WASHINGTON TRIES TO CAP THE WIKILEAKS LEAK

WikiLeaks released on July 25th 76,000 mostly one-page battlefield documents leaked from US Army sources out of a total of 92,000 in their possession. They detail a vast array of material about the Afghan War ranging from “tactical reports about small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the US and Pakistan”. STRATFOR's George Friedman (07/27/10) doubts that this disparate assortment of not-so-sensitive materials below the 'Top Secret' category would likely have been collected by any single source. WikiLeaks, an organization operating out of several European cities since July 2007, produced this report entitled: “Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010” and sent it to three news organizations, The New York Times, the Guardian of London, and Der Speigel in Germany. One United States official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation, said government lawyers were exploring whether WikiLeaks and its leader, Mr. Julian Assange could be charged in violation of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of national security information. They might be charged with a crime if they were to release actual names or identities of Afghans who had worked under cover with the US Army(NYTimes 07/29/10). Pfc. Bradley Manning, now returned from Army incarceration in Kuwait to the Quantico Brig in Virginia, previously released to WikiLeaks a 2007 video showing a US helicopter killing 12 unarmed Iraqis including two Reuters newsmen in Baghdad. WikiLeaks have not identified Pfc. Manning nor anyone else as the source of the current Afghan War Diary covering the period from Jan. 2004 through Dec.2009.

IT MAY NOT BE NEW NEWS BUT IT SURE WAS NEW TO GRANDMA FEINSTEIN
“Nothing new here, nothing we did not know”, we have been reassured by Defense Secretary Bob Gates and White House flak Robert Gibbs: “There is not much here that the public did not know and was not told by the media nor by the Administration”. To downgrade the leaks to old news is a clever way to reassure an uninformed public that they actually knew all of this before, so why should they bother reading it all again? President Obama told reporters in the Rose Garden on July 27th that: “While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.” Now if it's indeed all old news that has been publicly debated, then why would it be dangerous to our troops if this old news were known on the battlefield? Something does not quite add up here: does it name double agents, duplicitous Pakistanis or turn-coat Americans? Not so far it doesn't and Mr. Assange has been redacting such names from the 15,000 documents still to be released. Mr. Obama and top military officials said that the disclosure of the documents should not force a rethinking of America’s commitment to the war. I don't feel reassured by this. And Mr. Obama, please tell us where this public debate has been taking place about competing strategies, duplicitous Pakistanis, Task Force 373 and the like? Certainly not in our rubber-stamp Congress where the $37 billion supplemental appropriation to continue this war breezed through the day after the WikiLeaks leaked.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, broke from the Obama administration's contention that there were no real revelations in the reports and therefore there should be no real harm to the war effort. She told The Cable in an interview on July 27th that she was shocked by the allegations in the leaked reports that elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate were directly involved in attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan. "We need to find out if it's true. The suspicion is that it may well be true and if so, it's very serious. It's hard to believe it actually happened because of the size of it." she dithered (07/27/10). Other senior Democrats on Capitol Hill Tuesday said they weren't shocked by the reports. "I don't share her shock," Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, D-MI. (The Cable 07/28/10)

SHOOT THE MESSENGER – QUICKLY!!
Admiral Mike Mullen, our Joint Chief of Staff, accused WikiLeaks of “having on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family” (presumably who were informing against the Taliban) and Secretary Gates refers to “potentially severe and dangerous battlefield consequences”. Bill Van Auken (Countercurrents.org 07/30/10) comments “that no reporters at their joint news conference pointed to the absurdity of these angry denunciations of WikiLeaks from the two men whose colonial war had caused the deaths of well over 20,000 Afghans between 2004 and 2009” and whose hands are truly soaked in blood.

Much of the media as well as the US Congress has joined in to portray Assange and WikiLeaks as responsible for endangering innocent lives while actually providing details on the annihilation of thousands as a result of the US war. “The only crime of which WikiLeaks is guilty is that of breaking the main stream media's self-censorship of information exposing the bloody and criminal character of the US war.” (Countercurrents.org 07/30/10)

SO WHAT DO THE WIKILEAKS REVEAL THAT WE SUPPOSEDLY ALREADY KNOW?
First: Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence agency (ISI) has played a dual game for years, supporting, supplying and providing safe havens in Pakistan to Taliban insurgents while cooperating with the US in actions against the Taliban in other areas of Pakistan such as North Waziristan. Former head of ISI, Lt. General Hamid Gul regularly confers with the Taliban in Afghanistan about tactics and strategies.
Second: That the Taliban is a thoroughly sophisticated fighting force now equipped with MANIPADS, a man-portable air defense system capable of shooting down helicopters with heat-seeking missiles and ending our domination of the skies just as the Stinger missiles supplied by the US to the mujaheddin in the 1980s took away Russia's aerial warfare program and forced their withdrawal in 1989.
Third: There are actually two parallel war strategies being followed by the US Central Command. The COIN counter-insurgency program originated by General McCrystal seems to be our official position and would presumably encourage strong bonds with locals and the curtailment of air attacks upon villages and town. (Described in Obama-Watch 31st Edition). However, WikiLeaks now documents that an alternative war plan is actually the dominant tactic and involves heavy reliance upon a rain of terror from the sky upon towns and villages suspected of harboring Taliban utilizing unmanned drones operated by specialists in remote Nevada air bases with big TV screens and a bloodless hand on the trigger. It also involves Task Force 373 with 2000 senior Taliban figures on their kill or capture list, and with the very Orwellian name JPEL - 'Joint Prioritized Effects List'. Among the documents released are many reports of wanton and indiscriminate roadside killings of Afghan civilians who merely pass by Task Force 373 vehicles. Most of these are not investigated further nor are the killers even disciplined. This is a far cry from the “winning the hearts and minds” tactic loudly touted in Senate hearing rooms and praised in the main stream media.

WHY THE PAKISTANI DOUBLE GAME? The ISI continues to maintain liaison and material support to the Taliban just as they previously did (with US weapons and materiel) with the mujaheddin during the years of Russian occupation in Afghanistan. When the Russians left in 1989, the US turned over these operations in Afghanistan to Pakistan's ISI. This relationship apparently remains intact power. From Pakistan's viewpoint, it is most important that they maintain good relations with the Taliban on both sides of the border, since they will exist long after the US has withdrawn. It is not possible for Pakistan to have a hostile India to the east and a hostile Taliban controlling Afghanistan on the west. George Friedman suggests: “Given that Pakistan does not expect the Taliban to be defeated, and given that they are not interested in chaos in Afghanistan, it follows that they will maintain close relations with and give support to the Taliban. Given that the United States is powerful and is Pakistan's only lever against India, the Pakistanis will not make this their public policy, however. The US has thus created a situation in which the only rational policy for Pakistan is two-tiered, consisting of overt opposition to the Taliban and covert support for the Taliban.” (Stratfor 07/27/10). The US understands this dilemma and realizes that putting too much pressure on Pakistan could result in the unwanted destabilization of the entire Islamabad government.

MAKING SAUSAGE: As in making sausage, one must never look too closely at the messy ways in which wars are fought, particularly coalition warfare. Even the strongest alliances are fraught with deceit and dissension, as we learned working with the British in WWII. While the US is fighting to deny AlQaeda a base in Afghanistan, Pakistan is fighting to secure its western frontier against rebel tribesmen and maintain internal stability. Meanwhile, the Taliban know that they can win by not being defeated. Which gets us back to the WikiLeaks conundrum. Whoever did put all this together and leak it out, has provided the most powerful case yet for US withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather than later. (STRATFOR 07/27/10)

WAR GOING BADLY? LET'S JUST FIRE THE GENERAL!

The abrupt dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal by President Obama confirms that the war in Afghanistan is going very badly indeed. The general would not have been fired for a few unguarded remarks to a 2nd tier magazine had the war been succeeding according to plan. It may well be that his only offense was to express in too blunt and undiplomatic a fashion the sentiments of broad sections of the US officer corps. Nevertheless, the COIN (counterinsurgency) strategy, that McChrystal himself designed and that his boss General Patraeus sold to Washington, is rapidly falling apart:
The death toll for US and NATO troops rose to 85 so far in June, making this the worst month since the US invaded Afghanistan way back in October 2001.
The US quartermasters who maintain the supply chain for war materiel hire various war lords to funnel these supplies from Pakistan ports and from Central Asian airports into our Afghani bases. A good portion of these transportation costs have now been exposed as flowing directly into the coffers of Taliban insurgents so as to convince them not to attack the trucks. Thus, the Pentagon is indirectly financing the insurgency to the tune of approximately $2 million a week.
The failure of the US intervention in the southern town of Marjah this spring is now admitted (McChrystal calls it “a bleeding ulcer”). The Marjah campaign was intended to demonstrate how COIN would win local support (McChrystal jokingly called it 'government in a box'). The major advance into Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, has had to be postponed at least until next fall.
Amongst the Afghan people, President Hamid Karzai is widely reviled as a corrupt American puppet while his brother continues to operate a major opium entrepot. Opium remains the country's major cash crop (right next to US handouts and bribes).
Antiwar sentiment amongst our NATO allies is mounting, while in the United States only 44% now say the war is worth fighting, down from 56% three years ago.
The Rolling Stone article, which presumably led to McChrystal's dismissal June 23rd, and a New York Times article by C.J. Chivers both describe growing frustration among field officers, NCOs and rank-and-file soldiers in Afghanistan with McChrystal’s counter-insurgency tactics, which, in the name of reducing civilian casualties, call for “further tightening rules guiding the use of Western firepower—air strikes and guided rocket attacks, artillery barrages and even mortar fire to support troops on the ground”.
“The disrespectful behavior of the US commander in Afghanistan and his aides was symptomatic of a more deeply rooted, potentially dangerous malaise” writes Simon Tisdall in the UK Guardian (06/24/10). Surveys show that a majority of active-duty officers believe that senior officers should insist on making civilian officers accept their viewpoints and that only 29% believe that high-ranking civilians, rather than their military counterparts, should have the final say on what type of military force to use. “We want to fight like we did in Iraq and like we did in Afghanistan before McChrystal. I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts”, said a former Special Forces operator. “His rules of engagement put soldiers lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing”. (Hastings in Rolling Stone 06/22/10).
The support for the change of commanders by congressional Republicans and many right-wing media pundits shows that many had lost confidence in the General and his counter-insurgency strategy. In fact three of the most pro-war US Senators, McCain, Graham and Lieberman, issued a statement condemning McChrystal's recent comments and right wing media seems to agree to his being sacked.
Obama’s selection of Petraeus to replace McChrystal is a clear effort to appease these right-wing critics. The appointment of Petraeus was suggested in advance by neoconservative columnist William Kristol, and hailed by the right-wing media as a political masterstroke (WSWS 06/24/10).

LA PLUS C'EST LA MEME CHOSE
In relieving General Stanley McChrystal of command US and NATO forces in Afghanistan on June 23rd, Obama intended to emphasize that he remained fully in support of the program of military escalation and counterinsurgency warfare with which McChrystal is identified. He pledged to do “whatever is necessary to succeed in Afghanistan,” adding, “This is a change in personnel but it is not a change in policy.”. Yet most Americans are thoroughly confused as to what our policy may actually be. Nowhere in the Rolling Stone article does it suggest that McChrystal disagreed with the Obama policy in Afghanistan. This is hardly surprising given that he wrote the policy himself. The old saw that “the more things change, the more they remain the same” seems to have been inverted: “The longer things remain the same (la meme chose), the more likely they must change”. There seems little doubt now that a serious reassessment of our strategy is taking place behind this facade of steadfastness. McChrystal may have done Obama a favor by forcing a re-examination of strategy now before things get any worse.
The New York Times ((06/24/10) demands “a serious reassessment now of the military and civilian strategies”. STRATFOR, the respected voice of many former intelligence operatives and policy analysts, feels that the Afghan war is much bigger than the counter-insurgency plan championed by McChrystal and Petraeus and that the war is unwinnable by force of arms no matter how concentrated the focus is on counter-insurgency (Stratfor 06/23/10). “At the end of the day, no matter who is in charge, the American-led effort in Afghanistan remains deeply intractable with limited prospects for success” (Stratfor 06/24/10).
Just What Is Our Mission? Obama, while announcing the dismissal of General McChrystal, attempted once again to define our mission as: “To disrupt, dismantle and defeat AlQaeda”. Yet, General Petraeus estimated total AlQaeda strength in Afghanistan in the “double digits” in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (06/17/10). This is the same figure General Jim Jones, our National Security Advisor, gave Obama at year end. We rarely hear of any encounters between our 90,000 soldiers and this “real enemy” AlQaeda. Instead, we continue to fight the Taliban. Obama says that our task is merely “to break the momentum of the Taliban” while not telling us what that could possibly mean short of extermination (WH announcement 06/23/10). Back in 2008 while campaigning, Obama argued that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time, but Afghanistan was a necessary war. His reasoning went that the real threat to the US came from AlQaeda and Afghanistan had been its sanctuary. Were the US to abandon Afghanistan, AlQaeda would re-establish itself and once again threaten our Homeland (George Friedman,Stratfor 21/10/09). Looking back at this twisted logic, one must ask not only who was briefing Obama back in 2008, but how in the world he has managed to hold on to such a fatuous scenario ever since. None of the 19 named hijackers was Afghani, the Taliban had no hand in the 9/11 planning, and even the FBI has been forced to admit that “they had no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11” (Statement by Rex Tomb, FBI Chief of Investigative Publicity as reported in Muckraker Report 06/06/06).

COUNTER-INSURGENCY OR COUNTER-TERRORISM
The counter-insurgency strategy developed by McChrystal and Petraeus and announced by Obama last October was given eighteen months to demonstrate its efficacy. It proposed that we form strong bonds with local populations so as to provide intelligence against the Taliban operating in their areas. The US did this sort of thing with the Sunnis in Iraq in 2006 when we paid each of them $300 per week to stop fighting us. If COIN is to work, we must protect those who wish to cooperate with us, and this entails putting both US and Afghan troops as close to the Afghan people as possible, mainly in densely populated areas. We would need to curtail air and ground fire in such centers since that would run counter to the mission of protecting the population while winning them over. STRATFOR reports that “US and Afghani troops are unable to provide security to local populations and the locals do not appear interested or willing to break with the Taliban and cooperate with the Afghan government” (Stratfor 06/23/10). President Karzai continues to meet with Taliban leaders and the State Department has expressed interest in such talks. But, so far the State Department, neither in the person of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry or Special Representative Richard Holbrooke, has had much to do with directing our program in Afghanistan. They certainly haven't been meeting with the locals.
Joseph Biden has emerged as a strong backer of the counter-terrorism strategy. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counter-terrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden and Ambassador Eikenberry as “shortsighted,” saying it would lead to a state of “Chaos-istan.” The remarks earned him a smack down from the President himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: “Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile”. Counter-terrorism would involve a smaller US armed force in country and rely more heavily upon aerial attacks and artillery as “force multipliers” to root Taliban from well entrenched positions and from population centers.

HOW WILL IT ALL END?
Make Peace With the Taliban: Negotiate with the Taliban, as we did with the Sunnis In Iraq. Pay whatever it takes to get them on our side. Gates and others admit that the Taliban has too much internal discipline right now to allow meaningful negotiation (OK - we'll make it $500 a week). There is support within the State Department for Karzai's reconciliation efforts. (Stratfor 06/23/2010).
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: Andrew J. Bacevich, Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University and a West Point graduate as well, focused in his 2005 book “The New American Militarism” on how Americans have increasingly found themselves in thrall to military power and the idea of global military supremacy. He speaks of the “normalization of war and the acceptance of an unchallenged American military superiority”. David Lowe feels that “America is in a state of perpetual war. Before, it was the Cold War and now it is the War on Terror, AlQaeda and Islamic Terrorism, rather than Communism”. (Twitter 01/14/10). Noam Chomsky posits that a state of perpetual war is an aid to the most powerful leaders of our society to help them maintain positions of economic and political superiority. (Wikipedia). It may well be that the America military-industrial cabal has no intention whatsoever of totally withdrawing from either Afghanistan or Iraq, where we have now retreated to five huge crusader-like fortifications and can still keep our thumb upon those who run the local government while avoiding casualties that so upset the American public.
One Term Obama?: Petraeus, with his solid reputation in Congress can provide the political cover for Obama to again shift strategies in Afghanistan. If he can somehow avoid getting Obama's War blamed on him, we could see Petraeus as the Republican candidate for President in 2012. Paul Craig Roberts, who was Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, reminds us that: “Once the Roman Senate collapsed, the executive branch became the captives of the military. Now with General Petraeus replacing McChrystal in Afghanistan, we have Obama elevating Petraeus to the Republican presidential nomination in the next election. Thus Obama will have replaced himself with a man who can unify the military and executive branches” (06/24/10 ICH).
But What Do The Afghanis Want? Washington has not bothered to ask them.

FEEDING SHARKS IN OILY WATERS

David Remnick says President Obama has a penchant for compromise and avoids head-on confrontation on principle. (“The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama” by David Remnick, Knopf, 2010). “His way is to absorb and synthesize the arguments of others for his earnest consensus-seeking style”. Examples abound during his first 16 months in office: Health care compromises with the insurance and drug thieves on price controls; Dropping the public option; Approving the Defense Department's surge strategy in Afghanistan; Turning a deaf ear towards the Israeli genocide in Gaza; Avoiding strong regulatory reform on Wall Street; Abandoning the auto workers and their hard-won retirement rights; No restraints upon AIG/Goldman Sachs and no government takeover of the major banks. How much of this compromising personality is a result of a minority mentality, whether the minority be intellectual, racial or foreign upbringing, and how much is sheer ambition at any cost? Obama sometimes displays a haughty self-removal from the field of play, as if he were above all that wresting in the mud stuff.

Solutions for the oil spill will not come from BP in time nor will they cover all aspects of the problem. BP has underestimated the spill, blocked independent investigation and generally taken their time in mobilizing: they have had 5 weeks and have not even capped the well. The Obama administration has provided reassurances about who is responsible and who will pay for the cleanup but has not formulated any plan whatsoever to fix the leak, leaving that entirely in the hands of the oil company that, through its own inattention to safety and to following regulations, caused the problem in the first place This is no longer a small matter but a national disaster and a national task force ought to take charge. Leaving it all to BP is equivalent to giving the arsonist responsibility for putting out the fire and repairing the house. Obama can't view this catastrophe from the beach much longer, he's going to have to wade out and get his socks oily.

SET UP A DISASTER MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY
The Obama Administration needs to appoint a group of non-partisan experts in deep offshore oil fields, underwater repairs, and coastal protection under one strong leader who will be given the authority to impose solutions upon BP. This Disaster Management Authority would take control out of the hands of the perpetrator, the rule breaker, and their lobbyists and technicians. Only in this way we can we be assured that we are getting the best, the fastest, and the most thorough program to cap the well. Obama has instead brought in the Coast Guard, the EPA, the Marine Management Service (MMS), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and (for reasons most difficult to comprehend) the Small Business Administration. None, repeat none, of these bureaucracies has any noticeable expertise in capping runaway oil wells. There are plenty of specialists out there in the private sector who could be recruited to serve on such a disaster management authority. They would have no ax to grind in designing solutions to the disaster, whether related to the oil production hardware, the maneuvering of well capping or plugging equipment into place, preparing a coast line protection and cleanup plan, and oil dispersal technologies. Such a disaster management panel would not be bipartisan, it would not have any political dimension whatsoever. British Petroleum needs to be removed from the controls: their solutions are not necessarily in the best interests of the country as a whole.

Instead of a 'hands-on' approach, President Obama announced on May 21st a bipartisan commission to investigate what caused the oil spill and “figure out where the government went wrong, so as to make sure it never happens again” (NYTimes 05/22/10). Every time we hear the words 'bipartisan commission' we are warned that a political whitewash is underway, another Warren Commission report, another political coverup. With oil continuing to gush at what seems like an increasing rate, and after a month of confusion and failure by BP to come up with a workable method of capping the flow, collecting the spill, or repairing the well head, our highest priority is not an investigation of what went wrong. The Obama Administration has to come up with a plan to stop the disaster from continuing. They seem to think that the disaster was in the explosion and sinking of the drill rig. It was not. The disaster is in the present, right now, where some 95,000 barrels per day of crude oil flows unrestricted directly to the surface and spreads rapidly toward the shoreline or sinks as massive tar balls to coat the ocean bed, cutting off one end of the marine food chain.

“Mr. Obama has come under increasing fire for not being more aggressive. A letter to BP requesting more transparency was criticized as too deferential, and cable news channels are filled with commentators asking why the federal government has left so much for BP to handle. Spokesman Robert Gibbs explained repeatedly that the current law makes the company responsible for the recovery and cleanup, not the taxpayers” (NYT 05/22/10). BP has underestimated the size of the disaster from the moment of the explosion aboard the drilling rig. The current estimate of the leakage is “nearly 20 times the 5,000 barrels a day that both BP and NOAA have been citing for nearly three weeks. In fact the first estimate by BOP after the rig sank was only 1000 barrels per day. (MarketWatch 05/14/10) An engineering professor from Purdue University testified before congress on May 19th after viewing of video shots finally released by BP of the end-of-pipe. Professor Werely estimated a total flow of 95,000 barrel per day but allowed that this might be adjusted downward as more data are released by BP. Representative Ed Markey noted that the rate of leakage is critical to designing a solution, and that BP had been holding back the video and refused to allow independent scientists to perform more accurate measurements. (Wikepedia 05/23/10). Out of the total leakage, BP is collecting 5,000 barrels of oil plus associated gas through a 4 inch tube inserted into the end of the 19.5 inch well casing. This collection is brought to the surface and collected in tanks aboard their supply ship (RigZone.com 05/21/10). “If they had thought it was anything like that (95,000 barrels per day) they would have used a bigger pipe – say 10 or 12 inch - than the 4 inch employed” (Rodger Cagdell, Virtual Pipeline Systems).

So far, BP has tried five methods to cap the well including remotely operating valves on the well head, and dropping a huge metal box over the well head. The formation of ice crystals prevented this device from being successful. A 'Top Hat' was then lowered to the seabed but this approach failed as well. A 'top kill' device is now expected to be ready by Tuesday May 25th according to Doug Suttles, CEO of BP. This would involve lowering a large cap over the entire wellhead, securing this cap to the ocean floor, and pumping heavy drilling fluids (not seawater this time) into the blowout preventer to stop the flow. Then, cement would be injected to seal the well permanently (RigZone.com 05/21/10).

AN INOPERABLE BLOWOUT PREVENTER SAVED BP $500,000
Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan told a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that the blowout preventer, a very complex heavy duty device mounted upon the well-head on the ocean floor, failed to operate when the drill bit encountered a bubble of high pressure gas. This device had a dead battery in its operating circuit, it had hydraulics leaks in the lines that were supposed to slam it shut, and was not designed to cut through the heavy drill pipe couplings to cut off flow. “Manufactured by industry and installed by industry with no government inspector witnessing the installation or its construction” said Coast Guard Captain Hung Nguyen during Committee hearings, and even though “MMS approves the design of the well they don't check to see if the type of drill pipe is capable of being cut by the hydraulic ram. We have self-certification and unenforceable safety notices”. MMS writes letters but does not inspect. Tighter rules for monitoring deep water drilling were proposed nine years ago by the Coast Guard but MMS higher-ups in Washington never approved them. As far as I know, they're still up in headquarters” (Alternative Energy 05/12/10). An acoustical shutoff switch intended to be the 'deadman switch' was not installed as a cost-saving measure thus saving BP $500,000. In another economy move, the drilling contractor Tranocean Ltd., replaced the heavy drilling mud, normally used to keep a positive pressure on any oil or gas that may be encountered, with sea water just prior to the blowout.

We are experiencing a major maritime disaster – well beyond the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska , the blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel 40 years ago, or even the Katrina hurricane's flooding of New Orleans. Anger is justified and demands for Presidential action are overdue. Its oily socks time in the White House!

OBAMA & THE UNSPEAKABLE

President Barack Obama is finding that his ability as Commander in Chief to direct our military and diplomatic affairs is seriously restricted by groups within his own Administration. The CIA and the Pentagon, supported by very powerful political and corporate interests, are able to manage his access to strategic data and can threaten political havoc should he take certain initiatives they do not approve. These include direct discussions with Iran to reduce tensions, seriously pressuring Israel to eliminate illegal settlements on Palestinian land, proposing substantial reductions in nuclear missile inventories, setting dates for the withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and diverting funds from our war machine to domestic needs. He seems to be in a position similar to that of John Kennedy in the early 1960s.

JOHN KENNEDY'S DOOMSDAY DILEMMA
Back almost 50 years ago, John Kennedy found himself alone in the White House surrounded by foreign policy advisers, Pentagon brass, and Central Intelligence Agency professionals whose fix on the Cold War was that the president must be unyielding in demonstrating unswerving strength and determination in the face of mad dog Russia. They were driven by fear of losing a doomsday nuclear war, by the pressure from the military/industrial complex that thrived on military buildup, by the potential loss of dominance in world markets, by cutoffs in oil supplies, and by the inevitable economic decline that would result should we lose the cold war. JFK found surprisingly few advisers willing to seriously consider negotiation with the Soviet bloc to ease tensions, to reduce nuclear weapons stockpile, or to find a way to accommodate one other short of outright victory or defeat.

Nevertheless, he undertook a number of incredibly courageous actions totally opposed by the Pentagon, the CIA and most of the Department of State. These actions eventually resulted in his having the back of his skull shot off by an assassin's bullet in Dallas, Texas. The theologian and author James Douglass, in his book “JFK and the Unspeakable” (Verso 2008), says that “for turning towards peace with our enemy, Kennedy was murdered by a power we cannot easily describe but whose unspeakable reality can be traced, suggested, recognized and pondered.” He describes JFK's gradual turning away from nuclear confrontation as follows:

1.Refusing to directly support the Bay of Pigs invasion with US troops, ships and planes.
2.Dismissing CIA Director Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs debacle.
3.Negotiating for the neutralization of Laos.
4.Reducing US troops in Vietnam and establishing a timetable for complete withdrawal of US forces.
5.Encouraging peace negotiations with North Vietnam.
6.Refusing to bomb Cuba and initiating back-channel talks with Castro.
7.Conducting over a year of secret back-channel negotiations with Khrushchev for reduction of tensions and armaments.
8.Signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Russia.
9.Backing away from a military confrontation with Russian tanks along the Berlin Wall.
10.Negotiating for the removal of US missiles from Turkey in exchange for Russia's pullout of missiles from Cuba.
11.Proposing complete and general disarmament.
12.Totally frustrating the military-industrial power structure during his first 1000 as Commander in Chief. These people were accustomed to having their way.

Do we today find ourselves with another President equally caught between his campaign rhetoric, his aspirations for peace, and the military-industrial bloc's insistence upon total global domination? Is Obama frustrated by his impotence to seriously address domestic ills in a weakened economy that spends 53% of every tax dollar on wars and armaments even though no credible challenger to US global dominance exists? Obama's attempts to right the situation appear half-hearted: one cannot help but think that he must reflect upon JFK's fate when he considers negotiation with Iran or with the Taliban.

The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, saw evidence back in the early 1960s that the world had been stricken by the presence of The Unspeakable. (Peace in the Post-Christian Era" Orbis Books 2004) He saw the interlocking murders of the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and the escalating war in Vietnam as signs of Unspeakable forces within the US national security state. His work was read carefully by Kennedy. In his poem: “Chant to be Used in Processions Around the Site with Furnaces” Merton asks: “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done”. Since WWII, our government has found that the most heinous crimes against the innocent, starting with atomic obliteration of two entire cities, and including the firebombing unprotected civilians from Dresden to Fallujah, could be justified as a lesser evil than defeat or subjugation to a foreign enemy or terrorist band. Nuclear deterrence is still seen today as a reasonable way of preserving the peace and is under active discussion as a means to prevent Iran's achieving some sort of nuclear parity with Israel.

Every President since Kennedy has avoided direct confrontation over the relentless growth of the national security state and its insistence upon massive armed violence as the only credible response to those who would challenge us. Raymond McGovern, a 27-year CIA analyst, has described the covert arm of the CIA as operating entirely according to its own rules and without any oversight. He feels that this makes even the new CIA Director, Leon Panetta, afraid to confront them.

