Occupy’s public discussions on “diversity of tactics” have often lacked historical perspective; discussions, at least online, have tended to degenerate to “Ghandi!” “No, ANC!” Now, however, Erica Chenoweth has developed a dataset and analyzed the historical record. Below are the results of her study of 323
 non-violent and violent campaigns 
from
 1900‐2006. I’m sure, readers, that like any study, Chenoweth’s work is open to challenge on any number of grounds. That said, surely looking to the historical record to see what’s worked isn’t such a bad thing?

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta let slip on Sunday the big open secret that Washington war hawks don’t want widely known: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Panetta admitted that despite all the rhetoric, Iran is not pursuing the ability to split atoms with weapons, saying it is instead pursuing “a nuclear capability.” That “capability” falls in line with what Iran has said for years: that it is developing nuclear energy facilities, not nuclear weapons.

“They cannot continue to do what they’re doing. Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us.”

Republicans have been beating the drums of war in recent weeks as tensions in the Iranian gulf have soared. Iran has threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil transport hub crucial to global industry, if U.S. warships return to monitor their activities.

Iran said recently that it had created the country’s first ever nuclear fuel rod made from domestic uranium enriched at their own facilities.

Nuclear fuel enrichment is much different from enrichment for weapons. Most commercial nuclear reactors use lightly enriched uranium, which is between 3-5 percent enriched. Weapons-grade uranium must be enriched to approximately 85 percent or more of a key radioactive isotope for it to be usable in an atomic bomb.

On Thursday night, it will be December 29 when they go to bed and Saturday Dec 31 when they wake up — meaning they’ll skip Friday forever.

This neat bit of time travel is the result of a very contemporary concern: trade and economic relations with Pacific neighbors Australia and New Zealand, who are currently nearly a day ahead on the clock. Now, with the disappearance of Friday, Samoa will shift west of the international dateline and share the same date and time as its two key partners.

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi explained: “In doing business (now) with New Zealand and Australia we’re losing out on two working days a week,” the London Times reported. “While it’s Friday here, it’s Saturday in New Zealand and when we’re at church Sunday, they’re already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane.”

Read More: Herald Sun

The playwright turned President Havel who parlayed human rights activism into becoming Czechoslovakia‘s post-Communist President was a leader for the pro-democracy Charter 77 Movement, not just a Red-hating politician on a power trip.

Yet, the press praised him more for what he opposed than what he believed. The people who loved him adored him for both.

One report: “Thousands of silent mourners have accompanied the body of Vaclav Havel through central Prague as the Czech Republic began three days of national mourning for the icon of the Velvet Revolution.

About 10,000 mourners mostly in black, some carrying Czech or Slovak flags, joined a solemn procession taking the former president’s coffin from a church through narrow cobbled streets to Prague Castle, the seat of Czech presidents, on Wednesday.”

Havel was an intellectual, a non-violent revolutionary who also presided over the break up of his country into two: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

When his era ended, amidst deep economic problems, his country opted to turn right abandoning his humanistic sensibility by moving to the pro-American right and embracing aggressive capitalism.

Vaclav Klaus, his rigid “free market”-promoting adversary, was often hyper-critical when Havel was alive, but is now more charitable in his death, saying:

“Vaclav Havel’s life mirrors a large section of the 20th century: the war, the seizing of power by the communists, the thaw of the 1960s, the fall of communism, the building of the new democracy, the partition of the nation and its integration into European and global bodies.”

On Friday, there will be a procession of Western leaders showboating at his funeral including Bill and Hillary Clinton and leaders from Europe and Eastern Europe. Since his ascendancy to power, the Czech market was opened wide to western investment and military sales.

Havel had closer relations with American cultural figures including Frank Zappa and poet Alan Ginsberg than the neo-cons in Washington.

Not every Czech was enamored with him either, for other reasons, as expressed by “Smoker X” on the Hyperspace website:

“If he knew what was gonna come, he would never do it. The things he promised he would do for Czechoslovakia never happened. I lived under the dictatorship as you call it in Czechoslovakia and I say that people were much happier then. The system was pro-people; this system we live now is against people and pro a few rich bastards.

