragic mistakes. I am willing to testify in person regarding the content of this declaration, should that be necessary,” he added.

Gwynne Skinner, an assistant professor of clinical law at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon and a member of Hamad's legal team, said WIlkerson's declaration was originally intended to be filed in support of Hamad's habeas corpus case, which was still pending in federal court in Washington, DC, along with more than 100 others, even though Hamad and the other former Guantanamo prisoners have already been released.

But US District Court Judge Thomas Hogan dismissed the cases, stating the former prisoners' transfers rendered their habeas lawsuits moot. Attorneys for the detainees were upset because they had hoped the court would make a decision that would ultimately clear the peitioners' names, lift travel restrictions, and the stigma that comes from being detained at Guantanamo.

Still, Skinner said Wilkerson's declaration is signficant because it marks the first time a Bush administration official is willing to state, under oath, that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others knew many of the prisoners were innocent when they were sent to Guantanamo.

Wilkerson said detainees like Hamad were of little concern to Cheney.

The Office of Vice President Dick Cheney "had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them," Wilkerson said in the 9-page declaration. Cheney's position, Wilkerson asserted, "could be summed up as 'the end justifies the means.'"

Cheney, and his daughter Liz, have been vocal critics of President Obama's efforts to shut down Guantanamo. Obama signed an executive order immediately after he was sworn into office and set a one-year deadline to close the facility. But he missed the date, due in part, to Congress' refusal to earmark funds that would have allowed the administration to close the prison and move some detainees to a supermax prison in Illinois.

Cheney said last year that the only alternative the Bush administration had to setting up Guantanamo was to kill the prisoners detained there.

"If you don't have a place where you can hold these people, the only other option is to kill them, and we don't operate that way," Cheney said.

It is not news that the majority of the initial 742 prisoners who were detained at Guantanamo were innocent of the crimes that they were accused of.

Indeed, in February of 2006, the National Journal reviewed the case files of 132 prisoners who filed habeas corpus petitions and the redacted CSRT transcripts of 314 others and concluded that "most of the 'enemy combatants' held at Guantanamo... are simply not the worst of the worst of the terrorist world" as Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush had claimed.

"Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies," according to an investigative report published by the National Journal. "Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars."

The Journal noted that a common thread among many of the detainees is that a  majority of them "were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11."

That's a point Wilkerson made in his declaration and said it likely applied to Hamad's case as well.

"With respect to the assertions by Mr. Hamad that he was wrongfully seized and detained, it became apparent to me as early as August 2002, and probably earlier to other State Department personnel who were focused on these issues, that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all," Wilkerson said in his declaration. "I soon realized from my conversations with military colleagues as well as foreign service officers in the field that many of the detainees were, in fact, victims of incompetent battlefield vetting.

"There was no meaningful way to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory of another state such as Pakistan. The vetting problem, in my opinion, was directly related to the initial decision not to send sufficient regular army troops at the outset of the war in Afghanistan, and instead, to rely on the forces of the Northern Alliance and the extremely few US Special Operations Forces (SOF) who did not have the necessary training or personnel to deal with battlefield detention questions or even the inclination to want to deal with the issue.

"A related problem with the initial detention was that predominantly US forces were not the ones who were taking the prisoners in the first place. Instead, we relied upon Afghans, such as General [Abdul Rashid] Dostums forces, and upon Pakistanis, to hand over prisoners whom they had apprehended, or who had been turned over to them for bounties, sometimes as much as $5,000 per head.

"Such practices meant that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to US forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money. I recall conversations with serving military officers at the time, who told me that many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives." 

In Hamad's case, Wilkerson said that he has "no reason to believe that any more thorough process was used to determine whether his seizure or transfer to Guantanamo was justified."

Wilkerson said that he discussed the Guantanamo detainees issue regularly with Powell and, based on those discussions, Wilkerson discovered that "President Bush was involved in all of the Guantanamo decision-making."

"My own view is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so," Wilkerson said. "Moreover, by exploiting what Secretary Powell called the president’s 'cowboy instincts,' Vice President Cheney could more often than not gain the President's acquiescence."