WHO DOES THE CIA REPORT TO?
The National Security Act of 1947 placed the CIA under the National Security Council to “acquire, evaluate and coordinate information collected through espionage and concerning the national security of the United States. They were also allowed “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC may from time to time direct”. This turned the CIA into a personal, secret, unaccountable army of the president. (“Nemesis” by Chalmers Johnson, Henry Holt 2006). Clandestine or covert operations although nowhere specifically mentioned in the Act, quickly became the agency's main activity. The question thus arises: How did an agency set up to provide the President with a source of information become instead a tool whereby groups within his own government could restrict and flavor the intelligence channeled to the President in ways that did not serve his interests?

The CIA assured JFK in 1961 that Cubans would welcome American-supported insurgents invading their island during the planned Bay of Pigs operation. They never told JFK that they had just polled Cubans, found that Castro actually enjoyed overwhelming popularity and concluded that a popular uprising against Castro was very unlikely.. In Vietnam, estimates of enemy troop strength were deliberately distorted to make it appear that the US war was very winnable. On the Cold War front, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies had been deliberately over-estimating the strength of the Soviet economy and its ability to sustain itself in a new war. If, in many instances, the CIA was not acting under orders of the President nor carrying out stated US policy, then who actually does run this massive intelligence operation and what is their purpose? James W. Douglass' recent book (“JFK and the Unspeakable” Verso 2008) describes the JFK dilemma most clearly and shows how his adamant stand against the CIA probably cost him his life.

FEAR IS REAL, DEAL WITH IT
George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor, a global team of US intelligence professionals, sees a thoroughly apocalyptic world out there, and describes a reality that we peaceniks prefer to screen from sight. Friedman repeatedly shows that the other side is hell-bent upon our destruction, whether by full-fueled airliners, by nuclear suitcase bombs and biological weapons, or by shoe bombers and underpants igniters. He argues that we cannot prevent our adversaries from mounting such attacks merely by demonstrating our power to bomb their towns and cities to rubble, or by liquidating their rural wedding parties. Islamic radicals may be so hell-bent with righteous fervor as to risk all, sacrificing their individuals lives if necessary, to bring paradise closer. (George Friedman “America's Secret War” Doubleday 2004).

Our most hard headed military planners feel we must clearsightedly look into the reality of massive destruction and be prepared to use it when sufficiently provoked. They point out that humankind already lives under the threat of natural disasters like typhoon, flood, volcanic eruption, and another ice age. They see their ability to threaten total destruction with nuclear bombs as disaster by another means. But, it is what it may take to prevent our own obliteration. Holding up peace signs is a futile gesture in their view. It really gets down to kill or be killed sometimes. There may indeed be times when the threat of annihilation will temper a country's aggressiveness, when the fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD) can result in Cold War type stasis. But not right now.

In the Cuban missile standoff of 1962, the military and intelligence community was concerned that these two soft-headed leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, would leave the US in a more precarious position than before: a fear that the US would give away too much, get too little in return, and bring the next Armageddon even nearer. Kennedy's agreement to disband the Turkish ICBM missile sites and promise never to invade Cuba was seen as totally foolhardy capitulation. Similarly, his earlier refusal to support the Bay of Pigs invasion force with US air and sea cover not only doomed the invaders but helped assure Castro's being a fly in our eye forever. It proved for them JFK's unreliability as President.

In our current decade, where Al Qaeda has already engineered the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers and attacked the Pentagon, if they had not experienced immediate retaliation, then we could be assured that they would not hesitate to attack again, and with even more disastrous consequences. Thus, the immediate bombing of Afghanistan's pathetic little military machine was essential as a demonstration of our political will to use overwhelming power. While that war which slogs on, it now seems a very hollow demonstration of our retaliatory resolve. Friedman feels it may actually prevent another commando group from attacking our Homeland. While this is questionable to most of us, it is not to the military planners in Washington. After all, even the Palestine Liberation Organization became convinced that hijacking airplanes and ocean liners, or bombing Olympic athletes was not very productive. They learned that they would just have to live a life of fear and humiliation within their impoverished land for there seems no alternative. We have set back Iraqi civilization many decades, caused over one million casualties and inflicted unspeakable suffering amongst the innocent. Yet the military planners view it as a necessary war for it has brought military stability to the region, and assured the west of continued unchallenged access to the energy resources of the entire Middle East for decades to come. These were the gains and they are considerable, viewed from a geopolitical perspective. Were there alternatives to invasion? Could stable oil and gas production and market access have been assured by other means? Will continued pounding at remote bases in the AfPak mountains keep Al Qaeda at bay and the Pashtun resigned to living quietly in their tribal areas?

Is President Obama a wholehearted believer in this strategy, or is he merely restraining the Pentagon and the CIA from embarking upon even bigger offensives such as the 80,000 troop buildup in Afghanistan originally proposed by McCrystal (Obama bought him off with 30,000), and perhaps a subsequent military takeover of the unstable and thoroughly corrupt government of Pakistan? Will this demonstration of Presidential bloody-mindedness in Afghanistan be sufficient warning to Tehran not to pull on the United States' chain too hard about their right to produce enriched uranium. Equally, will this display of US determination continue to restrain Israel's President Netanyahu and his most frightening Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in Tel Aviv from pre-emptive attack against Iran? Obama must wake up seeing, as JFK saw each morning during the Cuban missile crisis, how close we all are to the apocalypse. A few rogue raids upon Iranian nuclear plants, an Iraqi missile attack against Israel, and retaliatory missiles fired upon Iranian sites from the US 5th Fleet in the Gulf, could well lead to the Iran's blockage of the Straits of Hormuz and the loss of the oil supply and the price stability we have won in the region since the 2003 invasion.

It was reassuring to hear General Petraeus complain the other day that: “Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world.” (Andrew Sullivan in Atlantic Magazine – 3/04/10). Petraeus sent a team of top CENTCOM officers to brief Admiral Mullen (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) on the topic and asking that the region be made a part of Petraeus' command. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Obama's Special Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, was "too old, too slow and too late."

It is all well and good to demand our troops withdraw from Afghanistan now and spill no more blood needlessly, but are we simply ignoring the realities of the global power struggle we are fully engaged in? Is Obama merely a captive of the CIA and Pentagon planners or can he somehow restrain and divert them while using all of his talents to pacify the radicals and calm down all the saber rattlers? We are watching a drama far more complex than we can clearly see through the fog spread before us on the evening news and reinforced by our politicians. Will we have to wait 45 years for another book like Douglass' to explain what really was going on back in 2010? Will we still be here to read it?

HARD CASH FOR HEALTH BUT NOT HEALTH-CARE

Never has the public been more effectively misled, ill-informed, and blatantly deceived than during the supposed health care debate over the past few months. We all have a naive belief that somehow debate between opposing arguments will yield truth and enlighten us as to the facts. This is rubbish!

There has been a televised debate between President Obama, Senators and Congressman who have more in common on the health care issue than differences. Most of them have accepted campaign financing from the health care lobby and are not seriously concerned about the soaring costs of prescription drugs nor the least bit troubled about leaving questions concerning our health up to the wisdom of insurance companies. Big Pharma and the five largest medical insurance companies have caused the health care crisis by their unrestrained thirst for outrageous profits. Yet, there has been no serious discussion in Congress about placing controls on these vultures or replacing them with a public-financed single payer system, as is the common practice in almost all industrialized countries in the world. President Obama began private negotiations with Big Pharma and the insurance thieves many months ago, assuring them they need not fear price controls nor a federally-managed health care system similar to Medicare. He never meet with the many associations of health care professionals such as the Nurses Association, Doctors for Universal Health Care, the American Medical Association or others who have advocated a single payer system.

LET THE LOBBY RULE – IT'S THE AMERICAN WAY
Congress has been besieged by well-paid agents for the insurance and drug industries, who now admit to having 13,739 paid lobbyists. Imagine – that's 25 for every member of Congress! Between 1999 and 2009, the medical industry budget for lobbying Congress has grown from $1.44 billion to $3.47 billion. Also, according to Health Care for America Now, premiums for family insurance grew more than twice as fast as the actual cost of medical care between 2000 and 2008. Notwithstanding these facts, the Heath Care industry’s trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), has consistently pointed to sky-rocketing health costs as the reason for all the growth in their premiums. (Washington Post 02/28/10).
Upon passage of the Health Care Reform bill in the House of Representatives last Sunday night, March 21st, the New York Times (David Sanger 03/22/10) assured us that “Obama will go down in history as one of the handful of presidents who found a way to reshape the nation's social welfare system”. Obama's methodology was actually quite simple: let the insurance thieves craft a piece of legislation that would make sure that they had captured the entire health care market without any restraints upon the prices they charge, and then tell the Democrats it was the best he could work out. If Obama had wanted to reduce health care costs, he would have worked vigorously for a single-payer system or at the very least placed some restraints upon the insurance and drug companies lust for profit. The fact that he negotiated privately with the drug and insurance industry from the start was an acknowledgment that they held the necessary political and financial power over both the White House and the Congress.

Obama assured the health care industry that their monopoly would not be endangered by any federally -run single payer option. He then acted out a series of phony populist rants against the insurance giants to make an already badly informed public think he was really on their side. A lot of people believed until the very end that their guy Obama was really intent upon serving their interests! WSWS reports (03/22/10) that: “Details of the legislation have been kept deliberately vague. The public presentation by the administration and congressional Democrats is designed to conceal far more than what it reveals. People are largely left in the dark as to the bill's provisions. There has been no honest public discussion”. In actuality, the bill promises cuts in Medicare, requires that families obtain insurance from private firms or pay a fine, and delivers a huge number of new premium payers to the private for-profit insurance companies. Employers will be under no obligation to provide health insurance to their workers and can avoid this responsibility with a minimum fine.

AN HISTORIC MOMENT INDEED
The New York Times editorial (03/23/10) in lauding what it calls Health Care 'Reform' argues: ”Over time the reforms could bring about sweeping changes in the way medical care is delivered and paid for. They could ultimately rival Social Security and Medicare in historic importance”. This is complete nonsense: Social Security and Medicare were actually wrested from the ruling establishment as the result of great social struggles by working men and women, whereas Obama's health care plan has been written by the insurance thieves themselves with no input by working class people, by labor unions, or by health care professionals. It bears no relation to genuine reform. The NYTimes suggests that the Obama plan would provide a brake on skyrocketing insurance premiums through the proposed Health Insurance Rate Authority. Unfortunately, this early proposal was eliminated during Congressional negotiations and no mechanism to control a rise in premiums any longer exists in the bill the President has signed. No one bothered to tell the NYTimes apparently.

The United States already spends twice as much as other industrialized countries on health care - $7,129 per person. If the system is not changed, soon one dollar out of every five spent by our citizens will be for health care alone, while the amazingly inefficient and costly insurance industry wastes 31 cents of every health care dollar on paperwork, corporate bonuses and profit. A total of 80% of registered Democrats favor universal single-payer health care. Yet Obama, with a rock solid majority in both Houses of Congress, has just imposed a health care plan that ignores the public will. Popular support was not considered important and could always be manipulated once you've banked the lobby's campaign contributions and gotten the media safely on your side. He discovered that it was a slam-dunk to get people like Denis Kucinich, John Conyers and Howard Dean to abandon their principles once he raised the promise of future campaign assistance and access to his good ear. With the promise of a few dams, bridges and roads to nowhere, he might have even bought himself some errant Republican votes, in the lubricious tradition of LBJ.

A TRIUMPH FOR HARD-WORKING AMERICANS, A OPEN DOOR FOR THIEVERY
The NYTimes called the Obama plan “a triumph for hard-working Americans by reigning in the worst practices of the insurance companies”. Yet this same newspaper's Business Section in that very same edition called it “a boon for hospitals, drug makers and private health insurance companies”. The share prices of Merck, Pfizer, Cigna and Aetna surged merrily. Health care is the most profitable sector of the American economy and, with the financial sector, the largest contributor to our politicians' re-election campaigns. There is a growing disillusionment with Obama, with the Democratic-led Congress that has given the banksters a trillion dollar social welfare program, and provided no further jobs program to counter increasing unemployment and increased reliance upon food stamps everywhere across the country. How was it that, after finally realizing that he would not get a single Republican to vote for real Health Care Reform, Obama even further weakened the bill by dropping even his watered-down public option clause? Didn't he have even a modicum of belief in reform?

KNIFING THE MIDDLE CLASS TO SAVE THE BANKSTERS

We are currently spending $1.4 trillion dollars more each year than we are collecting in taxes. President Barack Obama announced February 18th the appointment of a special blue-ribbon panel to recommend ways to cut back on Medicare and other domestic spending and to trim Social Security benefits. He named former Senator Alan Simpson, a Republican, and former White House Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles, a Democrat, as the co-chairmen. They have both long been committed to gutting the social nets that working people, safeguards built over many decades to make old age less of a burden for those not blessed with retirement funds or employer-funded health insurance. An 18 member panel, including 6 appointed by Obama, 6 appointed by Republican congressional leadership and 6 by Democratic leadership, will supposedly issue a report approved by at least 14 of their number this coming December. The goal will be to reduce the annual budget deficit from its current 12.4% of GDP to 3% by 2015: a not-inconsiderable task.

We are told by the banksters and many members of congress from both political parties that Social Security and Medicare are “unfunded liabilities”, a form of welfare we cannot afford. This is an outright lie – the social security money Obama wants to cut already belongs to the people. They paid it into the Federal Government trust fund over their entire working lives. Can he really take away that which does not belong to the government? Furthermore, the Social Security system is now healthy and self-funding. It is not in deficit and can continue to fund retirements for another 75 years if a modest adjustment in rates, amounting one half of one percent of GDP) is made in future. We are mislead on this issue by the sly deceptions of Wall Streeters and their paid political hacks in Washington. We can expect that this blue ribbon panel will again suggest privatizing Social Security and giving all these funds to the Wall Street Banksters to play with. As Paul Craig Roberts, former Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan said (Feb 17, 2010 Counterpunch): “After the latest crisis brought on by Wall Street's dishonesty and greed, trusting Wall Street to manage anyone's old age pension requires a leap of faith that no intelligent person can make... Having deprived the working population of homes, jobs, and health care, Wall Street is now after senior citizens' old age security”.

The annual budget deficit has soared under Bush 43: We had a $236 billion surplus in the final year of the Clinton administration, now our deficit has reached $1.4 trillion as Obama continues the policy of George W. Bush to throw trillions away on endless wars and costly and sophisticated armaments to defend our shores from primitively-armed bands of enemies such as the Taliban, the remnants of Al-Qaeda and assorted Somali pirates. The current deficit, is almost the same as that of Greece, whose government is about to go belly-up in default. This deep deficit is the result of (1) not only a bloated defense budget, but also (2) two costly foreign wars, (3) cutting tax rates on the wealthy from 70% to 35% under the Bushes, (4) fabricating enough tax loopholes to keep many large corporations from paying anything at all, (5) the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and (6) bailing out the banksters from their reckless gambling these past several years.

Expressed in terms of total national debt, we are currently faced with a $12.4 trillion total debt as of February 2010. It was only $3.2 trillion in Fiscal Year 2001 when Bush 43 took the reins and Cheney explained to him that deficits didn't matter. Obama's total proposed military budget is nearly $1 trillion including $880 billion for the Pentagon itself, plus secret (black) programs, military aid and bribes to Israel, Egypt and Pakistan, the costs of 225,000 mercenaries employed overseas by defense contractors like Blackwater, veterans' benefits, and intelligence services.
Afghani and Iraqi wars alone will cost $200 to $250 billion this year.

THE POLITICAL COVER COMMISSION
Why is the President cutting the retirement benefits of working people now, when we are in the depths of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Will putting less money in the hands of our senior citizens help to stimulate the economy? As Shamus Cooke explains: “Obama is being left with the dirtiest of missions – to cut the deficit by gutting domestic programs. He refuses to do this alone and talks about “bipartisan cooperation” (Counterpunch 02/16/10 ). Thus we have all this jockeying around to establish a Congressional Blue Ribbon Panel that will provide everyone with political cover while they stick the knife into the middle class while leaving the fat cats untouched. The strategy requires of course that there are no fingerprints on the knife. Even the corporate-friendly Wall Street Journal has called it “The Political Cover Commission” although their real motivation is to warn Republicans of the political fallout from cutting entitlements. The WSJ would rather let the Democrats take all the blame.

A ONE-TERM PRESIDENT?
When Democratic Party voters becomes fully aware of the complicity of Obama in this nasty business, they are likely to stay home in droves when he runs for re-election in 2012. Is he fated to be another of our one-term presidents? Maybe it will really take a Republican in the White House to rein in the banksters and bring Pentagon spending back under control, as George H.W. Bush once attemp

JACK BOOT DIPLOMACY ADDRESSES HUMAN NEED

In past weeks, we have watched America's response to Haitian's call for help. We have also seen the hysteria and fear stirred up by the “Underpants Bomber”. In both cases, Washington has lead with the punch they deliver best: armed military might. More than 15,000 heavily armed Marines, our best front-line combat specialists, are on the ground in Port au Prince. We have recently dispatched cruise missiles into primitive villages in remote sections of Yemen that the Underpants Bomber may have visited. We have brought back to our airports those same foolish see-through surveillance devices that were warehoused last year as impractical, so as to make sure none of us will even think about boarding a flight with a bomb anyplace in our underwear.

A NEW FRONT FOR OUR WAR ON TERROR: YEMEN

The events of the past month deserve to be seen in calendar order: First off:
two cruise missiles were launched from a US destroyer in the Red Sea on December 17th, eight days before the Underpants Bomber boarded Northwest Airlines flight 253 for Detroit. The US explained that the missiles were aimed at Al Qaeda hideouts in Sana'a and Abyan Provinces after the Yemeni government had indicated that a terrorist attack on the US and Yemeni installations in the city of Sana'a was imminent. It may be that we had advance information of some sort of Christmas Day incident and hoped a missile or two might change their mind (NYTimes 1/18/10 reporter Eric Lipton).

Immediately, on December 18th, the main stream media (Washington Post, NYTimes, LA Times, CBS Early Show, Wall Street Journal, CNN) flooded the airwaves with praise for Obama's quick retaliatory strikes in Yemen but without an ounce of independently gathered data on the size or the reality of this terrible Yemeni threat to our Homeland. A total 34 Al Qaeda fighters and 60 civilians were reported killed. Al Hayat in Cairo reported that immediately after the missile attack, Al Qaeda raided government centers in the Ludat District of Abyan and apparently took control (Long War Journal 12/19/09). The US has had Special Forces deployed in Yemen for some years and has increased their numbers and equipment capabilities recently. We have also used drones to eliminate a carload of people we didn't like way back in 2002.

Then, on December 25th, a young Nigerian known to US intelligence and already on at least some of our many watch lists, boarded a Northwest Airlines flight in Amsterdam headed for Detroit and attempted to ignite a primitive explosive device. The media appeared on our screens in full battle-dress, supported by all those former Pentagon and Intel type they use as advisors. Fear was reignited in the American public while the bomb on Flight 253 was quickly snuffed out. A little after the fact (8 years), CNN tells us that: “Field Marshall Ali Abdullah Saleh (president) had reached an agreement to allow the US to fly cruise missiles, fighter jets, and armed drones in Yemen airspace (CNN 12/30/10). The “US is clearly looking for fresh targets for a potential retaliatory strike that can be specifically linked to the Northwest Airline incident over Detroit and its planning”. Obama pledged that “all elements of US power will be used in response to the failed attack on Flight 253”. The US plans to give $190 million in military aid to Yemen in 2010 compared with only $4.6 million in 2006 and $67 million in 2009. We can only wonder where all this money goes in a country which has up until now tried to make peace with the small band of Al Qaeda militants in the Yemen's southeastern provinces. The Yemen Foreign Ministry declared on January 3rd that the threat posed by Al-Qaeda was exaggerated and that the Yemeni government was capable of tackling the militants in its country without foreign help” (AntiWar 1/3/10).

But such reassurances don't count for much when the US has gotten its dander up and needs to show off to its domestic television audience its ability for smack down each threat quickly and effectively. STRATFOR opined (1/06/10) that “Obama feels political pressure to initiate military action in Yemen to reassure Americans that something is being done to counter this latest jihadist threat.” We are warned that Yemen is strategically positioned on the Straits of Bab el Mandeb between Yemen and Djibouti through which Saudi and Kuwaiti oil tankers must pass on their way to European ports via the Red Sea. An unfriendly takeover of these straits by Yemeni terrorists could theoretically cut off the flow of 3.5 million barrels of oil a day. I can't imagine such a blockade holding up oil tankers for much more than an afternoon when confronted by the Sixth Fleet. “An excuse for US militarization of the waters around Bab el Mandeb would give Washington another major link in its pursuit of control of the seven most critical chokepoints (Straits of Sumatra, the entrance to the Persian/Arab Gulf, Gibraltar, Panama, Yellow Sea, etc) around the world” according to F. William Engdahl writing for Global Research (1/05/10).

HEY LET'S CONNECT A FEW DOTS
STRATFOR's George Friedman laments (01/03/10): “While Al Qaeda Prime might be in shambles, other groups are using the brand name – such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, while capabilities of jihadist terrorists overall have declined. This Christmas Day terror attack was relatively feeble and not well conceived but it raises the question as to why Obama is focusing on Afghanistan when the threat from Al Qaeda spinoffs can originate anywhere? There is no strategic solution to such low level terrorism”. The question remains as to why, to use Obama's simplistic language, “we didn't connect the dots”. A startling answer may have been given on Jan. 20th at hearings of the Senate Homeland Security Committee by Michael Leitner, Director of the Counterterrorism Center: “I will tell you that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here to track their movement and activities” (CongressDaily 01/22/10). In other words, the Administration has made the judgment that an incident (like that in Detroit) is worth the risk. Incidentally, no major media have printed this testimony and no senators have publicized it, a clear sign that the Administration does not want anyone to help us connect the dots.

MEANWHILE UP NORTH THE SAUDIS ARE BOMBING SHII'ITES
President Saleh has concentrated his attention in recent months upon the Al Houthi (Shi'ite) rebellion in the north and the secessionist uprisings in the south where many resent their low economic status. The Al Qaeda (Sunni) people out in Marib have not been on his agenda and in fact, they have provided the government with support in fighting Shi'ites up north. Saleh has allowed the Saudi airforce to intrude across his northern borders and bomb totally defenseless Shi'ite villagers. Letting the Saudis intrude, after they banned Yemenis from working in the Kingdom after 911. isn't likely to increase his already shaky popularity. The Saudis have lost 113 ground troops so far in their assault – their first real military battle since King Abdul Aziz had tea with FDR in 1945 on the deck of the Destroyer Quincy, and quite near to where the miussles were launched and unwittingly turned his kingdom into an American protectorate. On January 25th, the Houthis offered Saudi Arabia a cease fire and the Red Cross reported that 175,000 people in the Houthi region has been displaced by the Saudi invasion force. Yemen has forbidden reporters entry to the region.

HAITI

Leading with what we presumably do best, the Pentagon made sure there were plenty of young M16-laden Marines keeping order in Port-au-Prince, while five plane loads of hospitals and medicines supplied by Medecins Sans Frontieres had to wait five days for permission to land. A French flight carrying an emergency field hospital was also denied permission to land and aid flights by the Red Cross and the World Food Program were diverted to Santa Domingo. The Pentagon has ineffectively taken charge in Haiti and have dispatched combat troops to distribute food, tend the sick, free those still entrapped, and bury the dead. None of these humanitarian tasks were ever taught during their basic training. The message is clear: 'stand back, the Pentagon is in charge here'. The UN has responded by providing no initiatives, and the European Union is obediently waiting a call from Washington before taking any useful steps, all the while disavowing that there is any “suggestion of a rift” with the US, according to Financial Times 01/19/10. Despite these attempts to smooth things over, one French Minister slammed US troops for seizing Haiti's only airport: “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti” (01/18/10 Antiwar.com).

Hillary Clinton, on a quick flight to Haiti, explained that their President Rene Preval had just signed a decree imposing curfew and martial-law conditions: “The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us” she stated proudly. Beyond the 15 to 20,000 US boots on the ground, there is a 7,000 man Brazilian led UN peacekeeping force. Brazil's Defense Minister warned that peace keepers “could struggle if there were large scale protests. Haiti could quickly descent into rioting if 3 million hungry, thirsty and traumatized earthquake survivors don't receive emergency aid soon” (WSWS 01/18/10). This was followed up by their tear-gassing starving protestors at the airport gates and the firing of rubber bullets at those taking groceries from collapsed stores.

ANOTHER PATHETIC KATRINA RESPONSE
Guido Bertolaso, head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency, that had responded quickly to the earthquake in the city of Aquila (Abruzzo) last year, denounced the US-led effort in Haiti as “pathetic” and compared it to the Hurricane Katrina experience. “It is a truly powerful show of force, but it is completely out of touch with reality. “ he complained: “When confronted with a situation of chaos, the US tends to confuse military intervention with emergency operations that should not be entrusted to the armed forces.”

The World Food Program's Jarry Emmanuel told the NYTimes that most of the 200 flights a day to Haiti are for the US military. Their priorities are to secure the country, ours are to feed people. We have to get those priorities in synch”. The EU increased its aid to Haiti to $500 million, five times the US donation, Meanwhile Canada offered 1,000 soldiers in addition to their 1,000 now therewith the Haitian UN force and threw in two warships.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned Haitians trying to flee to the US that “you will not qualify for TPS (Temporary Protected Status).” In other words, they would be deported back to Haiti to struggle with the tear gas, and the lack of food and shelter. Seven Coast Guard ships are patrolling off Haiti to prevent boatloads of refugees from reaching US shores. The main stream media has given the American viewing public heart-warming shots of a few Americans bringing orphans to our homeland while never mentioning the Coast Guard cutters imposing an embargo on escape for any others from this natural holocaust.

GLOBAL WARMING - FACT OR FICTION?

This is our First Anniversary Edition of Obama-Watch. We started in November 2009 while Obama Bliss still swept our shores. From a few dozens hits on the web we now have three thousand readers for each Edition! I don't know most of them but I enjoy their comments and encouragement. We have also added a new Web Address: www.obama-watch.com . Previously we were only www.obama-watch.us. If you continue to plug in the earlier dot.us version it will automatically flip you over onto the new dot.com version. No sweat - no undue warming.

The threat of Global Warming has become accepted wisdom in America. Between the Al Gore book and film, the pictures of polar bears leaping amongst ice flows, and snippets of data about melting glaciers and how warm it has become recently, we have become captives of this calamitous scenario. In this essay, I have tried to separate fact from forecast, to examine actual climate history rather than computer generated projections of The Cataclysm That Awaits Us from Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Is Planet Earth really heating up inexorably? Is it because of CO 2 emissions from fossil-fueled power stations? I will lay out a few of the key questions and cite the evidence that exists. You can decide for yourself where reality lies, but first look at some of the data and arguments that question Big Al's simplistic forecast of a warm and watery doom if we don't change our ways right now. I hold no brief for dirty coal fired power production, and I believe that moving towards renewable power sources away from gasoline guzzling cars makes good sense. My home is fully solar powered and I'll purchase an all-electric car in 2010.

I first became wary of 'made-up' climate data some years ago, while managing a large irrigation project in Algeria, We lacked sufficient meteorologic data to predict rainfall patterns and thus available water for irrigated agriculture. We were forced to 'fill-in' large gaps in the historic rainfall data where trees had grown over rain gauges, or where the French had inadvertently burned a valuable meteorologic station while napalming miserably poor villages in the Atlas Mountains. I was reminded of this when I began to read of the paucity of reliable information on global temperatures before the advent of satellites in 1975, and the very spurious simulating of past surface temperatures by counting petrified tree rings, by drilling ice cores and the like. We are unable to track carbon dioxide levels very far back in time, but we do know that much of Greenland's shoreline was very warm and green in 1400 and supported herds of cattle. I have found that much of the current UN-sponsored research relies upon computer simulation to fill in their model of the environment. However, simulation is not observation and the resultant 'made-up' data cannot be verified. The lesson to be learned when relying upon computer simulation was stated by the famed mathematician John von Neumann: “Give me four adjustable parameters and I can simulate an elephant. Give me one more and I can make his trunk wiggle.”

