Media Lens, London, 18 January 2012

News that a fourth scientist in two years, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, had been assassinated in Iran by an unknown agency generated minimal outrage in the press.

Patrick Cockburn notedin the Independent:
‘While the identity of those carrying out the assassinations remains a mystery, it is most likely to be Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad…’

The Sunday Times published a meticulous account of the planning and execution of the attack provided by ‘a source who released details’ on the actions of ‘small groups of Israeli agents’ operating inside Iran. (Marie Colvin and Uzi Mahnaimi, ‘Israel’s secret war,’ Sunday Times, January 15, 2012)

Julian Borger’s article in the Guardian warnedagainst ‘Goading a regime on the brink.’

We wonder if the Guardian would have described the Iranian assassination of scientists on US or Israeli streets as ‘goading’. We also wonder if Borger would have described these as terrorist attacks.

Using the media database Lexis-Nexis we have been able to find just one example of a UK journalist describing Roshan’s assassination as an act of terror – New Statesman’s senior political editor Mehdi Hasan writingin the Guardian. Otherwise, almost all references have been limited to the use of the word by Iranian officials behind scare quotes. (After challenges from Media Lens and other activists, Borger did publisha rare example of non-Iranian use of the term.)

By contrast, in October, the US accused Iran of recruiting a used car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, as part of a terrorist plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant in Washington, DC. In that case, journalists had no qualms about using the word terror without inverted commas. Karen McVeigh reported in the Guardian:
‘Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalised US citizen, was arrested last month, and stands accused of running a global terror plot that stretched from Mexico to Tehran.’

The Daily Mail:
‘An extraordinary terrorist plot has been foiled – which would have seen the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. murdered on American soil.’

The Telegraph:
‘Iranian government officials were accused by the Obama administration of plotting a string of deadly terrorist attacks on American soil.’

On Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald postednumerous similar examples from the US media. The alleged Arbabsiar plot was subsequently debunkedby analyst Gareth Porter.

As Greenwald observed, ‘accusing Israel and/or the U.S. of Terrorism remains one of the greatest political taboos’. Responding to a Media Lens reader who had suggested, not unreasonably, that ‘a terrorist is one who brings terror to another person’, Channel 4′s Alex Thomson wrote:
‘Your definition of a terrorist as one bringing terror is nonsensical as it would encompass all military outfits’ including ‘the Royal Fusilliers [sic]’. (Forwarded to Media Lens, February 25, 2005)

Is that really so absurd? After all, following the murderous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill wrote to Bomber Command:
‘It seems to me that the moment has come that the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.’ (Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005)

Presumably, then, one can argue that the RAF is a terrorist organisation.

Returning to last week’s assassination, while no-one has yet suggested that Iran is now obliged to bomb Washington, Borger argued:
‘If Americans had been killed in the Georgetown restaurant that was supposedly the target [of the debunked Arbabsiar ‘plot’], the Obama administration would have been obliged to respond militarily.’

In similar vein, the aptly-named James Blitz asked in the Financial Times:
‘But even if an immediate military conflict… is averted, this still leaves a wider question: how much longer can Israel and the US wait before they bomb Iran’s nuclear sites?’

The day after Roshan’s killing, Andrew Cummings, formerly an adviser on the Middle East and US affairs in the UK cabinet office national security staff, commented in the Guardian on ‘the risks’ of ‘this audacious approach’ – he meant the murdering of scientists. The sub-heading explained:
‘The death of another Iranian scientist has led to criticism of such actions, but Tehran’s refusal to co-operate leaves little alternative.’

Cummings clarified:
‘What many people fail to recognise, though, is that a covert campaign, while rife with physical, diplomatic and legal risks, is the lesser of many evils.’

And yet, as Patrick Cockburn noted, ‘the US has found no evidence Tehran is trying to make a nuclear bomb, though US politicians [and US-UK journalists] often speak as if this was an established fact…
‘The US National Intelligence Estimates on Iranian nuclear progress, the collective judgement of all the US intelligence organisations, said there was no evidence Iran had been trying to build a bomb since 2003. The Defence Intelligence Agency concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme at that time was directed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and when he was overthrown by the US, it was ended.’

Compare this with Blitz’s version:
‘Some western intelligence agencies believe Iran will bide its time a little longer and enrich more uranium – but will not take the big strategic decision to race for the bomb in 2012. Still, in every other respect, the auguries are not good.’

Again by contrast, Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst, toldveteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh last year: ‘there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb’.

Readers might respond that Cummings and Blitz are entitled to their baseless views, and the Guardian and FT are perfectly entitled to publish them – that’s what free speech is all about. We agree.

But a problem arises when we try to imagine the Guardian publishing a piece justifying the Iranian killing of a US scientist on a US street one day after he had been murdered. And try imagining the FT hosting an opinion piece that asked: ‘How much longer can Iran wait before launching its bombers against the US and Israel?’