Socialism was not perfect but capitalism is pure evil.

The things you say about Havel are things you heard from tv or newspaper. He did not liberate people in Czechoslovakia, he put them in prison. I would go back to socialism tomorrow if it was possible. you have no idea how good it was to live free, free from stress, hunger. always helped when needed, always guaranteed with work and free health care and education and good education.”

David Warren refutes media cliches about him in the Ottawa Citizen:

“Reading and re-reading Havel, since his death, I am struck by his acute grasp of the emptiness and capitulation of that Enlightenment. Soviet Communism embodied it in perhaps its most extreme form, but as Havel realized, western “capitalism” and “libertarianism” are also premised on Enlightenment tenets: that man constructs meaning for himself, and is answerable to himself, only; that what cannot be precisely defined, quantified, and legislated is “irrational,” and “irrelevant” to public life.”

Havel was embraced by the West only as a a cold-war anti-communist symbol. The nuances of his philosophy and social critique were ignored.

This is not a view you see reported in the Western media.

A world away, there were millions in tears to mourn the passing of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il. Few Western leaders have expressed condolences even though South Korea and Japan had the compassion to do so.

The Chicago Tribune reports, “North Korea claimed Kim’s death generated a series of spectacular natural phenomena, creating a mysterious glow atop a revered mountain, cracking a sheet of ice on a lake with a loud roar and inspiring a crane to circle a statue of the nation’s founder before perching in a tree and drooping its head in sorrow.”

If he was revered at home with these exaggerated powers, he was just as demonized one-dimensionally abroad. In death as in life, he was presented only as the two-bit dictator of “the Hermit Kingdom”—insult, insult–who wore elevator shoes and had a big collection of western movies. How many times have you heard that! That’s about all we heard endlessly.

If did not have a few nuclear bombs, he would have likely been overthrown years ago. Despite the constant characterizations of him as bizarre and a maniac, State Department officials who accompanied Madeline Albright on a visit there told the New York Times how impressed they were with his strategic thinking and how well informed he was.

The West saw him, through the lens of our media, only as the embodiment of a hateful communism, stereotyping him an enemy to be feared.

Like Havel, his views were simplified, but in another direction.

He was pictured as Dr. Evil in a James Bond Movie—ironically, he had collected them all–and his country was the poster child of George Bush’s overhyped “Axis of Evil.” In the end, Bush did not prevail in his attack on him.

In a news world of black and whites, he was long blamed for every problem in the country. Yes, the people there are poor, suffer from famine and underdevelopment. They do need help, but refuse it at the expense of their independence and Juche ideology.

Have we already forgotten the many decades when South Korea had a U.S.- backed dictator who had collaborated with the Japanese war machine? He was hated by “his” people who protested for years against him, even as the Pentagon backed him and western investors profited from the economy.

The oxymoron of Western “intelligence” was caught napping when Kim died. Fears of his son—the “grand successor”—launching a war turned out to be bogus. (Remember all the reports of the U.S. and South Korea “on alert?”)

Within a few days, we learned that his power will be shared with the country’s bureaucratic military establishment. Kim #3 is on a tight leash.

The transition there went smoothly proving once again how little our media knows about the country and its history of defeating Japanese invaders and an American “police action” (with Chinese help) under the umbrella of the UN.

In our official cold war narrative, that war was blamed solely on a North Korean invasion on June 25, 1950.

In those years, the legendary journalist I.F. Stone refuted Washington’s fabricated Korea War propaganda.

Since then, historians like the University of Chicago’s Bruce Cumings have shown how the North Koreans were provoked and the conflict’s causes were complex. The North Koreans are said to have lost a million people in that war, but the country survived.

The people there may not have the “rights” we think we do, but they certainly seem to support their government and system even as human rights abuses are legion and dissidents expose Pyonyang’s policies.

So, there is more, much more, to both the stories of both Kim and Havel, two men with opposing political orientations, but whose views and roles have been simplified and distorted for myth-making political purposes in our “objective” media.