Despite the claims by various authorities, no consensus exists amongst scientists as to the existence of AGW. Yet, if you listen to the major mass media, you will be told that all serious scientists agree with the Al Gore hypothesis. “The debate in the scientific community is over” - Al Gore said on Meet the Press in 2009. But Al, there has been no real debate. Global Warming deniers are treated with about as much respect as those who openly question the holocaust. Seldom is an AGW denier allowed into a television studio nor given space in the print media to express another point of view. “Scientists who dissent from the global warming alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse” (Lindzen: Global Research.com 4/7/07).

The establishment of the UN sponsored IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) consisting of 600 scientists from 40 countries and its acceptance as authoritative at the 1992 Rio Conference represented the victory for politics over science and the firm establishment of the global warming paradigm as accepted wisdom. IPCC has very deliberately suppressed research by those who fail to support the notion that human actions such as fossil fuel burning power plants have caused a momentous increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and this has inhibited the earth's ability to cool itself by reflecting excess heat back into space.

The problem of an official and very politically managed IPCC controlling the publication of scientific data and studies was pointed out in 2007 by the President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Kraus who said a parallel panel was needed to avoid the one-sidedness of the scientific debate over climate change monopolized by IPCC (NIPCC Report March 2009). The eminent scientist, Roger Revelle once had Al Gore as a student. Later, in his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance”, Gore credits Revelle with introducing him to the horrors of AGW. However, Revelle changed his mind in the face of further research, stating (Singer Starr & Revelle, Cosmos Club Journal) that we knew too little about global climate to implement any drastic measures. Gore staffers and Harvard associates immediately started an intense campaign to have Revelle's name removed from 1991 paper that Gore had cited.

In response to the attempted monopolization of climate data by IPCC, an alternative scientific panel, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), was organized in Vienna in 2007 without governmental funding and with no connections to politicians. In June 2009, the first NIPCC report was published by The Heartland Institute entitled Climate Change Reconsidered. This report, some 880 pages in length, is a most comprehensive critique of the IPCCs' positions and lists 35 contributors and reviewers from 14 countries as well as the names of 31,478 American scientists who have signed a petition saying “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, explains how the UN-sponsored IPCC dominated the climate change debate up until this year: “There has been change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation programs”. In climate-related sciences, computer simulation of the environment has replaced observation, and these simulations are seldom tested against the past history of climate variation. Available historical data are inserted into the program, often without adequate controls as to reliability, gaps in data are adjusted through 'fill-in' programs which make up data that looks a lot like real data, and forecasts of future weather patterns, sea levels, and earth temperatures are then produced. There are no dependable temperature data earlier than 1895, and therefore all sorts of techniques have been devised to infer past temperatures from ice cores, from rings on well-preserved trees, and from evidence of human settlements in now-frozen tundra. We are working in very immature fields of science such as oceanography, geography, climatology and meteorology. Their data base being small, the tendency is to simulate past climatological patterns when direct observation of reliable data is not possible. This is dangerous, in the words of Frederick Seitz, (President Emeritus of Rockefeller University, Past President of the Nat'l. Academy of Sciences, and Chairman of the Science and Environmental Policy Project ): “It is foolish to impose drastic measures and harsh economic penalties when an environmental problem is largely theoretical and and not substantiated by observations”.

WHAT IS THE GLOBAL WARMING HYPOTHESIS?
The basic tenets of the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis are as follows:
1.Planet Earth is experiencing worldwide atmospheric warming, threatening life as we know it.
2.This warming is unprecedented because average worldwide temperatures for at least a thousand years have shown no significant variation until the last seventy years, which correlates with a thirty-percent increase in carbon dioxide gas generated by industrial activity.
3.“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is “very likely” due to observed increases in man-made greenhouse gas concentrations such as CO2 (carbon dioxide). (IPCC - AR4 2007 report). Heat absorbed by the planet earth from the sun cannot be released as infra-red radiation and is thus trapped by these greenhouse gases.
4.The burning of fossil fuels and the resultant increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a major component of the greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are increasing rapidly.
5.The glacial ice caps are melting precipitously and as they do the sea levels will rise inundating vast areas of our shores.
6.If we just find a way to reduce the production of CO2 and other greenhouse gases by mankind's activities, all will be well.

Is global warming the same as Climate Change? No, climate change is a broader term and refers to the long term changes in the earth's temperature either as a result of natural warming and cooling cycles of the earth, and a result of human activity. Climate change does not necessarily predict the advent of an inexorable global warming. The Medieval Warm Period from roughly 900 to 1300 C.E. and the Little Ice Age from 1650 to 1800 C.E. are examples of natural climate change. Mankind was not burning large quantities of fossil fuels at that time.

IS GLOBAL WARMING A PROVEN FACT?
Evidence of warming is not evidence that the cause is anthropogenic (man-made). The retreat of the Greenland Ice Sheet does not prove that mankind is responsible for it. The very long term fluctuation in the glacier mass depends upon many factors other than average global temperature. Way back in the Eocene Age, some 50 million years ago, the ice sheet was so small that a type of alligator swam around Spitsbergen Island, well above the Arctic Circle, and long before the discovery of fossil fuel.

The IPCC conclusion that the 1990s were the hottest decade of the millennium has been soundly refuted. The so-called “hockey stick” analogy first discussed by Climate Scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University in 1997 and made popular by Al Gore's book “A Inconvenient Truth” and his 2006 film used proxy tree ring data and ice core borings to prove that the 20th century was the warmest in 1000 years. This data completely obscured the fact that during the Medieval Warm Period temperatures soared far above what we have experienced anytime since. The hockey stick graph constructed by IPCC researchers appears relatively flat for over 900 years and then, about 1920, begins to rocket upward, with but a brief pause around 1970, before heading still higher with no relief in sight. They accomplished this 'trick' by shifting from the proxy data sources to actual temperature readings in about 1960. The IPCC concluded the graph's sudden change in character during the early 20th century correlated with the introduction and increasing use of fossil fuel energy in that period and that production of carbon dioxide represented the principal man-made greenhouse gas culprit”. (John McLaughlin, American Thinker 9/29/09). Mixing one source of data with another leads to total misrepresentation. Dr. Edward Wegman, Chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee, reported this to the House of Representatives and stated that the statistical methodology underpinning the 'hockey stick' version was, indeed, profoundly flawed and that the McIntyre & McKitrick analysis was correct and valid. The Wegman report and data from Greenland cores and other studies so thoroughly undermined the Mann hypothesis that it was not mentioned in the text of the 4th IPCC assessment (2007). Nevertheless that simple hockey stick graph “became canonical - it was the consensus view and it seems even today that anyone publicly questioning the conclusion was in for a ferocious reception” (McIntyre & McKitrick, Environment and Energy 2003).

Wegman criticized Dr. Mann and and his IPCC colleagues for “their systematic unwillingness to share research materials with other than like-minded analysts and concluded that Mann's assessment that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade and 1998 the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis” (he erroneously cited maximum and minimum global temperatures rather than mean global temperatures as commonly used in other analysis). In fact, 1934 turns out to have been considerably hotter. Satellite data, the most reliable method we have to measure the earth's temperature, has shown no warming trend since 1998. The most reliable U.S. surface temperature data show that from 1940 to the late 1970s temperatures actually declined, prompting concern about a coming ice age. Temperatures then increased until an El Nino spike in 1998. Since then temperatures have again been declining.

DOES THE INCREASE IN CO2 IN THE ATMOSPHERE CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING?
The correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide levels is weak and inconclusive. As an example the climate cooled from 1940 to 1975 while the CO2 level in the atmosphere was rising rapidly. There has been no warming trend in the current century as measured most accurately by satellites despite a continuing rapid rise in CO2. Aside from man-made sources, CO2 in the atmosphere is released from the oceans, from the decay of plant life, from animal manure, and from melting tundra. It is also reabsorbed by forests and by the oceans. We have very little data with which to measure the total impact of all of these factors, far less than would be necessary to predict the net effects of any mandated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. We do know however, that from the industrial revolution until WWI, (1850 to 1915) CO2 increased at an average of 4.5% per year, reflecting perhaps the great surge in the burning of coal. Then, the rate of increase slowed to 1.3 %/year until 1945, and subsequently increased at a rate of 4.3%/year from 1945 to 1975, supposedly as the world recovered from the depression and WWII. From 1975 through 2000 the annual rise in CO2 in the atmosphere was only to 1.2% per year.

WHAT IS THIS GREENHOUSE EFFECT?
The notion that more CO2 in the cooler upper atmosphere will trap solar heat and thereby warm the earth is a violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – heat cannot flow uphill from these cooler gases high in the sky to the hotter earth's surface. (John McLaughlin, American Thinker 11/27/09). Global emissions of CO2 have increased 40% since 1990, and the portion from fossil fuel burning went up 27%. But even yet, the total quantity of CO2 emitted from human enterprises only adds 10 parts per million to the total already held in the atmosphere (Roy Spencer, Climate Confusion, March 2009). Expressed another way, we dump 28.4 billion tonnes of CO2 each year into the air which already holds 3,000,000 billion tonnes of CO2. This does not seem like a suffocating quantity of man-made pollution, particularly when one considers that half the CO2 released ends up being re-absorbed by the oceans and the flora. The total quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is 387 ppm of CO2 plus 1.75 ppm of Methane, 0.3 ppm of NO2, and 0.0003 of fluorocarbons. No substantive data have yet been developed that proves the earth's surface temperature rise is directly related to the burning of fossil fuels. The use of the analogy to glass greenhouses, is, in the opinion of Gerlich and Tscheuschner, (International Journal of Modern Physics, March 2009) a deliberate misrepresentation. In a glass greenhouse, sunlight warms the air inside the glass windows and this air subsequently warms, by simple convection, the plant life in flower pots. No infrared radiation takes place in a glass greenhouse. “In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics or in engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.”

WHAT OTHER FACTORS COULD CONTRIBUTE TO GLOBAL WARMING?
Other factors beyond greenhouse gases have considerable impact upon global warming and cooling. These include: (1) increased output from the sun, (2) increased absorption of the sun's heat due to a change in the Earth's reflectivity, (3) El Nino, (4) volcanic explosions, (5) variations in the rate of absorption of CO2 by the oceans, (6) expansion of the biosphere (forests), and (7) the Iris Effect. The Iris Effect (Lindzen, Chou and Hou, American Meteorological Society, 2001) describes the major warming of upper level strati-form clouds in the tropics. During periods when surface temperatures increase, the 'iris effect' of these strati-form clouds decreases, countering the warming trend. This temperature balancing was found to be sufficient to significantly reduce any impact from higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. To further confound the IPCC scenario, ice core data confirms that increased CO2 in the atmosphere generally follows rising sea temperatures as the solubility of CO2 decreased. It does not precede it as the AGW model would have it. Yet, IPCC continues to say that it is 'very likely' (more than 90% chance) that humans are causing a global temperature change that will reach 3.2 to 7.2 degrees F by 2100.

BUT AREN'T THE GLACIERS MELTING?
Some glaciers are melting and a large number are actually increasing in coverage and thickness.
In Greenland, one of the largest glaciers has doubled its rate of advance recently, moving forward 7.2 miles per year. After gathering data for more than ten years, a team of Norwegian-led scientists has found that the Greenland Ice Sheet is actually growing thicker at its interior. Ignoring this data, James Hansen of NASA told CBS' "60 Minutes" recently that the edges of the Greenland ice sheet are melting rapidly and that the speed of this melting proves that man-made greenhouse gases are responsible. But this sort of melting also occurred 1000 years ago when the Vikings moved in 3000 people and cattle and communities thrived for 300 years. The name Greenland came from the lush green of the meadows along the coasts. When the Little Ice Age began, the Viking had to leave in 1408. Argentina's Perito Moreno Glacier (the largest glacier in Patagonia), is advancing at the rate of 7 feet per day. The 250 km² ice formation, 30 km long, is one of 48 glaciers fed by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. This ice field, located in the Andes system shared with Chile, is the world's third largest reserve of fresh water. While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed in recent years and ice coverage diminished, the interior of Antarctica has been colder and ice accumulation has been extensive. A study published by the American Meteorological Society has found that glaciers are only shrinking in the eastern Himalayas. Further west, in the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, glaciers are actually thickening and expanding.

Ice cores drilled deep into the Greenland ice sheet document a natural, sudden-but-moderate 1500-year global warming cycle which raised temperatures about 2 degrees C above the mean for 750 years or so and then abruptly dropped the temperatures 2 degrees C below the mean (at the latitude of northern Europe). The melting ice from the Medieval Warming did not flood London, and it's unlikely to happen in any Modern Warming Cycle. The melting of 100 cubic kilometers of Greenland ice would raise sea levels by only 0.01 inch. Recent satellite research shows Greenland's interior ice sheet has thickened 2 inches in the past 11 years, because warmer temperatures are evaporating more seawater to make more snow.

WON'T GLACIAL MELT CAUSE RISING SEA LEVEL?
George Stephanopolous said on ABC TV's Meet the Press recently that “the best estimates of sea level rise are much less dire than Gore suggests in his movie” In response, Gore whined that scientists just don't have the models that would give them a high level of confidence one way or the other – “its that the scientists just don't know”. But that's not how you sell books and movies, is it Al?

WHAT ABOUT THE WARMING AND COOLING CYCLES IN THE PAST
We have been through this panic about the Good Planet Earth heating up or freezing quite a few times: “Weather changes and the media are just as capricious” (Global Research May 2006.). Here are a few examples:

1895: New York Times headline 2/24/95: Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again
1902: L.A. Times: Disappearing Glaciers in the Alps with a persistence that means their final annihilation
1920: NYTimes: After a one-half degree temperature rise, Earth is Steadily Growing Warmer
1924: Arctic Explorer Macmillan Reports Signs of a New Ice Age
1933: NYTimes 3/27/33: America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1766
1954: Fortune Magazine: Climate – The Heat May Be Off Again
1974: Time Magazine 6/24/74: The cooling trend is here to stay
1975: NYTimes: A Major Cooling Widely Considered To Be Inevitable
1981: NYTimes 8/22/81: Global Warming of an Almost Unprecedented Magnitude
2006” NYTimes 12/27/06: Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming

CUI BONO - WHO BENEFITS FROM AGW
Six months before COP15, business and government leaders met quietly in Copenhagen for the Business Summit on Climate Change. Al Gore was there along with Ban Ki Moon and a large assortment of financial and energy business executives. “The Summit considered how the twin challenges of climate change and the current economic crisis could be turned into opportunity if business and government work together to stimulate low carbon growth”. (Copenhagen Climate Council May 2009). This wonderfully worded phrase translates into 'how can we use the notion, once approved at COP15 for a low carbon economy, to make a huge profit trading greenhouse gas emissions?'

So, Cui Bono? Who actually gains from the Anthropogenic Global Warming Craze:

First: The producers of electric power: The imposition of carbon taxes upon fossil fueled power stations will give utility companies all the rationale they need to hike electricity rates way up. Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who engineered the Cap and Trade legislation through the House of Representatives in June, admitted: “I certainly don't claim I know everything about this bill. We relied upon the IPCC scientists and there is a consensus that there is a problem with global warming and having an impact that we need to reduce. That's what I know. I rely upon the scientists”. And with no further effort to determine the truth about Global Warming, Waxman has pushed this legislation that will heavily tax certain industries, significantly raise energy prices, and increase the cost of almost all produced goods.

Second: The nuclear power industry – who have been arguing desperately for over 25 years for the resurrection of this terribly costly alternative power source.

Third: Carbon Derivatives Traders: Blyth Masters, the acknowledged inventor of the infamous credit default swaps, and now heading JPMorgan's carbon trading efforts, recently stated: “Banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost. Derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix”. Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity – in this case, carbon as in CO2. (Global Research 12/8/09). Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington State has argued against this and proposes that state governments be given the right to ban such unregulated financial products. ”The derivatives market has done so much damage to our economy and is nothing more than a very high stakes casino, except that casinos have to abide by regulations”. Speculators could easily end up controlling U.S. carbon prices and trigger the same type of boom-or-bust cycles that have buffeted other commodities. Banks will attempt to inflate the carbon market by recruiting investors from hedge funds and pension funds, Wall Street is going to sell it as an investment to people that have nothing to do with carbon, Then suddenly investment managers are dominating the asset class, and nothing is related to actual supply and demand. We have seen this before.” (Hedge fund manager at Masters Capital Management LLC).

Fourth: Carbon Offsets Marketers: Every major financial house has set up carbon trading operations and a recent report predicts that “the carbon market could become double the size of the vast oil market”. This carbon market could replace the 'wealth' that evaporated with the housing bust. However, it all depends upon achieving a consensus that CO2 emissions are the single biggest threat to the environment. Trading existing emissions for rights to CO2-eating rain forests does not reduce greenhouse gases one bit, but it sure does look good on paper. The head of Barclay's Trading predicts: “Carbon will be the world's biggest market and could grow from $60 billion currently to $1 trillion within a decade” (Renewable Energy World, 3/5/09). Its a wonderful scam – how can anyone possibly be against reducing that terrible carbon in the atmosphere?

Fifth: Many dedicated followers of the international environmental movement have taken on the cause of Global Warming as true believers. They will find they have strange bedfellows from the nuclear power camp as well as ravenous carbon derivatives sharks and power generating companies. The Third World nations of Africa, believing that they will suffer most from AGW and rising tides, have in many cases made common cause with the environmentalists. Notwithstanding, the biggest producers of CO2 will continue to stonewall any serious attempt to reduce carbon emissions, and the environmentalists will eventually drop away as they discover this to have been a false alarm. The movement for reducing environmental damage from coal mining and damage to our lungs from breathing the smoke from coal burning will suffer a set back and the push towards solar and other renewable energy sources may also slow down. This is regrettable.

COPENHAGEN COLLAPSES AS THE PLANET COOLS AND TRADERS WEEP
In November 2009, just weeks before the COP15 Summit, a data bank of over 3000 emails exchanges between key climate change scientists and researchers revealed a number of instances of scientific dishonesty and deceit and the “fixing of climate data to fit the policy” and to mask the fact that temperatures are now falling, not rising. Some of this is illustrated by the 'hockey stick' analogy discussed above. Strangely, the counteroffensive by the climate scientists whose emails were published never denies their authenticity but instead they state that “the Global Warming Consensus holds irrespective of their actions to selectively manipulate data”. Global Research 11/30/09). Oh?

Perhaps the angriest speaker at the opening of COP15 was Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of IPCC. He roundly condemned the email hackers not the data manipulators: “Given the wide-ranging nature of change that is likely to be taken in hand some naturally find it inconvenient to accept its inevitability. The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC”. All of this sounds a bit hollow when one considers that Dr. Pachauri, whom the BBC called 'the world top climate scientist” is actually a former railway engineer and economist, not a climate scientists. He has, since his elevation at IPCC, accumulated a worldwide portfolio of conflicting business interests as head of the Tata Energy Research Institute, an arm of the huge Tata Group in India, as a director of India Oil, and as an advisor to Credit Suisse Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and a number of other firms. His international business interest as a lobbyist for Tata Group have made several important 'climate skeptics” question his objectivity and suitability to head the IPCC.

So, what will happen now as people come to recognize the truth about AGW? Derivatives Traders will do their damnedest to keep the climate disaster story cooking. The major polluters like the US and China who have never seriously intended to cut back on CO2 emissions anyway will not need to adjust. The environmental movement will need to refocus their work towards stimulating renewable energy sources and all electric cars. The rest of us will need to remember that the consensus view always has something to hide. We must always question the accepted wisdom.

24TH EDITION - NOVEMBER 26, 2009

The Senate in SB 111, and the House in HR 3962, have finally passed similar health care legislation. We will now be forced to watch 536 legislators, most of them obscenely subsidized by the health insurance industry and Big Pharma. carve out like the bloated breast meat of the Thanksgiving turkey, a succulent meal for their benefactors. We had once expected, listening to the campaign rhetoric of President Obama, that after all these years we would be served a plate called Health Care Reform. In May 2007, speaking to the AFL-CIO, Obama promised health care for all by the end of his first term. The two bills now being masticated on Capitol Hill do not provide universal health care and do not even promise reform: the “R word” is not mentioned in either version of the bill. The plans so far passed in Congress only expand health care by between 31 and 36 million, still leaving 19 million people uninsured.

KUCINICH SAYS “I VOTE NO AND HERE'S WHY”
Dennis Kucinich voted with the most conservative Republicans to defeat Nancy Pelosi's compromise bill: “We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money by not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are.  But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles, they are simply trying to make a profit.  That is our system.

“Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution.  They are driving up the cost of health care.  Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills.  The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%.  It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care.  Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.  

“But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care.  In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million uninsured Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high. This would result in a windfall $70 billion in new annual revenue from taxpayers.  This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.”

The 'robust public option' which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry, was whittled down in the House so it now would cover only some 6 million of the 50 million uninsured. An amendment allowing for states to pursue single-payer health care independently was stripped on orders from Obama. It remains doubtful that a strong public option alternative to being forced to buy health care protection from the insurance monopoly will survive in the Senate.

We seem to be offered a program guaranteed to assure that those who caused the health care crisis by their predatory practices will now be subsidized by the government and rewarded with an vast expansion of their customer base. We are given few assurances that those who profit from the sick will not charge whatever they care to and make little effort to restrain costs or eliminate the 31 % administrative red tape we now endure. Medicaid, where the poor and indigent have gone when in need, will be eliminated, Medicare, the system that has worked for those over 65 will be cut back in scope and benefits.

WHY NOT MEDICARE FOR ALL?
The bills sponsored by John Conyers in the House and by Bernie Saunders in the Senate would have been a huge net savings to Americans, by eliminating the need for the Medicaid ($470 billion saved), the Veterans Administration health care system ($100 billion saved), and pubicly-funded charity care in hospitals ($300 billion saved). It would have also eliminated $150 billion in private health insurance administrative costs, and $75 to $100 billion in insurance industry profits. That totals $1 trillion dollars, people!! When the costs of Medicare for under 65 years olds is added in at a net cost of perhaps $750 to $800 billion, we are left with a savings of over $200 billion a year. (Dave Lindorff –dlindorff @mindspring.com). We have not included on the savings side of the ledger the enormous savings to business and private citizens who now must purchase expensive health insurance policies – this alone amounts to $1.5 trillion. Given all of these benefits, is it small wonder that we cannot take seriously the Republican hand wringing about the enormous net costs of Medicare for All to the government? We are being fed a lot of really misleading propaganda. Isn't it strange that while the Pelosi Bill promises no restraint on the escalation health care costs for those under 65, they have written in a $570 billion cut in Medicare payments – the part of the healthcare package that the insurance companies will not profit from.

MAYBE THE ABORTION BATTLE CAN SINK THE ENTIRE BILL
At the moment, the House bill has banned insurance coverage for abortion from receiving any subsidies from the federal government. The Senate is trying to find a way around this issue. If Obama and the more progressive forces would insist upon abortion being covered, then maybe the 60 votes needed in the Senate will not be possible and we will have seen the last of this fraudulent subsidization of a crooked insurance industry. Then we can take a deep breath and get back to work on real health care reform.

THE PEOPLE WANT A PUBLIC OPTION
Right now, the Public Option for those without the ability to pay full premiums has the support of 76% of Americans. (ABC/Washington Post poll 10/20/09). Single Payer Universal Health Care for everyone is supported by 57% in the same poll and the support of 88 Democrats in the House under Single Payer Bill HR 676. If Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Eric Massa (D-NY) can convince just a few of these 88 that HR 3962 is NOT BETTER THAN NOTHING then the entire Pelosi Bill can be defeated right now. After all, it only squeaked through by 5 votes. Marcia Angell, former Editor of New England Journal of Medicine explains that HR 3962 “simply throws money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry”

OBAMA SCRAMBLES HERE AND THERE

President Obama seems particularly 'at sixes and sevens' these past few weeks, as the Brits like to say. He suffers from an inability to focus on one issue sufficiently to bring it to a decision. It feels like drifting.

ITEM 1: WHO SHALL WRITE THE HEALTH CARE BILL?

Bill Clinton entered the White House with universal health care high on his agenda, so high in fact that he gave the task of crafting this legislation to his wife. Nine months later Hillary's Health Care Program had collapsed under Republican attack. Learning from this, Barack Obama decided it might be safer to let others take responsibility for drafting a new health care bill. After 9 months of talk, we are left with a leaderless tangle of proposals ranging from Universal Medicare for All to letting the insurance industry and Big Pharma just give us more of the same expensive and inequitable treatment to which we have all become accustomed.

We still do not know what it is that President Obama recommends nor what priorities he has established. The Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate is just as weak and spineless on Medicare as it has been on the war in Iraq since assuming the majority back in 2006. Leaving the job to them seems foolish at best and downright deceitful at worst, if we are to trust in Obama's early support for real health care reform. For a while recently it almost looked as if he wanted Republican Senator Olympia Snowe to craft the legislation, although no one knows exactly what she wants nor whether she could attract other Repubs to her position. Harry Reid is just as coy as Obama when it comes to revealing his preferences on the issue. Nancy Pelosi sometimes speaks as if she wants an real Medicare-type option but then again seems quite willing to take an even weaker position on the public option if it would get her a few Blue Dog votes.

Meanwhile, we have all become bored and confused while watching the well-funded insurance lobby continue to distribute their gifts on Capital Hill. We will probably end up with a weak gruel rather than the strong medicine that our health care crisis needs. However, you can be sure the President will point to it as a wonderful break-through and the health insurance and drug industries remain in charge of our health. (Is this the policy of a decisive President?)

ITEM 2: SHALL WE JUST STAY IN AFGHANISTAN FOREVER?

President Obama and his Secretary of Defense Gates have allowed General McChrystal and his press agents free reign to tout a program involving the dispatch of perhaps 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan and a dedicated counter-insurgency program lasting up to ten years. Obama insists he has made no final decision as to the number of additional troops he will ask for and insists that he is taking his time because he wants to get it right. Leaders of the key Congressional Committees have been pressing for McCrystal to present his strategy for two months now but Gates had kept him out of Washington. McCrystal speaks to Obama on video and even has time to appear remotely on 60 Minutes and to fly to London for a BBC Television interview, but there seems no point in his coming to Washington where the decision must be made, for the President just isn't ready to decide.

According to George Freidman, senior military analyst for STRATFOR 10/20/09, McCrystal's new plan calls for the increased use of conventional infantry in close proximity to the Afghan people so as to protect those willing to cooperate with us. They would be positioned in the more populated areas of Kabul, Kandahar, Helmand and Khost Provinces and eventually make regional alliances as locals see that we are there to provide them with safety and a peaceful life. Aerial bombardments, heavy artillery and drone attacks would be cut way back to avoid alienating the civilian populace in cities and town. Air attacks would be used to attack those Taliban hiding outside of populated areas. The US and NATO infantry forces could win battles against the Taliban, in McCrystal's view, because their superior training will be a counterweight to the Taliban's larger numbers of battle-hardened warriors. Many military analysts seriously question McChrystal's thinking.

“If, as our President has repeatedly emphasized, our main enemy is Al Qaeda and our task is to deny them sanctuary, then expanded US infantry presence in Afghanistan seems to have no relevance, for what forces Al Qaeda still have are mainly located across the border in Pakistan, and where we are not free to engage them on the ground”, Freidman states. He then observes that “Obama's decision depends not upon choosing between McCrystal's strategy and others, but upon how to manage the consequences of our eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan. While this is not the time to leave Afghanistan, the idea that securing it will hobble Al Qaeda is simply wrong. U.S. Afghan policy will not stop a global terrorist organization: terrorists will just go elsewhere.” Freidman then concludes that: “The McCrystal proposal is a good one for a strategy of 'hold until relieved' . We suspect that Obama will hold to show that he is giving the strategy a chance, but that the decision to leave won't be too far off”. (Is this the policy of a decisive President?)

ITEM 3: THE SWINE FLU SCARE STUMBLES ON

People who get the seasonal flu shot are twice as likely to catch swine flu, according to studies just completed in Canada. These studies await peer review and have not as yet been released for publication. Yet here in Ukiah California, the druggists at the Safeway Pharmacy have been giving out the seasonal influenza vaccine in advance of the normal spring schedule while awaiting delivery of the H1N1 vaccine and assuring customers that the CDC approves of this two-punch approach. CDC has never made the necessary tests and has actually never made its position clear on the interaction amongst various flu vaccines. On October 23rd, Obama declared the H1N1 virus to be a National Emergency.