Wilkerson said issues revolving around efforts to repatriate individuals wrongfully detained at Guantanamo came up during the morning briefings chaired by Powell that he and about 50 to 55 senior State Department officials attended beginning in August 2002 after the prison facility was opened.

"At the briefing, Secretary Powell would question Ambassador Pierre Prosper (Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes), Cofer Black (Coordinator for Counter Terrorism), and Beth Jones (Assistant Secretary for Eurasia), or other senior personnel for information about specific progress in negotiating detainee releases," Wilkerson said. "A number of these conversations arose because Secretary Powell received frequent phone calls from British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who had consulted with Secretary Powell frequently about repatriating the British Guantánamo detainees ...

"I also know that several other foreign ministers spoke with Secretary Powell urging him to repatriate their countries' citizens. During these morning briefings, Secretary Powell would express frustration that more progress had not been made with detainee releases."

During one particular meeting, Wilkerson said, Ambassador Prosper, the point person on negotiating the transfer of detainees to other countries, "would discuss the difficulty he encountered in dealing with the Department of Defense, and specifically Donald Rumsfeld, who just refused to let detainees go." 

Wilkerson said it was "politically impossible" to release detainees, even the ones Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other senior officials knew were innocent.

"The concern expressed was that if they were released to another country, even an ally such as the United Kingdom, the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people, whether the released detainee was subsequently found to be innocent by the receiving country, or whether the detainee was truly a terrorist and, upon release were it to then occur, would return to the war against the US," he said. "Another concern was that the detention efforts at Guantánamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were. Such results were not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DOD."

A spokesman for Rumsfeld said Wilkerson's claims are untrue. Peggy Cifrino, Powell's spokeswoman, said the former Secretary of State, "has not seen Colonel Wilkerson's declaration and, therefore, cannot provide a comment."

Still, what Wilkerson described may have very well been an issue in Hamad's case, although as Jim White pointed out in a blog post, the Pentagon appears to have had a policy in place to "justify the long-term detention and interrogation of innocent civilians."

According to Hamad's lawsuit, the Pentagon had cleared him for release in November 2005, according to a redacted copy of his clearance decision his attorneys cited in their complaint.

But he was not freed from Guantanamo until December 2007. His attorneys said they were notified via email in March 2007 that Hamad was eligible to be sent back home to Sudan and it was during negotiations with the Sudanese government that they discovered he was eligible for release a full two years earlier.

About 183 detainees, many of whom have already been cleared for release, remain at Guantanamo. A majority of them have never been charged with a crime.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Where America Stands: World Power

Fact Or Fiction?
By Lara Logan

Video Where America Stands: World Power

April 09, 2010  "CBS" -- "The mystique of American power I think is gone," said Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The United States is no longer the sole power towering over the post-Cold War era.

"It's not so much we're declining, other countries are coming up," said James Baker, Former U.S. treasury secretary, and U.S. secretary of state.

The report card shows America's foundation is in peril. Most alarming? Deficits are projected to average over $900 billion a year through 2020. The average? $976 billion.

The nation's debt is the largest in history: $12 trillion and counting. That's over $80,000 for every American worker.

China is now the largest holder of U.S. debt. It's also the largest exporter and within the next five to seven years, it's expected to surpass the U.S. as the largest manufacturer in the world.

The Problem:

The problem for America is that its greatness has always been rooted in its economic dominance.

"We're in a real pickle," said Baker. "We will not be as important on the world scene if we continue to be a tremendously large debtor nation."

That debt has forced the U.S. to keep borrowing from foreign countries.

"Can the world's greatest power remain the world's greatest power and also be the world's greatest borrower?" Miller asked. "I don't think so."

Aaron David Miller served as an advisor to six secretaries of state and has witnessed a decline in American diplomatic power.

"We can't morally preach anymore about the virtues of American-style capitalism when we can't fix our own dysfunctional broken house."

And seemingly can't win two wars, Miller says, that have already cost over $1 trillion.

"We can't fix these places and yet we can't walk away from them," Miller said. "For a great power, that's the worst place to be."