Danny Schechter writes about Occupy Wall Street on Al Jazeera, Progressive Radio Network other outlets and his News Dissector blog. He is a documentary filmmaker and author whose work can be found at Plunder the Crime Of Our Time. Please email comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

This blog was born in a warm autumn night, 26th October 2010, for reasons unknown. Why is it so funny? i have no idea either.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 breezed through Congress and headed to the White House, even though public opposition to parts of the bill, now directed at President Obama in the hope of a hail Mary veto, remains strong. The most troubling aspects of the bill violate fundamental rights provided in the U.S. Constitution to American citizens by giving the government sweeping power to indefinitely detain citizens without trial. Like many other pieces of legislation, this year’s NDAA is another push in a long series of movements marching the U.S. Towards a hard right, nearly fascist state.

In addition to this, the NDAA also contains troubling language regarding Department of Defense interests in Iran, China, Wikileaks, defense contractors and more. A report from a conference on the NDAA contains tough talk in respect to both China and Iran. Considering the amount of saber rattling many warhawks have already engaged in, one has to wonder seriously whether the U.S. Could further engage in military actions towards Iran and what exactly, the DOD believes our attitude towards the Chinese will be in the coming year. The bill contains an amendment which requires economic sanctions towards entities in Iran as well as a provision for “an independent review of current U.S. Capability gaps to counter Iran and China” (emphasis mine). The conference report also says it “takes steps to ensure that the United States is fully prepared to defend our vital interests against an emerging competitor” in regards to China.

Given the information dumps from Wikileaks over past two years, as well as the horrid treatment of Private Bradley Manning, on trial for providing information to Wikileaks, the Pentagon is very interested in keeping other potential whistleblowers at bay. The Defense Department’s research arm already expressed interest this year in employing a disinformation campaign against would be Wikileakers. The NDAA conference report codifies that interest, saying it:

Requires the Secretary of Defense to establish a comprehensive program to detect unauthorized uses of classified information. Requires technological solutions, updated policies and procedures, and enforcement measures to assist with detection of such unauthorized activities.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack while on a train trip, state media reported on Monday, sparking immediate concern over who is in control of the reclusive state and its nuclear program.

A tearful television announcer dressed in black said the 69-year old had died on Saturday of physical and mental over-work on his way to give “field guidance” — a reference to advice dispensed by the “Dear Leader” on his trips to factories, farms and military bases.

Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il’s youngest son, was named by North Korea’s official news agency KCNA as the “great successor” to his father, which lauded him as “the outstanding leader of our party, army and people.”

Read More: Reuters

In 2003 we went into Iraq under scandalously false pretexts, guns blazing—bragging about our ability to deliver “shock and awe” with impunity (the mark of the bully) and with one goal in mind: to rob and rape that country blind of its riches. The official excuse was that Iraq and Saddam were mortal threats that had to be neutralized.

Within a matter of weeks if not days, the official line—adopted without missing a beat by the entire punditocracy—was that we had gone in “to save Iraq”, “make it a democracy,” and all the rest of the self-serving claptrap we use over and over again to justify our uber-criminal behavior.  With a straight face the official voices declared that those who had the audacity to resist our criminal violence were ingrates. Don’t believe it? You may be forgiven: it is rather unbelievable.

Not too long after that, another somersault in logic and truth took place. This time the contortion was of Olympian quality, as we saw the same filthy pundits—a great many of them liberals—talking with a straight face (as did the man in the White House and other administration flacks) that if the Iraqis continued to “misbehave”, continued attacking our troops, imagine that, “we’d leave”—yeah, that’s right, their punishment would be that we, the self-annointed saviors, would leave!

Buwahahahahahahah….! Isn’t that a threat to shit in your pants? They didn’t receive us as liberators!

Reality quiz:

What would you do if you were the victim of a brutal home invasion; if they raped your wife and daughter, killed your animals, beat the shit out of you, and robbed you blind, to boot—oh, and reduced your house to rubble—and then they declared with a straight face that if you were not grateful for all that, if you didn’t beg them to stay … they’d leave? How’s that for the mother of all Orwellian nonsense?