In the meantime, a suit has been filed in Washington DC Court to halt further distribution of the H1N1 vaccine. plaintiffs state that the hasty FDA approval of four swine flu vaccines so far violates its own regulations and federal laws calling for proper safety and efficacy tests before release to the public. No studies nor clinical trials have been published demonstrating that safety testing has been carried out. Pressure from manufacturers of the Swine Flu vaccine seems to have driven this panic.

In Europe, health care professionals are not impressed by the H1N1 vaccine: one third of French doctors and other health care providers, 29% of Germans health care professionals, and over 50% of those in the UK will not take the vaccine despite pressure from their peers because of their high risks of exposure. Even with the brain wash we Americans receive every day from drug industry TV ads, the latest AOL poll shows that amongst the general public some 61% do not plan to take the vaccine!

ITEM 4: THE ECONOMY LANGUISHES - BANKSTERS FROLICK

Last February, Obama committed $787 billion to an economic stimulus program designed to create 3.5 million new jobs. Yet nine months later we have one in six out of work (9.8% for less than 6 months plus 7% more without full time work for longer periods) and no sign of new jobs forthcoming. We have 21.1 million unemployed if those out of work more than 6 months (6.6 million) are added to the 14.5 million still getting unemployment checks. When we add the 3 million new jobs needed just to keep up with population growth over the next 2 years, we are really in need of 24.1 million new jobs. Obama's program for 3.5 million new jobs would hardly make a dent in the need, even if it were successful. Yet, Obama refuses to put together a 2nd Stimulus Program even after the Republicans have derided his First Stimulus as basically worthless. (Money Morning 10/20/09).

Obama thought he should squelch public anger over the personal bonuses that the biggest banksters have handing out, using Federal funds that we taxpayers actually put in their accounts. So he asked his new Compensation Czar Feinberg to slice the pay checks of the top 25 executives of firms who received TARP funds last year. While we don't know the final 'savings' we taxpayers will receive from this not very impressive bit of bravado, rest assured that if won't have much impact upon the 24 million new jobs that are needed now to get out of this depressive slump.

OBAMA TRIPS UP ON AL QAEDA

OUR GOAL IS TO DEFEAT AL-QAEDA
On Thursday, September 24, 2009 President Barack Obama vowed in a speech to the UN General Assembly “not to permit safe heaven for Al-Qaeda to launch attacks from Afghanistan. In confronting them, America will forge lasting partnerships to target terrorists, share intelligence, coordinate law enforcement, and protect our people. He declared his administration’s strong economic support to Pakistan, a front line ally in the fight against terrorism. We have set a clear and focused goal: to work with all members of this body to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al-Qaeda and its extremist allies’ a network that has killed thousands of people of many faiths and nations, and that plotted to blow up this very building”.

GENERAL MCCHRYSTAL: THERE'S NO AL-QAEDA N AGFHANISTAN
Oddly enough, General Stanley McChrystal, who is in charge of US and NATO counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan directly contradicted the President's findings in a speech on the 8th anniversary of 9/11 attacks: He said that: “I see no indication of any large Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan”. The US currently has more than 47,000 troops on the ground and is building towards a total strength of 68,000 by year-end. All of these troops are engaged in battle with Taliban and Pashtoon tribal insurgency, none are fighting directly with Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, McChrystal, who seemed oblivious of having dismissed the President's ostensible raison d'etre for the conflict, continued to defend the war, maintaining that it was winnable given increased effort and insisting that, while he had no evidence to back it up, he “strongly believes” our actions have prevented other terroris attacks.

All of this has left us a bit confused, so we went back to read the good General's report to the Pentagon concerning the need for more troops to win the war. We expected that this would more clearly support the Administration's objectives. While this report has not been made 'public' for fear of restricting Obama's freedom to choose amongst various sources of advice, it was deliberately leaked to Bob Woodward, the highest profile investigative reporter in Washington. The leak was designed to gain maximum publicity and was snatched up by all the main stream media immediately. You might think that leaking a report the President had not seen would result in General McChrystal's immediate dismissal or at least a rebuke. But the Pentagon had apparently reviewed and approved the leak and McChrystal is planning to testify about it before Congress quite soon.

THE PURLOINED LETTER
So what did this 'purloined' report actually say about increasing our forces and gaining victory in Afghanistan? “Greater resources will not be sufficient to achieve success, but will enable implementation of the 'new' strategy. Conversely inadequate resources will likely result in failure. However, without a strategy the mission should not be resourced.” Wandering without a map through this thicket of Pentagon-ese, (do they teach this as 'creative writing' at West Point?) we called upon Strategic Forecasting, Inc., more commonly known as STRATFOR, a 'global intelligence company” that Barron's calls "The Shadow CIA". They were quick to explain that “The serving commander of all US and NATO troops in Afghanistan is saying that without more troops, the mission likely will fail. There is no ambiguity here. The most important point is that nowhere does it say that with more troops the US will win. Adding to this is the logical inference that General McChrystal, a very sharp and capable commander, will not command any expanded force in Afghanistan unless there is a new strategy as well.” Maybe Obama will tell us about this 'new strategy' in one of those marvelous rhetorical creations that are so far his only notable legacy.

1978 - 1980: US poured $5 billions into support for Islamist guerillas lead by Osama bin Laden to fight against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan with major tactical assistance from Pakistan.

1989: Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan after the loss of 1.5 million Afghan lives and the wrecking of Afghan society.

1990 - 2000: US loses interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Taliban seizes power in Afghanistan and imposes its own brand of Moslem fundamentalism.

2001: US decides to retaliate for 9/11 attacks by carpet bombing Kabul and driving the Taliban from power, although not a single Afghan was involved in the 9/11 attack. Al Qaeda, initially a Saudi financed terrorist group led by the former US 'asset' Osama bin Laden, is declared the mastermind of 9/11.

2003 - 2006: US withdraws much of its military from Afghanistan and concentrates upon the Iraqi war. War lords and corrupt politicians assume the reins of government in Kabul but Taliban insurgency regains strength out in the countryside. Osama bin Laden continues to elude capture and is all but forgotten in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

2009: Obama makes the war in Afghanistan his own and searches for a rationale to justify the loss of 840 US soldiers and 575 NATO troops, plus the expenditure of nearly $200 billion during a time of economic recession at home.

HOW WILL WE KNOW WHEN AL QAEDA HAD BEEN DEFEATED?
In Afghanistan we are fighting a mixture of Taliban fundamentalists and Pashtoon patriots intent upon getting back control of their own country. They are winning the fight and are estimated to have established a permanent presence in 80% of the country, up from 54% last year. (GlobalSecurity.org.) At the same time, STRATFOR feels Al Qaeda itself is “continuing a serious decline” and may not any longer be a force to reckon with on either side of the border. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf says that Al Qaeda has significantly diminished influence in Pakistan and Foreign Office statements support his assessment. STRATFOR feels that “Al Qaeda is changing from a centralized organization with global goals to a regional 'franchise' with more parochial aims.” In other words, small autonomous bases in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and elsewhere may blow up a hotel, a government building or a logistics depot now and then, but that's about it.

Within Pakistan, Al Qaeda operatives have been involved in bombings and assassinations mainly in urban areas and may have engineered the murder of Benazir Bhutto last year. However, they are not an equipped military force capable of being of tangible assistance to the Taliban. Our special US State Department representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke tried last week to give Obama a boost by suggesting that: “Al Qaeda is still there, ever dangerous and publicly asking people to attack the United States and publicly asking nuclear engineers to give them nuclear secrets from Pakistan”. This was at a reception in Washington hosted by the Congressional Caucus on Afghanistan (IndianExpress.com. 09/16/09). I had to wonder if Holbrooke thinks Osama bin Laden might have a mini-Los Alamos squirreled away somewhere in the Bora-Boras that can readily convert these coveted nuclear secrets into a deliverable bomb.

Back in Iraq, where we once considered Al Qaeda the principle thorn in our side, they are no longer considered a threat to the existence of the Iraqi State: They have fallen out of favor after being abandoned by the Sunnis back in 2006. (Joel Wing, The Progressive Realist 09/02/09). However, they are still capable of individual attacks upon hotels, government buildings and military installations and this is to our advantage since it keeps fear alive in the US media.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a defense and foreign policy expert at the Libertarian CATO Institute in Washington asks: “If Al-Qaeda is not in Afghanistan, why on earth are we in Afghanistan? We went there to defeat Al-Qaeda. If this isn't the arena for Al-Qaeda anymore, then our mission seems to have no rational purpose whatever. Even if the Taliban were able to re-establish control, it's not at all certain that they would allow Al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a training and logistical base again. After all, the Taliban were driven from power because of their association with Al-Qaeda back in 2001.” (NPR 9/24/09)

Poor rational Mr. Carpenter: he is not able to see that our mission was never about Al Qaeda, but always about reaffirming US military dominance in the Middle East and Central Asia so we can start pipelining gas from the Middle East through Afghanistan (soon to be renamed Pipeline-istan) all the way to India. If Al Qaeda is nearly dead then we'll resuscitate them to keep the fear alive. We must insist upon a submissive government in Afghanistan as we do in Iraq (where we are keeping hold of five huge military bases indefinitely). Our most immediate task in Kabul is to pull an attractive Afghan carpet over Karzai's election rigging and the corruption that seem endemic to all our diplomatic triumphs. Imagine Afghanistan as another client state like Egypt and Jordan: then we can get down to the serious work of laying pipe!

IS THE SWINE FLU PANDEMIC A HOAX?

The H1N1 pandemic seems to have taken on a life of its own – while the actual evidence of a serious and life-threatening epidemic has not supported the hysteria we hear in the main stream media. The news media and the World Health Organization have continued to pump out stories suggesting that we are just a few months away from Armageddon – and the mass inoculation of just about everyone with a still-untested vaccine is the only solution. Mark Horton, director of the California Dept. of Public Health announced that “millions of Californians, possibly one in four, may be affected by the coming H1V1 'swine flu' virus”. Dr. Marvin Trotter, Mendocino County's public heath officer “fears 'a perfect storm' scenario could lead to the rapid and potentially deadly spread of what the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calls a 'novel virus'. Ukiah Daily Journal 8-30-09. The virus seems to particularly attack the lung tissue and this can lead to viral pneumonia. The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology warned that “swine flu poses a serious threat: half the population could come down with the strain and 90,000 could die this season.” US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius warns that “this is not the flu we're used to”. As if to speed up their production, Sibelius has signed a document specifically granting pharmaceutical manufacturers immunity from prosecution for death or injury from the vaccine.

THE EVIDENCE SO FAR

Yet, the evidence collected to date seems to suggest that H1N1 is a relatively mild flu, similar to the common influenza we have dealt with for decades and is in fact practically indistinguishable from it. It lasts no more than a week and has caused relatively few casualties compared with the deaths attributed to conventional influenza each flu season. The CDC data shows that as of August 28th, 8843 Americans have been hospitalized with Swine Flu and 552 have died of the virus. By contrast the seasonal influenza claims on average 36,000 deaths each year in the U.S. The Swine Flu has supposedly killed 552 in five month, equivalent to 1325 per year.

Despite their dire press office releases and raising the level of the pandemic to their highest rating of 6 in June , WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) decided on July 10th that it was no longer necessary to collect data on the spread of the flu and therefore they would no longer require countries from around the world to send in data on confirmed cases. Nevertheless, WHO predicts that 2 billion could become infected over the next 2 years. WHO briefing note July 2009. They stated August 28th that “the swine flu virus H1N1 has overtaken other viruses to become the most persistent flu strain”. Around the world, 209,438 infections have now been identified in 170 countries and 2185 people are suspected to have died from H1V1. It is now the dominant influenza strain in most parts of the world”. At the same time they acknowledged that the underlying symptoms are moderate and that “most people will recover from swine flu within a week, just as they would from seasonal forms of common influenza”. Independent UK 8-22-09. WHO warned that second wave outbreaks of swine flu are expected this fall and that the actual number of cases may be much higher than their data showed. It was not clear how they arrived at their figures while no longer collecting data on the outbreak.

Nigel Dimmock, professor of biological sciences at Warwick University (UK) says it is 'surprising' that WHO has declared a virus the 'dominant strain' at such an early stage. “The scale and speed of the planned vaccination program is insane given that the overwhelming majority of those who have contracted the virus have had very mild symptoms.” Dr. Peter Holden of the British Medical Association said that “although swine flu was not causing serious illness, they were eager to start a mass vaccination campaign, beginning with priority groups.” David Icke July 2009

In Germany, Health Minister Ulla Schmidt admitted on TV on August 25th that “the swine flu vaccination campaign was a hoax and the largest ever inoculation experiment in history.” The Chair of the Health Committee in the German Parliament, Dr. Wolfgang Wogarg, warned about potential swine flu vaccine safety. “Novartis' vaccine contained cancerous animal cells. It is a great business for the pharmaceutical industry” he told Neuten Presse on August 22nd. “Swine flu is not very different from conventional flu, but the vaccine can have dangerous side effects. “

WHY THE PANIC?

“This is potentially the largest mass-vaccination program in human history” said Howard Markel, a professor at University of Michigan and advisor to the CDC. More than 2800 local health departments have begun recruiting pediatricians, obstetricians, nurses, pharmacists, paramedics and even dentists to carry out the vaccination program in the United States. The CDC is formulating a $4.8 million multimedia campaign to encourage people take the vaccine.
Five pharmaceutical companies are racing to produce the vaccine with the first 45 to 52 million doses due by mid-October. It will be at least February of 2010 before the total required number of doses have been manufactured.

The vaccination effort carries great risks for the Obama Administration: if the outbreak fizzles, they could be criticized for wasting $5 billion for 600 million doses of the vaccine. In addition the costs of administering the vaccine are estimated to run to $9 billion according to the Association of State and Territorial Heath Officials. On the other hand, if the pandemic really breaks out this fall and there will not be enough vaccine available, they will be accused of under-preparation. The last swine flu scare in 1976 fizzled and although 40 million were vaccinated, only one death was attributed to it. However it was blamed for the outbreak of a rare paralyzing disorder known as Giuilain-Barre Syndrome, for which there is no known cure.

“This is over reaction” said Barbara Lee Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center: “There is no national security threat here, why are we operating like this? This is not polio, this is not smallpox.”

The US Military is ready to jump into the pandemic. The Northern Command is awaiting Defense Secretary Gates' approval of a plan for military task forces to work with FEMA and provide assistance in support of civil authorities to assure that all Americans are vaccinated. This is a direct violation of the Posse-Comitatus Act.

GUILLAIN-BARRE SYNDROME

There will be no data available from clinical testing of the vaccine on humans before the inoculation program begins in October of this year. The first to be inoculated will be children, pregnant women, and health care workers. It is unheard of for a vaccine to bypass the precautionary procedures normally involved with clinical trials. Yet no one in a position of authority seems particularly concerned as they rush to get this still-untested vaccine out on the market. One of the vaccine ingredient: the adjuvant “squalene', has been directly linked to cases of the Gulf War Syndrome from the 1990s. This same adjuvant is planned to be added as a means to boost it effectiveness and stretch limited supplies. Ten laboratories in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia have documented squalene as inducing autoimmune diseases in animals. The Swedish Kartolinska Institute has demonstrated that squalene alone can induce rheumatoid arthritis in animals and the Florida Medical School has shown that it induces the production of antibodies associated with systemic lupus etythematosus. Paul Joseph Watson, Global Research 7-27-09.

This is not the first time that fear of a flu epidemic has generated hysteria. The avian flu scare in 2005-06 caused the US and UK governments to buy 34.6 million doses of Tamilflu vaccine at a cost of billions. These stockpiles are now reaching the end of their shelf life. There has been no avian flu pandemic to support this hysteria and there is a considerable history of US soldiers who were forced to take the vaccine and who become ill as a result. In 2003 the SARS virus was predicted to have a 25% chance of killing tens of millions. The virus actually killed 774 between Nov. 2002 and July 2003 and there hasn't been a single infection in the past six years. The BSE virus was said to have the potential to infect up to 10 million Britons. The disease itself did virtually no damage, yet 6 million beef cattle were slaughtered and the meat industry in the UK was savaged. Paul Watson Prison Planet.com 5-1-09.

EFFICACY OF THE VACCINE – 30,000 COULD WELL BECOME PARALYZED

The H1N1 vaccine will be acceptable to the Food and Drug Administration if it creates a protective antibody level in 30% of recipients. For those over 65, this figure drops to 18%. In other words, the vaccine is likely to be ineffective in 70% of recipients under age 65. This does not seem to suggest that its much of a cure.

CDC estimates that 30,000 Americans could have potentially lethal adverse reactions to the novel H1V1 vaccine and get Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) for which is no treatment and which can lead to paralysis and death. This is based upon the experience of 1976, when 40 million received a swine flu vaccine, and 4,000 developed GBS. If all 300 million Americans are vaccinated, then the experience of 1976 then as many as 30,000 could very well die just from the side-effects of this vaccine.

Given that the vaccine will provide protection to only 30%, is it reasonable to put at risk 30,000 lives when the swine flu itself is experienced as only a mild one-week illness? Dr. William Schaffer Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University and a member of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, wrote in an e-mail that: “I am skeptical of finishing the vaccine before we know the appropriate dose to be included in each inoculation, before immunogenicity studies are complete, or before safety assessments have been finished. We should not make vaccine available before the trials are completed and the results carefully assessed.” Yet the Obama Administration has elected to start vaccinations in mid-October without waiting for the clinical trials.

“I fear that a rush towards vaccinating the population without completing trials risks leading to the harmful outcome that we witnessed during the 1976 swine flu scare” wrote Dr. A. Afkhami of George Washington University. In that instance, “the government advocated rapid production and vaccination of the population without adequate safeguards, which led to an unexplained increase in cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) amongst other complications, and massive liability for the government”. Dr. Afkhami is a international recognized expert on the 1918 Influenza pandemic and an advisor to the US State Department and the World Bank. He warns that “we must learn from lessons of the past and be mindful of not jumping from the proverbial frying pan into the fire by putting people's health at risk without adequate production and safety monitoring of the vaccines”.

THE DEMISE OF UNIVERSAL SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE

Obama in 2003 before the AFL/CIO: “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what is meant when we say everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House: The health care industry (insurance, hospitals, pharmaceuticals and health care professionals) paid for a considerable portion of his record-breaking campaign budget. Ever since that 2003 speech, he has steadily and consistently backed away from a Universal Single-Payer health care plan for America. Now, thinking forward, he is concerned more with the damage he could suffer if the powerful lobbies were to tag him a “big spend' Democrat advocating “socialized medicine” and ruin his chances for a 2nd term. Obama failed to mention in the 2003 speech that in addition to taking back the White House and Congress, we would need to take back power from the major health industry corporations.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that Obama used to support a single-payer health care plan but flip-flopped on the issue Nicholas Ballasy, 8/04/09 – CNN News.com. “I can remember when Obama agreed with me,” said Conyers, referencing Obama’s past support of a single-payer health care system at a recent National Press Club luncheon. In reference to why Obama changed his mind about single-payer, Conyers said: “I'm just guessing now, because we haven't talked about it, but it's because of the Rahm Emanuel factor. Which is, to quote him: “look, we want success and we're willing to make a deal about anything to win in the off-year elections and to get our president reelected the next time he comes up. But I don't want anything that's stamped ‘reform’ and let it go at that.” Conyers said that the approach President Obama is taking now will not achieve its objective of holding down health-care costs and it will not cover everybody. It will not take away the misery of hundreds of thousands of people: the tragedy of people having to go into bankruptcy, of not being able to eat or pay rent, or even to get their pharmaceutical prescriptions.”

NOW THE HEALTH CARE THIEVES MEET INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE
“During his presidential campaign, Obama lashed out at the influence of the drug companies in Washington and criticized their chief lobbyist Billy Tauzin, a former Louisiana congressman. Now, writes the LA Times on 8/0409, Tauzin has secured an agreement that the Administration wouldn't try to overturn the very Medicare drug policies that Obama criticized on the campaign trail. Tauzin has now morphed into the President's partner - invited to the White House repeatedly in recent months along with chief executives of Abbott Laboratories, Merck, and Pfizer”. Ken Randall WSWS 8/05/09. The health care lobby spent $133 million in the 2nd Quarter of 2009 alone to gain this kind of access, more than any other sector. Not to be left behind, the lobby has given Chairman Rangell of the House Ways and Means Committee $1.6 million, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Max Baucas got $1.5 million, and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley $2 million. The lobby invested $170 million in Washington politicians in the past 2 years while scoring a 428 percent (over the past 7 years) increase in profits to reach a net profit of $23 billion in 2007. Now that's smart investing !

OBAMA AT WATERLOO
Senator Jim DeMint: “If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him”. Bill Moyers 7/25/09 Truthout: “The Republican Right is moving in to mortally wound the Obama Presidency early in his term, as they did to the Clintons in 1993.” William Kristol, one of their propagandists back then, urged his party to block any health care plan for fear that Democrats would be seen as “the generous protector of middle class interests”. Now he's telling the GOP to 'go for the kill - drive a stake through its heart”. The Wall Street Journal describes “a string of Republican victories plucked from the Senate Finance committee by drug company lobbyists including: (1) no cost cutting steps, (2) no cheaper drugs from Canada, (3) no direct Federal government negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower Medicare drug prices and from the Senate Health Committee (4) a monopoly for the biotech industry against competition from generic drugs for 12 years.

This hijacking of any resemblance to a Universal Single Payer Plan now makes the partisan debate over costs so warped and distorted as to be meaningless as well as inscrutable. “Opponents of reform have hoodwinked much of the public into believing that investments in America's national health care system will wind up costing individuals more than they'd gain from the effort. The CBO now estimates the costs of “reform'to be $611 billion over ten years. Compare this $61 billion per year to the one-time $700 billion bailout of our most insolvent banks. The bigger question now is whether we can afford not to fix the health care system. We are now spending 17% ($7,290 per family) of our economic output on health care compared with 5% in 1960 and this cost has seriously undermined our entire economy and our competitiveness as a nation. Other industrialized countries only spend $2,964 per family). Joshua Holland, Alternet 7/29/08.

DOES THE PUBLIC REALLY WANT MAJOR REFORM
Critics of the Obama public option have had little difficulty distorting public opinion to fit their prejudices: On Meet The Press 7/19/09, Michele Norris of NPR stated that “90% of those who voted in 2008 actually have health insurance and three quarters of them are satisfied with what they got”. Norris' figure fails to include the 50 million without insurance. We learn on Fox News that “nobody really understands the urgency of health care reform and that the American people are beginning to distrust that urgency, that rush into legislation”: Alexis Glick, Fox Business Network 7/21/09. The Wall Street Journal editorial writer Paul Gigot claims “that Obama is making the same mistake that he made on the stimulus package – he's governing from the left. That's why you see these extraordinary costs and extraordinary taxes”.

The Pew Research Center reports that 71% feel we need 'fundamental changes' or want our health system to be 'completely rebuilt'. Anthony Dimaggio, Counterpunch 07/29/09. The American public has actually supported a national health care initiative for many years. A Gallup Poll in 2007 found 64% agreed that it is “the responsibility of the Federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage”. In July 2009, the Washington Post/ABC News poll reported that 72% felt that Obama was placing the right amount of attention on health care or needed to focus even more attention on the issue.

HR 676 – THE SINGLE PAYER OPTION
John Conyer's HR 676. the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, is no longer even mentioned on the television news shows nor is it seriously discussed in Congress. President Obama predicted in 2003 that such a plan would be enacted by the Democrats once Congress and the White House were under Democratic control. Now that these things have come to pass, he says that Single Payer is not 'practical'. Once the Congress has sold its votes to the health care lobby, and once our President has decided that his chances of re-election are more important than the health of the nation, I must agree, Single Payer is no longer 'practical'.

RALPH NADER GETS THE LAST WORD
“About 100,000 lives are lost through hospital negligence per year, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. This vast tragedy is hardly going to get worse under universal government health insurance that assembles data patterns to reduce waste, enhance quality, and transparency. By contrast, the secretive big health insurers who make more money the more they deny claims, ignore their loss prevention duties. In 1950, when President Truman sent a universal health insurance bill to Congress, the American Medical Association (AMA) launched a massive counterattack. The AMA claimed that government health insurance would lead to rationing of health care, higher prices, diminished choices, and more bureaucracy. The AMA beat both Truman and the unions that were backing the legislation, using the phrase “Socialized Medicine”. Fifty years later, 'corporatized medicine' has produced all these same consequences, along with stripping away the medical profession's independence. Today, the irony is that the corporate supremacists are accusing reformers in Washington of what they themselves have produced throughout the country: Rationing, higher prices, less choice, and mounds of paperwork and corporate red tape. Plus, fifty million people without any health insurance at all.”

THE GREAT GAME

The Editor of Obama-Watch.US, Jim Houle, spent three weeks in June and July traveling across Central Asia along the legendary Silk Road visiting Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China's Xinjiang Province where the Uighur (wee-gur) people predominate. These Turkic-speaking people have been the “Stopper in the Bottle” between Europe, Russia, China and India for over on thousand years. The Gateway to Elsewhere, it has seldom, at least until now, been desired for its own value but was seen as a portal to the riches of India for the Russians and to the markets of Europe for the Indians and Afghanis. In the 20th century, with the discovery of oil and gas around the Caspian Sea, the collapse of the Soviet Hegemony, the withering away of British majesty, and the United States' global domination of world energy resources, all has changed - or has it changed at all? Perhaps the “Great Game”by Peter Hopkirk, that amazing story of the 19th century battle over these remote kingdoms stumbles on, with Putin replacing the Czar and Obama taking Queen Victoria's role.

Obama sees Central Asia as an important element in his program to expand 'Full Spectrum Dominance', assure the supply of oil and gas, and the continued sustenance of the Dollar as the world reserve currency. Petroleum (oil and gas) has since 1971 replaced gold as backing for the dollar and our huge military machine has taken on the role of enforcer. Should people decide to pay for their oil barrels with some other moolah, or a 'market basket' of currencies, the value of the dollar would drop like a stone. Our indebtedness would soon crowd us off the world stage. We could no longer print oil-soaked dollars and offer them to China and Japan as legal tender.

Genghis Khan found the 'Stans' (Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and East Turkestan (now renamed Xinjiang by the Han Chinese) a wonderful launching pad, (good horses, good grain, plentiful food supplies, terrible roads) for his insatiable drive to the west. Later, Temur who was born in Samarkand, went on to occupy Russia, Turkey, much of the Middle East, parts of China and northern India. Buddhism had been strong here before Islam but little remains of its influence today. The Arabs swept through in the late 7th century preaching from the Messenger's Koran and driving out Buddhism. Mohammedanism changed the entire culture, imposed Koranic law, and introduced a new vision of science, mathematics, poetry and philosophy.

The region's only protection from outside invaders had been it greatest natural resource: a ring of impenetrable high mountains, and surrounding trackless desiccating deserts. Ghenghis Khan, traveling light, penetrated these physical barriers and made its lush valleys his base for fodder, for food and for further conquests. Temur, a native of Samarkand who knew the region well, established the Moghul Empire in northern India and brought their riches home. Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent became glorious and wealthy cities. The Russians were never very successful here until they built a rail line across those deserts in the 1880s, and under Stalin's regime absorbed the five 'stans' into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The British, who were the world class Hegemon in the 19th century, wanted to strengthen and maintain their hold upon India and keep the Russians, the Persians and the Ottoman Turks the hell out.

All of this changed during the 20th Century with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the independence of the five stans, and the discovery of vast natural gas deposits around the Caspian Sea. In the 21st Century we have introduced the pilot-less drone, aerially refueled troop transports, and Barack Obama. What has really changed? Has everything changed from the days of The Great Game or are we still fighting the age-old battle for territory and influence? The five stans have now been repackaged as the eight stans in the minds of our Pentagon strategists, if you throw in Pakistan and Afghanistan, nicknamed AfPak, and add that new concept called 'Pipeline-istan'. These are the new focus of America's militant foreign policy. The Obama presidency has also introduced us to a brand new acronym to justify all of this: OCO for Overseas Contingency Operations, formerly known as GWOT (as in Global War on Terror).