Solutions:

The solution is to accept that many nations now have a seat at the table and can influence world outcomes.

Atlantic Magazine's James Fallows just returned after living in China for three years. "It was easier long ago to say well you have a couple big powers. Now you have a lot of big powers."

"China has a very, very long way to go before they have the dimensions of a national power that the U.S. does - maybe never," Fallows said.

Is American power on the decline?

"Not really, things are changing," Fallows replied. "Other countries are getting relatively stronger but it doesn't necessarily mean that the U.S. will decline in any way that really matters."

Fallows believes the changing world order will be a catalyst for an American comeback - much as fear of Soviet domination in the Sputnik era galvanized American education.

"The fact that the U.S. success will eventually end doesn't mean it has to end now - or 10 years from now - or 100 years from now if we do the right things," Fallow said.

What about that Chinese owned debt?

"If the U.S. dollar plummets in value - we suffer and so do the Chinese," Fallow said.

"Their debt is worth nothing then?" Logan asked.

"Yes, exactly," Fallows said.

Baker believes America's absolute power is still intact, for now.

"When I was treasury secretary everybody was writing that Japan Inc. was going to take over the world," Baker said. "America was in permanent decline."

We're in the same situation now with people talking about America's decline.

"I don't think it's going to happen provided - one big proviso - that we deal with this debt bomb," Baker said.

If we don't, Baker said, "Then it might happen."

The U.S. still remains the most important single power in the world. But in the time it took to watch this report, the national debt grew by nearly $18 million.

 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

EU Countries sinking into Depression

 It still seems toe that the real problems have been and are the U.S. and England.

The Coming European Debt Wars

By Prof. Michael Hudson

April 09, 2010 "Globalresearch" - - Government debt in Greece is just the first in a series of European debt bombs that are set to explode. The mortgage debts in post-Soviet economies and Iceland are more explosive. Although these countries are not in the Eurozone, most of their debts are denominated in euros. Some 87% of Latvia’s debts are in euros or other foreign currencies, and are owed mainly to Swedish banks, while Hungary and Romania owe euro-debts mainly to Austrian banks. So their government borrowing by non-euro members has been to support exchange rates to pay these private-sector debts to foreign banks, not to finance a domestic budget deficit as in Greece.

All these debts are unpayably high because most of these countries are running deepening trade deficits and are sinking into depression. Now that real estate prices are plunging, trade deficits are no longer financed by an inflow of foreign-currency mortgage lending and property buyouts. There is no visible means of support to stabilize currencies (e.g., healthy economies). For the past year these countries have supported their exchange rates by borrowing from the EU and IMF. The terms of this borrowing are politically unsustainable: sharp public sector budget cuts, higher tax rates on already over-taxed labor, and austerity plans that shrink economies and drive more labor to emigrate.

Bankers in Sweden and Austria, Germany and Britain are about to discover that extending credit to nations that can’t (or won’t) pay may be their problem, not that of their debtors. No one wants to accept the fact that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. Someone must bear the cost as debts go into default or are written down, to be paid in sharply depreciated currencies, but many legal experts find debt agreements calling for repayment in euros unenforceable. Every sovereign nation has the right to legislate its own debt terms, and the coming currency re-alignments and debt write-downs will be much more than mere “haircuts.”

There is no point in devaluing, unless “to excess” – that is, by enough to actually change trade and production patterns. That is why Franklin Roosevelt devalued the US dollar by 75% against gold in 1933, raising its official price from $20 to $35 an ounce. And to avoid raising the U.S. debt burden proportionally, he annulled the “gold clause” indexing payment of bank loans to the price of gold. This is where the political fight will occur today – over the payment of debt in currencies that are devalued.

Another byproduct of the Great Depression in the United States and Canada was to free mortgage debtors from personal liability, making it possible to recover from bankruptcy. Foreclosing banks can take possession of collateral real estate, but do not have any further claim on the mortgagees. This practice – grounded in common law – shows how North America has freed itself from the legacy of feudal-style creditor power and the debtors’ prisons that made earlier European debt laws so harsh.