Only with a totally confused public can the revolting media creatures who pass for journalists and commentators in the US foist such a huge con on the public mind … with nary an audible  protest.

Yeah, it’s pathetic alright. And if we don’t watch it, it will happen again.

PATRICE GREANVILLE is editor of the Greanville Post, a site dedicated to political, cultural and historical analyses.

A matrix of closely tied university-based strategic studies ventures, the so-called Grand Strategy Programs (GSP), have cropped up on a number of elite campuses around the country, where they function to serve the national security warfare state.

In tandem with allied institutes and think tanks across the country, these programs, centered at Yale University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, Temple University and, until recently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, illustrate the increasingly influential role of a new breed of warrior academics in the post-9/11 United States. The network marks the ascent and influence of what might be called the “Long War University.”

Ostensibly created to train an up-and-coming elite to see a global “big picture,” this grand strategy network has brought together scores of foreign policy wonks heavily invested — literally and figuratively — in an unending quest to maintain US global supremacy, a campaign which they increasingly refer to as the Long War.

Read More: Truthout

Hear the one about the Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia that nobody noticed?No, this is not a joke. With the Syrian regime, long out of favor with the West, we heard about the uprising from the beginning. In the case of Libya, run by the fiercely independent and eccentric Qaddafi, much of the world’s press credulously rushed to print every rumor about regime excesses.

In the case of the mother of all petro-allies, Saudi Arabia, however, protests have been met with near silence by the media and no expressions of sympathy for the dissenters by Western governments.

Here’s the background: On November 21, government troops opened fire on demonstrators in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, killing at least four and injuring more. Given the general paucity of demonstrations in a country where dissent is dealt with fiercely, the unrest and violence seemed a highly newsworthy development.

The next day, the Middle-East-based Al Jazeera English, the “best” Western source of news from the region, punted. Instead of getting direct eyewitness accounts that might anger the Saudi leadership (close allies of the Emir of Qatar, who owns Al Jazeera), the network used an old trick. It quoted a Western news agency, the French outfit Agence France Press, which merely reported the Saudi government’s version of events.

Two days after Al Jazeera, the Associated Press had its own report, also based on the Saudi spokesman. The article did note “a series of clashes between police and protesters in the country’s Shiite-dominated eastern region, starting in the spring.” The purported context comes in the final paragraph:

“There is a long history of discord between the kingdom’s Sunni rulers and the Shiite minority concentrated in the east, Saudi Arabia’s key oil-producing region. Shiites make up 10 percent of the kingdom’s 23 million citizens and complain of discrimination, saying they are barred from key positions in the military and government and are not given a proportionate share of the country’s wealth.”

The salient point in Saudi Arabia, however, is not really ethnic discrimination, which exists throughout the world. It is the story of the avarice and brutality through which one extended family dominates a country.

In Libya, the uprising was dominated by a distinct tribal opposition, yet it was quickly characterized as representing broad national sentiment, with a kind of nobility and inevitability. Not so (up to now) with reporting on the Saudi protests. In truth, dissatisfaction with the Saudi royal family is hardly limited to the Shiites, and the levels of anger are probably as great and perhaps greater than that felt by the average Libyan toward Qaddafi.

Those wanting a closer look at what is going on in Saudi Arabia can go to the site Liveleak, where there’s highly disturbing video accompanied by this text: “Qatif—Firing live bullets at the demonstrators November 21, 2011: Video shows the brutal style Saudi security forces in dealing with the demonstrators by firing live bullets.” Another source is a blog called Angry Arab News Service, which features video in which a large and vocal group in Qatif are apparently chanting “Death to the House of Saud.”

That kind of material seems to warrant worldwide attention. And with that, we might reasonably expect the protests to grow. But the coverage has not come, nor the greater uprising.

Who’s to blame? Everyone, really. But based on its claim to be the gold standard, we focus on The New York Times. According to a search of the database Nexis-Lexis, the Times ran nothing at all on Qatif until Sunday November 27, when it featured a survey of turmoil throughout the region.