AFGHANISTAN – NO END IN SIGHT
John Pilger suggested in his interview on 'Democracy Now' July 6th, that: “The Afghanistan War, so called, is really about building what Defense Secretary Robert Gates describes as a number of secured permanent bases throughout that country and reinforcing the major airbase facility at Bagram. The United States has no intention of getting out of Afghanistan. It is now building another of its fortress embassies in Kabul, just like the one in Baghdad and the $1 billion embassy planned for Pakistan's capital city of Islamabad. In the long term plan, having large numbers of boots on the ground will make no difference. They will be replaced by a string of heavily fortified and electronically advanced bases that will dot the landscape all the way from our client states of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the Emirates and thence on to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan. These new-age Crusader Castles will be manned by American soldiers and supported by a large number of mercenaries. Electronic surveillance will employ drones and other remote control devices capable of both monitoring and inflicting instant retaliation upon populations from monitors as far away as Reno, Nevada. No more horrible treks across the desert wastes and the frozen Pumirs. At present we are not allowed, by treaty, to build fortresses within Pakistan, but that too could change. Hegemony without pain, high altitude murder without mayhem or even guilt. These are seen as places where our long term strategic position will allow us to observe objectively every country's behavior, help shape their internal policies, sit in on every rural wedding party, and restrain the influence of our imperial rivals. And oh yes, and insure that the oil and gas valves remain open.

After nearly eight years of fighting, Obama has escalated the Afghani conflict to a new and bloodier level. David Kilcullen, the former advisor to General David Petraeus, told the British Independent this week what is being openly discussed in the White House and on Downing Street: “We are looking at 10 years at least in Afghanistan, and that is the best case scenario. At least half of that will be pretty major combat. This is the commitment that is needed, and this is what the people in America and Britain should be told, and they should be told that there will be a cost involved.”

“General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed US commander, has launched a lobbying drive for a substantial further increase in troop numbers” James Cogan WSWS, 7/14/09. An unnamed senior officer told the Washington Post that: “the view in the military was that as many as 30,000 more US troops were needed, on top of the 68,000 already deployed. Obama has committed his administration to the establishment of a US client state in Afghanistan and selected McChrystal to ensure that this is accomplished. This will certainly require the mobilization of more National Guard and reservist units and a stepped-up recruiting drive.”

The original pretexts given for waging war in Afghanistan have fallen by the wayside. The “authorization of the use of military force” legislation passed by the US Congress in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York City was predicated on the American military being used to hunt down those blamed for these atrocities—al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, a name that now goes virtually unmentioned in official Washington circles.

However, Hilary Clinton was apparently not informed of the change in the wind for, in her big policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations 7/18/09, Information Clearing House, she explained “In Afghanistan and Pakistan, our goal is to disrupt, dismantle, and ultimately defeat al-Qaida and its extremist allies, and to prevent their return to either country”. As for Bush’s purported desire to bring democracy to the Afghan people, Obama has explicitly rejected such a goal as unrealistic. The only reason left for what is now clearly Obama’s war is the real and original one—the utilization of American military might to assert Washington’s dominance over the oil-rich and geo-strategically vital region of Central Asia. Three major pipelines are planned to bring the vast gas resources of Iran and Turkmenistan to India and China go through Afghanistan. Could this be the real motivation for our military policy?

PIPELINE-ISTAN
The Central Asian country that cannot speak its name is Pipelineistan and it is not easy to locate 0n the map. The only explanation for the massive US investments in the GWOT is that the Middle East and Central Asia are not only the source of most of the world's remaining oil and gas resources, but also the territory through which pipelines must transit to bring these resources to Europe, to India and to China where the big markets are. We are currently looking at a number of expensive pipeline projects such as (Pepe Escobar, Tomdispatch.com 5/13/09):

TAPI – Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India Gas Trunk line, a $7.6 billion project through the deserts of Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. Note that the US is already building a mega-base at Dasha-e-Margo ('the Desert of Death') along this proposed route and plans more.

IPI – The Iraq-Pakistan–India Pipeline (the so-called Peace Pipeline) intended to transport gas from Iran's huge South Pars field (9% of total world gas) in the Persian Gulf. This line goes to the south of Afghanistan. This presumably would be financed by the Chinese.

The Mother of all Pipelines: Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan-China Gas Line to south China's energy-starved Guangdong Province. Cost is $26 billion and the length 7,000 kilometers. The Chinese financing agreement specifically calls for no US bases to be built in Turkmenistan. The first phase is under construction.

Nabucco Gas Pipeline: From Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan across the Caspian Sea and through Georgia and/or northern Iran to Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and on into Austria, German and the Czech Republic. Promoted by the US to break Russia's control of Western Europe's gas supply.

The foreign policies of Russia, the United States, China and India are all focused upon Pipelineistan. Forget about the GWOT and freeing women from the tyranny of the burkah.

THE CONTINUING WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ:
When Obama went to Annapolis on July 21, he said we’re getting out of Iraq and appeared to be giving a timetable: “within a matter of weeks, I believe”. General Casey contradicted him and said “we will probably be there for another 10 years. Another Pentagon general upped it to 15 years. The VOA News reporter Al Pessin quoted Pentagon spokesman Whitman on 14 July 2009 as follows: “Whitman says there will be no significant increase in the U.S. troop strength in Iraq, currently at 128,000. The plan is for that number to fall sharply in the first part of next year to between 35,000 and 50,000 by August 2010. Much of that residual force is expected to fall into the new category of Advisory and Assistance Brigades. All U.S. troops are to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.” We had previously been told that this withdrawal would begin in mid-2009 and by 2010 only 30,000 to 50,000 would remain at remote bases. No combat forces would be stationed in the cities and towns. The date “for all troops out” may be 2011 or it may be 2024 depending upon who has the most credibility and what we actually mean by the word 'troops'.

Stratfor reports July 1: “Iraqis celebrated the long-awaited departure of American combat forces from their cities on Tuesday, July 1st. But concerns about the fragility of the new-found stability in Iraq persists, and nowhere is that more evident than in the fact that U.S. troops remain essentially the same as at pre-surge level of three years ago.” While it is important that the “withdrawal of US combat forces be seen in the US media as a “stunning turnaround”, the truth is that the US needs these troops elsewhere but cannot allow Iraq to fall into chaos again as lethal political battles amongst the party factions replace the U.S.-jihadist war. "In other words, there is a reason the United States continues to commit 130,000 troops to Iraq: to assure the day-to-day security of its cities as effectively as possible.” Stratfor July 1. So the July 1st deadline for withdrawal has passed but the troops remain, despite slight-of-hand about who is combat and who is trainer, and whether downtown Baghdad comprises one of those remote fortifications to which our forces would withdraw upon Iraqi takeover of security needs. No mention is made of the enormous American army of mercenaries. They are never counted when it comes to withdrawal schedules but they're armed, poorly disciplined and well compensated.

KYRGYZSTAN – OUR NEW DEAL
The US was kicked out of the Manas Air Base at Bishkek, which also serves as the country's only international airport last February as the government tried to extract concessions from the US and get counteroffers from the Russians for another base near the city of Osh. The Manas Base is a hub for C-17 transports to Afghanistan and the lead refueling location for US and NATO forces. Without Manas, the Afghan war becomes a logistical nightmare as routes through Pakistan have become less secure. I sat in the airport in June for hours awaiting a flight to Osh and watched the heavy US troop transports lumber into the air and the lines of GI's being dumped from buses into the bellies of these behemoths. I thought they kicked us out, I asked, and later discovered that on June 23, 2009, a new deal had been reached between the U.S. and Kyrgyz governments. Under the terms of the new agreement, U.S. payment for use of the facilities will increase from $17.1 million to about $180 million per year including a $60 million signing bonus and funds for upgrading the airport, $21 million for fighting drug trafficking in the country, and $20 million for economic development. Stratfor 7/7/09. These Kyrgyz sure are learning how to play 'The Great Game'. While Russia generally wants the US out of Central Asia, they are, at the same time, unwilling to see a Taliban government in Afghanistan. They are not interested in committing their scarce resources to such an effort and seem convinced the Manas agreement can be revoked once again when it's in their interest.

HEY - LOOK OUT FOR THE MONSTROUS TYRANNY!
Are you still unconvinced, despite Bill Gates' testimony, that the Clinton/Bush doctrine of Total Global Dominance continues? Then try reading Obama's wonderfully Churchillian speech in Annapolis, Maryland: Barack Obama Annapolis Graduation Speech 5/22/09:
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalog of human crime. That is our policy.
“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs - Victory in spite of all terrors - Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without Victory there is no survival. We will ensure you can meet the missions of tomorrow, which is why we’re investing in the capabilities and technologies of tomorrow — the littoral combat ships, the most advanced submarines and fighter aircraft — so that you have what you need to succeed. In short, we will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen.”

What is this never-surpassed monstrous tyranny? Surely Mr. President you aren't talking about that almost forgotten group of Al-Qaida fighters holed up in the AfPak mountains? Are you speaking of the Shi'ites in Iran, the Sunni Taliban in Pakistan's Hindu Kush, the Somali pirates? No? Then we must admit that we have never heard such ringing phrases to describe the defense of the dollar. Could it have been scripted at one of those Think Tanks in Washington stat are staffed by our military-industrial contractors and their Pentagon pals? Is all this rhetoric really necessary to assure the free flow of oil and gas from producer to consumer?

OBAMA PLAYS CAIRO

In this Eighteenth Edition, we review the Obama speech in Cairo, the Palestinian impasse, and how he balances his message of friendship with Moslems world wide alongside his armed attacks in Afghanistan and support for the Pakistan’s army’s assault upon the Taliban in the Swat Valley.

The man’s performances are captivating to us all. We are proud of a President so knowledgeable of Moslem history and accomplishments, who can speak comfortably of common aspirations, while skipping deftly past lethal Drone attacks on wedding parties in small mountain villages, and yet who somehow keeps our hopes alive while moving us towards more war and ever greater hypocrisy.

The Cairo speech was directed not to any one country but addressed the entire Islamic Nation, most of whom are intensely wary of American motives and of our capacity for change, while incredibly fond of our way of life. Stratfor suggests 6/03/09 that: “the Moslem masses are in for a disappointment . . . but this will not pose much of a problem for Obama. The fond feelings of the Moslem world might be nice to claim but ultimately he does not need their support. In the end, it will be the American people, not the rest of the world, who will issue the final referendum on his performance as President.”

GAZA WILL NOT DIE
It is 139 days since January 19th, when Israel stopped the wanton killing of Gazans, so as not to “rain upon the start of Obama's Reign” the following day. John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), told a Code Pink delegation to Gaza last month that “billions in aid had been promised in the wake of Israel's massacre, but so far nothing had arrived”. Code Pink reporters added: “Make no mistake about it: the blockade, directly enforced by Israel and Egypt but conspired in by their superpower patron in Washington, is a continuing act of war against an entire civilian population of 1.5 million, a form of collective punishment and a crime against humanity.” Roane Carey, The Nation 6/02/09.

Building materials that would allow Gazans to rebuild are forbidden, not one bag of cement, not one 2 by 4. Netanyahu complained that: "We are being asked to ease the living conditions of the population and allow goods and equipment in, but we have other priorities in the Gaza Strip. We do not want to strengthen Hamas, by allowing them to rebuild their defenses". By this logic, he could forbid flour since it gives nourishment that rebuilds strength and thus furthers resistance. In Cairo, Obama acknowledged that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza: “Suffer daily humiliations that come with occupation. There is no doubt that the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.” He said America will not turn our backs on their “legitimate aspirations” while carefully avoiding ascribing to them any 'rights'. Most appropriately, Obama said: ”Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build.” A nice phrase, but without the weight of a single bag of cement.

AND THE PALESTINIANS AIN'T ABOUT TO LEAVE
Obama equated Palestinians’ displacement from their homes (first in 1948 and now with each new Jewish settlement in the West Bank) with Israel having to suffer the hostility and attacks from individual Palestinians. “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed." He talked about Negroes in our south who resisted yet never did he acknowledge that it was their physical resistance which eventually got them some rights in America. Never once did he condemn Israel's violence in Gaza (1400 killed), nor in Lebanon (1300 killed), nor in the West Bank (2308 Palestinians killed in the Al Aqsa Intifada from 2000 to 2004, along with 727 Israelis).

Uri Avnery reports from Tel Aviv 5/31/09 that: “This week, the Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. The bill also promises one year in prison to anyone who publicly disagrees, no matter whether they be Arabs or Jews. It also prohibits Jews from advocating any change in the state’s definition, or the creation of a bi-national state in all of historic Palestine or spreading any other such unconventional ideas.” Finally, Avnery speculates: “One can only imagine what would happen in the U.S. if a senator proposed a law to imprison anyone who suggests an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. This government has already adopted a bill to imprison for three years anyone who mourns the Palestinian Nakba”. Nakba refers to the 1948 uprooting of more than half the Palestinian people from their homes and lands by a Jewish Army.

Well that pretty much brings us up to date in the prospects for either a one-state or even a two-state solution. Our Seventeenth Edition outlined the futility of these non-solutions and need not be repeated here, although President Obama hangs onto the Two-State Plan as if he couldn’t think of any other place to stand.

But let us at least end on a positive note with the announcement that Israel has finally released a set of maps showing where US-supplied cluster bombs were released around Lebanese villages during the last few days of their 2006 invasion of Lebanon. According to Ha’Aretz, the Israeli newspaper in Tel Aviv, between 1.2 and 3 million were dropped in Southern Lebanon (IDF figures). Since the war, 30 have been killed and 203 injured by these indiscriminate weapons that are prohibited under Article 50 of the 1977 Geneva Conventions. AntiWar 6/04/09 Stephen Green.

AFPAK WAR DEVISTATES AND DEPOPULATES
James Cogan reported 6/01/09 in URUK.net that: “A little over a month ago, the Pakistani government acquiesced to the demands of the Obama administration to use brute force to eradicate radical Islamist influence in the north-west of the country, as part of the so-called AfPak war to secure American interests in Central Asia. Pakistan had resisted all pressures up until this time to go after the rebels in the Northwestern Territories. In recent years, they have been afforded a considerable autonomy and allowed to impose their own system of government and of justice so long as they stayed in the mountains and did not come into the valleys.
Now, for the first time, the Pakistani military has attacked the Taliban on the ground as well as from the air in the Swat Valley where they had seized large areas. The Pakistan Army claimed over the past weekend that they had largely shattered the armed opposition in the Swat Valley, Lower Dir and Buner districts of North West Frontier Province (NWFP).”
The military operation in NWFP has emptied the city of Mingora – population 300,000 and has driven out most of the ethnic Pashtun population in the three districts targeted. The current UN estimate is that 2.4 million people have been internally displaced in just over a month, making it the largest displacement on the Indian subcontinent since the 1947 partition. The mass exodus has taken place during the harvest season, meaning that thousands of small farmers who could barely subsist before the offensive have not been able to bring in their crops. A large number of livestock have died or been lost.
The violence, instability and suffering will only escalate if, as appears increasingly likely, the government bows to US demands to carry out a full-scale offensive against the strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal agencies of South and North Waziristan. These areas are used as a safe haven by Pashtun fighters from over the border in Afghanistan who are resisting the US/NATO occupation of that country. Targets in these areas are being repeatedly bombed by unmanned US Predator drones but the cross-border movement has barely been disrupted.
Pakistani troops, not American, serve as Obama’s cannon fodder in these bloody battles with an estimated 15,000 Taliban fighters. In exchange, the Pakistani ruling elites represented by President Asif Ali Zadari and Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani will get the financial assistance they need to stave off economic collapse of the entire nation” reports James Cogan.

Obama’s only mention in Cairo of his major new military thrust into Pakistan was a brief reference to a $1.5 billion dollar five- year program to build schools, hospitals roads and new businesses. Did his speech writers just overlook the latest offensive? Did Obama think that with all his warm hug-a-Moslem talk his audience would forget this increasingly dark side of America’s program for the Moslem world?

SO AFTER CAIRO WHAT HAPPPENS?
We have searched the text of this “historic” speech for even a single concrete proposal to redress the grievances the Moslem world holds against America. We have not located a one. Yet many liberals praise Obama’s efforts and not a few conservatives have been equally enraptured. He has been applauded for not being Bush, for looking a bit ‘Third-Worldly’ and for a willingness to recognize US errors in the past. He was drafted several years back by key sections of the American power-elite to put this new face on American imperialism and global hegemony. Veteran cold warriors like Zbigniew Brzezinsky, who has backed him for years now. Zibby recently said, in an interview with the German magazine ‘Der Spiegel’, that the collective danger we (the US) face in coming decades is “that the majority of humanity will no longer tolerate these enormous disparities in the human condition”. In other words, world revolution is the fear and Obama was put in the White House to prevent such a cataclysmic social upheaval. Hence, our new and exciting President has opened his road show in Cairo this past week.

WILL ISRAEL BECOME AN APARTHEID STATE?

The semi-annual Israeli trek to the Oval Office took place this week and was a wonderful success – nothing changed, no one moved, and all is as deranged as ever. Bibi Netanyahu, with a most diverse Cabinet and an almost-fascist Foreign Minister, is said to have arrived hoping to get “fundamental redefinitions of the regional dynamic”, Stratfor 18 May - George Friedman, such as a re-examination of the 'two-state solution' and a “finite time frame for talks with Iran, after which unspecified but ominous-sounding actions are to be taken”. With Obama up to his ears in torture, the AfPak War, and a broken economy, Netanyahu's expectations seem quite demanding. Exactly why Obama agreed to the visit at this time is strange in itself, but Bibi is new at the job, and he needs to demonstrate his “special US relationship” in front of constituents. Israel has lost a lot of friends lately after their murderous treatment of the Gazans. Recent figures show emigration now outpacing immigration while between 700,000 and 1 million citizens live outside of Israel proper. A 2007 poll showed only 69% wanted to stay in the country and this included half of all young people. These figures are a bad omen for Israel” says John Mearsheimer in the American Conservative 5/15/09.

“Progress towards a two-state solution”, the assumed rationale for all talks between Palestinians and Israelis for years now, “is a total chimera” in the view of George Friedman in Stratfor 5/18/09. “It is a fiction that serves US purposes”: Geographically it is impossible to implement and control. Israel will never agree to return to the 1967 Truce Lines upon which the two-state plan is based. Furthermore, the major Arab powers are not supportive: The Jordanian royal family does not want to see Fatah in charge of a new Palestinian State on the West Bank, expecting that they would quickly overthrow the Hashemites that tried to annihilate them way back in Black September, 1970. President Mubarrak of Egypt views Hamas as a descendant of the damned Moslem Brotherhood that he has tried to eliminate for 20 years. Certainly the Saudis have no particular interest in according Palestinians any power or voice. So, the gentleman's agreement has been to make comforting noises about Palestinian rights while being careful not to achieve anything much beyond food handouts and periodic payoffs to political leaders.

“The various Israeli-Palestinian peace processes have thus served US and Arab interests quite well: they provide the illusion of activity with high-level visits breathlessly reported in the media, succeeded by talks and concessions - - all followed by stalemate and new rounds of violence, thus beginning the cycle all over again”. George Friedman Stratfor 5/18/09.

The Israeli prime minister is now asking that the various Arab states become directly involved in a conference wherein they would be forced to reveal publicly their very different public and private positions on Palestinian statehood and their lack of any real interest in pressuring the US to demand a viable two-state arrangement with Israel and a return to the 1967 borders. The clever thing about this position is that Netanyahu not only knows his request will not become a reality, but he and almost all Israelis do not want it to become a reality. The continued political stability of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even Syria is as much in Israel's interest as it is America's. “Israel is a conservative power, it does not want upheaval, and it is quite content with the current regimes in the Arab world. But if the Arab states were to roundly condemn Israel at a big international conference it would help justify tough Netanyahu's policies domestically, showing once more how Israel is surrounded by hostile states lusting for its downfall. Obama would probably just as soon put off any demonstration of the hollowness of the two-state peace process as long as possible. He's sent George Mitchell as his Middle East special envoy to deal with the issue and that's quite enough attention to the problem.

Netanyahu, of course, knows all this. Part of his mission is simply convincing his ruling coalition, and particularly Israel's most aggressive foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, whom Netanyahu needs to survive, that he is committed to redefining the entire Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Once he has performed this Two-State Two-Step in the Oval Office, Netanyahu can move on to Iran where the US has made it very plain that Israel cannot mount an attack on their nuclear facilities without US approval to over-fly Iraq. Yet, Israeli writers continue to place scare articles in the American media, knowing full well that they are not a free agent when to comes to bombing the Persians. Netanyahu knows the limits of Israeli power in the region and is highly unlikely to put it to the test.

THE SAME OLD TWO STATE TWO STEP
So, given that Netanyahu does not expect nor actually really want the full-frontal Israeli-Washington embrace to change significantly, then what is all this talk about one-state and two state, and about the hard line opposition to a two state solutions by his hard-assed Foreign Minister Lieberman? Well – it is mostly thin smoke and foggy mirrors but should allow Bibi to return with an increase in his yearly allotments of economic and military aid.

Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, who earned Israel's eternal wrath in 2007 as co-author of 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy' explains the total impossibility of the Two-State Solution best:

- Netanyahu has been opposed for many years to a separate Palestinian state and will continue to build illegal settlements that ensure no Two-State solution can ever be reached;
- Obama is committed to the Two-State solution and to the elimination of any new settlements in the West Bank;
Israel confiscated 40,000 acres of Palestinian land, built 30 new settlement, and built 250 miles of roads connecting them since the 1990s;
- Like Presidents before him, Obama is powerless to stop Israel's colonization in the face of a hugely powerful lobby in the US Congress;
- Obama's silence during the murder of over 1000 civilians in the Gaza War shows him to be no match for the Jewish lobby in America, despite poll results that indicate 60% of Americans favor withholding aid from Israel if they continue to block a separate Palestinian State;
- Without some movement, Palestinians will remain locked-up in a handful of impoverished enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza and periodic strong-armed suppression will continue.

THE CASE FOR A GREATER ISRAEL
If we are to rule out the Two-State Solution since withdrawal from the new settlements would be political suicide, and if we consider the impossibility of living within a chopped-up Bantustan-like Palestine intermingled with walls, checkpoints, uneasy Jewish settlers, and a myriad of commercial, legal and political complications, then we are left with three alternatives that can be grouped under the rubric “Greater Israel”. All three make Israel, Gaza and the West Bank into one country that could be called one of the following:

-- Integrated Greater Israel - a secular society
-- An Ethnic Cleansed Israel – all Palestinans clear out please
-- An Apartheid Israel – the South Africaner Model

The0 Integrated Greater Israel would be a democratic bi-national state with Palestinians and Jews having equal political and civil rights but would mean the abandonment of the original Zionist vision of a Jewish homeland since the Palestinians would soon outnumber them. Israelis would never agree to such a thing.

Expelling all Palestinians from Greater Israel would be seen to outsiders as a crime against humanity. There are 5.5 million Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean and they would put up a wicked fight! Yet there are many Israelis who no longer have any qualms about killing Palestinians.

The most likely alternative is an Apartheid State wherein the Palestinians would have limited autonomy and few political rights. Former Prime Minister Ohlmert has warned that this will become the solution unless there is a two-state solution. He feels that apartheid would be suicidal for Israel. Mearsheimer, 5/15/09.

While Netanyahu and Obama posture for the cameras, Israel is indeed in serious peril. The only practical solution may be the two-state solution even though 480,000 Jewish settlers now live illegally outside Israeli borders and only32% of Israelis support the plan. The best argument for it is the fear that arises when the alternatives are considered.

ARBUSTO NEGRO AND THE AFPAK WAR

Many Americans voted for Obama because he promised to end the war in Iraq. He promised to remove our troops in 18 months but he never said “all the troops”. Obama seems to be slipping out of any commitment for withdrawal anytime soon since the pressure is off: fewer US troops are being killed in Iraq, no US reporters are stationed there, and America has just lost interest now that it has the loss of jobs and mortgages to worry about. He needs a new focus for our “war against terror”. Why a new focus you ask? Because us taxpayers will not continue to see 50% of our federal budget spent for war in a time of economic depression unless someone can keep convincing us that there's a really serious threat out there to our comfortable lifestyle. So, he must demonstrate that America defends the New World Order, maintains the dollar as the world's reserve currency, keeps the oil flowing, prevents any serious challenge to our global hegemony, and delivers us from terrorists.

Afghanistan was the obvious choice for a new theater of war. With a mere blink of the eye, the news purveyors inside the Pentagon and the editors of these 'insider' stories at the major media outlets shifted gears from the Iraq conflict while continuing to emphasize the key ingredients: the need to defeat Islamic fundamentalism, to kill Al Qaeda terrorists, and to build democratic institutions. Same old story but this time it's in Afghanistan. However, when Obama looked around Kabul, he realized he'd have a hard time selling it on the Evening News Shows since those Afghanis had:

No WMDs
No threat to our Homeland
No oil resources to protect
No Iranian fundamentalists across the border
No turbaned terrorist faces to showcase
No easily defined battle lines and no measure of military success
No organized military to maintain law and order on our behalf

Our hand-tailored President Hamid Karzai just hopped a flight to Washington for a “Trilateral” conference with Obama and President Zardari of Pakistan. Patrick Cockburn commented in Counterpunch 5/06/09 that if ”the President's motorcade had headed for the southern outskirts of Kabul, he would have soon experienced the limits of his government's authority. It ends at a beleaguered police post within a few minutes drive of the capital. Drivers heading for the southern provinces nervously check their pockets to make sure they are carrying no documents linking them to the government. They do so because they know they will soon be stopped and their identities checked by black turbaned Taliban fighters who sometimes take the traveler's cell phone and redial numbers recently called. If a call is answered by a government ministry, or even worse, by a foreigner, then the phone's owner may be executed on the spot”.

The Taliban is hard to define and often hard to admire but it has never been the caricature that Fox and CNN developed. Member of Parliament Daoud Sultanzoy of Ghazni Province told Cockburn that: “Security has not deteriorated because of what the Taliban has done, but because people feel the government is unjust. It is seen as the enemy of the people, and because there is no constitutional alternative to it, the Taliban gain”. Support for the Taliban is not very high, but it has increased since 2006 when their rebellion effectively resumed with aid for Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI – Inter Services Intelligence – which supports the Taliban in Afghanistan and allows them refuge in the Pakistani mountains. ISI advises them not to fight to the end but to wait until the US loses interest in Afghanistan. “A withdrawal of Pakistani support and a denial of safe refuge would be a crippling blow to the Taliban but is not likely to happen. President Zardari may want to do it, but policy on the Taliban is decided by the Pakistani military” which continues to have little stomach for fighting fellow Moslems. Counterpunch 5/07/09.

The NYTimes published 5/05/09 an interview with a Taliban “logistics tactician” who described how free movement across the porous AfPak border, ready recruitment of Pakistani men, the cooperation of Afghani villagers, and the ability to disrupt supply lines at will and then to retreat inside Pakistan where the US forces are forbidden to pursue made their task easy and their patience inexhaustible. The only US weapons that seemed able to penetrate their defenses were the American drones now extensively employed over Pakistan with merely perfunctory complaints from the Pakistani President.

OBAMA'S TWO-PRONGED WAR
Given all of this, it's small wonder that Obama is changing wars once again. He wants to make Pakistan into his first priority war zone but he cannot appear to be abandoning Afghanistan to the opium farmers. Someone coined the phrase AfPak last week and a war in Pakistan certainly has more cachet on the Evening News:

Lots of WMDs
Plutonium producing reactors
Needs stable government
The Pakistanis already have a large land army
A well-organized militia of turbaned fundamentalists
A thirst for oil and gas
Positioned on the pipeline route from the Middle East to South Asia
A corrupt and easily-bribed government
Not perceived as a threat to our Homeland, given all the Pakistanis already working here

Were Pakistan to fall into the hands of the local Taliban, and if they gained access to the Nukes, this could be a threat to the stability of the entire Indian Subcontinent. So, U.S. President Barack Obama, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will attempt to hammer out a common strategy to battle the growing Jihadist insurgency in South Asia when they sit down for a trilateral meeting at the White House this week.

Karzai's demands for this meeting are relatively straightforward. The embattled Afghan leader is facing re-election in August, and now has both a Tajik former warlord and a Hazara former mujahideen commander by his side as vice-presidential running mates to take advantage of a deeply fractured opposition. (I guess we can forget about 'democratization' for the moment.) He faces a stream of criticism from White House officials for leading a thoroughly corrupt regime and exaggerating civilian losses caused by U.S. and NATO attacks. Stratfor 5/05/09. He also would like Pakistan to no longer provide safe haven to their tribal brothers from the Afghan side of the Durand Line but this seems unlikely.