 Jan 13 2012 by Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi

Golden, like a shower, said one of the US marines as he urinated, along with three of his fellow officers, on three dead Afghans. Over the last forty-eight hours this grizzly spectacle has resuscitated the horrific images of US soldiers’ torturing and sexually humiliating men from Abu Ghraib prison to Guantanamo Bay.

Then as now, brown bodies are the raw material through and upon which US soldiers realize their darkest fantasies and their deepest secrets. The pornography that popularized the “golden shower” and the Islamophobia that fuels the War on Terror inspire these scenes. In them, US soldiers feminize Muslim men and demonstrate their power over them. US soldiers can and will sodomize, piss on, and otherwise sexually humiliate Muslim and/or Arab men. And the world will witness this confident hierarchy of masculinity through the dissemination of the torturer’s documentation.

In the face of the standard US official military response to Abu Ghraib—just a few bad apples in an otherwise principled and ethical army—the journalist Seymour Hersh laid out the systematic policy of “Copper Green.” Donald Rumsfeld had approved this clandestine task force, Hersh asserted. It built on the deeply nuanced work of Rapheal Patai’s The Arab Mind. The men and women of this “black op” molded an interrogation technique based on the two codes central, the profound argument went, to breaking the Muslim man. One, he only understands force. Two, his deepest weakness is shame and humiliation.

It would be wrong to assume that strongly held beliefs such as Patai’s were limited to the actions of a few “black ops.” Culturalist arguments have saturated the logic of the War on Terror since its inception. They shaped the US “shock and awe” bombing campaign of Iraq. They informed the stated aim to drain that cultural swamp which breeds terrorism in the Muslim world. They guided the smearing of menstrual blood on a Guantanomo detainee. They inspired the posing of Abu Ghraib detainees in homosexual relations. They underlie the latest subjection of an Afghan’s body to the “golden shower” of the US soldier who may have killed him just before unzipping his fly.

Then, as now, these images unleashed a dastardly slew of military officials’ and pundits’ reflections on how the sole actions of these US soldiers would awaken the deepest cultural alienation among the Arabs and the Muslims. Apparently, the real risk that the Abu Ghraib images revealed was not that brutal sexual torture was routine. The real risk was that US soldiers would now become the targets of Arab and Muslims’ rage and violence.

After all, it is these soldiers’ security that justified the censorship of the most “sensitive” photos that document some of the harshest realities of life at Abu Ghraib. If Arabs and Muslims “saw” American soldiers raping male and female Iraqis, it might unleash their cultural essentialism. Thus US torture has nothing to do with a US military culture of misogyny, violence, and Islamophobia. Instead, it is the Arabo-Islamic culture of misogyny, violence, and hyper-sexism that somehow manages to both inform and challenge US torture!

Last March, Rolling Stone published a full expose of the atrocities that Jeremy Morlock, Andrew Holmes, Adam Winfield, and Michael Wagnon, among others committed. These men formed the “Kill Team” in Kandahar province. They executed the innocent, they hacked off bits of skull and fingers as trophies, they placed severed heads on sticks, and they cheered as they conducted airstrikes on civilians. It was not enough to partake in brutalization, the “Kill Team,” watched themselves again and again through a roving usb that featured all the bloody details. Journalists asserted that the Kill Team operated in plain view of the rest of their company.

Then, as now, the Pentagon confidently explained the exceptional and clandestine nature of these US troops. From the top leadership to the rank and file, the forceful argument was that these actions were “not consistent” with American values nor “indicative of the character” of the US military.

Kill Teams, Piss Teams, and Rape Teams–these are all exceptional, US officials would have us believe. The fact that one in three female US soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in US uniform is also an abberation of what the military truly stands for.

Yet as Saree Makdissi has pointed out, “the scandal consists in the urination rather than the killing itself.” We are told that this type of violence is extreme and unacceptable. But somehow, the 150,000 Iraqi deaths (estimated at about eighty percent of which are civilian) and the estimated 70,000 civilian Afghan deaths since the launch of the War on Terror is acceptable and normal.

The fact of the matter is that the dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims during the war on terror informs both the impunity with which civilians are killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and the desecration of corpses.

US officials hailed, and continue to hail, the exemplary character of the US army and the great sacrifice of its members just as they fretted, and continue to fret, over the implications that these sole actions would have on the Arab and Muslim world. Indeed, what the depraved actions seemed to indicate more than anything else in the minds of these commentators is the exceptionalism of the Arab and Muslim world.

Apparently, piling naked bodies on top of one another, torturing them into wanton sexual positions, unleashing dogs on exposed genitalia, putting a gun to the head of a bound and hooded man while forcing him to masturbate, and urinating on the dead is ok everywhere else but the Arab and Muslim world.