Yet the Times should have realizing that it was looking at a pattern. After all, the paper did cover a previous incident in Qatif—back in March. It was a single article, with a Beirut dateline: “Saudi police officers opened fire at a protest march in a restive, oil-rich province on Thursday, wounding at least three people, according to witnesses and a Saudi government official.”

Could it have something to do with Saudi Arabia’s indispensability as an ally and supplier of oil? In which case, traditional news reporting standards do not apply?

And did anyone ask the U.S. government, so quick to condemn Qaddafi for his crackdown on demonstrators, if it had any reaction to the Saudi crackdown on demonstrators? Doesn’t look like it.

Meanwhile, what of this scapegoating of Iran for what seems to be authentic Saudi dissent? How does this dovetail with the overall western effort to characterize Iran as behind every nefarious act, even the ludicrous-sounding plot announced months ago by the White House, in which the Iranians were purportedly trying to recruit Mexican drug gangs to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.?

Agence France-Presse, via MSN News

Large-scale strikes have hit China in recent weeks, as workers resentful about low salaries or lay-offs face off with employers juggling high costs and exports hit by lower demand from the debt-burdened West.

Politburo member Zhou Yongkang said authorities needed to improve their system of “social management”, including increasing “community-level” manpower.

“In the face of the negative impact of the market economy, we have not formed a complete system of social management,” Zhou said in a Friday speech to officials reported by the state Xinhua news agency at the weekend.

“It is urgent that we build a social management system with Chinese characteristics to match our socialist market economy.” China’s economy grew by 9.1 percent in the third quarter, down from 9.5 percent in the previous quarter.  Manufacturing — a key engine of growth — slumped to its lowest level in nearly three years last month, amid slowing demand from the European Union and the United States.

Beijing has started to implement measures to boost lending and spur growth in the world’s second largest economy.

Read More: Agence France-Presse, via MSN News

* A Further Observation from the Dystopia Diaries — a Glossa McGonagalica: What — you weren’t thinking you could run an export economy under an austerity-induced global demand slump, were you?

We present five other countries where Goldman Sachs could install bankers as heads of state.

Where to begin, though? Originally, I considered Ireland to be a prime candidate for some Goldman Sachs coup d’etat action, but it seems that Ireland already got the old Goldman Sachs in/out in the form of Peter Sutherland, a non-executive director of Goldman Sachs, as well as a non-executive at BP. Here are five countries that could use a little Goldman Sachs in/out.

Spain: With concerns in Italy lessening amidst the installation of ex-Goldman man Mario Monti as PM, bankers and investors in the eurozone and abroad are looking to Spain, which the BBC is calling the “weaker link in the eurozone chain.”

This is obviously the first country that requires a Goldman Sachs premiership. Get on it boys.

Read the rest from DJ Pangburn at Death and Taxes

An opposition MP set off a teargas canister in the South Korean parliament in a failed attempt to prevent the ruling party passing a free trade deal with the US.

Proponents said the deal, the largest US trade pact since the 1994 North America Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), could increase commerce between the two countries by up to a quarter. But the opposition claims it will harm South Korean interests, putting jobs at risk.

Members of the ruling Grand National party were greeted with shouts and screams as they occupied the national assembly’s main hall to railroad the deal. Opposition MPs tried to physically block them, leading to scuffles and Democratic party’s Kim Sun-dong set off teargas.

He shouted: “Let me go, bastards. No FTA”, as he was been taken out of the chamber by security guards. The chamber was cleared briefly but less than an hour after the scuffles began, the bill was passed by 151 votes to seven.

Read More: Guardian

The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.

This is the most remarkable thing of all: a giant leap forward for, or perhaps even the successful culmination of, the Goldman Sachs Project.

Simon Johnson, the former International Monetary Fund economist, in his book 13 Bankers, argued that Goldman Sachs and the other large banks had become so close to government in the run-up to the financial crisis that the US was effectively an oligarchy. At least European politicians aren’t “bought and paid for” by corporations, as in the US, he says. “Instead what you have in Europe is a shared world-view among the policy elite and the bankers, a shared set of goals and mutual reinforcement of illusions.”