President Zardari of Pakistan has a sea of troubles: Taliban militants have moved out of their Pashtun strongholds in the Northwest Provinces right into Pakistan's Punjabi heartland. The growing Talibanization phenomenon in nuclear-armed Pakistan is now dominating the headlines and fears mount that Pakistan's leadership will continue to be ineffective. U.S. officials have insisted that the Pakistani army push the Taliban back in the Buner and Dir districts around Swat, while Pakistani commanders on the ground acknowledge that trying to move aggressively into Swat would be suicidal. This week, the Pakistani Air Force is bombing villages in Swat while Taliban forces are already preparing for a major counteroffensive. They see the Pakistani military's moves as playing into their hands. Pakistani troops simply lack the capability and will for a ground offensive. Already this week, at least 500,000 refugees have fled the Swat Valley, situated a a mere 100 kilometers from the capital city of Islamabad.

Obama will attempt to boost Pakistan's confidence when he meets with Zardari and hands him another $1 billion in aid and emoluments. Note that the Taliban are motivated primarily by tribal loyalties that spread across borders, although within the same tribe. Pakistan has dealt with them by alternating between strong-armed tactics and flimsy peace deals in an attempt to confine the rebels into the lawless northwest provinces. Such tactics have thus far backfired: with each new military offensive that displaces a local population, more refugee camps are created from which the Pakistani Taliban can pluck fresh recruits. Stratfor 5/6/09

The Pakistani military simply does not share the US view that the radical Islamist threat should be the top national security priority. They assign higher priority to their eastern front with India where they face a nuclear armed neighbor, an interminable conflict over Kashmir, and now seething anger after the Mumbai massacre last year. Given all of this, they are most reluctant to get themselves pinned down and picked off in the lawless tribal areas of the northwest. Furthermore, military intelligence (ISI) is heavily penetrated by Islamist sympathizers who work on both sides of the insurgency.

The Taliban in Afghanistan are in no mood for reconciliation and insurgencies have long lives in this region that has driven out many occupiers in the past. The militants seem to have the motivation and patience to fight to the end while the United States has neither the luxury of time nor patience. Obama has given a number of subtle -- and a few not-so-subtle -- hints that he is not about to make his re-election in four years time dependent upon an AfPak war gone sour. His focus has now turned to ensuring that, at the very least, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is secure. If he finds that nuclear security is threatened, he may just march into Pakistan despite anyone's fears of foreign boots on their ground armed with large bribes and an even larger arsenal of remote-triggered weapons, drones and special forces with night vision goggles.

FEAR AND EXISTENTIAL FRIGHT
The hype and hysteria has already begun: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned that Pakistan's fragile government is facing an "existential threat" from Islamic militants who are now operating within a few hours of the capital. LATimes 4/34/09. “Nuclear-armed militants could also pose a "mortal threat" to the United States and other countries.” State Dept Spokesperson Robert Wood picked up on this phrase on 4 May: “We are facing an existentialist threat from these violent extremists. These violent extremists must be confronted”. The Cable – Stratfor 5/04/09. Not content, Mr. Wood demonized the insurgency as follows: “these violent extremists are not open to dialogue, they are interested only in death and destruction”. He managed to say “Violent Extremists” six times in 10 minutes. (The last time we invaded Kabul, the Taliban were identified as fanatics with long sticks who beat blue veiled women and girls away from schools.) The State Department also seems unaware that an “existential” attitude commonly begins “with a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of the apparent meaninglessness of an absurd world”. They seem to be referring only to the definition of an “existential risk” “that which is both global (affects all of humanity) and terminal”. Wikipedia. Its a shame Hilary did not clarify this for us frightened masses.

Obama described Pakistan’s civilian government at an April 29th news conference as “very fragile” and not having “the capacity to deliver basic services” to its people, or to gain their “support and loyalty.” “We want to respect Pakistani sovereignty but we have huge national security interests”. Obama’s statement was widely interpreted both in Pakistan and within the US political establishment as signaling that Washington is considering sponsoring a military coup. This was underscored by reports citing the chief of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, as saying that if the Zardari government did not demonstrate over the next two weeks that it can crush the Taliban insurgency in the country’s northwest, the US will have to determine its “next course of action.” Such was the outcry in Pakistan that the dutiful Robert Wood was forced to deny Friday that Islamabad faces a two-week “time frame.” Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, denounced the apprehensions voiced in the Pakistani press that less than nine months after the last US-backed dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, was forced to relinquish the Pakistani presidency, Washington is considering supporting a military-led government. “This is journalistic garbage ... journalistic gobbledygook,” declared Holbrooke. WSWS 5/05/09

In an interview given to the BBC on Monday May 4th, Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones singled out as the top US concern the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and made a thinly veiled threat against the Pakistani government, saying, “If Pakistan doesn’t continue in the direction that it presently is, and we’re not successful there, then, obviously, the nuclear question comes into view.” He went on the say that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban would be “the very, very worst case scenario” and added, choosing his words carefully but pointedly, “We’re going to do anything we can within the construct of our bilateral relations and multilateral relations to make sure that doesn’t happen.” We were left more than a bit puzzled as to who these rustic Taliban tribesmen intended to shoot the nukes at, what sort of missiles they would ride them in upon, and for what purpose beyond national suicide if aimed at India.

Oh yes, it is the era of Arbusto Negro. It's a little more subtle than Arbusto Blanco, and its better phrased, but it has the same relentless drive toward total global dominance, the same mission to preserve the world the way we would like it to be.

SUCH TORTUROUS TWISTING AND TURNING

In the past 6 days, Obama has shown us much about his political style and courage as our President. Intent upon opening up the records concerning torture, and after a Freedom of Information suit that forced his hand, he allowed four legal memos to be published Thursday 4/16/09. They provided legal cover for torture of political prisoners during the Bush years. He was immediately accused by four former Directors of the CIA of jeopardizing national security and aiding the terrorists; then he was challenged by Dick Cheney to tell the good results of torture; next, roundly condemned in a Wall Street Journal editorial; and finally pilloried by a plethora of patriotic Republicans. Obama's panicky responses to these attacks reveal much about what we can expect during the future Battles of Barack: ringing words, cautiousness when attacked, signals that he'll compromise, a very watered down piece of legislation, and then a nice closing speech.

“The Obama administration is caught in a devastating political contradiction” reports Patrick Martin, WSWS.org 4/20/09. “Legal documents drafted by the US Department of Justice in 2002 and 2005, and released by Obama, clearly establish that acts of torture were authorized and justified by the highest levels of the Bush administration. Yet, the President said on 4/16/09: “This is a time for reflection, not retribution”. He asked that we “put the pain behind us, and right our course in concert with our core values and move forward with confidence.” Keith Olbermann objected immediately on MSNBC 4/16/09: “This country has never 'moved forward with confidence' without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.” To ignore our past may very well keep the haunting images of Abu Ghraib alive in peoples minds, and allow torturers to assume that the lack of prosecution indicates that their actions were indeed justified. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made it even clearer on Sunday 4/19/09 on the ABC News program 'This Week with George Stephanopoulos' that Obama’s opposition to any prosecution extends not only to CIA agents who directly participated in torture but also to all the top officials of the Bush administration who authorized and justified the policy. This caused shock waves.

WHO'S COVERING UP FOR WHOM?
The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak immediately responded that:”This directly implicates the current administration in the cover-up of crimes carried out by its predecessor and as such, places the White House decision in direct violation of international law”. In an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard on 4/18/09, Nowak pointed out that the UN Convention Against Torture “requires the prosecution of those who engage in actions like waterboarding that are universally regarded as torture. The United States, a signatory to the UN convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court. The fact that you carried out an order doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility”. Nowak, an Austrian law professor, has previously urged the Obama administration to bring charges against George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld for torture and abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. He said the UN was in possession of documents that proved Rumsfeld gave orders for the torture of the prisoners and that the abuse was not the result of a handful of rank-and-file soldiers acting on their own.

Reporter Martin continues: “Emanuel’s comment makes it clear that Obama has bowed to enormous pressure from the US military/intelligence apparatus in agreeing not to hold anyone guilty for this torture. The British newspaper Independent reported that “past CIA directors John Deutch, George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden have been lobbying the White House furiously both to block any torture prosecution and to bar release of the torture memos.” They and others in the intelligence community have mounted a carefully choreographed campaign to denounce Obama for allegedly jeopardizing national security and aiding terrorists by making the memos public.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial of 4/20/09 cleverly spun the four memos: “ Far from 'green lighting' torture -- or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees -- the memos detail the actual techniques used to ensure that interrogations did not cause severe pain or degradation”. Imagine how fortunate these prisoners must feel today! The resulting clamor for justice in the past few days has caused Dick Cheney to emerge from that personal darkness within which many of us hoped he would remain, to remind us all that the use of torture has helped prevent a terrorist attack upon 'Our Homeland'. “Details and evidence of that are scarce” responded STRATFOR dryly in its Geopolitical Diary prepared 4/20/09 by an impressive staff of intelligence professionals. At the same time, former CIA Director Michael Hayden told The Guardian 4/19/09 that: “the public release of memos by Obama would make it harder to get useful information from suspected terrorists”. He apparently assumes we shall continue to torture during the Obama years.

While all of the civil liberties organizations have roundly condemned Obama's decision, such criticism was not reported widely in the MSM (main stream media) and totally avoided on all the Sunday talk shows. The American Civil Liberties Director stated 4/20/09 that: “Torture is a crime. Without accountability, we cannot 'move forward' because the stain of the past will haunt us into the future. No one is above the law. Prosecutions accomplish societal healing by ensuring that criminals pay their debt to society. This is as true for common criminals as it is for government officials who sanction and engage in torture”. The New York Times, leader of the MSM, in an editorial Sunday (NYTimes 4/19/09) suggested that top Bush administration officials, including former vice president Dick Cheney, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, should be questioned under oath, and urged that Jay Bybee, author of one of the torture memos while at the WH Office of Legal Counsel and now a federal appeals court judge, should be impeached and removed from the bench. However, the editorial was notably silent as to whether George W. Bush or other top officials should be prosecuted.

WHERE IS THE DISTURBING DISUNITY?
Obama was reported to be concerned by the 'disturbing disunity' fueled by the secret interrogations. “He was referring, not to popular revulsion against torture, but to the growing and publicly expressed bitterness of the CIA and other intel groups at having their criminal acts exposed, and to their fierce opposition to being held accountable”. “Obama had sought, in allowing publication of the memos, to give the appearance of making a real break with the past while at the same time reassuring the intelligence community and the military that his administration will continue the basic thrust of Bush's policies” reports Barry Grey 4/21/09 WSWS. Unfortunately, Obama's attempt to 'split the difference' as he is fond of trying, has increased demands for further investigation, provoked a bitter conflict within the state, and divided those within his administration. Most worrisome, all of this serves to highlight the amazing strength and control that the military-intelligence apparatus has achieved – a veritable state within a state. Illustrating the disturbing disunity' swirling around Obama's head, newly appointed Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair released the full text of a private memo he sent to colleagues on April 16th: “I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given. The information gained was valuable in some instances” he acknowledged in support of Dark-Sider Cheney. Jeremy Scahill Common Dreams 4/22/09 points out that “This is contrary to the White House view that they had not been effective”.

On Monday, April 20th, the President rushed off to Langley Virginia, to reassure the CIA, some of whom had carried out these egregious crimes, that they would not be investigated nor prosecuted and furthermore that the US government would pay for their defense should others attempt to make them answerable for their acts. Genuflecting to this power center before a crowded hall, Obama called it a great honor to speak to those agents “who protect the American people and the freedom we all cherish” Tom Eley WSWS 4/22/09. He downplayed his release of the four memos, explaining that much of the information was already public, and never mentioned that he was actually responding to a court order under the FOI.

By Tuesday, April 21st, the President apparently discovered that he had placed himself in the legally untenable position of promising to protect individuals who ordered and carried out torture in violation of US and International Law. Therefore he announced seeming off-handedly, during a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan in the Oval Office, that he may take the position that it “is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws” AntiWar 4/21/09. He went on further saying he was “open to Congress forming a bipartisan commission to conduct an inquiry”. Jeremy Scahill reports in CommonDreams.org 4/22/09 that: “The fact is the President already did incredible damage to the accountability movement and possibly acted unconstitutionally and in contravention of international law, by publicly and repeatedly stating that he will not allow prosecution of the CIA torturers”. The Center for Constitutional Rights has pointed out that the decision not to prosecute the torturers was not Obama's to make. “The attorney general is entrusted with upholding the law where crimes are committed, not making a political decision as to whether the president believes it is expedient to do so”.

What are the implications of all of this twisting and turning by Obama in the winds of Washington? Has his early assessment of the strength of the military/intelligence apparatus caused him to fear the consequences of allowing simple justice to proceed? Would setting up a bipartisan commission have any value? “Recent experience with such commissions, most prominently the 9-11 commission, shows that these can easily turn into whitewash operations” according to Jeremy Scahill CommonDreams.org 4/22/09. “If they wheel out tired old Lee Hamilton, you know this ain't goin' nowhere. What is actually needed is a Special Prosecutor”.

So, has our President now satisfactorily polled the centers of power: the military, the intelligence agencies, the Congress, the Democrats, the media and, oh yes, the public? Can he calm the winds of partisan discord? Can he overcome the apparent disunity within his own Administration? Will responsibility and accountability prevail? Should we keep waiting for the tooth fairy?

CONFUSE AND CONQUER: BANKERS TO THE BARRICADES!

The trouble with the original Hank Paulson TARP plan last fall that handed $700 billion to the biggest banks in compensation for their bad judgment was that it was too transparent. By the time we got to the Christmas holidays, everyone had figured it out and was grumbling. Paulson spooned out the bailouts over a four month period after warning Congress that the world would end if they didn't give Hank the money by the weekend. Some in Congress finally began to look at what they had approved, once they noticed that the public was beginning to suspect a con job. Obama, a far wiser politician, has taken steps to avoid these errors in his approach to our economy's continuing collapse. First he bribed us with a $787 billion dollar economic stimulus program designed to ease our pain, protect the unemployed, and give the states huge sums to hand out more or less as they wished. Second, he directed his new Treasury Secretary, the bright and shiny penny, Timothy Geithner, to fashion a series of second phase bank bailout programs that would be far more opaque than Paulson's, and which would be distributed quickly, in very large tranches (a phony French financial phrase meaning Gobs of Cash), and for the most part outside Congress' purview. That should take care of those grumbling voters.

Now Geithner has encountered a sea of troubles with his PPIP, the Public-Private Partnership Program. The idea was to show that private sector funds could indeed form a partnership with us taxpayers to soak up the troubled assets resulting from the collapse of the housing market, the financial derivatives trading, the credit default swaps and the like. Geithner has been working feverishly on a new strategy since February, but has yet to announce his definitive attack plan. We will examine Geithner's various proposals in a minute. But first, let's try to understand one basic question:

WHATS WRONG WITH OUR BIG BANKS ANYWAY?
“The dirty little secret”, writes economist F. William Engdahl in Global Research 3/30/09, “which Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple: there are only at most five US banks which are the source of the toxic poison that is causing such dislocation in the world financial system. The heart of the present problem, and the reason ordinary loan losses as in prior bank crises are not the problem, is a variety of exotic financial derivatives most especially the so-called credit Default Swaps.” “Today five US banks hold 96% of all US bank derivatives positions” (data from Federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released March 30th, 2009). Most of America's second and third tier banks never traded in these derivatives.
The five are, in declining order of their total derivatives holdings: JPMorgan Chase: $88 trillion in derivatives; Bank of America: $38 trillion; Citibank: $32 trillion; Goldman Sachs: $30 trillion; Wells Fargo-Wachovia: $5 trillion.
“These banks consider themselves too big to fail and thus can dictate policy to the Federal Government. Some have called it a bankers' coup d'etat, and it definitely isn't healthy” Engdahl continues. “Should this become generally known, it would focus voter attention on real solutions”.

“The Federal Government has long had laws in place to deal with insolvent banks: The FDIC places such a bank in receivership and its assets and liabilities are sorted out by independent audit. Irresponsible management is purged, stockholders lose, and the purged bank is eventually split into smaller units and when again healthy, resold to the public” explains Engdahl. “This is what Wall Street and Geithner are frantically trying to prevent.” The longer the government delays and refuses to demand full and independent audit to determine the solvency or insolvency of these five banks, the more costly it will be for all of us.

BUT WASN'T PAULSON'S $700 BILLION PLAN LAST FALL GOING TO CURE THIS?
When Hank Paulsen panicked the Congress into giving him $700 bn back in September 2008, supposedly to buy bad assets, he blew the money on the banks themselves: $125 bn to the 9 biggest banks and another $125 to smaller regional banks without any accountability. Then $80 bn went to the ailing AIG, several tens of thousands to Citigroup, and $20 bn to auto companies. Now there is less than $135 bn left and nothing much to show for it. None was used to buy bad assets because the banks wouldn't sell them at anywhere near their market value since this would appear as a huge loss on the bank's books. They continue to carry them on the books at inflated prices, and dare not reveal that, like the Emperor, they have no clothes. Paulson did use the funds to buy preferred non-voting stock in some banks, giving him little or no leverage over bank decisions, compensation packages or bonus policy. Paulson's program temporarily shored up the hole in bank balance sheets without attacking the cause. Then our boy Hank was saved by that stirring ceremony on the steps of the Capital on January 20th. He has not made even a squeak since.

SHOULDN'T OBAMA'S ECONOMIC STIMULUS PLAN HAVE HELPED?
The $787 billion program does not address any of the problems in the financial sector. It is merely a stop gap measure to expand the food stamp program, increase unemployment insurance, provide some assistance with medical costs for the jobless, and hand out grants to states for their favorite public works programs. A total of 38% of the $787 bn are for various tax cuts. The job creation program, thought by many to be the key issue just now, received only $29 bn for 2009 and a total of only $200 billion over the entire life of the program. The jobs program is too slow and too small: it may create a few hundred thousand jobs in contrast to the 5 to 7 million who will lose their jobs in 2009. With this staggering level of unemployment and consequent decline in consumer spending, the Stimulus Package looks like a thin gruel indeed. A second stimulus bill will be necessary later this year.

GEITHNER AS THE POSTER BOY OF ZOMBIE ECONOMICS
“Geithner has become the Poster Boy for everything that's wrong with the government's scatterbrain financial rescue plan” complained Mike Whitney 3/23/09. “He played a central role in the $165 million AIG bonus scandal and helped ignite a huge public fury. Now he must finally announce the details of his long-awaited plan for removing up to $1 trillion of toxic assets from the balance sheets of the country's biggest banks”. The delays have resulted in part from the fact that the hedge funds and other private sector investors, whom Geithner had expected to join with the government (read taxpayer) in picking up these banks' toxic assets have been very reluctant to play along. Consequently he sweetened up the deal several times before announcing the heavily subsidized program described by Nobel Prize Economist Joseph Stiglitz below.

Geithner's plan initially released at the end of March is described by Jack Rasmus in Z Magazine 4/01/09 as a combination of three proposals to stabilize the Financial System:

Part 1 is a $1 trillion effort called PPIP - Public Private Investment Fund which we discuss below.
Geithner also plans two additional programs but has provided little descriptive material so far:
Part 2 is TALF - Term Asset Backed Securities Lending Facility at a cost of another 1 trillion.
Part 3 is HASP – Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan: a $275 billion to subsidize mortgage lenders, servicers and investors.

Joseph Stiglitz, NYTimes 4/30/09, describes Part 1 - the PPIP as follows: “ A win win lose proposition: banks win, investors win, taxpayers lose”. He reminds us of what caused this mess: “banks got themselves into trouble by over-leveraging – by using relatively little of their own capital and borrowing heavily - to buy extremely risky real estate assets using complex instruments called collateralized debt obligations”.

Stiglitz explains how the PPIP would work (We call this the Outside Bidder Alternative): “Take a toxic asset likely to be worth somewhere between zero and $200 in a year's time. The 'average' value is $100 in a competitive market. Under the Geithner Plan, if a private investor is willing to pay $150, then he puts up $12 and the Treasury the remainder - $138 of which $12 is equity and the remaining $126 is a loan at zero interest. If in a year's time the asset value declines to zero, the private investor loses $12, and the government loses $138. If the value after a year increases to $200, then the partners split the $74 of net gain after paying back the $126 loan. The private partner gains $25 on a $12 investment. The govt, who risked $138 gets back only $37. This is ersatz capitalism – privatizing the gains and socializing the losses!”

Fortunately, the private sector still shows almost no appetite for investing in these toxic assets, even when they only have to put up $12 for a $50 share and can lose no more than the $12. They know that the real value of these toxic assets is close to zero – so why put even a penny into them? Therefore Geithner continues to search for the magic formula that will protect the naked bankers and keep taxpayers confused. The naked bankers are indeed like the zombie who keeps coming back.

The Inside Bidder Gambit as recently devised by Geithner and Larry Summers is even worse than the Outside Bidder shuffle, in the view of Columbia University Economist Jeffry Sachs, Huffington Post 4/06/09: “Consider a toxic asset held by Citibank with a face value of $1 million and a market value of zero. An outside bidder such as the 'private investor' described by Stiglitz above, would pay nothing for such as asset. Suppose, however, that Citibank sets up a Citibank Public-Private Investment Fund (CPPIF) under the Inside Bidder Gambit. The CPPIF bids full face value of $1 million for the worthless asset because it can borrow $850k from the FDIC and get $75k from the Treasury to make the purchase! Citibank will only have to put in $75k of the total.

“Citibank thereby receives $1 million for the worthless asset while the CPPIF ends up with a perfectly worthless asset against $850k in debt to the FDIC. The CPPIF shortly thereafter quietly declares bankruptcy, while Citibank walks away with a cool $1 million”. The taxpayer (under the auspices of the FDIC) loses $925k and Citibank makes a net profit of $925k after deducting its original $75K investment in the CPPIF. “Cynics believe the Geithner-Summers Inside Bidder Plan is exactly what it seems: a naked power grab of taxpayer money by Wall Street interests”, Jeffrey Sachs concludes.

The Liberty Bond Gambit as introduced in the New York Times 4/09/09: Now that the Hedge Funds have opted out since they know there is no living breathing value left in these toxic assets, the Obama administration is encouraging several large investment companies to create the financial crisis equivalent of Liberty Bonds, right out of World War I. But now we will call them bail out bonds. “This is an opportunity to forge an alliance between Main Street, Wall Street and K Street” said an executive at Black Rock, the big money management firm. “Its giving the guy on Main street an equal seat at the table next to the big guys”. Geithner described it as a win-win-win program. The hope seems to be that the small Mom and Pop investor on Main street will not be equipped with a crap-detector equivalent to those in use by the hedge funds who have already turned down Geithner's Outside Bidder scheme.

Why is Geithner kept on? In the Atlantic Monthly of May 2009, Simon Johnson, formerly Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund and MIT Professor, states that: “The crash laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government. If the US was an merging market economy under the control of the IMF, they would tell it what they tell all countries in that situation -recovery will fail unless you break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.”

OBAMA'S TROJAN HORSE AT THE GATES OF DETROIT

An auto worker said this week : “My opinion of him at first was that he was going to stick up for us, but there has been an abrupt change in attitude towards workers since taking office. I tried and tried to find something about that man that I liked but I couldn't.” “Obama: I am looking at you, but there is something else underneath. You are not what you appear to be. Its like you were a Trojan horse”. WSWS 4/01/09

Obama complains that cost cutting programs have not gone far enough. Chrysler has to merge with Fiat or go bankrupt, he demands. If GM doesn't fundamentally restructure in the next 60 days the government will throw it into bankruptcy. He emphasized his consternation by demanding the immediate resignation of their CEO. The main stream media enthusiastically praised Obama's insistence that auto workers accept job cutbacks and salary reductions in order to return the US auto industry to profitability. Everyone has now piled on including the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. “It is important to hold UAW accountable and cut legacy liabilities” (previously agreed-upon retirement packages) said the Financial Times. The Post said: “It was important that the president did not flinch in demanding even deeper concessions from workers”. In distinct contrast to all of this, Larry Summers intoned on Meet the Press that the government could not force AIG to withhold bonuses because contracts can't be broken. Apparently if you shower when you come home from work on the assembly line, your contract does not give the protection that those who shower before heading to a desk job in Wall Street receive.

Obama says the auto manufacturers must remake themselves with 'fundamental restructuring' but he doesn't want the government to run the industry Counterpunch 4/1/09. GM management has not engineered any fundamental change in it business plan in the past 20 years. If he wants real change, Obama will have to install a management team committed to producing an electric car with a reasonable price tag, rather than the $40,000 'Volt' they intend to put out in 2011. The auto industry task force set up by Obama on Feb. 28th consists of cabinet secretaries and senior advisors to the White House. Not one member has experience in the auto industry.

The New York Times predicts that GM will be forced into a 'controlled bankruptcy' (NYT 4/1/09) with an 'Old GM' and a 'Good GM'. This 'Quick Rinse Bankruptcy' could include tearing up 'debt obligations' to union retirees for the health care plans promised decades ago under VEBA (Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association). Counterpunch: Brenner, Gaus & Slaughter – 4-01-09. Bankruptcy has proven popular for the airlines, the steel industry and many other employers as a wonderful way to avoid their legal obligations under earlier contracts with labor unions. If GM is too big to fail, why doesn't Obama take it over?

WHAT IF THEY TREATED DETROIT LIKE WALL STREET?
Maybe we'd see a plan to get the hedge fund investors to absorb some of the auto industry's excess capacity by buying up the cars that can't be sold just now and holding them as 'legacy assets' until the market brightens up. The government would put up 87% of the capital for this little booster program and the hedge fund investors 13% ($71 million to buy $1 billion worth of fine American-made cars – please don't call them toxic assets). If the cars sold some day, the hedge funds would take the profit. If they didn't, good old Uncle Sam would take all but $71 million of the loss Robert Weissman in Counterpunch 4/02/09. Hell it's sounds good for the Wall Street banks, why not for General Motors?

The Geithner Plan for embattled banks contrasts sharply with the very tough, hard-headed approach taken towards the automakers. Why kid gloves for Wall Street and tough love for Detroit? Well, for starters, our financial community has made a long-term investment in our politicians and also provided most of the policy makers now in office at Treasury and the Fed. What would happen if they treated AIG like Detroit?

Sheldon Filger writes in the Huffington Post: 4/03/09: “If G.M. and Chrysler are in fact doomed, along with much of what remains of America's industrial capacity, this will be largely due to a policy decision that establishes the financial sector as the center of gravity for the U.S. economy, reflecting the vastly more significant taxpayer dollars that have been allocated to that sector, with far fewer strings than are being attached to the paltry aid given to Detroit. How is it possible for the U.S. to rebuild its economy if the industrial sector, epitomized by companies such as General Motors and Chrysler, is largely sacrificed on the altar of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Bank of America and their ilk?”

THE HYPE IS SPILLING OVER FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER
Since Sunday March 15th we have been hit with one of those Talk Show Tsunamis that always leave us trying to sniff out the Washington hype from the real goods. What are they saying?

- Mexico is losing control of its cities to drug gangs and could collapse.
- Mexico is close to becoming a failed state.
- 2000 weapons each day are shipped into Mexico from the wide-open gun dealers in the US.
- Drug syndicate criminals are infiltrating the US.
- This situation is our top priority: Homeland Security Czar Napolitano.
- Its a serious problem: Secretary of Defense Gates.
- US Embassy in Mexico City tries to dampen it down: “The US had no intention of sending troops into Mexico”.
- DEA's top intelligence official Antony Placido believes: “Calderon is making important strides against the cartels. The violence we see is actually a signpost of success.”
- Obama says he's considering putting troops on the border.
- Chief of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen says he is willing to supply unmanned drones and helicopters to chase down the Mexican drug mafia.
- Bay Buchanon (Pat's lethal sister) says Calderon and his government are down for the count. Without a US rescue operation Mexico will soon become a narco-state.
- Sen Joe Lieberman says he's: “looking into potential implications of increased terrorist activity”. (Does he mean the increased activity is potential or that the implications he foresees are still potential? In other words that they don't even exist at this point in time.)