The question is, who will bear the loss? Keeping debts denominated in euros would bankrupt much local business and real estate. Conversely, re-denominating these debts in local depreciated currency will wipe out the capital of many euro-based banks. But these banks are foreigners, after all – and in the end, governments must represent their own home electorates. Foreign banks do not vote.

Foreign dollar holders have lost 29/30th of the gold value of their holdings since the United States stopped settling its balance-of-payments deficits in gold in 1971. They now receive less than a thirtieth of this, as the price has risen to $1,100 an ounce. If the world can take that, why shouldn’t it take the coming European debt write-downs in stride?

There is growing recognition that the post-Soviet economies were structured from the start to benefit foreign interests, not local economies. For example, Latvian labor is taxed at over 50% (labor, employer, and social tax) – so high as to make it noncompetitive, while property taxes are less than 1%, providing an incentive toward rampant speculation. This skewed tax philosophy made the “Baltic Tigers” and central Europe prime loan markets for Swedish and Austrian banks, but their labor could not find well-paying work at home. Nothing like this (or their abysmal workplace protection laws) is found in the Western European, North American or Asian economies.

It seems unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that large sectors of the New European population can be made subject to salary garnishment throughout their lives, reducing them to a lifetime of debt peonage. Future relations between Old and New Europe will depend on the Eurozone’s willingness to re-design the post-Soviet economies on more solvent lines – with more productive credit and a less rentier-biased tax system that promotes employment rather than asset-price inflation that drives labor to emigrate. In addition to currency realignments to deal with unaffordable debt, the indicated line of solution for these countries is a major shift of taxes off labor onto land, making them more like Western Europe. There is no just alternative. Otherwise, the age-old conflict-of-interest between creditors and debtors threatens to split Europe into opposing political camps, with Iceland the dress rehearsal.

Until this debt problem is resolved – and the only way to resolve it is to negotiate a debt write-off – European expansion (the absorption of New Europe into Old Europe) seems over. But the transition to this future solution will not be easy. Financial interests still wield dominant power over the EU, and will resist the inevitable. Gordon Brown already has shown his colors in his threats against Iceland to illegally and improperly use the IMF as a collection agent for debts that Iceland doesn’t legally owe, and to blackball Icelandic membership in the EU.

Confronted with Mr. Brown’s bullying – and that of Britain’s Dutch poodles – 97% of Icelandic voters opposed the debt settlement that Britain and the Netherlands sought to force down the throat of Allthing members last month. This high a vote has not been seen in the world since the old Stalinist era.

It is only a foretaste. The choice that Europe ends up making will likely drive millions into the streets. Political and economic alliances will shift, currencies will crumble and governments will fall. The European Union and indeed, the international financial system will change in ways yet to be seen. This will be especially the case if nations adopt the Argentina model and refuse to make payment until steep discounts are made.

Paying in euros – for real estate and personal income streams in negative equity, where the debts exceed the current value of income flows available to pay mortgages or for that matter, personal debts – is impossible for nations that hope to maintain a modicum of civil society. “Austerity plans” IMF and EU style is an antiseptic, technocratic jargon for life-shortening and killing impact of gutting income, social services, spending on health on hospitals, education and other basic needs, and selling off public infrastructure for buyers to turn nations into “tollbooth economies” where everyone is obliged to pay access prices for roads, education, medical care and other costs of living and doing business that have long been subsidized by progressive taxation in North America and Western Europe.

The battle lines are being drawn regarding how private and public debts are to be repaid. For nations that balk at repayment in euros, the creditor nations have their “muscle” waiting in the wings: the credit rating agencies. At the first sign a nation is balking in paying in hard currency, or even at the first hint of it questioning a foreign debt as improper, the agencies will move in to reduce a nation’s credit rating. This will increase the cost of borrowing and threaten to paralyze the economy by starving it for credit.

The most recent shot was fired n April 6 when Moody’s downgraded Iceland’s debt from stable to negative. “Moody’s acknowledged that Iceland might still achieve a better deal in renewed negotiations, but said the current uncertainty was hurting the country’s short-term economic and financial prospects.”[1]

The fight is on. It should be an interesting decade.