Other people, not programmed with this culture, would not feel violated, helpless, and enraged at the public demonstration that their lives are worth less than American lives.

If we could just look beyond the pissing, the rape, and the torture and, for those of us who are trying to count as the US army claims it cannot “tell” the combatant from the civilian—the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would see that the US military is otherwise a force for good in the world.

Let us step outside the chorus of essentialism and ask: What do these acts of brutalization and depravity say to us about the United States? More still, what does the fact that the broad understanding that it is these acts alone that are brutal, excessive, and unacceptable say about us all?

CNN contributor salutes Marines for urinating on dead Afghans (AUDIO)

Striker Mohammed Ghadir puts Israeli anti-racism to the test

By James M. Dorsey

Maccabi Haifa striker Mohammed Ghadir believes that he and Beitar Jerusalem, the bad boy of Israeli soccer, are a perfect match.

“I am well suited to Beitar, and that team would fit me like a glove. I have no qualms about moving to play for them,” Mr. Ghadir is quoted by Israeli daily Ha’aretz as saying. Beitar has a large squad, a significant fan base, wide media coverge and lacks talented strikers, he says.

There is only one hitch: Beitar doesn’t want Mr. Ghadir. Not because he’s not an upcoming star and not because they wouldn’t need a player like Mr. Ghadir but because the striker is an Israeli Palestinian. “Our team and our fans are still not ready for an Arab soccer player,” Ha’aretz quotes Beitar’s management as saying. The club prides itself on being the only top league Israeli club to have never hired a Palestinian player in a country whose population is for 20 per cent Palestinian and in which Palestinians play important roles in most other top league teams.

The Beitar management may be right in its approach, not because the team has a point in picking its players on racial grounds but because it prides itself on its bad-boy racist image and is under no pressure to change its ways despite Israeli legal restrictions on discrimination in the work place, the Israel Football Association being the only Middle Eastern soccer body to have launched a campaign against racism and Palestinian tax money contributed to the funding of this year’s refurbishing of Jerusalem stadiums.

Beitar has argued that it has broken no laws by not having hired Palestinian players because no Palestinian has ever solicited at the risk of being a target of the club’s racist attitude. Mr. Ghadir’s desire to play for Beitar puts paid to that argument.

“Now an extraordinarily courageous Arab player has stood up, and fearlessly indicated that he is not afraid to play for Beitar. The Jerusalem squad did not assent to his request – not because he lacks sufficient talent, but because he is an Arab. This is a mark of Cain for Beitar Jerusalem and its fans, and also for the city of Jerusalem, the state of Israel and its legal system, the Israel Football Association and also for the media, which continues to cover this soccer team. Day by day, we reinforce and popularize this loathsome form of racism,” said Ha”aretz columnist Yoav Borowitz in a recent article entitled ‘Kick racism out of Beitar Jerusalem soccer team.’

Established in 1936 and supported by Israeli right wing leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Beitar traces its roots to a revanchist Zionist youth movement. Its founding players actively resisted the pre-state British mandate authorities. Its fans shocked Israelis when they refused to observe a moment of silence for assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who initiated the first peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Beitar has the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s top league. Since 2005 it has faced more than 20 hearings and has received various punishments, including points deductions, fines and matches behind closed doors because of its fans’ racist behaviour. Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. It’s mostly Sephardic fans of Middle Eastern and North African origin, revel in their status as the bad boys of Israeli soccer. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews of East European extraction rivals their disdain for Palestinians.

In some ways, Mr. Ghadir’s interest in transferring from Maccabi Haifa to Beitar has an element of going from bad to worse. Israeli police said in October that it suspect militant right-wing Jewish fans of Mr. Ghadir’s own team of painting slogans reminiscent of language used by Jewish settlers on buildings in the town of Bat Yam and Muslim and Christian graves in Jaffa, the formerly Palestinian part of Tel Aviv that today is home to both Israelis and Palestinians. The slogans asserted that “Maccabi Haifa doesn’t want Arabs on the team,” “Death to Arabs,” and “Rabbi Kahane was right,” a reference to the late leader of the outlawed extreme right-wing Jewish Defence League (JDL) who was assassinated in New York in 1990. The perpetrators signed the slogans as “Haifa supporters.”

Militant soccer fan racism is encouraged by far-right wing politicians such as National Union deputy Michael Ben-Ari, a proponent of expelling all Palestinians from Israel, who this year proposed legislation that would require members of Israeli national sport teams to sing the national anthem and recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The latter demand is rooted in an Israeli desire backed by Mr. Netanyahu to impose recognition of the Jews’ historic right to settle Palestine and block recognition of Palestinian rights to return to lands within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Mr. Borowitz noted that “Jerusalem mayor, Nir Barkat, who cultivates an image as a tolerant, modern public servant, has yet to utter a word on this topic. He has done nothing to alter Beitar’s racist, discriminatory policy. Avi Luzon, chairman of the Israel Football Association, also remains inert on this issue; and the association’s court has never lifted a finger to challenge Beitar’s racism. Meantime, Israel’s media continues to cover the team’s games, and barely addresses the racism issue. Could an English or French soccer squad get away without putting a black or Jewish player on the field throughout its history? How would its fans respond to that? Would football associations in such countries countenance such blatantly racist policy?”