Read the rest at The Independent

Lt. Col. Max Klaar (left) Bundeswehr (retired) embraces Merrit P. Drucker, retired US Army major at a ceremony in Washington. Photo: Monica Frim.

World War Two stopped in 1945, but it did not end.

The death rate among soldiers and civilians in Germany increased. No peace treaty was signed between Germany and its former opponents. And according to many Germans, there is still no real peace either, because the country is occupied and lacks a treaty.

It is identified by the United Nations as a “Hostile State;” the propaganda which helped to start the war still goes on against Germany; the conquerors have never been called to account for the atrocities they inflicted on their German prisoners of war, or for the deaths by forced starvation of millions of German civilians. Thuggish fascists still threaten freedom of speech. Thousands of political prisoners have been sentenced to jail in Germany for expressing opinions tolerated among the conquerors.

All that has suddenly started to change because a retired US Army officer, Merrit P. Drucker, read my book entitled Other Losses, which describes in gruesome detail the dying agonies of a million German prisoners of war in American and French camps after World War Two. Drucker, who had been posted to Rheinberg in 1989,  investigated the book’s claims in archives in Germany and the USA to ascertain its veracity, and has now written a letter of apology to Max Klaar, Chairman of German Soldiers Association and formerly a lieutenant colonel in the Bundeswehr, apologizing for the fate of German prisoners of war in US Army camps in 1945.

“Starting in April, 1945, the US Army and the French army casually annihilated about one million captives, most of them in American camps,” said Army Senior Historian Col. Ernest F. Fisher (retired) in his foreword to the book.

Fisher was present on October 31 2011 at an emotional ceremony in Washington launching the new American edition of Other Losses. The book has been a world-wide best-seller for 22 years, but according to a Washington bookseller, was “deep-sixed” in the US when a small edition appeared here two decades ago.

Accepting the apology in Washington, Klaar presented a 14-point proposal to end the war both formally and prasctically. According to Klaar, Germans are today a “nation of wounded souls” constantly suffering the war-guilt and shame of a criminal past which the conquerors are constantly re-inflicting on them.

Anyone in Germany who speaks today of the crimes inflicted on Germans themselves after the war, is shouted down by the Anti-Fascist movement, which threatens violence against owners of venues where opponents are scheduled to speak out against political correctness. This fascistic Anti-Fa movement is scarcely known outside Germany but it has attained powerful control over public expression there. Many are silenced, many are arrested and many jailed for speaking out on the subject of allied atrocities which are deemed by Anti-Fa reasoning to diminish German guilt. Political correctness in Germany as in many other countries dictates that only the Germans were the criminals of World War Two; but in Germany itself, to say that they too were victimized courts violence, criminal prosecution and a jail sentence.

Drucker’s apology derives from a sense of the injustice of the US behavior, and a determination “to see this thing right,” by which he means making amends as far as possible for the horrors inflicted on the prisoners themselves and their families. I started research for the book because, by chance, working on a book about the French Resistance, I saw the silhouette of a terrific and half-known story that had to be revealed. Many times I was told by Germans who were in the allied death-camps, “Thank you. No German could have told this story.”

James Bacque contributed the essay “A Truth So Terrible” to the disinformation anthology Abuse Your Illusions.

U.S. Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro says the U.S. and the Israeli regime are set to hold their ‘largest and most significant’ joint military maneuvers without offering details about the time and location of the war games.

More than 5,000 U.S. and Israeli forces will take part in the war drills, said Shapiro, in a Saturday speech at the Israeli-sponsored think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). He reportedly did not mention a specific time and location for what observers have described as part of the new U.S.-led publicity campaign aimed at raising the threat level against Iran.

The joint military maneuver will simulate Israel’s ballistic missile system and will allow Washington to ‘learn from’ Tel Aviv’s experience in warfare, the senior American official added.

More: Press TV

The Obama Administration announced two weeks ago that a bumbling Iranian-American used car salesman had conspired with a U.S. government agent posing as a representative of Mexican drug cartels to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. This brought highly skeptical reactions from experts here across the political spectrum.

But even if some of this tale turns out to be true, the handling of such accusations is inherently political. For example, the U.S.  government’s 9/11 commission investigated the links between the attackers and the Saudi ruling family, but refused to make public the results of that investigation. The reason is obvious: There is dirt there and Washington doesn’t want to create friction with a key ally. And keep in mind that this is about complicity with an attack on American soil that killed 3,000 people.

By contrast, the Obama Administration seized upon the rather dubious speculation that “the highest levels of the Iranian government” were involved in this alleged plot.  President Obama announced that “all options are on the table,” which is well-known code for possible military action. This is extremist and dangerous rhetoric.

Read more here.

Computer hackers, possibly from the Chinese military, interfered with two U.S. government satellites four times in 2007 and 2008 through a ground station in Norway, according to a congressional commission.

The intrusions on the satellites, used for earth climate and terrain observation, underscore the potential danger posed by hackers, according to excerpts from the final draft of the annual report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The report is scheduled to be released next month.

“Such interference poses numerous potential threats, particularly if achieved against satellites with more sensitive functions,” according to the draft. “Access to a satellite‘s controls could allow an attacker to damage or destroy the satellite. An attacker could also deny or degrade as well as forge or otherwise manipulate the satellite’s transmission.”

Read More: Bloomberg

President Barack Obama announced on Friday that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year. The president made the announcement at a White House briefing following a private video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

“As promised the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, the war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said.

More than 4,400 American military members have been killed, and another 2,000 wounded since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The two countries have been negotiating over whether the United States would leave behind up to several thousand military trainers after year-end, or if all remaining troops would depart as planned by Dec. 31. The main sticking point has been legal immunity for any U.S. forces that remain.

Iran Affairs

I’m sure you’ve heard about the alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US and bomb the Israeli embassy etc. which was supposedly “directed by factions of the Iranian government” (whatever that means.)

Simple question: Why? Suppose the alleged plot was successful – then what? Apart from risking a major diplomatic incident, what would Iran have to gain from doing any of this? Would Saudi Arabia or Israel simply disappear? Are the Iranians just crazy people who like to blow up places for no real gain?

There have been many such ‘terror plots’ foiled in the US – and the one thing they all had in common was that there was a government informant who was involved and even instigated the plot by recruiting some otherwise hapless and simple-minded “terrorists” and provided them with the tools and financing – including buying them the military boots that were later presented in their trial as evidence of their militancy, as well as the cameras that they used to photograph their intended targets.

How hapless and simple-minded? Remember Jose Padilla who was supposedly going to launch a nuclear “dirty bomb” attack? Did you know he was planning to convert plain uranium ore (i.e. rocks) into enriched uranium … by swinging a bucket of the stuff in a circle over his head? Yes folks, these are the “terrorists.”

Of course the line between informant and agent provocateur is very negligible. Some of you may remember Tommy the Traveler, a government agent who traveled to college campuses across the US and infiltrated student anti-war movements, in order to provoke them into committing acts of violence for which they could be arrested?

Details of an amazing American military plan for an attack to wipe out a major part of the British Army are today revealed for the first time. In 1930, a mere nine years before the outbreak of World War Two, America drew up proposals specifically aimed at eliminating all British land forces in Canada and the North Atlantic, thus destroying Britain’s trading ability and bringing the country to its knees.

Previously unparalleled troop movements were launched as an overture to an invasion of Canada, which was to include massive bombing raids on key industrial targets and the use of chemical weapons, the latter signed off at the highest level by none other than the legendary General Douglas MacArthur.

The plans, revealed in a Channel 5 documentary, were one of a number of military contingency plans drawn up against a number of potential enemies, including the Caribbean islands and China. There was even one to combat an internal uprising within the United States.

In the end there was no question of President Franklin D. Roosevelt subscribing to what was known as War Plan Red. Instead the two countries became the firmest of allies during WW2, an occasionally strained alliance that continues to this day. Still, it is fascinating that there were enough people inside the American political and military establishment who thought that such a war was feasible.

Article continues at here.

Nearly 70 percent of Israelis surveyed recently said that Israel should accept a Palestinian state if the United Nations chooses to recognize it, according to a report in Thursday’s edition of The Jerusalem Post.

The poll results fly in the face of American conservatives and even President Barack Obama, who have taken the lead in discouraging the U.N. from voting on the matter, claiming that it could threaten Israel’s security.

The study was carried out by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. A further 83 percent of Palestinians said that turning to the U.N. for statehood is the right thing to do.

The United States has vowed to veto any request for Palestinian statehood at the Security Council, potentially sparking a new Middle East crisis. Tens of thousands of Palestinians took part in rallies to back the Palestinian leader on Wednesday.

For Obama, the confrontation is an embarrassment as 12 months ago he stood before the same assembly and called for Palestinian membership in the United Nations within a year.

With the electoral breakthrough of the NDP in the federal election, attention to the nature of social democracy has returned to the political agenda. What do socialists say about the NDP and social democracy today?

There are two main views about parliamentary — or electoral — democracy in the history of the socialist movement. The social democratic view sees the liberal democratic state as a neutral body that can be peopled by delegates of the right or the left. Marxists, however, have stressed the limitations of the liberal democratic state. This view dates back to Marx’s analysis stated simply in the Communist Manifesto.

Contemporary social democratic parties, like the NDP or the Labour Party in the UK, keep a close eye on every aspect of parliamentary practice. Social movements, student activism and trade union struggles are seen as important at times. But what is considered “extra-parliamentary” work is seen as a means to influence “political” outcomes, which are narrowly defined in terms of parliamentary elections, debates or policies.

But the difference between a reformist, or social democratic, view, and a revolutionary, or Marxist, one, has not always been easy to discern.

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In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 787 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs.

When we hear conspiracy theorist talk about this or that powerful group (or alliance of said groups) “pulling strings” behind the scenes, we tend to dismiss or minimize such claims, even though, deep down, we may suspect that there’s some degree of truth to it, however distorted by the theorists’ slightly paranoid perception of the world. But perhaps our tendency to dismiss such claims as exaggerations (at best) comes from our inability to get even a slight grip on the complexity of global corporate ownership; it’s all too vast and complicated to get any clear sense of the reality.

But now we have the results of a global network analysis (Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston) that, for the first time, lays bare the “architecture” of the global ownership network. In the paper abstract, the authors state …

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The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.

On August 24, 2011, around 8:45 a.m. CDT, agents for the federal government executed four search warrants on Gibson’s facilities in Nashville and Memphis and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. Gibson had to cease its manufacturing operations and send workers home for the day, while armed agents executed the search warrants. Gibson has fully cooperated with the execution of the search warrants.

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In hopes that action would discourage President Barack Obama from permitting an extension to the Canadian Keystone pipeline — also known as the “Keystone XL” — a group of First Nations and American Indian activists protested in front of the White House on Friday.

Before being arrested, the protesters insisted that the extension — which will run from Alberta Canada to Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas — will harm ancestral homelands.

“Our Lakota people oppose this pipeline because of the potential contamination of the surface water and of the Oglala aquifer,” said Deb White Plume, a Lakota activist. “We have thousands of ancient and historical cultural resources that would be destroyed across our treaty lands.”

Even the New York Times’ editorial board came out against the pipeline, writing that it was concerned about oil spills along the route and carbon emissions. “[T]he extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does,” the board wrote last month.

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Scientists in the US have warned NASA that the amount of so-called space junk orbiting Earth is at tipping point. A report by the National Research Council says the debris could cause fatal leaks in spaceships or destroy valuable satellites.

It calls for international regulations to limit the junk and more research into the possible use of launching large magnetic nets or giant umbrellas. The debris includes clouds of minuscule fragments, old boosters and satellites.

Some computer models show the amount of orbital rubbish “has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures,” the research council said in a statement on Thursday.

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