Prof. Micheal Hudson is Chief Economic Advisor to the Reform Task Force Latvia (RTFL). His website is www.michael-hudson.com  .

[1] THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, “Moody's Downgrades Iceland Outlook,” The New York Times, April 7, 2010.

© Copyright Michael Hudson, Global Research, 2010

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

The Surveillance Regime

Editorial - The Nation

April 09, 2010 "The Nation" -- The recent California federal district court ruling that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping violated a 1978 surveillance law was the first significant judicial rebuke to post-9/11 government eavesdropping. For that reason alone, Judge Vaughn Walker's damages award to the Muslim charity Al-Haramain and its attorneys, targets of unlawful spying in 2004, is worthy of celebration. But the ruling won't change our current deeply troubling surveillance regime. In that sense, it is a timely reminder of unfinished business.

Ever since Barack Obama took office, accountability for rights violations during the "war on terror" has been thin. Victims of wrongful overseas detention, surveillance and torture have received no apology and no reparations. Despite an early commitment to close Guantánamo, 183 prisoners remain there. Indeed, Obama has released fewer detainees than Bush did during his last year in office. And despite an early promise to protect the First Amendment rights of Muslim charities, Obama has done nothing to change the onerous application of terrorism financing laws. Walker's decision is only the second to have ruled against the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. All other challenges--including one against the odious 2008 FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which The Nation has joined as a plaintiff--ultimately got booted at the courthouse door.

Even if Walker's opinion survives possible appeal, it will have no effect on the broad surveillance powers unleashed by the FAA, which passed with then-Senator Obama's support. Under that law, the government can dispense with individualized warrants, the cornerstone of Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Absent meaningful judicial review, we simply can't know how much surveillance the government is carrying out.

Continuity, not change, has characterized the conduct of Eric Holder's Justice Department. Walker documents, in his opinion, the government's persistent "refusal to cooperate with the court's orders," its improper use of procedural delays and even point-blank refusals to produce information. Yes, this was business as usual during the Bush era. But Walker was talking about events on Obama's watch.

Nor is Walker's experience unusual. In lawsuits by survivors of the CIA's "black sites" and Guantánamo's interrogation rooms, the government either keeps insisting that "state secrets" require outright dismissal or has stuck to the canard that noncitizens forcibly brought into US custody overseas lack all constitutional rights. In Guantánamo litigation, habeas lawyers complain about obfuscation, secrecy and delay not dissimilar from what they faced in the Bush era.

Blaming the lawyers is easy. But it is the otherwise near-absolute absence of accountability that makes Walker's opinion such a lonely beacon. This absence is, in large part, a result of the Obama administration's failure to explain to the American people that the surveillance program violated the Constitution, and that unlawful and futile torture was rife in Guantánamo and the black sites.

It is not too late to win the political, or the moral, battle. It is not too late to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to explain that reckless and illegal incursions into privacy rights are no road to security. It is only by taking on that battle that the Obama administration, and not just a handful of voices on the federal bench, can produce the real change its lawyers have been fighting.

Copyright © 2009 The Nation

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Bedfore you go to hatin'.....

Understand what a vested interest the powers-that-be in corporate America and their paid minions, whom we call our elected officials, have in keeping us at each others throats

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

America: The Grim Truth

By Lance Freeman

April 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --  Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: 

I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:

Finland: 44 

Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

Of course, you don’t have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself – you’ve got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.

If you’re “lucky,” you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you’ll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan – welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America, you grow up thinking you’ve got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don’t think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can’t come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its “credit card” sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American “petro-dollar” system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).

Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. 

In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from “terrorists,” then you’re sadly mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you’ll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don’t want their tax base escaping. They don’t want their “recruits” escaping. They don’t want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I’ve written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do?

You should leave the United States of America.

If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.

You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

  

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Nuking the Mullahs

By Philip Giraldi,

April 08, 2010 "Antiwar" -- Back in August 2005, I broke the story that Dick Cheney and the Pentagon were working on a contingency plan to use tactical nuclear weapons in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The nukes would be used because they were the only effective way to destroy the hardened sites, many of which are located deep underground. I also reported that the contingency plan would kick in if there were another major terrorist attack against the United States, whether or not Iran was actually involved. It would use the terrorist action as a justification for taking preemptive action and employing nukes would serve as a warning to Iran that any retaliation would result in possible additional nuclear strikes. If implemented, it would have constituted the first use of nuclear weapons since the end of the Second World War.

It would be convenient to assume that the Dick Cheney school of international relations no longer exists. In truth, the summer of 2005 seems almost like ancient history, part and parcel of a very different world, where Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Rumsfeld were still running amok scarcely reined in by the more moderate but equally ghastly Condi Rice. Iraq was just starting to implode and Afghanistan was on a back burner but the hubris that drove the Bush Administration to look for enemies to destroy seems dated at the present due to economic and political deterioration in the United States. Even many of those who saw America as the essential nation five years ago now recognize decline when they see it and are arguing for retrenchment.

But some things don’t change and the theory that just a few really big bombs can change the Middle East for the better has again surfaced.  Two weeks ago the non-partisan Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) issued a study suggesting that low yield tactical nuclear weapons are just the ticket for destroying Iran’s nuclear plants.  The report states that "some believe that nuclear weapons are the only weapons that can destroy targets deep underground or in tunnels."  "Options in Dealing with Iran’s Nuclear Program" was written by Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman, both highly respected analysts and commentators.  

The authors and CSIS do not exactly endorse the use of nuclear weapons and they note that there would be major political consequences, but they accept that there is a high likelihood that Israel is planning an attack of some kind and also observe that Tel Aviv’s only other options would not be very effective.  Israel has no heavy bombers and only a limited supply of bunker buster bombs.  F-16 fighter bombers launched from Israel would have little time on target and only limited conventional payloads that could not do much damage to the dispersed and deeply dug-in Iranian facilities.  Iranian air defenses, which have been enhanced over the past few years, might also prove to be a formidable obstacle.  At best, the Israelis would only be able to delay an Iranian nuclear program for six months to a year and the attack itself would guarantee Tehran’s commitment to develop its own nuclear deterrent as quickly as possible.

An Israeli nuclear strike could, on the other hand, be launched using ballistic missiles that Tel Aviv already has or from cruise missiles on submarines, which are also already in the country’s arsenal, meaning that Israeli warplanes would not have to cross hostile territory and face antiaircraft fire.  The targeting would also be more accurate using missiles that could be carefully aimed rather than unstable and possibly under attack aircraft and the results, compared to a conventional attack, would be devastating.

Two issues likely will determine whether Israel will use nuclear weapons against Iran.  The first relates to the ultimate objective of the Israeli attack.  An attack with conventional weapons will hardly cripple the presumed Iranian nuclear program and would be designed rather to send a message and to bring the United States into the conflict to finish the job.  But if the Israelis were to make the judgment that the United States will somehow refuse to cooperate or be drawn in, they might just be tempted to use the tactical nuclear weapons reported to be in their arsenal to destroy the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

The second issue is Israeli isolation and irrationality, something that is harder to assess but which is becoming more evident.  Israel continues to be protected by the United States in the UN through its veto power and also in other international fora, but there should be no doubt that President Obama has a visceral dislike for Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and everything he represents.  And the feeling is mutual, but given the vulnerability of Israel if the US were to withdraw its support, the actions of Netanyahu to goad and defy Obama have to be seen as those of a man whose ability to behave rationally might well be questioned.

The truth is that Israel is fast becoming a pariah nation, like South Africa before the final collapse of apartheid, because no one any longer accepts the legitimacy of its settlement growth and occupation policies.  Like South Africa, the Israeli response to criticism has been to become more reactionary and inward looking, constructing a police state internally and waging unending war against its neighbors to maintain cohesion against foreign enemies.  The program to divest from Israel is gathering steam both in Europe and the US and even traditional allies of Tel Aviv like Britain have begun to react to Israeli rogue behavior.  The recent expulsion of Israel’s Mossad chief from London over the issue of copying fifteen British passports for use in assassination operations was significant.  Visitors to Israel have now been warned that surrendering passports at immigration could lead to their being cloned to support illegal activities, a warning that is literally without precedent.  Several European countries that claim universal jurisdiction in war crime cases, including Spain, appear to be prepared to arrest traveling Israeli officials for civilian deaths in Gaza.