Mr. Borowitz notes further that Jerusalem’s 280,000 Palestinian residents contributed to the NIS 100,000,000 ($27 million) in taxpayer’s money allocated for stadium renovations this year. “Yet this contribution does not entitle the city’s Arabs to representation, even of the most minimal sort, on Jerusalem’s sole team in the nation’s top league,” Mr. Borowitz said.

The importance of Palestinian players to Israeli soccer was driven home to Israelis in 2005 when Abbas Suan, a devout Muslim who refused to sing the Hatikva before a game, achieved for a brief moment what politicians in more than a half-century had not: he united Israeli Jews and Arabs by securing with a last minute equalizer against Ireland Israel’s first chance in 35 years to qualify for a world cup. The game earned him the nickname The Equalizer and made him an Israeli hero; his cheery face and toothy smile featured in ads for the state lottery.

That sense of unity was short-lived. When Suan set foot on the pitch in Israel a week later as captain of Bnei Sakhnin, an Israeli Palestinian team, Jewish fans of Beitar Jerusalem, Israel’s most nationalistic club, booed him every time he touched the ball. “Suan, You Don’t Represent US,” blared a giant banner in the stadium. Fans shouted, “We hate all Arabs.”

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

By rahnuma ahmed

It is not only the American corporate media which keeps the lid on the Federal Reserve System — since, contrary to what most  Americans believe, it is `not federal’, has `no reserve’, is `not even a bank’ but actually a banking cartel which serves and furthers the interests of the wealthiest men in the world – American universities too play their role. As Stephen Lendman points out, his MBA curriculum 46 years ago, had `left out the most important parts of the story and never hinted at anything sinister about how the banking system works in fact’ (The Federal Reserve, Z Magazine, June 29, 2006).

A similar situation seemingly prevails in the UK, for, when I asked a relative who teaches business and finance at a British university about who owns the Bank of England, I was told, its nationalised. Its a public organisation wholly-owned by the government.  Corroborating the official storyline secured in place by the powers-that-be, reflected in the Bank’s website:  ’As a public organisation, wholly-owned by Government, and with a significant public policy role, the Bank is accountable to Parliament.’

But this account – unfailingly subscribed to by most Brits, `You ask the question, Who Owns The Bank Of England? to one thousand Britons, and I kid you not, all of them will say that it is owned by the Government’ (The Tap Blog, February 27, 2010) – glosses over actualities. For instance, the setting up of  a wholly owned subsidiary called Bank of Nominees Limited (BOEN), a private limited company, by the Bank of England in 1977, which was granted an exemption from disclosing its shareholders. ‘It was considered undesirable that the disclosure requirements should apply to certain categories of shareholders.’ This exemption is separate to the fact that the Bank of England is also protected by its Royal Charter status, and the Official Secrets Act. To put it briefly, members of the British public are ‘not allowed to know who the shareholders are who own the company which carries out Central Banking in the UK.’

Obviously, the public’s access to such basic information in the mother of parliamentary democracies, is `undesirable.’ What was it George Orwell had said? All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

There are other powerful banks as well, these include the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank (consisting of the 12 European countries which adopted the singe euro currency in 1999). But the mother of these powerful central banks which serve and further the interests of the wealthiest men in the world, is a little-known bank — ‘a bank never heard of’ — the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). Founded in 1930, based in Basle, Switzerland, it is `the central banker to its member central banks.’ The BIS and the dominant central banks, writes Lendman, wield their influence in a `cartel-like alliance with each other to assure they all benefit more than they otherwise would without such a cozy arrangement’ (The Federal Reserve, June 29, 2006).

The `concentration of financial power into the hands of a small group of powerful banking and investment firms on Wall Street’ through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature From Jekyll Island, interview, April 2, 2004) was preceded by longer term historical changes which ‘switched’ money from wealth to debt. As monetary researchers at Discover the Secret of Our Money System blog explain, the real issue is not gold and silver vs. paper, commodity money vs. fiat money. The real issue is wealth money vs. debt money. It is honesty vs. fraud. A close look at the trail of United States money reveals how previous notions and practices of gold and silver commodity money which was `put into circulation as a wealth to the people, by the people’ was later replaced by ones of `monetized debt, put into circulation by the banks, as interest bearing debts to the people, for the personal profit of bankowners.’ These, are current.