The current hype leaves one to ask “Qui Bono” - who benefits from this sudden tsunmai? The parroting of this story in almost identical language in all of our remaining newspapers coast to coast and on the major TV news broadcasts suggests the dead hand of yhrPentagon's War Justification Unit. We know them only too well from the buildup to Iraq. The stationing of a sizable US military force on the Mexican border has not happened since 1914 when we dispatched 11,000 troops across the border and occupied Veracruz. The Mexicans rose up in revolt against this and the entire power structure was toppled in the 1920's . It took another half century for the wealthy land-owners to regain the full hegemony they and their northern partners now enjoy over the Mexican economy.

We have now been told that Mexico is about to explode as a result of the local drug wars and their supposed 'spillover' into nearby US cities. This spill-over terminology was first mouthed by General Gene Rennart, head of the recently formed US Northern Command, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 17th that the Pentagon is reviewing plans to send more US troops to the Mexican border. The US military already has some 3,000 troops there and additional National Guard could be deployed under a plan he will announce within a week. We are currently providing Calderon's regime with some $1.4 billion in military hardware and "technical assistance" under the Merida Initiative and employing techniques developed for Iraq and Afghanistan such as spy planes and pilot-less drones. "We're going to examine whether National Guard deployments would make sense" said Obama.

Now where did all this come from? While there have been a few stories over the past months about the heating up of gang rivalries amongst the drug gangs battling for turf and arguing over what suitable honorariums they need pay to corrupt police and government officials. President Felipe Calderón has deployed national police to a number of cities but he has not asked for US troops on the border. Most of the US border towns report relative peace and tranquility and the Mexican drug lords have generally been very respectful of our turf. Phoenix has experienced a surge in kidnappings recently but is this all the dreaded spillover actually has amounted to? Lots of adjectives, few facts so far.

DRUG WAR DOUBLESPEAK
Is all of this rhetoric truly about drugs and gang land spillover or is something much more subtle afoot? Lets review the bidding:

What does the US provides to Mexico?
- A huge market for narcotics.
- Money laundering services to the drug cartel by our large international bankers like CitiGroup.
- A supply of high powered assault rifles, and other weapons used to fight Calderon's National Police.
- A very large portion of the total capital investment in Mexican manufacturing.

What does Mexico provide to the US?
- Cheap labor on demand which keeps the lid on wage rates in the US particularly in agriculture, food and meat processing.
- Recreational drugs including cocaine, opium derivatives, meth-amphetamines and marijuana.
- Low cost manufactured goods.
- Oil for our Gulf Coast refineries

Shamus Cooke reports in Global Research 3/15: Mexican drug cartels are not actually a threat to the US and “narco-terrorists” are not the problem. Our interest is really in protecting US investments in Mexico. As the Mexican economy sinks under low oil prices, a declining market for Mexican goods, the shutdown of new foreign investment in Mexican industry, the drop in labor remittances from Mexican labor in the US, and the recessionary climate in general, Washington may feel that we need to prop up Calderon just to keep the Mexican people from revolting. We have already witnessed major labor protests in Europe, Russian border states, and Asia as a result of the sinking world economy. Social unrest in Mexico doesn't seem very theoretical. This gives further justification to the militarization of our southern borders to put a little starch into Calderon to keep the lid on any political movements that might threaten US investments and oil supplies and avoid the dreaded “spillover”.

Pentagon has always planned for sufficient US military capability to fight two wars on the world stage at the same time. Are we sliding towards a third war front? Admiral Mullen told the media after his recent visit to Mexico City about “plans for the Pentagon to assist the Mexican armed forces in dealing with the terrorist-like 'counter-insurgency' now underway using tactics the US forces employed in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan”. Let's hope Obama will maintain a sense of balance and keep the Pentagon out of Mexico.

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EVERY IDEA CONSIDERED EXCEPT FOR SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE:
At last Thursday's Health Care Forum, President Obama promised that “every voice will be heard, every idea considered and every option must be on the table”. But before the forum could even begin, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs explained, in reference to Single Payer Universal Health Care, that: “The President doesn't believe that's the best way to achieve the goal of cutting costs and increasing access”. No supporters of single payer were invited but at the last moment, Congressman John Conyers, single-payer's leading advocate in Congress, was allowed to attend. Amy Goodman on Democracy Now 3/06/09 reported that single payer advocates had been largely silenced in the media. As media attention focused on the health care issue in early March, no advocates of a single payer health care plan were heard on any mainstream TV network and very few in the print media.

What is 'Single Payer Universal Health Care'? It provides that all citizens will have their medical expenses paid for by the Federal Government (the single payer). There will be no insurance company involvement whatsoever. It will function much as the Medicare system, which pays all hospital costs for those over 65, has operated for the past 43 years.

What is Obama's Alternative 'Universal Heath Program'?: This program, still being fabricated in the White House, requires all who can afford it to purchase private health insurance and has the Federal Government pay for the insurance policies of those who cannot afford to pay themselves. The health care industry would continue to operate under the management of the private insurance industry, much as it does now, as a for-profit business.

How did this happen? Luke Mitchell in the Feb. 2009 issue of Harpers Magazine reports that “A single payer system would take a lot of money out of the private insurance system”. It's also something that a lot of people in Washington understand as ideologically threatening, that is to say, they equate a single-payer system with what they call socialized medicine.” “There's clearly a massive resistance to single-payer on the Hill.” Mitchell continues: “Obama himself said he favored a single-payer health plan in 2003 and has repeatedly said this was the best approach but there are a lot of built-in players to be dealt with. The 'Universal Health Programs' we are seeing an offer that basically acts to bribe those middlemen, the private health care insurers, into not complaining too much. It requires you to buy private insurance and if you can't afford it, the government will fund you. So it's not a market system exactly; its essentially government-funded private insurance. And the reason normal people might find it preferable is that they have a preference for what they think of as 'market solutions'. They think these market solutions are just more efficient.”

Yet, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that administration consumes 31.0 percent of U.S. health spending under our privatized health care, double the proportion of Canada national health care plan (16.7 %). Average overhead among private U.S. insurers was 11.7 %, compared with 1.3 % for Canada’s single-payer system and 3.6 % for the US Medicare system run by the federal government and which pays hospital costs for all over age 65.

HELL – YOU CAN'T EXPECT FREE MARKET PLANS TO COMPETE WITH THE GOVERNMENT!
Five senior Republican Senators gathered after the Forum to warn Obama that he would face opposition if he pushed the public option: “Forcing free market plans to compete with government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition. Ultimately we would be left with a single government-run program controlling all of the market”. After all, didn't Ronnie Reagan tell us that free markets were always bound to be less costly and more efficient than government solutions?

Today the US is the only industrialized country without a government-funded health care system and it has the highest costs by far of any of them: $7,126 per capita per year versus half that amount in Western Europe.

Senator Baucus, Chairman of the Finance Committee, explained his opposition to “Single Payer Universal Health Care” on March 10th: “Its not going to get passed. I'm not going to waste any time on it. Maybe some day”. Senator Baucus is talking about its getting approved in Congress, not in the nation, where the vast majority of nurses and health care workers already support single payer health care. A recent survey showed 59% of all medical doctors also supporting single payer. In the minds of many people, however, government involvement in health care is still equated with the invasion of privacy and the loss of free choice.

The health insurance industry gave Obama $19 million during his run for president. It doesn't sound like much but when added to the hundreds of millions given over many years to practically every incumbent in Congress, it certainly supports Baucus' prediction that “nothin's gonna' happen right now”.

SO WHAT CAN WE EXPECT?
As Michael Hiltzik put it in the Los Angeles Times on Mar. 9th: “the health insurance industry's trade group AHIP revealed it had experienced an epiphany and decided to support the principle of universal health care. Briefly the industry wants the government to assume the cost of treating the sickest, and therefore the most expensive, Americans. The industry will accept a government mandate to take on all customers, as long as all Americans are required to buy coverage”. So, the insurance industry would still run the health care business but now with an even bigger market to feed upon, and with the Federal Government paying the insurance premium for all of those who are impoverished, unemployed, or just too damned sick to come up with the jack. What is this? Privatized socialism?

THE IRAQI PULLOUT HOAX
The New York Times suggests that Obama has made a statesmanlike compromise between his campaign pledge to “get out of Iraq in 16 months” and the Pentagon Brass pushing for 23 months: he split the difference at 19 months (September 2010). Most Americans had thought on Election Day that this meant all troops would leave Iraq but we have been disabused of this naïve notion. American will continue to have “a residual force” stationed at the four large desert bases (often referred to as crusader castles) for an undefined number of years.

This “continuing presence” after August 2010 has been called Advisory Training Brigades. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell conceded on Feb. 24th that some would continue to “conduct combat operations,” and Iraq would still be considered a war zone. The rest would be what he described as “enablers. The issue is why will we need them there? We can only conclude that Obama has not let go of what had been the over-riding justification for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003: to dominate the region militarily. The objective was then and continues to be: to control Iraq's oil resources, to assure the continued security of the corrupt medieval monarchies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and to utilize the Persian Gulf as our private lake. The four crusader fortifications we have built with their huge airfields and weapons stockpiles can serve as a launching pad for any bombing raids found necessary in future years to keep in line those 'Seven Stans” of Central Asia: Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, Turkomen, Kirghiz, Afghani and Pakistani along with those unreliable Persians and any Palestinians that might acquire a modern weapon. It's all part of the unworkable and unaffordable program called “full spectrum global dominance” back at the Pentagon and that has already run us near to full spectrum bankruptcy. The administration intends to call those remaining troops a “transition force” - apparently to guard us as we move to a Pax-Obama future. None of the Iraqi political parties support any continued US presence after the year 2011, as had been agreed during the Bush administration.

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a bit confused: “I don’t know what the justification is for 50,000,” she said on MSNBC February 25th. “I would think a third of that, maybe 20,000, a little more than a third, 15,000 or 20,000.” As of February 26th, Obama's people are putting the size of the residual force at 35 to 50,000. Obama just budgeted $130 billion to fund the wars costs for Iraq and Afghanistan for the fiscal year starting June 2009. Pentagon Spokesman Geoff Morrell has now further parsed his words: “while Iraq would remains a war zone, most of these remaining forces would not do anything that resembles fighting. But just because these troops would carry a sidearm, as all U.S. troops do in theater, that should not be confused with them having a combat mission”. What is this? Will two mile long runways be defended by residual forces with sidearms?

We need to go back to the Middle Ages to find a historic parallel. After the long series of Crusades initiated by various Popes and Kings of Europe between 1095 and 1270 AD, the bloody venture was finally abandoned after Saladin had recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders and a large number of Christian knights were left out in desert fortresses or on the island of Rhodes. The crusades had been self financing from the loot stolen and sent back to the royal counting houses. But when the revenue flow stopped, the Kings and the Pope turned away and the remaining knights were forced to support themselves through piracy, pillage, and attacks upon desert caravans. They were known as the Knights Templar or the Knights of Saint John. Will we repeat this history? Washington still seems to think that access to Iraqi oil contracts will pay our way just as the pillage of rich caravans had kept the struggling crusaders fed. Does anyone really expect the Iraqis will go along with this?

WILL OBAMA RESTORE CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT? Contributed by former Congressman Dan Hamburg and Lewis Seiler.
While most of us have had our attention fixed on the economic firestorm engulfing the planet, President Obama is failing to meet his only sworn responsibility as our chief executive: to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Americans understand that George W. Bush defiled the Constitution through the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions, torture, rendition and warrant-less wiretapping. Now, less than a month into the Obama era, we are seeing that little has changed in terms of extra-constitutional prosecution of the so-called War on Terror. So far, he has signed an order banning “harsh interrogation techniques” but may be keeping other reprehensible policies in place, and perhaps adding a few of his own.

Ironically, it was the liberal bastion Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco before whom Obama attorney Douglas N. Letter argued that extraordinary rendition and torture shall remain unpunished under the watch of Barack Obama. The case (Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc.) involved five “detainees” who have filed suit against a subsidiary of Boeing for flying them to CIA “black sites” where they were brutally tortured. Attorney Letter startled the judges by invoking the same “state-secrets” argument employed by Bush. He maintained that the “no change” position he advocated had been “thoroughly vetted with appropriate officials within the new administration.” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said: “This is not change, this is definitely just more of the same.”

Meanwhile back in Washington, plans for detention at home are being expanded under Democratic Party leadership. On January 22, H.R. 645 - the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act was introduced calling for establishment of six “centers” to be constructed on military installations across the US. These new FEMA centers are “to provide temporary housing, medical and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster.”

Why” asks Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) “are these centers being constructed on military bases if they’re not for the purpose of rounding up and detaining large groups of people?” “They use the ever popular excuse that the facilities are for the purposes of a national emergency” but Ron Paul is highly suspicious of their real motives.

Last fall, the Third Infantry Division’s 1st Combat Team, trained in Iraq, was deployed within US borders to “help with civil unrest and crowd control.” (Have you heard of any civil unrest recently?) ”According to Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of the US Northern Command, at least two more brigades will be deployed by 2010, contrary to the doctrine of posse comitatus, which prohibits US troops being used against US citizens. Obama needs to explain both the new FEMA camps and this deployment of combat troops on home turf. Excerpted from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle 2/20/09. Lewis Seiler is president of Voice of the Environment. Dan Hamburg, a former member of Congress representing District #1 in Northern California, is executive director.

THE OBAMA BUDGET and the GREAT GAME
Much is coming forth late this week in this impressive budget document that had not been clear during the new White House staff's earlier weavings and shifting. We will delve into it in the Eleventh Edition (out in early March).

A CAPTIVE OBAMA
The military holds Obama captive to its strategy for maintaining US security and continuing the supposed war on terrorism. After Bush Administration sold Congress and much of the American public for 8 years on the necessity of preventing another 9/11, Obama now finds it impossible to change the paradigm, declare the war over, cut our defense budget in the face of national bankruptcy, and withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan without being immediately accused of leaving America at risk. Further, the pressure upon him by Republicans and some Democratic lawmakers makes it extremely difficult to pass truly progressive legislation that does not have the approval of those who finance these law-makers. These financiers include the war-machinery manufacturers, the mass media and the financial community. They have everything at stake in this economy that spends 50% of tax revenues on making war. My God, what would happen if peace broke out? Where will we sell our cluster bombs?

Thus Obama can at best withdraw slowly and carefully from Iraq and then only if he can guarantee the war machine that it will still be able to bomb anywhere at will in the Middle East from secure bases or with conscienceless drones. Should he make any moves that threaten the “existing world order” he will confront the type of blockage he just encountered in the US Senate where Republicans and even some Democrats whittled away at his economic stimulus plan, not because they had real alternatives to offer, but merely to show they were still around and had muscle.

OUR INTEL ADMIRAL DISCOVERS ECONOMICS
Retired Admiral Dennis Blair, our new director of national intelligence, warned the Senate Committee on Intelligence Feb. 12th that the deepening world capitalist crisis posed the paramount threat to US national security and warned that its continuation could trigger a return to the "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s. This frank appraisal, contained in the "annual threat assessment" on behalf of 16 separate US intelligence agencies, represented a striking departure from earlier years, in which a supposedly ubiquitous threat from Al Qaeda terrorism and the two wars launched under the Bush administration topped the list of concerns. Reported by Bill Van Auken Global Research, February 14, 2009.
Admiral Blair declared: "The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications. The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism."

But Blair stressed that the threat that the crisis will produce revolutionary upheavals is global. The financial meltdown, he said, is "likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year." Blair also pointed to the damage that the crisis has done to the global credibility of American capitalism, declaring that the "widely held perception that excesses in US financial markets and inadequate regulation were responsible has increased criticism about free market policies, which may make it difficult to achieve long-time US objectives." The collapse of Wall Street, he added, "has increased questioning of US stewardship of the global economy and the international financial structure."
Curiously, Admiral Blair's entire pitch never attempted to justify propping up our economy to create jobs or to reduce poverty. The justification for any aid to the economy was to keep the war machine in operation and our global hegemony in place. That seemed his bottom line.

OBAMA SINKS BOTH HIS BOOTS INTO AFGHANISTAN
Barry Grey writes on Feb.19 in WSWS.org that “President Obama ordered the dispatch of 17,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan in a major escalation of the increasingly bloody American-led occupation of the war-ravaged country. He cast the increased deployment as a response to a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan and linked the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan with an Al Qaeda safe haven along the Pakistani border, which he claimed, echoing the rhetoric of his predecessor, 'threatens America'.

“The new marines and army units had initially been slated to be sent to Iraq. Obama said the military was able to send the troops to Afghanistan because his administration was 'responsibly' drawing down US forces in Iraq. In fact, the US troop level in Iraq remains at 140,000, and the White House has thus far failed to implement Obama's campaign pledge to withdraw one combat brigade a month and remove all combat troops from Iraq within sixteen months of his coming to power. Top military commanders have publicly questioned this timetable and Obama has indicated his willingness to break his campaign promise which, in any event, would leave tens of thousands of "non-combat" troops in Iraq indefinitely”. Barry Grey explains.

A recent analysis by Stratfor, the authoritative Intelligence Blog published by former CIA types and usually close to the thinking at “The Company”, contradicts Obama in several respects:

There is no longer any linkage between the fates of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

It is not clear that Al-Qaeda is any longer operational.

If the primary reason for fighting the Taliban is to keep Al-Qaeda from having a base of operations in Afghanistan, that reason might be moot now as Al-Qaeda appears to be wrecked.

The search for Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups is an intelligence matter and does not require tens of thousands of troops.

The Taliban have forged relationships with many Afghan tribes, who aid and shelter them and do not want to get on their wrong side. The Taliban have the classic advantage of guerillas operating in known terrain with a network of supporters and superior intelligence.

Conclusion: there is no conceivable force the United States can deploy to pacify Afghanistan.

From the February 17, 2009 CS Monitori>, Walter Rodgers recalls that: “History may not repeat itself, but all too often it recycles mistakes. In 1961, before the Vietnam War became full-fledged, former Gen. Douglas MacArthur warned President Kennedy not to fight a land war in Asia. Over the next 14 years, more than 58,000 Americans died as Washington ignored his advice and ramped up operations. Today, the US is stuck in another land war in Asia: Afghanistan. The original mission was to capture Osama bin Laden, disable Al-Qaeda, remove the Taliban, and keep the country from being a safe haven for terrorists. After seven years of fighting, hundreds of dead US soldiers and thousands more wounded, those objectives have not been met. And now the US wants to double down, adding as many as 30,000 additional US troops to get the job done”.

“It's unfathomable that Washington learned so little from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which ended in an ignominious retreat followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union three years later. The Soviets lost 15,000 soldiers.
“The United States now has 33,000 troops in Afghanistan. Even if President Obama agrees to double that amount, the effort will be wasted. Half a million US troops might not be enough - it wasn't in Vietnam. Mr. Obama needs to recognize that hesitation to expand the war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with will or cowardice and everything to do with wisdom.“

As Steve Holland commented on Reuters Feb 17th: “The Afghan War now belongs to Obama”.

Elizabeth Burmiller in the NY Times on Feb 18 reports: “The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, said Wednesday that the heightened troop levels that President Obama ordered for Afghanistan could remain in place for as long as five years. General McKiernan, said that the buildup 'is not a temporary force uplift' and that it was essential to break what he called a stalemate in southern Afghanistan, the epicenter of the Taliban-led insurgency. He said that he could not determine exactly how long the troops would be there, but that the buildup would 'need to be sustained for some period of time,' and that he was looking at the next three to four or five years."

IS THIS A CHANGE-of-TEAM WE CAN BELIEVE IN?
Dave Lindorff, reporter for Salon, the Nation and Businessweek, writes: :”Just two weeks after his historic inauguration ceremony, Obama's presidency is lurching towards failure, and not because three of his administration picks have been found to be tax cheats, but because nearly all of his administration picks are corporate whores and shills”. Lets look at the list:

William Lynn: A former Raytheon Co. lobbyist, confirmed today as deputy secretary of defense, (the department’s chief operating officer – which includes overseeing acquisitions). He has agreed to sell his stock in the military contractor but will not be forced to step back from decisions related to Ratheon, the Defense Department said Friday. Instead, Obama wrote Lynn a special permission slip to exempt him the new revolving door ban. Allowing Lynn to do business with his former employer makes a mockery of Obama’s new ethics rules.

Tom Daschle: Nominated as Secretary of H&HS – dropped out after acknowledging that he had belatedly paid more than $128,000 in taxes owed to the federal government.

Nancy Killefer: Intended to become the government's first “chief performance officer”, bowed out, after admitting she never paid payroll taxes for her household employee.

Timothy Geithner: a key official of the Bush years, has now been confirmed at Secretary of the Treasury, although he admits not having paid the Social Security and Health Care taxes he owed to the US Treasury., while working at the IMF. He had avoided paying them, despite his signed acknowledgement that he owed theses taxes and hid behind the 3 year statue of limitations, thus had saving himself $41,000. He only paid up after his nomination was confirmed. And this guy will supervise the IRS?

Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) dropped out today after having accepted the job of Commerce Secretary. A deeply conservative man, he is opposed to the very existence of the Commerce Department he will head. To top it off, Obama had worked out a deal to have the Democratic governor of New Hampshire fill Gregg's vacated Senate seat with a Republican appointee, thereby forfeiting the right to add a Democrat to the Senate and eliminate any chance of Republican filibusters. Gregg explained that he didn't like Obama's economic stimulous program. It sounds like his ego got ahead of his ability to keep current on the news.

Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture: A Strong supporter of Monsanto's genetically-engineered crops and of unsustainable ethanol manufacture from corn and soy beans.

Senator (D-Co) Ken Salazar, Obama's choice for Secretary of Interior: a loyal servant of the big ranching, and mining interests. Energy stocks climbed over 10% on expectations that his taking charge of Interior would assure continued opening up of federal lands for minerals exploitation”. WSW.org 12/18/08. However, on February 10th, he surprised us by extending the review period for oil and gas leases in western states by 6 months. Should we wait and see it this leopard changes his spots?

Arne Duncan (currently CEO for the Chicago Public School System) will become Education Secretary. He is seen as a strong supporter of the “No Child Left Behind” initiative of the Bush administration.

Dr. Steven Chu has headed the Lawrence Berkeley Labs these past 4 years and is a scientist, not a businessman. His lifelong support for the nuclear power industry is why he'll be DOE Secretary.

THE GEITHNER BAILOUT – JUST MORE PAYOFFS TO THE BANKERS
As reported by Paul Krugman, and WSWS.org, the Geithner Plan outlined on Tuesday Feb. 10th is actually a massive expansion of the program announced back last November to provide cheap loans and subsidies to hedge funds, private equity firms and other speculators to encourage them to buy bank securities backed by auto loans, credit card debt, student loans, commercial real estate and small business loans. Like the Bush administration plan, it is geared to protecting the interests of the financial elite and shoring up its ownership and control of the banking system. It assiduously avoids imposing any cost to bank shareholders or bondholders in return for government handouts and is designed to limit government equity in banks that receive cash injections, requiring the firms to recompense the government in convertible preferred securities rather than common stock. It does not require the banks to increase their lending to other businesses or consumers as a condition for receiving government funds. To second these remarks, Martin Wolf in the normally quite conservative Financial Times Feb 11th asks: “Has Barack Obama's presidency already failed? He suggests that Tim Geitthner's $2.5 trillion Financial Stabilization Plan is basically an extension of the Bush-Paulson giveaway.

Like Obama, Geithner attempted to portray the new financial rescue plan, dubbed the Financial Stability Plan, as a sharp departure from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) instituted by Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, claiming it included extensive provisions for transparency and accountability and harsh restrictions on banks that receive additional bailout funds. The supposed limits on executive pay and other requirements on the banks are, in fact, largely ephemeral, designed to assuage public opinion and obscure the reality of a vast new windfall for the financial elite.
The bogus nature of this pretense is underscored by the fact that Geithner, in his former position as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, played a central role alongside Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke in devising the TARP program, which he now admits failed to resolve the financial crisis and merely handed over hundreds of billions to Wall Street without any controls over the banks’ use of the taxpayer money.
The New York Times on Tuesday reported that Geithner opposed Obama political aides who were pushing for more serious restrictions on executive pay and costs to shareholders in a new bailout plan, out of concern over public anger and worries that the administration might be unable to secure congressional approval when it returns for new legislation to commit more taxpayer funds to rescuing the banks.

GUEST COLUMN: HAVE THE DEMOCRATS REALLY CHANGED?
The 110th Congress went along with Bush on just about everything. Their excuse was that they didn't have enough votes in the Senate to override a veto.  Even though the Democrats had a majority in the House, and a de facto majority in the Senate, with two Independents voting with their 48, they gave Bush war funding, bank bailout money, tax cuts for the rich, ecological degradation for the corporations- you name it.  Everything was for Bush, his wealthy friends and corporate clients.
 
The Democrats in the Senate had plenty of votes for a filibuster.  They only attempted it once, to block approval of some judicial appointments.  Bill Frist, the Republican Senate majority leader threatened to use something called "the nuclear option", whereby the majority can end a filibuster with a simple vote.  The Democrats backed down. Now the Democrats have a Democratic president and a clear majority in the Senate- 59 including independents Lieberman and Saunders.
 
So why is MoveOn raising money for an ad to pressure Senate Republicans? Why am I getting urgent messages from True Majority?  Why did SaveOurEnvironment just send me a warning that key clean energy and water initiatives are at risk of being cut from the bill.  Is it to make the threat of a Republican filibuster seem likely, to give the Democrats an excuse to "negotiate" away the people's money?  Is this how they will maintain the appearance of being the party of We the People, while continuing to benefit their wealthy friends and their corporate clients? Is this why Obama bargained away a Democratic Senate nominee from New Hampshire? Now that the Democrats have a majority, they could easily use the "nuclear option".  So they do not have to compromise away whatever hope the stimulus package offers regular people to help weather the hard times ahead. Many of us have been saying that the Democrats and Republicans are in fact a single party, hired via campaign money by the wealthy, with the job of plundering the middle class and poor to enrich the wealthy.
 
Even more sinister, does Obama already know that his package won't pass without more concessions to Wall Street, or is he merely there as a placebo, to make the people think change is on the way, while the Senate Republicans continue to get their way? We all want to hope.  We all want to believe in the change Obama promised.  We all want to take heart from his early pronouncements and from this first significant piece of economic legislation.
 
But where will the money come from to pay for all this stimulus?  The tax base is shrinking, as the people are impoverished.  The corporations and banks continue to get bailout money with no strings attached, although Obama at least has expressed outrage over executive salary increases and bonuses on taxpayer money. 
 
There are several obvious places to get the money.  1) Defund the Pentagon.  Make peace, stop the wars, stop the war machine that has gobbled up our economy; 2) Restore progressive taxation.  One government study showed that the tax breaks for the rich are the single biggest reason for the huge federal budget deficit; 3) Prosecute the war criminals and confiscate their ill-gotten gains.  How many billions, or trillions, have Halliburton and Carlyle, the Cheney and Bush family enterprises, made from the Iraq war?
 
Has any legislation in this direction, sensible legislation to start rebalancing the federal budget and restoring the value of the American dollar, been proposed by the Democrats?  Not that I'm aware of.  One of Obama's campaign pledges was to INCREASE the Pentagon budget. 
 
Is business as usual still going on in the halls of our elected officials?  If so, we better notice it pretty quickly, and decide what to do about it. By Carol Wolman, Green Party Candidate for Congress in California's 1st District in 2008. Dr. Wolman is an evironmental activist and a practicing psychiatrist in Mendocino and in Oakland, California.

KEEPING PALESTINE OFF MY PLATE
Obama knows for sure that Israel controls U.S. policy in the Middle East and he's not going to mess with the problem in the early days of his Presidency. Any attempt to deal fairly with the survivors of Israel's holocaust attack on Gaza will be seen as a threat by AIPAC, who will call all their supporters in Congress into immediate action. The House voted 390 to 15 and the Senate unanimously last week to support the IDF - 4th largest land army in the world – in its invasion of a defenseless ghetto. Not one other government in the world supports Israel's actions. Keeping 1.5 million refugees packed into the tiny Gaza enclave for 60 years and never even discussing a permanent solution is very hard to imagine, yet no one seems to question it in Washington. So, given how the deck is stacked, what does Obama do in his first week?

1.Appoints the aging and benign George Mitchell as our Middle East Envoy with the authority to at least keep the lid on in Gaza for the time being. As Jim Lobe points out in LobeLog.com 1/22/09, neither AIPAC nor WINEP (Washington Institute on Near East Policy) can challenge the Nobel laureate's reputation as a peace maker after his work in North Ireland.
2.Makes telephone calls to our client states: President Mubarrak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Olmert of Israel, and Mohammed Abbas of the Palestine Authority to affirm their privileged status - another sign that Obama is sticking to traditional approaches.
3.Charges Mitchell with ensuring that the very shaky “informal ceasefire between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip becomes durable and sustainable”.

However, news reports from the Arab world seem to contradict all of Obama's impressions of what is going on:
Patrick Cockburn writing in The Independent 1/23/09 quotes Prince Turki al-Faisal of the Saudi ruling family that: “Bush had left a sickening legacy in the Middle East and had contributed through arrogance to Israel's slaughter of innocent people in Gaza over the past month. If the United States wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact ... it will have to revise drastically its policies vis a vis Israel and Palestine".
Cockburn goes on: “The sharp decline in support for Fatah and the discrediting of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, because of his inertia during the 22-day Gaza war, will make it very difficult for the US and the EU to pretend that Fatah are the true representatives of the Palestinian community. The international community is likely to find it impossible to marginalize Hamas in reconstructing Gaza.” Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister of planning points out that: “Hamas has been highly successful in portraying itself as the party of resistance.” He adds that: “Mr Abbas was badly damaged in the eyes of Palestinians when he blamed Hamas for Israel's assault on Gaza in the conflict's first two days.”
Robert Fisk writes in the Independent 1/23/09: “There was the phone call yesterday from President Obama to Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe Obama thinks Abbas is the leader of the Palestinians, but as every Arab knows, except perhaps Mr Abbas, he is the leader of a ghost government, a near-corpse only kept alive with the blood transfusion of international support and the 'full partnership' Obama has apparently offered him, whatever 'full' means.

President Obama's remarks to State Department employees on Thursday, 1/23/09 included the following: “For years, Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at innocent Israeli citizens.” (Fact check: there were 3050 rocket attacks from Gaza from 2001 through 2008 years killing 15 Israelis in total. The combined air and land attacks by the IDF over these past 22 days have killed 1330 civilians including 437 children.) “No democracy can tolerate such danger to its people (he means here only Israelis) nor should the international community, and neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror.” Nowhere has he suggested that Israel's massive bombings of densely packed civilian ghettos in Gaza City and Rafah were intolerable, nor that dropping white phosphorous in these cities was an act of terror.

Prime Minister Olmert of Israel is on his way to jail for corruption just as soon as the Israelis vote the very right-wing Bebe Netanyahu back into power on February 10th, so that phone call by Obama to Olmert was probably wasted effort. Netanyahu, whose arrogance had thoroughly annoyed Bill Clinton a decade ago, will now have an opportunity to work his charms on Hillary. Perhaps this experience will begin to awaken Obama to the futility of playing nice with those who fail to see Palestinians as human beings.

LEADING FROM THE CENTER: SATISFYING NO ONE VERY MUCH
For those who paid too much attention to Obama's talk of change during the campaign, most of his cabinet level appointments have been disappointments. Now, as the focus shifts from personality to policy, his advisors and spin specialists speak of “bipartisanship, centrism, pragmatism and post-partisanship”. We don't expect to hear the phrase 'change we can believe in' in the inaugural address. Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com reports that: “Obama talked during the campaign about creating a new kind of post-partisan politics -- and dissolving the country's cultural and racial and ideological boundaries. Given Obama's limited record in Congressional politics, it was hard to know what he really meant, but it now seems that he was serious. Since Election Day, he has taken a series of steps to co-opt his opponents and fashion a new governing majority. It's an admirable strategy but also a high-risk one, since the "center," however attractive it may be in principle, is often a nebulous political never-never land.”
“Whatever else one might want to say about this 'centrist' approach, the absolute last thing one can say about it is that there's anything 'new' or 'remarkable' about it.  The notion that Democrats must spurn their left-wing base and move to the 'non-ideological' center is the most conventional of conventional Beltway wisdom.  That's how Democrats earn their Seriousness credentials, and it's been that way for decades.”
We merely have to revisit the Clinton era and his abandonment of welfare programs, his failure to pursue health care reform, and his willingness to promote globalism at the expense of American workers, to be reminded of what that retreat to the center involves. Many Democrats who voted to authorize invading Iraq later claimed they'd been mislead: yet they have dutifully approved supplemental appropriations for the war every year since, unwilling to risk being accused of not supporting the troops.
Greenwald concludes: “I've been saying since the election that it makes little sense to try to guess what Obama is going to do until he actually does it. That's especially true now, since we'll all have the actual evidence very shortly, and trying to speculate by divining the predictive meaning of his appointments or prior statements seems fruitless. Moreover, anonymous reports about what Obama is 'likely' to do are particularly unreliable.  I still believe that, but Obama's interview January 11th with George Stephanopoulos on ABC is the most compelling -- and most alarming -- evidence yet that all of the 'centrist' and 'post-partisan' chatter from Obama's supporters will mean what it typically means:  devotion, first and foremost, to perpetuating rather than challenging how the Washington establishment functions.”

IF WE DON'T PROCESCUTE THOSE WHO COMMITTED HIGH CRIMES, HAVE WE NOT APPROVED THEIR ACTIONS?
Bob Fertik, writer and co-founder of Democrats.com asked Obama via the website Change.gov : "Will you appoint a special prosecutor -- ideally Patrick Fitzgerald -- to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?" Fertik's question got so much attention and approval from other users on the site that it made its way to the top of the Change.gov list and onto the Sunday talk shows, finally garnering this response from Obama when George Stephanopoulos asked the question directly:
"We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."
Fertik said that while "there has not been a lot of passion for accountability on some of the bigger blogs", he sees pressure building at the grass roots. Part of the recent public outrage surrounding this issue has been that White House officials have been talking openly about their having violated the law. "It's been an open secret: George Bush admits that he authorized torture: Dick Cheney admits that he authorized torture," Fertik said.
Fertik was frustrated by the president-elect's response on ABC's This Week. "It was a dodge. It was evasive". He feels it is unlikely that a Special Prosecutor will be named. Obama said in his interview with Stephanopoulos that he feared an investigation may make some in the CIA "feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering." Fertik has an idea of a good way to ensure that doesn't happen: “Start at the top. The people who are most deserving of prosecution -- Bush and Cheney -- will not be working in the CIA after Jan. 20th". Obama‘s final word via Stephanopoulos was this: "When it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

SUCCESSFULLY GUIDING THE SHIP OF STATE DURING ITS SUNSET CRUISE
Alexander Cockburn writes in Counterpunch 1/17/09 that: “I've always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job. On Bush’s Jr’s fitful watch Latin America edged nervously out of Uncle Sam’s shadow. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia boldly assert their independence and thumb their noses at Uncle Sam. Twenty years earlier the 'strong leadership' craved by Americans of all political stripes would have seen Chavez and Morales briskly toppled by the CIA and their local right-wing allies.”
“Barely a month went by in Bush Jr’s second term but that some liberal or left pundit would predict a US attack on Iran. It turns out that the Israeli high command made numerous requests for clearance for its planes to overfly Iraq on their way to Iran, but were adamantly nixed by George Jr. “
“Jr’s greatest single triumph in reducing America’s standing was his insistence that the assembly elections in Iraq go forward as planned, in December of 2005. Many seasoned counselors advised Bush to suspend the elections he’d pledged because they would lead to a majority Shi'ite government. Nevertheless, the 43rd president obstinately rejected these counsels, and the elections resulted in a mortal blow to U.S. objectives in Iraq and in the entire region.”
“Somewhere in late 2003, blaming everything on Bush became a national pastime and alibi. He took the hit for fifty years of venal failure by the city fathers of New Orleans and the legislators of Louisiana to protect their city. He’s even had to shoulder the blame for the Wall Street meltdown and the sub-prime crisis, for which Congressional legislators and overseers can far more justly be held responsible.”
“Blessed blunder dogged his every step: He made so half hearted an effort to 'reform' Social Security – the last defense of older Americans – that Wall Street, the instigator of the 'reform', remembered with profound nostalgia that Bill Clinton was well on his way to destroying Social Security until the Lewinsky scandal forced him to abort the mission. Bush passed his final White House years in morose seclusion, despised by all, obeyed by none – a welcome rebuke to the concept of 'unitary power' and an omnipotent executive.
“Now Obama proclaims his mission of renewing America, always a sinister prospect. We’re heading back into the high country of moral uplift, and dispiriting talk of America’s 'mission'.

THE SAME OLD TEAM OF SEMITES
Roger Cohen of the NY Times questions the team selected so far by Hillary Clinton to advise her on Middle East policy. Most of them have a long history of association with the major Israeli lobby organization in Washington, AIPAC and its sister think-tank The Washington Institute on Near East Policy, and have spent considerable time as US government officials advising the Clinton administration on how best to follow Israel's lead so as to prevent Palestinian rights ever being realized.
“They include Dennis Ross (the veteran Clinton administration Mideast peace envoy who may now extend his brief to Iran); James Steinberg (as deputy secretary of state); Dan Kurtzer (the former U.S. ambassador to Israel); and Martin Indyk (another former ambassador to Israel).” Cohen goes on: “Now, I have nothing against smart, driven, liberal, Jewish (or half-Jewish) males; I’ve looked in the mirror. I know or have talked to all these guys. They’re knowledgeable, broad-minded and determined. Still, on the diversity front they fall short and on the change-you-can-believe-in front, they also leave something to be desired. Newsweek recently praised Ross’s previous experience “as the indefatigable point man during the failed Oslo process, as well as the main negotiator with Syria, makes him uniquely suited for a major renewal of U.S. policy on nearly every front.” Really?” Cohen asks: “I wonder about the capacity for 'major renewal' of someone who has failed for so long”.
“Do people in the region take note when Arab-Americans are not represented? Sure they do,” said Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. The people of Palestine are Semites, just as are the Israelis, yet no prominent Arab-American scholar has been invited to join the Obama team. For Obama and Clinton to place the same old pro-Israeli lobby in charge of our policy will merely generate more rage amongst the Palestinians and less trust of America's good intentions.

IS UNCONDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL GOOD FOR AMERICA?
As I watch the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, I must ask who really controls American Middle East policy. Our strategic interests in the region are clear:

1st: We have much to gain through peaceful relations with the oil producing nations of the Middle East. Israel produces no oil or gas.
2nd : The Arab petroleum producers buy our shaky treasury bills and keep much of their cash in our bank vaults. By contrast, we give Israel $3 billion per year in economic aid to keep their economy afloat and another $3 billion to keep their military machine well oiled.
3th : We supply the F-16 jets, the anti personnel mines, and the missile systems Israel employs to keep their neighbors at bay.
4th : Without America's weapons and money, Israel would have had to come to a lasting peace with its neighbors after the 1967 War, in accord with UN Resolutions.

So, do the majority of Americans feel we have some sort of obligation to support Israel in their battles with the Hamas, their continual suppression of the Palestinians in the West Bank, and with the Hezbullah in Lebanon? Is there any logic in our encouraging Israel to operate outside of the Nuclear Proliferation Agreement?

The answer is no. The American Jewish Lobby, representing no more than 2.2% of Americans, has managed to take control over what we can read in the press, what we can hear on our main stream broadcast media, and what our elected politicians in Washington can safely say on the subject of Israel. No politician, no television news show host, and no newspaper editorialist will dare to question the pro-Israel position government. The power of the American Jewish lobby, working through the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and similar groups, has effectively stifled all dissent. You will find far more dissent with Israeli policy in the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz than ever makes its way into print in the U.S.

WHEN SENDING NO MESSAGE IS THE MESSAGE
Israel's intensive 5-day bombing of the world's most densely populated refuge camp, the Gaza Strip, and the subsequent ground attacks have put the incoming Obama Administration in an untenable position: While Obama himself has supported the Israeli military's right to retaliate against rocket's fired into Jewish settlements, he has so far avoided even seconding Condi Rice's call for Israel to avoid civilian targets in Gaza.

When does his studied neutrality become an implicit approval of genocide? Most international observers do not believe that prevention of the relatively inconsequential attacks by home-made short-range rockets justifies bombing raids by US-supplied F-16s that have so far killed 700 Palestinians. By comparison, a total of 20 Israelis have been killed by Hamas rockets in the past 7 years. The efforts of Israel to terrorize the civilian population were indicated in a January 1 report by the New York Times, which wrote: "Tens of thousands of Gazans have received recorded phone calls from the Israeli Army warning them that their houses have been marked as targets because they harbored either militants or weapons facilities like rocket workshops. Noncombatants were urged to clear out. Hundreds of thousands of leaflets gave the same message." In an area 25 miles long and only 3 to 7 miles wide, the 1.4 million Palestinians have no where to go to avoid becoming targets for the F-16s.

As the Israeli ground invasion proceeds against a very restrained but well-dug-in Hamas. a few sane words of caution from Washington by both Obama and Rice could lead to a truce. By maintaining silence, they are both complicit in the Israeli invasion and this horrible blood-letting.

STOP ENTITLING THOSE OLD RETIRED PEOPLE!
President-elect Obama gave us the first taste of his economic program this week: He promised to “overhaul Social Security” . . . to deal with the threat that these entitlement programs might “grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run”.

Bush tried to privatize Social Security as a wonderful gift to his Wall Street backers in 2004. Had that happened, a lot of retirees would have lost their pensions in the recent stock market crash. Responsible analysts all agree that minor adjustments to the Social Security program will keep it self-sustaining for many decades. The political analyst Chris Floyd suggests instead that we curb military expenditures, that now absorb over 50% of government spending to fight useless wars, throw our weight around, and maintain 750 bases in foreign countries. Counterpunch 1/08/09

TOO MUCH INTEL EXPERIENCE & TOO LITTLE
Admiral Dennis Blair is Obama's pick for National Security Director, a nice-sounding position with a rather hollow job description. Like many who have been engaged on the Dark Side, he comes with a bit of dirt under his nails. Correspondent Allan Nairn trailed him during a visit to Indonesia's General Wiranto in 1999. The General was then directing the very bloody suppression of the East Timorese independence movement by Indonesian-supported militias. “According to a classified cable on the meeting, Blair, who had been directed by Congress to tell Wiranto to shut the militias down, instead offered him a promise of further U.S. assistance. When word of this reached Washington, Blair was directed to call Wiranto and correct the error. In this telephone conversation, ten day later, Blair again failed to insist that the militia be shutdown.

The story was published in The Nation in September 1999 and never denied by Admiral Blair. When President Clinton, was later confronted by Correspondent Nairn, he pleaded ignorance and kindly referred him back to Blair. It is difficult to believe that the Admiral merely had a problem delivering bad news. Was he actually obeying orders from a “higher authority”?

In contrast to Blair's considerable Intel experience, Congressman Leon Panetta, Obama's choice for Director of the CIA, is being criticized by Senator Diane Feinstein, the new Chair of the Intel Committee, for having too little. After all, how can we keep a lid on things at the CIA if they keep bringing in unseasoned outsiders? Ray McGovern, a career CIA man, “thinks Panetta's being an outsider is a virtue, rather than a drawback. He has no association with the abuses of the last decade. He can come in and look at things without having to cover up”. Jim Lehrer New Hour 1/06/09

BUYING THE SENATE
Millionaires and their friends have traditionally bought US Senate seats by dumping their money and that of their sponsors into campaigns. US Presidents have sold key ambassadorships for generations. Politics on the Washington level involves barter, trading of favors, and negotiation. So, when the Governor of Illinois Ron Blagojevich announces that he is open to bids for Obama's now vacant seat, should we be apalled at his wanton commercialization of the political process? If someone offered, quite legally to donate to Blago's campaign fund in return for 2 years in the Senate, would an eyebrow be raised? In the current imbroglio, the only real issue should be whether Blagojevich was going to pocket some cash in his personal account. Yet our soon-to-be President protested extensively that he and his staff never had discussions of this sort. Now we find that his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has had at least six conversations about this very thing with the Governor and his aide. Wouldn't it have been far easier for Obama to have admitted at the start his interest in the nomination and disavow having offered to enhance the Governor's personal accounts? Another question is now raised: Inasmuch as no deal was made for the seat, how can Attorney Fitzpatrick prosecute the Governor? Why this pre-emptive justice?

MISSION CREEP IRAQI STYLE
Obama promised to have all combat forces off the streets by June 2009 and all forces out of Iraq in 16 months - May 2010. Now, as he confronts Generals Odierno and Petraeus, he seems to be creeping away from the campaign rhetoric crucial to his election. The Generals have negotiated a December 2011 date for full withdrawal with the Iraqi government under a Status of Forces Agreement. This is 18 months beyond the Obama Plan. Our good generals have begun protesting that "three years is a very long time" and that the date is subject to further negotiation. The SOFA also calls for a June 2009 withdrawal of combat forces but the generals suggest that some combat troops may have to stay longer as "transition teams and enablers" helping the Iraqis to cope. Robert Parry writes: "The top US commanders for Iraq have taken the measure of the President-elect and decided that they can openly flout his campaign promise". Consortium News 12/22/08. We will need to watch most carefully how Obama handles this quite open challenge from the military - it could provide an signal as who will really call the shots about foreign policy under the new Administration.

GOVERNING FROM THE CENTER
Before the election, Obama had explained to his advisors that he intended to “govern from the center”. He said he wanted various views represented within his administration. He also “promised greater transparency than ever before and a fresh approach”. Nancy Pelosi's statement two days after the election seems to reflect Obama's views: “The country must be governed from the middle: You have to bring people together to reach consensus on solutions that are sustainable and acceptable to the American people”. Elizabeth Drew in the NY Review of Books 12/18/08. Some Obama people argued that while the President-Elect needed to be careful and centrist in his selection of cabinet members dealing with national security, he would show his true progressive agenda of change when he selects Secretaries for Agriculture, Education, Interior, Environment and Energy.

So, we will have Gates at Defense, Clinton at State, and General Jones as National Security Advisor. But why pick a big agri-business spokesman as Secretary of Agriculture? Why give an advocate of private mining on public land control over the Interior Department? Why Arne Duncan, a promoter of the “No Child Left Behind” disaster as Education Secretary? And why a nuclear power advocate to head the Energy Department?

OBAMA'S DOMESTIC CABINET PICKS

Tom Vilsack's nomination as Secretary of Agriculture “sends the message that dangerous, untested, unlabeled genetically-engineered crops will be the norm in the Obama Administration” says the executive Director of the Organic Consumer's Association, Ronnie Cummins. Vilsack has also been a strong promoter of unsustainable ethanol manufacture from corn and soy beans. Op-Ed News 12/17/08

Senator (D-Co) Ken Salazar, Obama's choice for Secretary of Interior, “ .. stands on the right wing of the Senate Democratic Caucus”. “He is widely seen in the west as a loyal servant of the big ranching, and mining interests” “Indeed, Salazar's appointment was celebrated on the stock market Wednesday. Shares of Consul energy and Massey Energy both climbed over 10% on expectations that his taking charge of Interior would assure continued opening up of federal lands for minerals exploitation”. WSW.org 12/18/08.

Arne Duncan (currently CEO for the Chicago Public School System) will become Education Secretary. He is seen as a strong supporter of the “No Child Left Behind” initiative of the Bush administration, in particular the imposition of standardized testing and the rote learning that goes with it”. His nomination has been praised by both of Bush's Secretaries of Education, and by David Brooks, the NY Times advocate of Bush's No Child policies. WSW.org 12/18/08

Dr. Steven Chu has headed the Lawrence Berkeley Labs these past 4 years and is a scientist, not a businessman. His clear scientific reasoning will be a welcome relief after Dick Cheney formulated our Bush era energy policy in secret backroom meetings with oil and coal company executives. Steven Chu's support for the nuclear power industry is why he'll be DOE Secretary, according to Stephen Lendman writing in the Baltimore Chronicle 12/18/08. When asked in 2005 if fission-based nuclear power plants should be a larger part of the energy-producing portfolio, Chu responded: "Absolutely" and was cavalier is his dismissal of problems associated with the accumulation of even more nuclear waste. Chu is "trapped (in a) nuclear mindset," according to Greenpeace USA's Jim Riccio.

Lisa Jackson will be the new EPA administrator. Jackson has served as head of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). According to the Washington-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), her record there "should disqualify her from serving as the next head of the US Environmental Protection Agency. In many instances, Jackson embraced policies at DEP echoing the very practices at the Bush EPA which Senator Barack Obama condemned during the presidential campaign." DEP employees called her "politicized" and accused her of suppressing scientific information, issuing gag orders and threats against professional staff members who objected, and acting against the environment, not for it. Baltimore Chronicle 12/18/08

UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN
"I have never spoken to the governor on this subject. I am confident that no representatives of mine would have any part of any deals related to this seat." Obama on 12/10/08 On 12/12/08 Obama clarified this: "I've asked my team to gather the facts of any contacts with the governor's office about this vacant seat so that we can share them with you over the next few days," and then added: "But what I'm absolutely certain of is that our office had no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat. That, I'm absolutely certain of. That would be a violation of everything that this campaign has been about. And that's not how we do business." Yet his senior advisor David Axelrod said that "Obama talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them”. Fox News 11/23/08 On Tuesday, 12/9/08 Axelrod explained that “I was mistaken when I told an interviewer last month that the president-elect has spoken directly to Governor Rod Blagojevich about the Senate vacancy”. (Editor's note: Now why wouldn't Obama want the Governor to have his recommendations as to a replacement Senator? Must he run like a young maiden from this Rod who has become so suddenly tainted? We sure hope Barack didn't leave his panties lying around anywhere.)

OH YEH - THERE'S TROUBLE IN DETROIT CITY! IT'S NATIONALIZATION AND THAT LEADS TO SOCIALISM!
“We don't want government to run companies” Obama told Meet the Press on Sunday: “Generally, government historically hasn't done that very well”. Obama went on to describe the long term bailout of the automakers would be conditioned on Federal oversight, the government would mandate or at least heavily influence what kind of cars companies make, what mileage and environmental standards they must meet and what large investments they are permitted to make – to create an industry “that actually works. That actually functions”. The Congressional bailout includes nomination of a “car czar” to oversee expenditures and this will likely make Washington a major shareholder in the Big Three. Yet no one in the Obama camp wants to be caught uttering the N-Word “nationalization” even though that seems to be where we're drifting. NY Times 12/09/08

DETROIT'S A LONG LONG WAY FROM WALL STREET
Obama's insistence that Detroit restructure and “make the kind of changes that they should have made 20 or 30 years ago” is a far cry from the way Hank Paulson has doled out cash without strings to Wall Street bankers. Obama has endorsed the Treasury Secretary's plan while the Federal Reserve continues to provide cash for trash to banks and insurance companies at a volume now approaching $2 trillion. If the auto industry has a “bad engineering” problem for which it is being held responsible, why aren't the banks, insurance giant AIG, and their enablers being held to a similar standard? Well, according to Michael Hudson, a former Wall street economist and now a professor at the University of Missouri, the auto makers didn't have a friend like Hank Paulson in the Cabinet. Too bad GM: you really should have done a little planning.

“The automakers dangle the electric car, but the best they can come up with is the Chevrolet Volt which will cost $40 to $50,000 dollars and find few buyers: it's just more window dressing by GM. We’re still saddled with the infernal, eternal, internal combustion. So, what I think should be done is for the government to say, OK, you want our help then the government will be a shareholder and insist you remove the executives that have not been performing and put in people who know how to produce fuel-efficient cars that meet our needs.”Ralph Nader 12/7/08

Moody's estimates the Detroit bailout will cost $75 to $125 billion, not the measly $14 billion that Pelosi and Company have proposed. "What I've seen thus far is a travesty," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. "This is an installment on a huge bailout that will come later. This will not make Chrysler, General Motors or Ford competitive. This is only delaying their funeral." Despite the urging of Dick Cheney and others, the Republicans seemed dead set against this mini-bailout. And then, on Friday 12/12/08 the sky parted briefly above 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the awakened President told Hank to find $14 billion amongst the spare change left in the $350 of bailout funds already approved by Congress. The car industry wasn't going to collapse on Bush's watch!

WHEN A WITHDRAWAL IS NOT A PULLOUT AND COMBAT TROOPS ARE NOT RESIDUAL FORCES: Thom Shanker headlines his 12/04/08 NY Times analysis: “Campaign Promises on Ending the War in Iraq Now Muted By Reality” even though no significant change in the reality of our occupation has occurred since we went to the polls. “Rather what has taken place – in a manner breathtaking both for its speed and blatancy - is Obama's repudiation of his campaign pledge to end the Iraq war”. WSW.org 12/06/08. While his early pledges had included, for the careful listener, hedges as to 'residual forces' and 'any advice received from the generals', he continually criticized Bush over the war and indicted Hillary Clinton for voting for the invasion way back in Oct. 2002. He now says tens of thousands “will be left behind in Iraq” even though he had promised a pullout of all combat troops within 16 months. Pentagon planners are currently preparing programs for Obama's review which involve leaving up to 70,000 troops there well beyond the May 2010 deadline he pledged during his campaign. They may very well stay in place until the full withdrawal deadline of Dec. 2010 now written into the Status of Forces Agreement.

FOLLOWING A TORTUROUS PATH AT THE CIA
If Obama follows through on campaign rhetoric and makes a clean break with the Bush Administration concerning interrogation practices, will he alienate many in the CIA? He has pledged to “maintain the high ground and keep people on our side, and to banish secret interrogation rules and require American interrogators to follow the Army Field Manual” NY Times 12/03/08 While the Army Field Manual disallows secret interrogation techniques now being practiced, there are many like Diane Feinstein, incoming Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who waffle saying “I think you have to use the non-coercive standard to the greatest extent possible, and the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize there are other views and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them”. Senator Ron Wyden says he would approve techniques that went beyond the Army Field Manual so long as they are legal, humane and non-coercive”. NYTimes 12/03/08 Obama has withdrawn the name of John Brennan, a CIA veteran as head of intelligence after critics pointed out his role in implementing the CIA's detention and interrogation program under Bush.

Read more »

A SEAMLESS TEAM FOR NATIONAL SECURITY
“We want to make sure that there is as seamless a transition on national security as possible”. Obama on 60 Minutes 11/30. The reappointment of Robert Gates at Defense, perhaps only for the first year, along with Hilary Clinton at State, General James Jones as National Security Advisor has been called a “war cabinet” by some. Dreyfus – Democracy Now 12/1. Will Obama seamlessly continue the Bush Doctrine? He has called during the campaign for 20 to 30,000 more boots on the ground in Afghanistan, for an expansion of the Army and Marine Corps by 90,000, and suggested we could strike at Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan at will.

Given the power of the military industrial complex, perhaps the Gates appointment is as far as Obama dares go in confronting the powers that be at the very start of his term. Obama may find he is pressured to slow down any change militarily. Nevertheless, by sending another 20,000 troops to Afghanistan he could inherit Bush's failed war and make it his own failure. General Jones has recently stated: “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan”.

Despite their reputation as veteran cold warriors, Jones and Gates have shown some independence from Bush policies: A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, Robert Gates began a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible. In a similar vein, General Jones has emphasized reconstruction projects and infrastructure projects in Afghanistan rather than merely a military strategy. NY Times12/1/08.

EXPERIENCING HILLARY CLINTON
During the campaign, Obama asked about Clinton's qualifications: “What exactly is this foreign experience? I know she talks about visiting 80 countries. It is not clear was she negotiating treaties or agreements, or was she handling crises during this period of time? My sense is the answer is no”. Obama speaking to reporters 3/5/08. The nomination of Clinton to the chief foreign policy position in the Obama cabinet contradicts this. In response to a reporter's question, Obama replied: “This is fun for the press to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign”. 12/1/08 NY Times. Does he think campaign quotes are not significant? People voted for him based upon what he said.

RECYCLE FOR CHANGE
Responding to criticism that “there's a recycling of people from the Clinton Administration”, Obama responded as he introduced his Economic Team that “they combine experience with fresh thinking”. Obama news conference 11/26 – Chicago. Nevertheless, “the vision for change comes first and foremost: it comes from me”.

In his introduction of 80-year old Paul Volker as a member of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, he stated that: “Paul had served both Republicans and Democrats and is held in high esteem for his sound and independent judgment”.Paul Volker hasn't been in Washington for some time, and that's part of the reason he can provide a fresh perspective.” NY Times 11/27/08.