Israel demonstrated both its increasing isolation and its irrational side in response to the British expulsion of its intelligence chief.  Two Israeli parliamentarians compared the British to dogs, one adding that the "British may be dogs, but they are not loyal to us, but rather to an anti-Semitic system."  What system he had in mind was not exactly clear and it is also interesting to note that an Israeli legislator would expect loyalty from the British government.  There was some speculation in the media that at least some of the anger might be directed against British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who is Jewish and has family in Israel.  Miliband has generally been regarded as a good friend of Israel, having blocked legal moves to arrest visiting Israeli politicians and generals as war criminals, but even he had to take steps when the integrity of British passports was being undermined.

To be sure, there is a certain danger in isolating the Israelis too much as it could easily feed the always present Masada complex that might influence a dangerously unstable government to take action that might include exploiting its nuclear arsenal in search of Armageddon.  And make no mistake that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman are not to be trusted by anyone.  Netanyahu’s deceptions and evasions were too much even for markedly pro-Israeli US President Bill Clinton, who became angry with him after being repeatedly lectured on policy, asking whether Netanyahu thought that he represented the superpower.  King Hussein of Jordan similarly finally gave up on achieving anything with a stonewalling and lying Netanyahu in the 1990s. The fact is, Bibi Netanyahu has never been interested in peace and his policies of creeping annexation of the West Bank and ethnic cleansing are instead designed to create a unitary Israeli state without Palestinians.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is even worse than Netanyahu and is a symbol of the kleptocratic impulses that characterize the extreme right in Israel.  He is a racist who has openly advocated executing Arab members of the Knesset and drowning Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea.  At one time he called for bombing the Aswan dam to punish Egypt for supporting the Palestinians and he was behind a bill in the Knesset that would have required all Israeli citizens of Arab descent to swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state or face expulsion.  That he is the Foreign Minister of a country that pretends to have western-style democratic political values is itself telling.

It all adds up to a toxic brew.  If the US refuses to cooperate in bombing Iran conventionally, Israel might well accept the view that the Iranian nuclear program can only be destroyed by using other nuclear weapons.  Tel Aviv, controlling its own nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver the bombs on target, would be able to stage such an attack unilaterally.  An increasingly isolated Israel headed by reactionary and irrational politicians who are influenced by their own sense of racial superiority just might decide that the gamble is worth it.  It would be a very bad decision for Israel, Iran, and for the United States.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and a fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Under The 'Dar

RADICAL RIGHT -- MCDONNELL: SLAVERY WASN'T 'SIGNIFICANT' ENOUGH TO BE INCLUDED IN MY CONFEDERACY PROCLAMATION: Last week, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) "quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month," calling on Virginians to, among other things, "understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War." Notably absent from the proclamation, however, is any mention of slavery. McDonnell explained yesterday that he did not reference slavery because he focused on the issues that he "thought were most significant for Virginia." Neither of Virginia's previous two governors, Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, declared a Confederate History Month. Republican governor Jim Gilmore, who served from 1998-2002, did issue such proclamations but acknowledged slavery as "one of the causes of the war" and a practice that "degraded the human spirit" and "is abhorred and condemned by Virginians." For his final proclamation in 2001, Gilmore replaced Confederate History Month with "a tribute to both black and white Civil War combatants that expressly denounces slavery as the root cause of the four-year conflict." Gilmore's predecessor, Republican George Allen, started the practice of Confederate History Month. He didn't include slavery in his proclamation and, under significant pressure from civil rights leaders, eventually apologized. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported on April 12, 1997, Allen said, "Surely, I don't want want to upset anyone. For those who are sincerely offended...I apologize." The American Prospect's Adam Serwer writes that McDonnell's proclamation is "telling" because "it reveals which Virginians he feels are 'significant.'"
There is nothing civil about civil wars!