Gold and silver had worked earlier, say Byron Dale, Gregory Soderberg and Thomas Hedin,  because people had produced the gold and silver, a raw resource of the earth, through their labour. It was a wealth to `ourselves’, the people, it was spent into circulation as a benefit to all of society, there was no debt attached to it. But, it was not the depositing of gold and silver coins at the Treasury for the sake of convenience, in lieu of Treasury notes (paper money), that signalled the shift because there was still `good, honest, wealth money with no debt, no excessive profit, nor excessive purchasing power to anyone.’

It was the depositing of gold and silver coins in a fractional reserve bank, which clinched the switch: `The bank held the coins as a reserve and expanded the money supply by making new loans equal to 10 times the face value of the coins deposited.’ Wealth switched to debt, as all new money was formed not by creating wealth, but by creating debt.

What might have seemed a good idea to many at the outset, leading to all round benefits, banks get more profits, people get quicker and easier loans, more capital is available for commerce, for production, increasingly turns into a nightmare as `sooner or later, more and more people can not make their loan repayments.’ As increasingly, what Thomas Jefferson foresaw — when banks are allowed to control the issuance of their currency the American people are gradually deprived of all property, until their children one day wake up homeless — becomes a reality.

Another Founding Father, James Madison, a main draftor of the US Constitution, had  called bankers ‘Money Changers,’ a reference to the Bible which says Jesus twice drove the Money Changers from the Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. ‘History records that the Money Changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.’

The US Congress and the President’s agreement to privatise the nation’s money system, says Lendman, to relinquish what should have remained the government’s exclusive power led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, an all-powerful privately owned banking cartel which has the right to print money in any amount, to control its supply and price. To ‘benefit hugely by loaning it out for a profit including to the government itself that must pay interest on the money it should never have to if it simply printed its own.’

The Federal Reserve Act was possibly, and still is, illegal as Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution – the inviolable law of the land — states that the Congress shall have the power to coin (create) money and regulate the value thereof. The US Supreme Court in 1935 ruled that the Congress `cannot constitutionally delegate its power to another group or body.’

The American public is harmed in several ways because of the Fed, points out Lendman. Through the invisible tax of inflation: newly-created money entering the system dilutes the purchasing power, it reduces the value of dollars already present. The dollar’s weakness since 2002 is possibly the result of excessive printing to fund the Bush administration’s `endless wars and reckless tax cuts for the rich.’ Through the banking cartel’s practice of usury, its power to artificially move rates up or down to any level it chooses.  Through the taxes the public must pay, `to cover the interest on the huge national debt’, well over $8.4 trillion, which has accumulated from the money the Fed printed and loaned to the government. Through the cartel getting the public to bail out the system with more of its tax dollars. Through — contrary to what the public had been fed (pun intended) about the Fed, that it would stabilise the economy, smooth out the business cycle, maintain sustainable growth, keep prices steady, benefit all – the crashes since its creation in 1913, `with them in charge’ are: 1921, 1929, the Great Depression years, recessions of 1953, 1957, 1969, 1975, 1981, 1990 and 2001.

The manner in which the Fed and European central banks operate to impoverish their own people, bears parallels to how the World Bank and the IMF does to `the rest’, but that is another story.

Controversy over whether the United States official gold reserves (over 4,500 metric tons) actually exist in the United States Bullion Depository, widely known as Fort Knox, or have been spirited away, have raged over the past decades. Edith Roosevelt, the grand-daughter of president Theodore Roosevelt is often quoted by many, ‘Allegations of missing gold from our Fort Knox vaults are being widely discussed in European circles. But what is puzzling is that the Administration is not hastening to demonstrate conclusively that there is no cause for concern over our gold treasure – if indeed it is in a position to do so.’

These concerns were revived in 2009 when rumours spread virally of tungsten i.e., fake gold bars of Fort Knox origin, having been discovered in Hong Kong. Informed sources say, hours after the scam was identified, Chinese officials caught the perpetrators. And reportedly uncovered, during the Clinton administration ‘between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 thousand metric tonnes].  Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day.’ Stock market analyst Robert Prechter claims to know people who have ‘copies of the original shipping docs with dates and exact weights of ‘tungsten’ bars shipped to Ft. Knox’ (Market Oracle, November 12, 2009).

The Fort Knox gold story got murkier middle of this year, when rumors circulated that a report prepared by the Federal Security Service for the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin says, the former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged and jailed for sex crimes in the US on May 14 because he had discovered that all of the gold held at Fort Knox was `missing and/or unaccounted’ for. This was reported in the EU Times, May 31, 2011 (nothing to do with the European Union by the way, the online publication does not enjoy credibility with many, according to wiki_rational, it is ‘xenophobic,’ ‘anti-semitic,’ ‘racist’), and I have no means at my disposal of verifying whether the Federal Security Service had actually reported any such thing to the Russian prime minister. However, other news items reported in the feature are verifiably true. That Putin had posted a defense of Strauss-Kahn on the Kremlin’s official website, alleging that he was the victim of a US conspiracy, ‘It’s hard for me to evaluate the hidden political motives but I cannot believe that it looks the way it was initially introduced. It doesn’t sit right in my head.’ That Ron Paul, a top Congressman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate (of Libertarian views) is worried that the Fort Knox gold is gone. That, when directly asked by reporters, he had replied, ‘I think it is a possibility.’

