The Largest Minority

June 4th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Perhaps it’s time to cut funding to Israel.

Obama is undeniably pro-Israeli, so you may be asking, “What more do the Jews in this video want?” Nothing short of complete eradication of all Muslims. Ironic isn’t it? Despite the overuse of Goldwin’s Law these days, comparisons between Zionists and Nazis are frighteningly valid.

Zionists frankly don’t want peace. They want all the land they think they’re entitled to (which extends far beyond Israel) and think any negotiation is unacceptable. Putting Libertarian conspiracy theories about 9/11 aside, Zionists actually do pose a huge threat to the President’s life and US security. If I were Obama I’d be keeping a close eye on Rahm Emanuel’s father, a former Irgun terrorist, and I’m only half-joking when I say that.

A militant Israeli state served our imperial interests for decades, but now that we can no longer sustain our empire we face perhaps the largest example of “blowback” we have ever seen. So how do we quell a Zionist monster we’ve been feeding for decades? Backing international law regarding Israel would be a good start. Supporting the Palestinian Right of Return would turn Israel from a right-wing “Jewish State” which breeds extremism into a democratic one which respects human rights.

h/t Allison Kilkenny who also has a great piece on why Obama’s Cairo speech was a failure.

May 27th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Any speech in which President Obama announces a change in policy follows the same basic format of denouncing Bush’s policy, taking long thoughtful pauses, then adopting Bush’s policy.

When I was campaigning for Nader, on the rare occasion that I would meet a self-described liberal calm enough to engage in a conversation with me, they would state that they were voting for Obama because they didn’t want a clone of George W. Bush (meaning John McCain) to win the White House. I would often reply that I wasn’t voting for either McCain or Obama for the very same reason. Both men were outright fascists. Of course, stating something like that would often end the conversation. What an absurd thing to say. Right?

h/t FireDogLake

May 23rd, 2009 by Manila Ryce

During a speech in which he attempted to justify the future illegality of his administration, President Obama also committed a crime against logic by setting forth a false compromise often used by moderate progressives to justify their lack of backbone. After criticizing the far-right for their authoritarian policies and prideful ignorance, the president then surmised that those on the exact opposite end of the political spectrum must also be incorrect, therefor leaving the only sane position to be the compromised one in the middle. There is an idiotic inclination in American journalism and politics to be “fair and balanced” by insisting that the truth to any debate must be in the middle even when one side is clearly wrong.

Using that fallacious argument, Obama could have very well said, “On one side of the spectrum there are those who insist that the world is 6,000 years old, and on the other end of the spectrum we have ideologues who insist that the world is 4.5 billion years old. Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right. The American people are not ideologues. They know that the answer lies somewhere in between these two dates.”

Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is not happy that President Obama has labeled him an “absolutist” for defending the rule of law. Ratner also rightly criticizes the president for being too weak on matters like Guantanamo. He states: “It’s pretty remarkable to me that he would equate on one side the Cheney et al. people who advocate torture, continuing people at Guantanamo, continuing military commissions, having preventive detention, all of those types of depredations of the constitution, and then put us on the other extreme, saying we’re extreme also or absolutist because we actually want the rule of law. It seems to me that that equation is pretty false and outrageous.“

May 12th, 2009 by Guest

Venezuelan police arrested four men and confiscated a large quantity of sophisticated weaponry that government officials speculate could have been part of an assassination plan against President Chávez. This discovery occurred in the context of a wave of apparently politically motivated violence that Chávez supporters suspect is part of a wider new campaign against the government.

On Friday the Venezuelan investigative police raided an apartment in north Caracas which was allegedly the property of a French citizen, Frederik Bocquet, who according to Tarek El Aissami, minister for internal affairs, is “a person ready and trained in the military and furthermore, is a sniper.”

Following the weapon confiscation El Aissami said, “There’s an irrational sector of the opposition in this country who still hold hopes of destroying this revolutionary process and they have planned as their objective, getting rid of President Chávez.”

He explained, “We can demonstrate that this type of weapon used by these military terrorist organisations are for destabilisation actions. With this discovery we don’t hesitate to tell the country that we have landed a strong blow against terrorism and to those groups who want to drag Venezuela down to scenes of blood and confrontation.”

In the apartment police found a range of weaponry, including 13 long range rifles, 3 shot guns, knives, two machine guns, silencers, telescopic citers, bullet-proof vests, 20,000 bullets, grenades, military uniforms, radio equipment, electronic detonator systems, and half a kilogram of C4 explosives.

In connection to the discovery the police have detained three men of Dominican nationality along with Bocquet.

read full article…

May 7th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

April 23rd, 2009 by Guest

By Michael Ratner

Today I awoke to read that a number of human rights type groups have called on President Obama to create a commission of accountability to investigate and report publicly on torture and the cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees. There is not a word in the petition about criminal prosecutions of the torture team. Yet, I know that some of these groups would say they still want prosecutions. Sadly, this call for a commission, if set up, would almost guarantee that prosecutions won’t happen.

Briefly, here is why: We have reached a critical political moment on this issue. Obama has been forced or pushed to open the door to prosecutions, an opening I thought would take much longer to achieve. If there was ever a time to push that door open wider and demand a special prosecutor, it is now. We have documented and open admissions of criminality. We have Cheney and Hayden admitting that they approved these techniques; and Cheney saying he would approve waterboarding again. We have the Senate Armed Services Report detailing how the torture program was authored and approved by our highest officials in the Whitehouse and employed in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. And we have thousands of pages of proof. There is public outrage about the torture program, and the media in the US and the world are covered with the US misdeeds.

So at this moment, instead of human rights groups getting together and calling for a special prosecutor, what do they do? Call for a commission. What this call does –and it must be said strongly — is take the pressure off the growing public push for prosecutions and deflects it into a commission. Outrage that could actually lead to prosecutions is now focused away and into a commission. Think if this list of human rights groups had demanded prosecutions. We would be closer and not farther from the goal.

I am sure some of these human rights groups will argue that a commission will, or can be, a first step to prosecutions. Sure, it is possible, but unlikely for the reasons I gave in a letter published in Harper’s and available on my blog. The commission process will drag on, statutes of limitation will run and the conclusion of the commission is likely to be: the US should not have tortured, but it was an extraordinary and dangerous moment after 9/11 and the torturers were acting in our best interest to avoid another 9/11. Prosecutions are not recommended.

I don’t think I need to repeat here why we need prosecutions. If we are to stop torture in the future we need to send the clear message that if an official tortures, prosecutions will follow. Without that message the next President or even this one, can again put us on the page of torture by signing another executive order. And don’t think that won’t happen no matter how many commissions reach results saying the US should not have tortured. It will and Cheney, Hayden and other have said so.

It is time to do what is necessary. Appoint a special prosecutor and insure that this country will not again be a country of torture.

source

April 13th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

April 13th, 2009 by Guest

by Johann Hari

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.

But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: Pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t?

In his book “Villains of All Nations,” the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the cat o’ nine tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.”

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its 9 million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

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