With the US Treasury’s debt to China having reached the $1.2 trillion mark, with the largest creditor of the world’s superpower having advised the latter to ‘live within its means’ (Huffington Post, August 6, 2011), the US targets China in classic warfare fashion: encirclement, seige, more or less clandestine support for internal disorder (Global Research, November 18, 2010).

As sounds of `End the Fed‘ voiced by Occupy Wall Street-ers reverberate across the world, as I ponder Madison’s Biblical reference to the Money Changers, I come across a recent interview of Eric Walberg, author, Post-modern Imperialism. Walberg, who dislikes slots and -isms, who makes use of Marx, who describes himself as being `a freelance monotheist’ (Eric Walberg and Jonathan Reynolds, Global Research, November 10, 2011), suggests something with which I would like to end my two-part series:

‘The Judaic prophets, followed by Jesus and Muhammad, and the nineteenth century secular prophet of revolution Marx, rejected usury and interest, as representing ill-gotten gain, with good reason. Marx condemned this mode of extraction of surplus as the highest form of fetishism, based on private property and exploitation of labor. They all rejected this exploitation on a moral basis as unjust, insisting that morality be embedded in the economy, a principle which was abandoned when capitalism took hold. While Judaism and Christianity adapted, Islam did not.

‘Interest, and today’s money based on US military might alone, are the root cause not only of the current world financial crisis, but, as a corollary to Rothschild’s dictum ['Give me control of a nations money supply and I care not who makes its laws']… and Clausewitz’s dictum [Politics is the womb in which war develops], the primary instrument facilitating (and benefiting from) the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the world political crisis.’

Whether believers and secularists can unite to fight this battle, is anyone’s guess.

Published in New Age, Tuesday, November 15, 2011

To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in yearslong struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austeritystate now even attack the private realm and people’s right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosedupon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable?

Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst.

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.

But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anticamping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.

We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011.

For Artists and Performers, Britain Puts Out an Unwelcome Mat (New York Times)

From left: John Ewing, Korine Fujiwara, Charles Wetherbee and Kristin Ostling of the Carpe Diem Quartet. Photo: Karina Wetherbee

By SARAH LYALL

Published: October 19, 2011

The system, intended to limit the influx of foreigners at a time of economic and security tensions, seems straightforward enough on paper. While some artists qualify for “temporary worker” status, the rules are intended to ensure that those who make brief visits for exhibitions, festivals, readings and the like do not earn money or try to remain in the country. But they have proved so onerous and so open to subjective misreading that even people who have been coming to Britain for years are suddenly being refused entry.

“Artists and authors are being treated as if they are potential economic migrants or terrorists,” said Jonathan Heawood, director of the literary human-rights group English PEN, which has been pressing the government to loosen the rules. “Essentially the government is trying to crowbar them into a system that wasn’t designed for them and that sees them as a threat and not a benefit.”

Recent victims of the system include the Russian-born, New York-residing beat poet Alex Galper, who was turned away when he planned to read for no fee at a charity event; the Georgian artist Gela Patashuri, who was commissioned to produce a work for a London gallery but whose visa was denied because the authorities said they were “not satisfied” with his qualifications; and the renowned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who canceled plans to direct “Così Fan Tutte” at the English National Opera after his visa was granted and then withdrawn, and he was told to re-apply and to give his fingerprints again.

Britain is not the only Western country with tough borders. The United States has a notoriously arduous visa application system that has led to numerous well-publicized cases of artists and performers being refused entry.

But in Europe, Britain stands out for the strictness of its policies and the apparent inconsistencies in the way it enforces them.

In 2008 the government, under political pressure to curtail non-European immigration, introduced a tough points-based visa system. Artists and performers applying for temporary worker status now have to prove, among other things, that they have the equivalent of £800 (about $1,250) in a bank and that it has been there for 90 consecutive days; pay nonrefundable application fees of hundreds of pounds; and find established arts organizations that can pay additional hefty fees, sponsor them and take responsibility for them while they are in Britain.

A separate category, for “entertainers,” requires that applicants promise not to make money in Britain or perform — even for no fee — at for-profit events.

“We expect individuals to meet our entry requirements,” said a spokesman for the Home Office, speaking on condition that his name not be used, according to government policy. “For too long immigration has been out of control, and this government is committed to having a system which benefits the best and the brightest but curbs the number of people who seek to abuse the system.”

But the rules are onerous and perplexing. Visa applicants are required to surrender their passports for weeks at a time — a difficult proposition for people from, say, African countries without British consulates, who have to travel abroad and wait around while their cases are considered.

Tiny groups wanting to sponsor unknown artists often cannot afford the fees or meet the government’s definition of a bona fide organization. Artists without sponsors — novelists or painters who want to spend some time producing their work in Britain, for instance — are often unable to come unless they lie and say they are tourists.

There seems to be little consistency in whether or not applications are approved. The celebrated Indian musician Rajeswar Bhattacharya, for instance, has been coming to Britain annually since 1996 — always receiving a visa — to give workshops and perform. This year he was scheduled to take part in a festival celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Bengali poet and cultural ambassador Rabindranath Tagore. Mr. Bhattacharya’s application was all but identical to last year’s, but it was rejected. British officials ruled that because he planned to teach as well as perform — something he has always done — he would be working as a “music teacher” and was ineligible.

The rules also stymie travelers coming for obscure but passionately attended events. The Argentine tango dancers Ismael Ludman and Maria Mondino, for instance, had hoped to dance, for no fee, for several dozen people at a village hall in Scotland, a brief stop in a European tour. Refused entry when officials questioned the nature of the event, they protested on the Web, posting a video of themselves tangoing at the airport.

The American photographer Alec Soth, meanwhile, ran into trouble when he told immigration officials he had been invited to take photographs to be displayed at the Brighton Photo Biennale. He finally got into the country after hours of interrogation — but only after promising not to take photographs. (His 7-year-old daughter, traveling with him, took them instead.)

Even established artists at Springsteen-esque fame levels are required to obtain temporary worker visas if they come to Britain for paid engagements. While stars like Bruce Springsteen have managers and agents to handle such matters, this rule often trips up smaller-scale artists and performers from the United States and other countries whose citizens don’t need visas to enter Britain as tourists. “They assume that because of the visa waiver program they’ll have no problem and so they just turn up,” said Robert Sharp, campaigns manager at English PEN. “But then an official spots their tuba or their cello or their paintbrushes and says, ‘You’re working, get back on the plane.’ ”

Musicians say the mere sight of their instruments provokes instant skepticism at the border. Last year, arriving at Heathrow en route to Leeds, the American cellist Kristin Ostling was met by a wall of questions like: Do you intend to play that cello? And: No, really, who is paying you?

Ms. Ostling, a member of the Carpe Diem String Quartet in Ohio, explained that she had paid her own way and was performing free at an academic conference on the Russian composer Sergey Taneyev. But after eight hours Ms. Ostling (and her cello, which needs its own seat) were put on a plane and sent back to Chicago.

“Customs said to me that we should have advertised for anyone from the E.U. who was willing to play the music of Taneyev for nothing,” said Derek B. Scott, the head of the University of Leeds School of Music and the host of the conference, describing his subsequent conversations with the authorities.

Even as she was being sent back, Ms. Ostling’s three Carpe Diem colleagues flew to Heathrow to try their own luck at getting in.

Korine Fujiwara, the group’s viola player, sailed through. But officials mistrusted the motives of the violinists, John Ewing and Charles Wetherbee, and took them aside for extra questioning.

“He was trying to get us to admit we were there to work,” Mr. Ewing said of one official. “He kept saying, ‘Why do you have your violins?,’ and we kept saying, ‘We’re musicians.’ He basically didn’t accept our story that we were going to an academic conference.”

Eventually they got through and made it to Leeds. But they could not play without Ms. Ostling.

Back in Chicago, meanwhile, with a passport reflecting her shameful new status as a British reject, a weary Ms. Ostling pleaded her case at the British consulate. And that was when the full incoherence of the system became clear.

“I said, ‘Is there some kind of special visa that I should have?’ ” she related. “They said: ‘No, we can’t give you a visa because you don’t need one. Immigration was wrong.’ ”

By Vijay Prashad

21 October 2011 — The Greanville Post – Qaddafi, From Beginning to End

NATO’s Agenda for Libya

On the dusty reaches out of Sirte, a convoy flees a battlefield. A NATO aircraft fires and strikes the cars. The wounded struggle to escape. Armed trucks, with armed fighters, rush to the scene. They find the injured, and among them is the most significant prize: a bloodied Muammar Qaddafi stumbles, is captured, and then is thrown amongst the fighters. One can imagine their exhilaration. A cell-phone traces the events of the next few minutes. A badly injured Qaddafi is pushed around, thrown on a car, and then the video gets blurry. The next images are of a dead Qaddafi. He has a bullet hole on the side of his head.

These images go onto youtube almost instantly. They are on television, and in the newspapers. It will be impossible not to see them.

The Third Geneva Convention (article 13): ‘Prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.’

The Fourth Geneva Convention (article 27): ‘Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honor, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity.’

One of the important ideological elements during the early days of the war in Libya was the framing of the arrest warrant for Qaddafi and his clique by the International Criminal Court’s selectively zealous chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. It was enough to have press reports of excessive violence for Moreno Ocampo and Ban Ki-Moon to use the language of genocide; no independent, forensic evaluation of the evidence was necessary. [Actually, independent evaluation was soon forthcoming from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, decisively debunking Ocampo’s charges. AC/JSC.]

NATO sanctimoniously said that it would help the ICC prosecute the warrant (this despite the fact that the United States, NATO’s powerhouse, is not a member of the ICC). This remark was echoed by the National Transitional Council, NATO’s  political instrument in Benghazi.

Humanitarian intervention was justified on the basis of potential or alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions. The intervention’s finale is  a violation of those very Conventions.

It would  have been inconvenient to see Qaddafi in open court. He had long abandoned his revolutionary heritage (1969-1988), and had given himself over to the U. S.-led War on Terror at least since 2003 (but in fact since the late 1990s). Qaddafi’s prisons had been an important torture center in the archipelago of black sites utilized by the CIA, European intelligence and the Egyptian security state. What stories Qaddafi might have told if he were allowed to speak in open court? What stories Saddam Hussein might have told had he too been allowed to speak in an open court? As it happens, Hussein at least entered a courtroom, even as it was more kangaroo than judicial.

No such courtroom for Qaddafi. As Naeem Mohaiemen put it, ‘Dead men tell no tales. They cannot stand trial. They cannot name the people who helped them stay in power. All secrets die with them.

Qaddafi is dead. As the euphoria dies down, it might be important to recall that we are dealing with at least two Qaddafis. The first Qaddafi overthrew a lazy and corrupt monarchy in 1969, and proceeded to transform Libya along a fairly straightforward national development path. There were idiosyncrasies, such as Qaddafi’s ideas about democracy that never really produced institutions of any value. Qaddafi had the unique ability to centralize power in the name of de-centralization. Nevertheless, in the national liberation Qaddafi certainly turned over large sections of the national surplus to improve the well-being of the Libyan people. It is because of two decades of such policies that the Libyan people entered the 21st century with high human development indicators. Oil helped, but there are oil nations (such as Nigeria) where the people languish in terms of their access to social goods and to social development.

By 1988, the first Qaddafi morphed into the second Qaddafi, who set aside his anti-imperialism for collaboration with imperialism, and who dismissed the national development path for neo-liberal privatization (I tell this story in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, which will be published by AK Press in the Spring of 2012). This second Qaddafi squandered the pursuit of well-being, and so took away the one aspect of his governance that the people supported. From the 1990s onward, Qaddafi’s regime offered the masses the illusion of social wealth and the illusion of democracy. They wanted more, and that is the reason for the long process of unrest that begins in the early 1990s (alongside the Algerian Civil War), comes to a head in 1995-96 and then again in 2006. It has been a long slog for the various rebellious elements to find themselves.

The new leadership of Tripoli was incubated inside the Qaddafi regime. His son, Saif al-Islam was the chief neoliberal reformer, and he surrounded himself with people who wanted to turn Libya into a larger Dubai. They went to work around 2006, but were disillusioned by the rate of progress, and many (including Mahmud Jibril, the current Prime Minister) had threatened to resign on several occasions. When an insurengy began in Benghazi, this clique hastened to join them, and by March had taken hold of the leadership of the rebellion. It remains in their hands.

What is being celebrated on the streets of Benghazi, Tripoli and the other cities? Certainly there is jubilation at the removal from power of the Qaddafi of 1988-2011. It is in the interests of NATO and Jibril’s clique to ensure that in this auto-da-fé the national liberation anti-imperialist of 1969-1988 is liquidated, and that the neoliberal era is forgotten, to be reborn anew as if not tried before. That is going to be the trick: to navigate between the joy of large sections of the population who want to have a say in their society (which Qaddafi blocked, and Jibril would like to canalize) and a small section that wants to pursue the neoliberal agenda (which Qaddafi tried to facilitate but could not do so over the objections of his ‘men of the tent’). The new Libya will be born in the gap between the two interpretations.

The manner of Qaddafi’s death is a synecdoche for the entire war. NATO’s bombs stopped the convoy, and without them Qaddafi would probably have fled to his next redoubt. The rebellion might have succeeded without NATO. But with NATO, certain political options had to be foreclosed; NATO’s member states are in line now to claim their reward. However, they are too polite in a liberal European way to actually state their claim publically in a quid-pro-quo fashion. Hence, they say things like: this is a Libyan war, and that Libya must decide what it must do. This is properly the space into which those sections in the new Libyan power structure that still value sovereignty must assert themselves. The window for that assertion is going to close soon, as the deals get inked that lock Libya’s resources and autonomy into the agenda of the NATO states.

VIJAY PRASHAD is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu