In Place of Fear

When even the head of Mossad doesn't believe Iran would use nuclear weapons on Israel , will we fall for the same lies as on Iraq all over again?

2012-01-27T20:36:00.005Z

The rhetoric coming from the US, British and Israeli governments is that all the sanctions being imposed are about bringing Iran to the negotiating table, because we supposedly could not risk the “threat” that Iran would pose if it developed nuclear weapons, despite the fact that not even the head of Mossad believes Iran would use nuclear weapons against Israel if it developed them.

(Map of US military bases and allies around Iran from The Peoples Voice blog)

Apart from US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta saying Iran is not currently developing a nuclear weapon ; and the fact that we’ve been being told Iran was about to develop a nuclear weapon for 20 years, including among many, many others, some CIA claims in 1992 and Israeli intelligence claims in 1995 that Iran would have them in 5 years and US State Department claims that they’d have one within 16 days in December 2006; not even the current head of Mossad thinks Iran would use nuclear weapons on Israel if it developed them (1) – (5).

Last month he told ambassadors that Iran developing nuclear weapons would not be an “existential threat” to Israel (6). Former US General John Abizaid, US Central Command (Middle East) commander under Bush agrees with Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld that if Iran does develop nuclear weapons it will be as a deterrent against attack, not to launch nuclear Armageddon (7) – (8).

As Condoleezza Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2000, before she began participating in war propaganda, ‘if they ["rogue states"]do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration’ (9).

This is certainly the case, as even if Iran wiped out Israel in a sudden nuclear strike (the supposed threat), it would then face either a counter-strike or a massive invasion from the US and it’s allies which no senior Ayatollahs or Revolutionary Guard commanders would survive.

The past decisions of the Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard commanders also show they don’t wish to commit national suicide. In 1988, fearing the US military was joining the Iran-Iraq war on Saddam’s side, they persuaded Khomeini to negotiate peace (10) – (11).

The issue can’t be democracy or “Iranian aggression” either, when our governments continue to support and sell arms to the Saudi monarchy whose troops have invaded Bahrain in British Aerospace Systems vehicles to ensure there are no concessions to democracy protesters; only jail, torture or death for them (12). Saudi forces killed their first ‘Arab Spring’ protester in their own country earlier this month (13). Bahrain and Saudi were still invited to arms fairs in London. Hyping up the Iranian “threat” may be helping boost western arms sales to the gulf emirates though.

The Iran “nuclear threat” is as phony as the Iraq “WMD threat”. Saddam was not prepared to risk nuclear retaliation or being overthrown by a US invasion by using WMD when he did have them, in 1991 , either. His chemical warheads for his scuds were never used in attacks on Israel or Kuwait – only conventional warheads. (14).

The current campaign of sanctions and ‘covert action’ including assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists may well be designed to try to provoke Iran’s rulers into retaliation that can be used as a pretext for war (15) – (17).

The huge cost in lives of sanctions and war against non-existent threats

The story that sanctions or war will do less harm and carry less risks than maybe letting Iran get it’s own nuclear deterrent is the opposite of the truth. Sanctions on Iraq killed millions due to shortages of food and medicines, including over 500,000 children, according to the two heads of the sanctions programme who resigned in protest (18) – (19).

Iraq is now full of not only Al Qa’ida terrorists, but also US trained police commando and ‘counter terrorist’ death squads, ( modelled on the notorious ones trained by US forces in El Salvador in the 1980s), using the same torture methods as under Saddam – rape, electrocution, beatings, breaking bones, pulling out nails – and additionally kidnapping people to torture to extort money from their families (20) – (25). Arab Spring demonstrations against the government led to protesters being shot dead (26).

War on Iran would lead to the kind of chaos there has been in Iraq since the invasion (and the same massive increase in terrorism ) or the kind of chaotic civil war that is going into it’s second round already in Libya, as rebels imprison, torture or kill many thousands of people on suspicion based on the colour of their skin or what tribe they belong to, leading to renewed fighting in Bani Walid (27) – (29).

In Iraq, far from securing arms dumps or suspected WMD sites the US invasion and occupation allowed huge amounts of conventional weapons and ammunition, hundreds of tonnes of explosives and machinery which could potentially be used to make chemical weapons or nuclear components to be looted. Much of the conventional arms and explosives likely used by insurgents and terrorists afterwards (30) – (34).

In Libya Gaddafi’s armouries weren’t secured either in an “intervention” which supposedly “would not repeat the mistakes made in Iraq” - and Al Qa’ida may now have it’s hands on surface to air missiles as a result (35) – (36).

By far the most likely way terrorists could get their hands on nuclear material would be if Iran was collapsed into chaos by war or civil war, Iraq or Libya style. No government, religious (e.g Pakistani military, military fundamentalist since General Zia) or secular, democracy or dictatorship(e.g China and North Korea as one party states with nuclear weapons), has ever given WMDs to terrorist groups, because it would have lost control of incredibly dangerous weapons by doing so.

The threat of WMD attacks by terrorist groups is also greatly exaggerated though. Massive amounts of nuclear material went onto the black market when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 – and smaller amounts in the chaos in Iraq after the invasion. Yet no terrorist group has used any of this material in any attack in the 21 years since the USSR collapsed or the 8 years since the invasion of Iraq.

Same Old Lies – To the Same Old Tune ‘It’s different this time’

We’re seeing a re-run of the sanctions and UN resolutions on Iraq, on Iran – a combination of a means of weakening a country with a lot of oil reserves that won’t obey orders; and for show to say that we tried sanctions and diplomacy, but they didn’t work, so we have “no choice” but to go to war against a non-existent threat from a minor power. Iran is supposedly threatening Israel, the strongest military (and nuclear) power in the Middle East, which has the greatest military and nuclear power in the world (the US) as it’s ally, plus the rest of NATO (the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Canada), by getting it’s own nuclear deterrent to deter those powers from attacking it (37).

Of course it also provides a useful distraction from mass unemployment, made worse by austerity policies at home, which take jobs and benefit money from the majority, the poor, the disabled and the unemployed, but never result in an end of government subsidies for the wealthiest or arms companies.

Whether Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons or not does not matter to the Israeli or US or British governments, let alone whether they would actually use them or not.

With Iraq we were told that if it allowed inspections and disarmament, there would be no war. In fact when UNMOVIC head Hans Blix reported twice to the UN Security Council that weapons inspectors that they were making more and more progress in destroying what little WMD remained (relatively small quantities of nerve gas and chemical mortar rounds) along with destroying those of Saddam’s missiles which had a range of over 150 kilometres (38) – (39).

Bush invaded anyway, because whether Saddam had WMDs and whether he would use them were only ever pretexts designed to fool the gullible and those who wanted to believe their country and it’s government must be in the right.

Will we really fall for exactly the same lies twice, played to the same old tune of ‘it’s different this time’?

Sources

(1) = USA Today 08 Jan 2012 ‘Panetta: Iran not building bombs yet’,http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-01-08/iran-nuclear-weapons/52451620/1

(2) = NYT 21 Aug 2004 ‘Sharon on the warpath : Is Israel planning to attack Iran?’ by Martin Van Creveld, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/opinion/21iht-edcreveld_ed3_.html ‘On the other hand, the claim that Iran is working on nuclear weapons and would have them within three years has now been floating about for almost a decade and a half and, so far, has always proved false.’

(3) = Forward (Jewish Daily) 19 Aug 2009 ‘With Each New Assessment, Iran’s Nuclear Clock Is Reset’http://www.forward.com/articles/112468/ , ‘The senior Israeli official’s tone was dire. In only a few years, the Iranians would be ready to launch a nuclear bomb. He minced no words. “If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years.”......The year this apocalyptic prediction was made: 1995. …. In 1992, Robert Gates, then director of the CIA, pointedly upended conventional thinking about Iran’s nuclear progress when he gave a much shorter time span for attainment of the bomb. “Is it a problem today?” he asked at the time, “probably not. But three, four, five years from now it could be a serious problem.”’

(4) = Bloomberg 12 Apr 2006 ‘Iran Could Produce Nuclear Bomb in 16 Days, U.S. Says (Update2)’, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aduNTcpDuDd4&refer=germany

(5) = Haaretz (Israel) 29 Dec 2011 ‘Mossad chief: Nuclear Iran not necessarily existential threat to Israel’, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/mossad-chief-nuclear-iran-not-necessarily-existential-threat-to-israel-1.404227

(6) = Israel National News 29 Dec 2011 ‘Mossad Chief: Nuclear Iran Not an Existential Threat’,http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/mossad-chief-nuclear-iran-not-necessarily-existential-threat-to-israel-1.404227

(7) = CNN 18 Jun 2007 ‘Retired general: U.S. can live with a nuclear Iran’, http://articles.cnn.com/2007-09-18/world/france.iran_1_nuclear-weapon-nuclear-program-nuclear-fuel?_s=PM:WORLD

(8) = Forward (Jewish Daily) 24 Sep 2007 ‘The World Can Live With a Nuclear Iran’ by Martin Van Creveld, http://www.forward.com/articles/11673/#ixzz1kQQdA2qR

(9) = Rice, Condoleeza (2000) in Foreign Affairs January/February 2000‘ - 'Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest' http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20000101faessay5-p50/condoleezza-rice/campaign-2000-promoting-the-national-interest.html - cited in Chomsky, Noam (2003) 'Hegemony or Survival' , Penguin Books , London & NY 2004, pages 34 & 260 citing Mearsheimer, John & Walt, Stephen (2003) in Foreign Policy Jan/Feb 2003

(10) = Takeyh, Ray (2006), ‘Hidden Iran - Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic, Times Books, New York, 2006 , pages 170-174

(11) = Pollack, Kenneth M.(2004), ‘The Persian Puzzle', Random House, New York, 2005 paperback edition, pages 231-233

(12) = Financial Times (ft.com) 12 Sep 2011 ‘Bahrain and Saudi offered slots at arms fair’, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/65a7634e-dd27-11e0-b4f2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1kQT7iY9p ‘Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have both been invited to the UK’s largest arms fair this week, in spite of the two countries’ roles in suppressing pro-democracy movements earlier this year…..This year Saudi Arabia used Tactica armoured vehicles made by BAE to send its National Guard into Bahrain to suppress pro-democracy protests.’

(13) = BBC News 13 Jan 2012 ‘ Shia protester 'shot dead' in Saudi Arabia’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16543013 ‘At least one person has been killed and three others injured in clashes between security forces and Shia protesters in eastern Saudi Arabia, activists say.Issam Mohammed, 22, reportedly died when troops fired live ammunition after demonstrators threw stones at them in al-Awamiya, a town in the Qatif region.’

(14) = Nye , Joseph S. & Smith , Robert K. (1992), ‘After the Storm, Madison Books , London , 1992 , hardback edition, pages 211-216

(15) = BBC News 11 Jan 2012 ‘Iran car explosion kills nuclear scientist in Tehran’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16501566

(16) = guardian.co.uk 11 Jan 2012 ‘Iran nuclear scientist killed in Tehran motorbike bomb attack’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/11/iran-nuclear-scientist-killed

(17) = Haaretz (Israel) 29 Dec 2011 ‘Mossad chief: Nuclear Iran not necessarily existential threat to Israel’, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/mossad-chief-nuclear-iran-not-necessarily-existential-threat-to-israel-1.404227 ‘According to three ambassadors present at the briefing, the intelligence chief said that Israel was using various means to foil Iran's nuclear program and would continue to do so, but if Iran actually obtained nuclear weapons, it would not mean the destruction of the State of Israel.’

(18) = BBC News 30 Sep 1998 ‘UN official blasts Iraq sanctions’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/183499.stm

(19) = Guardian 29 Nov 2001 ‘The hostage nation’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/nov/29/iraq.comment

(20) = NYT magazine 01 May 2005 ‘the way of the commandos’, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ARMY.html

(21) = The Nation 22 Jun 2009 ‘Iraq's New Death Squad’, http://www.thenation.com/article/iraqs-new-death-squad

(22) = BBC News 27 Jan 2005 'Salvador Option' mooted for Iraq’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4209595.stm

(23) = Times 08 Aug 2005 ‘West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work’, http://www.infowars.com/articles/iraq/west_turns_blind_eye_saddams_torturers_at_work.htm

(24) = Amnesty International Annual Report 2011 – Iran,http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/iran/report-2011#section-64-6

(25) = Guardian 16 Jan 2012 ‘Corruption in Iraq: 'Your son is being tortured. He will die if you don't pay'’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/16/corruption-iraq-son-tortured-pay

(26) = BBC News 25 Feb 2011 ‘Protesters killed in Iraqi 'day of rage'’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12576613

(27) = Independent 24 Jun 2011 ‘Amnesty questions claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as weapon of war’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/amnesty-questions-claim-that-gaddafi-ordered-rape-as-weapon-of-war-2302037.html ; ‘Rebels have repeatedly charged that mercenary troops from Central and West Africa have been used against them. The Amnesty investigation found there was no evidence for this. "Those shown to journalists as foreign mercenaries were later quietly released," says Ms Rovera. "Most were sub-Saharan migrants working in Libya without documents."….Others were not so lucky and were lynched or executed. Ms Rovera found two bodies of migrants in the Benghazi morgue and others were dumped on the outskirts of the city. She says: "The politicians kept talking about mercenaries, which inflamed public opinion and the myth has continued because they were released without publicity."’

(28) = Guardian 24 Nov 2011 ‘Libyan rebels detaining thousands illegally, Ban Ki-moon reports - An estimated 7,000 detainees being held, including women, children and black Africans tortured for skin colour’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/24/libya-illegal-detentions-un-report

(29) = Independent 27 Jan 2012 ‘'Free' Libya shamed by new torture claims’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/free-libya-shamed-by-new-torture-claims-6295394.html

(30) = Times 28 Oct 2004 ‘350 tonnes of high explosive looted in Iraq’,http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article498870.ece

(31) = AP 31 Oct 2004 ‘2nd Site With U.N.-Sealed Arms Was Looted, Inspectors Report’,http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/international/middleeast/31chemical.html

(32) = Washington Post 11 May 2003 ‘Iraq nuclear sites reportedly looted’, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-05-11/news/0305110454_1_nuclear-bomb-looted-iraq

(33) = AP Worldstream 31 Oct 2004 ‘Iraq Looted Chemical Site’, http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-101900373.html

(34) = NYT 13 Mar 2005 'Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says', http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/international/middleeast/13loot.html

(35) NPR 27 Jan 2012 ‘U.S. Fears Terrorists Could Acquire Looted Weapons’, http://www.npr.org/2011/09/12/140388721/fears-terrorists-could-land-looted-gadhafi-weapons

(36) = CNN 07 Sep 2011 ‘Missiles looted from Tripoli arms warehouse’, http://articles.cnn.com/2011-09-07/world/libya.missing.arms_1_igla-s-surface-to-air-missiles-shoulder-launched-missiles?_s=PM:WORLD

(37) = Arms Control Association – ‘Nuclear Weapons : who has what at a glance’, http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat

(38) = Briefing of the Security Council, 14 February 2003: An update on inspections, Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC, Dr. Hans Blix, http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/new/pages/security_council_briefings.asp#6

(39) = Briefing of the Security Council, 7 March 2003: Oral introduction of the 12th quarterly report of UNMOVIC, Executive Chairman Dr. Hans Blix,http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/new/pages/security_council_briefings.asp#7

A non-binding consultative referendum on independence or increased devolution for Scotland would still have democratic legitimacy

2012-01-10T23:30:00.003Z

David Cameron and the UK government can certainly refuse to make the results of any referendum including increased devolution legally binding under UK law, but they can’t prevent the Scottish government holding a consultative, non-binding, referendum. It would be impossible to deny the democratic legitimacy of the result.

The only questionable part of the SNP’s plan is allowing 16 and 17 year olds to participate. This would give the Unionist parties an open goal to say the results of the referendum weren’t valid, since 16 and 17 year olds can’t vote in UK General elections.

Labour and the Lib Dems have joined with the Conservatives in insisting any referendum must be a straight choice between the status quo or independence, yet both parties supported devolution in the 1997 referendum. How can they argue that Scottish voters be entitled to choose to devolve some domestic powers, but not others, especially when polls show 67% want more powers devolved to the Scottish government including full powers to decide how taxes raised in Scotland are spent? (1) – (2)

Devolving more powers could reduce the amount of taxpayers’ money that Westminster parties could hand to billionaire and corporate patrons. If Scottish governments gained the powers to issue bonds, borrow money, or spend a higher share of taxes raised in Scotland, PFI gravy trains here might end.

If Scots are refused the increased devolution option, more will vote for independence. This would lose the UK revenues from oil and gas off Aberdeen and Shetland. UK governments fiddle the figures to pretend an independent Scotland would be bankrupt, by assuming oil revenues would be split proportionally to population. In fact under international law they would be split by proximity, giving Scotland far more than it’s 10% of the UK population.

An independent Scotland would be a small neutral country on the North-Western edge of Europe, so would not need a nuclear deterrent any more than Norway or Sweden, and would avoid the costs in money and lives of involvement in US-led wars. These costs would then be paid solely by the rest of the UK. So Scotland would be better off and the UK (unless it gets a much better government with better policies) much worse off.

We might even avoid future financial crises. Both Norway and Sweden avoided any crisis or recession and both of their economies are still growing, as they never de-regulated their financial sector to the degree that the Conservatives (from Thatcher’s 1986 ‘Big Bang’ on) or Labour governments in the UK have.

Is Cameron trying to provoke Scots into independence in the hope the Coalition will have a permanent majority if 50 Scottish Labour MPs are gone?

If so this is unlikely to work.

Labour’s last three majorities exceeded the number of Labour MPs elected in Scotland (3) – (8). Three quarters of Lib Dem voters surveyed at the time of the last election and again recently no longer support the party (9). Cameron should realise that independence will hurt his party far more than increased devolution would.

(1) = The Politics Wire / British Future 10 Jan 2012 ‘Support for devolution across Britain is growing as ‘national’ identity outweighs feelings of ‘Britishness’ ’, http://www.ipsos-mori.com/newsevents/blogs/thepoliticswire/985/Support-for-devolution-across-Britain-is-growing-as-national-identity-outweighs-feelings-of-Britishness.aspx , ‘During this period, support for independence in Scotland has grown. This is illustrated in recent Ipsos MORI polls and is reinforced by our latest survey for British Future, which shows around a third of Scots now backing a breakaway from the UK….At the moment, however, a majority of Scots prefer to remain part of the UK, albeit favouring substantial new powers for the Scottish Parliament. Ipsos MORI polling in Scotland shows that over two-thirds would vote in favour of giving Holyrood further legislative and tax-raising powers.’

(2) = STV News 21 Dec 2011 ‘Most Scots back complete revenue raising powers for Holyrood’,http://news.stv.tv/politics/291223-most-scots-back-complete-revenue-raising-powers-for-holyrood/

(3) = BBC News Last updated Sep 2005 ‘Blair win historic third term – majority of 66’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/constituencies/default.stm

(4) = BBC News 23 May 2005 ‘Election 2005 – results: Scotland’,http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2005/html/region_7.stm (shows 41 Labour MPs elected in Scotland)

(5) = BBC News ‘Vote2001: Results & Constituencies’http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/vote2001/results_constituencies/default.stm ; Labour majority 167

(6) = BBC News ‘Vote 2001 : Results & Constituencies UK Breakdown – Scotland’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/vote2001/results_constituencies/uk_breakdown/scotland_full_1.stm , – shows 56 Labour MPs elected in Scotland in 2001 General Election

(7) = BBC News ‘Vote 2001: Election battles 1945-1997’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/vote2001/in_depth/election_battles/1997_over.stm , ‘In 1997 Labour…Tony Blair's New Labour had gained a staggering 179-seat overall majority.’

(8) = Denver, David (1997) ‘THE 1997 GENERAL ELECTION IN SCOTLAND:AN ANALYSIS OF THE RESULTS’ in Scottish Affairs, no.20, summer 1997 (table 1 on page 2 shows 56 Labour MPs were elected in Scotland in 1997), http://www.scottishaffairs.org/backiss/pdfs/sa20/SA20_Denver.pdf

(9) = Independent 06 Jan 2012 ‘Lib Dems lose three out of four of their voters ’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lib-dems-lose-three-out-of-four-of-their-voters-6285640.html

The power struggle in Iraq may be more about Exxon and other oil companies wanting contracts with the Kurdistan regional government than sectarianism

2011-12-26T22:51:00.002Z

and the US and it’s allies have not tried to prevent sectarian violence, but encouraged it as a means to divide and conquer

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s sacking and arrest warrants for Iraqi Sunni Vice President Tareq Al Hashemi and the bombings happening at the same time are being talked of as sectarian politics resuming due to the withdrawal of US forces.

In fact the divisions in Iraq are about politics and power more than ethnicity or religion and the US government and American oil companies have encouraged them, partly to divide and conquer Iraqis and partly to get the power to negotiate oil contracts devolved to regional governments, which will give oil companies a stronger hand in negotiations than they would have with the central government. The current crisis has probably been triggered by the Maliki government’s decision to declare contracts between Exxon-Mobil and the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan, made in November 2010, illegal (1).

This and the fact that Maliki allied himself with Moqtadr Al Sadr’s party to get a majority after the 2010 elections may have led the Americans to go all out to try to get the opposition Iraqiya coalition, which includes their client Ayad Allawi, into government.

There are major divisions between Maliki’s Dawa party and it’s ISCI allies on the one hand and the third main Shia party in Iraq – Moqtadr Al Sadr’s; and as in the past Sadr is closer on many issues to two of the three Sunni parties in the Iraqiya opposition than to the Shia Dawa and ISCI.

During the build up to the 2004 Coalition offensive on Sunni rebels in Fallujah, Sadrists and other Shia in Najaf declared their support for the rebels and sent aid convoys of food and medicines to Fallujah (2). Sunnis and Shia have often marched together against the occupation over the last eight years (3) – (4).

In 2008 Maliki, a Shia, was leading the Shia ISCI and Dawa government in joint Coalition and Iraqi government offensives on Al Sadr’s Shia Madhi army militia in Baghdad, but not on other militias responsible for as much or more killing, including the ISCI’s Badr Brigades (5) – (6).

One reason was that Maliki was reliant on US support for his position; and Sadr and his party were allied to Sunni parties in opposing the presence of US troops, US influence in Iraq, and the oil law the US government wanted to get favourable contracts for it’s oil companies. Another was that Sadr was Maliki’s rival for Shia votes. (7)

The ISCI and Dawa are both closer to Iran’s government than Sadr and his party are – the Sadrists historically being strong Iraqi nationalists. The US government’s belief that all Shia are pro-Iranian or Iranian backed is also far from the truth. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s Khomeini hoped that Iraqi Shia would defect from Saddam’s forces. A few did and joined armed exile groups in Iran, but the vast majority of Shia conscripts fought loyally for Saddam, not because they supported him, but because they were Iraqi before they were Shia. Most Iraqis, with the exception of the Kurds, remain Iraqi first and whatever religious or ethnic group they are second.

The US and other Coalition governments are mostly net oil importers and their main aim in Iraq is to get their own oil companies contracts in Iraq on favourable terms. They are torn between on the one hand wanting to keep a strong central government in Iraq under their control ; and on the other wanting to weaken the central government so they can make separate contracts with regional governments like that of Iraqi Kurdistan. As long as Maliki remains allied to Sadr to stay in power the US has failed in it’s attempt to control the central government so will prefer strengthening the regional governments by dividing Iraqis.

However Sadr and Maliki are increasingly at odds again and the Sadrists’ call for early elections may be more about trying to gain seats from Dawa and the ISCI than about keeping Sunnis out of it, though the Sadrists will not be comfortable with all of the Iraqiya party as it includes former Baathist and then US client Ayad Allawi (8).

One Iraqi website quoting Sadr says he said that “The issue of Hashimy’s trial should take place under the auspices of the Parliament and the people….even the sacking of politicians from their posts must take place in a legal manner.”

“The issue of confessions against Vice-President, Tareq al-Hashimy and the raising of this issue at the current period may harm the country, its unity and security, including the downfall of the current political process and the security situation, along with harming the political process as well,” Sadr said.

Sadr also stressed that the said case “had boosted the isolation of Iraq nowadays, including the transformation of the government into a single-party government and the imposition of its power on the necks of everybody.” (9)

The quotes seem to be confirmed by a CNN report that repeats part of the above and adds ‘Al-Sadr said the crisis could tarnish the prime minister's [i.e Maliki’s] reputation and result in the consolidation of power with one-man rule.’ (10)

An alliance between the Kurds and the Iraqiya party would suit the US as a potential alternative to the Iranian brokered alliance between Maliki’s Dawa, the ISCI and the Sadrists. If Maliki’s accusation that Hashemi and Mutlak were proposing an autonomous Sunni regional government , that would suit Exxon very nicely too (11).

Former Bush (senior) official Peter Galbraith wrote a book called ‘The End of Iraq’ advocating the break up of Iraq into three states – Kurdish, Sunni and Shia – but his motives were cast into doubt when it was found that he was receiving money from oil companies seeking contracts in Iraqi Kurdistan and had a 5% share of any profits in contracts on some deals. A complete breakup of Iraq would not be needed to achieve the oil companies’ aims though – only a change to regional governments having the final say on oil contracts (12).

The Iraqiya party is made up of three parties. Two of them – Hashemi’s and Mutlak’s are Sunni parties and have been as strongly opposed to the presence of US troops and US influence in Iraq as the Sadrists, but the third – Ayad Allawi’s party – are US clients and mostly secular (13) – (14).

Allawi, although a Shia, started off as a Ba’athist under Saddam , assassinating Iraqi dissidents who had fled to Europe. Later he fell out with Saddam, went into exile himself and was carried out car and cinema bombings in Baghdad with CIA support. He was appointed Interim Iraqi Prime Minister by Bush’s ‘Governor of Iraq’ Paul Bremer and oversaw El Salvador style US trained Iraqi death squads, along with the TV programme ‘Terrorism in the Hands of Justice’ in which torture victims confessed live to being terrorists (15) – (16).

In the first post-war elections Allawi was the candidate backed by the US and British governments, but he lost heavily. US support for Allawi has continued though under Bush and Obama. The Iraqiya coalition of parties did far better in the 2010 parliamentary elections and was initially thought to have won, but couldn’t form a working coalition.

The idea that the US government and military have been trying to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq , or that their withdrawal and a fall in US influence has been the cause of it, are also pretty far fetched.

The US government and other Coalition members have encouraged sectarian divisions and violence among Iraqis from the start, because unless Iraqis are divided and fighting one another for power, foreign powers can’t have that much influence in Iraq. In the first few years of the Iraq war they trained mostly Shia extremist units like the Wolf Brigade of the US trained ‘Special Police Commandos’ to target Sunnis, on the faulty logic that all Sunnis were Saddam supporters (17) – (19).

Then in 2007 came what Seymour Hersh called ‘the re-direction’. The US government had decided that Shia dominance of Iraq’s politics had given the Shia Iranian government too much influence in Iraq and began paying the same Sunni tribal militias that had been fighting US forces to fight Al Sadr’s Medhi army militia and the Sunni extremist Al Qa’ida instead (but not the Shia, pro-Iranian ISCI’s Badr Brigades, who didn’t oppose the oil law). This was on the dodgy theory that the Sadrists were proxies of the Iranian government, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy (20) – (22).

(1) = NYT 13 Nov 2011 ‘Iraq Criticizes Exxon Mobil for Its Deal With the Kurds’, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/world/middleeast/iraq-criticizes-exxon-mobil-for-its-deal-with-the-kurds.html?_r=1 ; ‘A deputy prime minister overseeing Iraq’s oil industry criticized Exxon Mobil on Sunday over its effort to expand into the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the country’s north…. The statement from the official, Hussein al-Shahristani, said the central government had cautioned Exxon against pursuing oil deals in Kurdistan. The government considers such agreements to be illegal until long-awaited rules can be worked that would divide revenues among Iraq’s fractious regions.

Mr. Shahristani’s office issued its statement after Exxon, whose headquarters are in Irving, Tex., became the first major international oil company to sign a contract in Kurdistan.’

(2) = http://www.juancole.com/2007/01/muqtada-al-sadr-and-sunnis-mickey-kaus.html

(3) = Guardian 10 Apr 2004, ‘Sunni and Shia unite against common enemy’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/apr/10/iraq.rorymccarthy1

(4) = Guardian 10 Apr 07, ‘Moqtada rallies Shia to demand withdrawal of foreign troops’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2053247,00.html

(5) = Washington Post 26 Mar 2008 ‘U.S. Armor Forces Join Offensive In Baghdad Against Sadr Militia’, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032700781.html?hpid=topnews

(6) = HRW 28 Oct 2006 ‘Iraq: End Interior Ministry Death Squads’, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/10/28/iraq-end-interior-ministry-death-squads

(7) = BBC News 3 July 2007, ‘Iraqi cabinet backs draft oil law’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6264184.stm

(8) = NYT 26 Dec 2011 ‘In Blow to Government, Sadr Followers Call for New Elections’, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/world/middleeast/moktada-al-sadr-followers-call-for-new-election-in-iraq.html

(9) = the iraqidinar.com 25 Dec 2011 ‘Shiite Cleric, al-Sadr, calls for trial of Iraq’s Vice-President Hashimy under Parliament’s auspices’, http://theiraqidinar.com/2011/12/25/shiite-cleric-al-sadr-calls-for-trial-of-iraqs-vice-president-hashimy-under-parliaments-auspices/

(10) = CNN 26 Dec 2011 ‘Al-Sadr's bloc calls for dissolution of Iraqi parliament’, http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/26/world/meast/iraq-politics/

(11) = Al Jazeera 25 Dec 2011 ‘Iraqi VP refuses to face court in Baghdad’, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/12/20111224191245752178.html ; ‘Maliki convened a meeting of his crisis-response cell on Saturday, his office said. …In separate comments on Saturday, Maliki warned that any efforts to create an autonomous Sunni region within Iraq would cause deep divisions in the country and lead to "rivers of blood".’

(12) = NYT 11 Nov 2009 ‘U.S. Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits’, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/world/middleeast/12galbraith.html

(13) = Al Jazeera 28 Oct 2008 ‘Iraq Sunni party severs US ties’, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2008/10/2008102644323791621.html ; ‘But the IIP has been locked in a bitter rivalry with the Sunni tribal leaders who joined forces with the US and that has raised concerns that the political tensions could spark violence and disrupt the Awakening Councils.’

(14) = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_National_Movement

(15) = Times 01 May 2005 ‘West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work’, http://www.infowars.com/articles/iraq/west_turns_blind_eye_saddams_torturers_at_work.htm

(16) = NYT magazine 01 May 2005 ‘The Way of the Commandos’, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ARMY.html

(17) = BBC News 11 Jun 2005 ‘Profile: Iraq's Wolf Brigade’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4083326.stm

(18) = See (14) above

(19) = Guardian.co.uk 28 Oct 2010 ‘Iraq war logs: 'The US was part of the Wolf Brigade operation against us'’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/28/iraq-war-logs-iraq

(20) = The New Yorker 05 Mar 2007 ‘Annals of National Security - The Redirection’, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh

(21) = NPR 17 July 2008, 'U.S. Trains Ex-Sunni Militias as Iraqi Police', http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11240000

(22) = Sunday Times 25 Nov 2007, ‘American-backed killer militias strut across Iraq’, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3076670

David Cameron's talk of Christian values is empty while he punishes the poorest and the majority while helping the wealthiest get wealthier

2011-12-24T06:44:00.005Z

Prime Minister David Cameron’s talk of Christian values is empty coming from a man whose government is cutting benefits for the disabled and forced people into homelessness by increasing rents for people living in social housing - including hundreds of thousands of disabled people - to 80% of market rates, while capping housing benefit (1) – (9).

While he claims ‘there is no money’ for the disabled or those he makes homelessness or unemployed, he provides taxpayer subsidies to arms companies and won’t tax banks or hedge funds a penny more.

The government is paying BAE billions to build an aircraft carrier which will be left to rust; and billions more for another which will have just 6 aircraft by 2020. The National Audit Office found Cameron’s claim that it would be more expensive to cancel the contract was false (10) – (13).

Department for International Development Minister Andrew Mitchell told parliament that UK foreign aid to India is intended to secure trade deals with India including £6.6bn of British fighter jets (14). There is money for the war in Afghanistan too and for new PFI contracts, which the Treasury Select Committee found cost taxpayers 70% more to repay per pound than funding by taxation or loans (15) – (16).

Cameron protects the City of London financial sector from new taxes and regulations (17). This includes stock market traders and hedge fund and bank managers who caused the financial crisis, on an average income of £100,000 per year including bonuses, who got a 12% pay increase in 6 months (18) – (19). At the same time he’s making hundreds of thousands of teachers, nurses, police and others unemployed (20).

Then, with six people unemployed for every job available, even on the government’s fiddled figures, his party labels them lazy scroungers (21) – (22).

His government cracks down hard on benefit fraud, which amounts to just £1.6 billion each year out of over £187 billion, with fraudulent claims made by just 0.6% of benefit claimants, often for very small amounts (The inaccurate £6 billion figure the government sometimes claims for benefit fraud actually includes mistakes made – many of them by Department of Work and Pensions staff, not claimants.) (23) – (24).

Meanwhile each year between £6.9 billion and £12.7 billion of benefits that people are entitled to go unpaid either because they are unclaimed or because staff wrongly or mistakenly refuse them to people entitled to them (25).

So at least 4 times as much money isn’t paid out in benefits to people entitled to them as is taken by fraud.

The UK National Fraud Authority’s reports show that the vast majority of fraud each year in the UK is tax fraud (around £15 billion a year) and private sector company and individual criminal fraud most of the rest (around £16 billion a year) (see page 7 of their annual report for 2011). So benefit fraud is peanuts by comparison (26).

At the same time Cameron allows tax havens in the Channel Islands and Belize to remain and lets the Inland revenue do sweetheart deals with big companies to get off with billions in taxes each year (27).

While it’s estimated at least 3,000 people will die of cold related illnesses this year in the UK due to being unable to afford to heat their homes ; and with the proportion of households in fuel poverty having risen from a fifth to a quarter under the Coalition, Cameron’s government allows the big energy companies off with what a study by Manchester University found to be profiteering – raising their prices immediately by 80% of cost increases when their costs go up, but when costs fall cutting prices to consumers by only 50% of the fall in the wholesale costs of gas, coal and oil generated electricity (28) – (30).

As a result the gap between energy companies’ costs per unit of electricity or gas and their prices in the UK rose from £1.93 in 2004 to £4 in 2010. It’s since fallen due to media coverage – but is still much higher than in 2004 at £2.73 (31).

Yet no hint of capping energy profiteering coming from Cameron’s government.

In Cameron’s version of the Bible does Jesus invite the money-changers into the temple to discuss how they can work together to ring more money out of the poorest?

(1) = guardian.co.uk 16 Dec 2011 ‘Cameron calls for return to Christian values as King James Bible turns 400’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/16/cameron-king-james-bible-anniversary

(2) = Guardian.co.uk 21 Oct 2011 ‘Disability groups fear further benefit cuts after miscalculation’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/21/disability-groups-further-benefit-cuts

(3) = BBC 08 Jul 2011 ‘Affordable rent housing plans 'to hit London families'’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14073437 ; ‘Families will struggle to afford multi-bedroom homes in London if government proposals for a new "affordable rent" tariff are introduced, a report by the London Assembly has said. Social housing tenants would be charged 80% of the market rent under the plans.But this is generally higher than the current level and may make payments tricky for families, the assembly's planning and housing committee said. And the proposed cap on benefits could make things even worse, it added. "In this example, new clients could therefore be facing rents that are higher by nearly 100% for a one-bedroom flat and over 300% for a four-bedroom property." This week the government said the changes to housing benefits were about "fairness" and were needed to reduce a bill "which has spiralled to £21bn a year under Labour". But Labour criticised the coalition after it emerged a senior civil servant had warned 20,000 people could be left homeless by the cap on benefits.’

(4) = Observer 21 Aug 2011 ‘Families 'will be priced out of social housing by plans for higher rents' - Proposed rent rises will be unaffordable across much of urban England, not just London, study warns’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/21/families-priced-out-social-housing

(5) = BBC News 11 Mar 2011 ‘Housing benefit cut to hit 450,000 disabled people’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12714313 , ‘An assessment from the Department for Work and Pensions shows the change will leave 450,000 disabled people an average of £13 a week worse off.’

(6) = Scottish Government Communities Analytical Services January 2011 ‘Housing Benefit Changes : Scottish Impact Assessment’ (1^st draft version),http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=%22shelter%20scotland%22%20rent%2080%25%20market%20rates&source=web&cd=9&ved=0CFsQFjAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scotland.gov.uk%2FResource%2FDoc%2F1125%2F0110252.doc&ei=a0KzTuzaN8OO8gO6p4jxBA&usg=AFQjCNGZf0X0ZRayjdogzPZqTzkV8I7JXA&cad=rja

(7) = Shelter (England) 12 Oct 2011 ‘Rent rises hit home’, http://england.shelter.org.uk/news/october_2011/rental_market_in_crisis

(8) = Shelter Scotland 21 Sep 2011 ‘50% Cut In Affordable Housing Budget As SNP Government’s Manifesto Pledge Turns to Rubble’, http://scotland.shelter.org.uk/media/press_releases/press_release_folder/2011/50_cut_in_affordable_housing_budget_as_snp_governments_manifesto_pledge_turns_to_rubble

(9) = BBC News 27 Oct 2010 ‘No change to housing benefit plan - Cameron’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11633163

(10) = Guardian 07 Jul 2011 ‘National Audit Office challenges £6bn project to build aircraft carriers’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/07/nao-report-aircraft-carriers-navy

(11) = guardian.co.uk 11 Jul 2011 ‘David Cameron 'prevented independent watchdog seeing aircraft carrier papers'’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/11/david-cameron-aircraft-carriers

(12) = Channel 4 News 07 Jul 2011 ‘Guardian 07 Jul 2011 ‘Full fact check : the real cost of cancelling aircraft carriers’http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-the-real-cost-of-cancelling-aircraft-carriers/7210; ‘In 2007, the Labour government decided to build two 65,000-ton Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers at an estimated cost of £3.65bn….But since then, costs have spiralled dramatically, with the projected outlay now thought to be £6.24bn for just one fully operational carrier, the Queen Elizabeth…..The second ship – the Prince of Wales – will be built, but left in a state of “extended readiness”, meaning that fighter planes won’t be able to launch from or land on its deck…..It gets worse: the NAOnow thinks the eventual bill for the programme “will significantly exceed £10 billion”.’

(13) = Guardian 29 Nov 2011 ‘MPs warn Royal Navy's carriers will be costly, late, and of limited use’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/29/royal-navy-carriers-impaired-use-public-accounts-committee ; government admits one carrier to be mothballed on construction in 2016, one to have no planes on it till 2020, when it will have only 6, raised to 12 in 2023

(14) = Independent 17 Dec 2011 ‘Aid to India part of broad plan to build trade and investment, says minister ’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/aid-to-india-part-of-broad-plan-to-build-trade-and-investment-says-minister-6278373.html , ‘The Government's controversial decision to continue giving money to India, a nation that has more billionaires than the UK and an aid programme of its own, is directly linked to developing trade and investment opportunities, a senior minister admitted yesterday.

In terms of perhaps surprising bluntness, international development minister Andrew Mitchell said the decision to spend £1.2bn over the next five years was part of a broader partnership that also included the hoped-for sale of fighter jets to India…. One potential deal officials are anxiously following is the sale of 126 fighter jets to Delhi. The EuroFighter Typhoon, made by a European consortium including Britain's BAE Systems, is one of two jets that have made the final shortlist in a deal worth an estimated £6.6bn.’

(15) = guardian.co.uk 19 Jul 2011 ‘300 schools to be built with £2bn PFI scheme’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/19/300-schools-built-private-finance-scheme

(16) = BBC News ‘PFI projects 'poor value for money', say MPs’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14574059 ; ‘The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) used by successive governments to pay for new schools and hospitals is poor value for money, MPs have said. The Treasury select committee said PFI was no more efficient than other forms of borrowing and it was "illusory" that it shielded the taxpayer from risk. Government had become "addicted" to PFI, the committee's Tory chair said…. In a critical report, the cross-party Treasury select committee said the long-term expense of PFI deals - where the private sector shoulders the upfront cost and is typically repaid by the taxpayer over a 30-year period - were now much higher than more conventional forms of borrowing. Due to the financing costs involved, it said paying off a £1bn debt incurred through PFI cost the taxpayer equivalent to a direct government debt of £1.7bn.’

(17) = Guardian 07 Dec 2011 ‘David Cameron threatens veto if EU treaty fails to protect City of London’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/07/cameron-threatens-veto-eu-treaty

(18) = Astbury Marsden Compensation Survey 2011 – Banking Infrastructure London,http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:tN8-iJkGpa8J:www.astburymarsden.com/documents/Astbury%2520Marsden%2520Compensation%2520Survey%25202011_Banking%2520Infrastructure%2520London%2520small.pdf+Astbury+Marsden+report+city+pay&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjCp35WxasQC0uKU6hyPufcF3PKQgqywr0k1qNAEGK_4wMSeFBhohPhKrGo7oTiY4RLukF4E51KGYTxH6kmRfhX-1zs80hIKdv6Ckao6ZzZxFrjD6HI5anmt52lZR3QiNTc0ttx&sig=AHIEtbS9vlPCGJzgvi4HFde7s45wAlnw_w ; shows average salary for city of London financial sector is £83,000 with 12% increase in 6 months in 2011

(19) = Guardian 28 Nov 2011 ‘Banks under fresh pressure to curb bonus and dividend payouts’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/28/banks-curb-bonuses-dividends ; ‘According to a survey by headhunters Astbury Marsden published on Monday, City professionals expect an average bonus of 24% of their basic pay for 2011, indicating a payout of £19,920 on an average salary of £83,000.’ (which brings their average annual income including bonuses to about £103,000)

(20) = guardian.co.uk 29 Nov 2011 ‘Cuts: an extra 300,000 public sector jobs now face the axe’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/patrick-butler-cuts-blog/2011/nov/29/300k-extra-public-sector-jobs-face-axe , ‘The Office for Budgetary Responsibility now reckons 710,000 public service jobs - not 410,000 - will go over the next five years.’

(21) = Office for National Statistics ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2011’, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2011/index.html ; shows 2.62 million people unemployed in 3^rd quarter of 2011

(22) = Labour market statistics: 16 Nov 2011 – Vacancies - http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2011/statistical-bulletin.html#tab-Vacancies ; shows 462,000 job vacancies in 3^rd quarter of 2011

(23) = Guardian 01 Feb 2011 ‘Benefit fraud: spies in the welfare war’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/01/benefits-fraud-investigators ; ‘The Salvation Army and a number of other charities have written to the prime minister pointing out that the £5bn figure highlighted by the chancellor was "a threefold exaggeration of the true government estimate of benefit fraud". The frequently cited figure is achieved by adding the estimated amount of fraudulent claims (approximately £1.6bn) to the estimated total of claims made as a result of an error either by the claimant or the official handling their claim….There is an artful misrepresentation here; the suggestion is that the benefits bills is out of control because vast quantities of fraud is being committed by benefits claimants – so cutting the bill is just a question of tackling fraud. It is true that the benefits bill has grown rapidly, from £125bn in 1996/7 to £187bn in 2009/10, but this is not the result of increased fraud. The cost is higher because more people are (legitimately) claiming benefits and because an ageing population is making the cost of pensions soar. Less than 1% of people on benefits commit fraud, and those who do, campaigners argue, are often the poorest of the poor, and the sums involved very small.

(24) = Full Fact 01 Nov 2010 ‘Calls grow for George Osborne to correct the record’,http://fullfact.org/blog/calls_grow_for_george_osborne_to_correct_the_record-2364

(25) = Hansard House of Commons Written Answers 16 March 2011column 401w ‘Social Security Benefits’ http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110316/text/110316w0004.htm#1103171000102 ; ‘Dr Whiteford: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what estimate he has made of monetary value of unclaimed benefits in the latest period for which figures are available; and how much was unclaimed for each benefit and allowance type. [45049].Chris Grayling: For the six income-related benefits for which estimates are available there was between £6,930 million and £12,700 million left unclaimed in 2008-09’

(26) = National Fraud Authority Jan 2011 ‘Annual fraud indicator’,http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/agencies-public-bodies/nfa/annual-fraud-indicator/annual-fraud-indicator-2011?view=Binary

(27) = Guardian 20 Dec 2011 ‘HMRC hid 'sweetheart' tax deals for big business, MPs say’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/dec/20/inland-revenue-sweetheart-tax-deals

(28) = guardian.co.uk 19 Oct 2011 ‘Fuel poverty 'will claim 2,700 victims this winter'’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/oct/19/fuel-poverty-2700-victims-winter ; figure is if only 10% of 27,000 cold related excess deaths in winter are due to fuel poverty ; figure is for England and Wales only so including Scotland , with Scotland having a population of 5.2 million and England and Wales 63 million, there will be 222 cold related deaths in Scotland this winter, which, added to the 2,700 in England and Wales comes to 2922 – roughly 3,000)

(29) = guardian.co.uk 01 Dec 2011 ‘Fuel poverty affects a quarter of UK's households as bills soar and pay freezes’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/dec/01/fuel-poverty-affects-quarter-households

(30) = guardian.co.uk 02 Dec 2011 ‘Big six energy firms face fresh accusations of profiteering’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/02/energy-firms-accusations-profiteering-electricity

(31) = See (30) above

Obama has taken the civil liberties and human rights Bush couldn’t and expanded the war on terror – the big changes are in rhetoric not reality

2011-12-22T02:44:00.022Z

President Obama has now said he will no longer veto the National Defense Authorisation Act 2012 that includes amendments passed by both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and Congress, which give the US military the power to detain anyone suspected of terrorism indefinitely without trial – including US citizens on US soil and imposes US sanctions on any bank in the world that does business with Iran’s Central Bank (1) – (5).

The power to imprison US citizens indefinitely on mere suspicion is one Bush and Cheney attempted to get in the PATRIOT Act and in their planned follow ups to it, but were blocked from getting by opposition by congress and the American public. Now Obama, by appearing more progressive, is approving it without the same media or public attention.

So the Obama administration will take the civil liberties and democratic rights that the Bush administration couldn’t – and continue to ratchet up the tension towards war with Iran, under the cover of talk of hope and change.

Of course this time the bill was proposed by Senators of both parties, not Obama, while Bush proposed the PATRIOT Act and its successors, but the end result of a President approving it is the same

This is another nail in the coffin of the hope that Obama would be significantly more progressive in foreign policy or civil and human rights than Bush was. Whether it’s the result of what Obama’s own preferences, or merely political pragmatism in not wanting to be accused of being “soft on terrorism” with the Republicans controlling congress now, is pretty academic.

Three years into Obama’s first four year term, the similarities between his administration and George W Bush’s are greater than the differences. There’s stripping away civil and human rights through jail without trial and ‘extra- l, , civilian deaths in air and drone strikes, backing dictatorships and using ‘Salvador option’ US trained native death squads.

Bagram air base has replaced Guantanamo, with any rights gained by Guantanamo prisoners lost to those in Bagram; the war in Afghanistan has been expanded to Pakistan; and Obama is moving dangerously close to making an Iran war his Iraq war. Torture had not ended even before this NDAA either, though the numbers involved and who’s carrying it out may have changed.

Whether this is all due to Obama’s own politics or more due to his modelling himself on Abraham Lincoln and putting unity between Democrats and Republicans above anything else is another question.

Is Obama a principled progressive frustrated into unwelcome compromises with the Republicans and the right wing of his own party? Or are his aims and methods basically the same as Bush's, Cheney's and Rumsfeld's, but carried out with more subtlety and better public relations, without carrying out things like torture on a scale so large as to ensure detection? Or is it a bit of both? Whichever it is the differences between Obama's policies and Bush's in office are a matter of degree, not kind.

Obama like Rumsfeld, gives up the name, but keeps ‘the thing’

In February 2002, under Bush, Pentagon staff briefed New York Times reporters on the establishment of an Office of Strategic Influence, which would be “developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organisations”. The resulting outcry resulted in the OSI being publicly closed down (6) – (7).

It wasn’t really gone though. Only the name was gone.

In November 2002 Rumsfeld told interviewers “And then there was the office of strategic influence. You may recall that. And "oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall." I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.” (8).

Obama, like Rumsfeld with the OSI, dropped the name ‘ war on terror ’ – but that’s not the end of the thing.

Guantanamo to Bagram, extra-ordinary rendition (kidnapping) and torture

Photo - looks like Guantanamo under Bush? It's Bagram under Obama

While saying he would close Guantanamo, end indefinite imprisonment without trial and end military tribunals Obama merely modified the tribunals – which don’t come close to being real courts offering a fair trial and shifted indefinite imprisonment from Guantanamo to Bagram and ‘black sites’ in Afghanistan. This was certainly partly due to criticism from Republicans, but from the day he took office Obama has directed administration lawyers and CIA officials to argue in court and before congress that the CIA has the right to carry out ‘extra-ordinary rendition’ (i.e kidnapping for illegal detention without trial) from any country in the world to Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan – and that Bagram prisoners should not have the access to appeal US military tribunal rulings (based on ‘trials’ with no independent lawyer and no jury) in US courts - a right which some US courts have granted Guantanamo prisoners (9) – (15).

In other words if Obama had closed Guantanamo it would only have been to transfer it to Bagram. Initially Obama’s lawyers lost that argument in court – but by May 2010 they had won it, allowing anyone newly kidnapped anwyhere in the world, or currently held in Guantanamo, who might get access to a fair trial in the US, to be transferred to Bagram where they won’t (16) – (17).

Bagram was the Abu Ghraib of Afghanistan under Bush – one of the sites of systematic torture by US forces, where two detainees were beaten to death , one by a private security contractor using a mag-lite. Dilan Dilawar turned out to be a taxi driver with no involvement in terrorism (18) – (19).

Under Obama the number of prisoners at Guantanamo has fallen to 170, but the number held at Bagram has increased to 3,000, as $60 million was spent on expanding the prison, – some prisoners moved from Guantanamo, others newly kidnapped from elsewhere – and in September this year the administration put out a contract to build a larger prison to hold 2,000 prisoners , near Bagram at an estimated cost of between $25 million and $100 million (20) – (22).

Obama has banned physical torture by the US military by law, but not ‘psychological’ forms of torture, added to approved interrogation techniques in the US Army field manual in ‘Appendix M’ by the Bush administration in 2006. These can include sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation over days, weeks or months as well as inducing fear , for instance by targeting phobias (recalling the scene with the rats in Room 101 in Orwell’s 1984) (23) – (25).

Studies of people tortured in Bosnia and Northern Ireland and of Americans subjected to sleep deprivation have found that psychological torture techniques cause the same kind and degree of permanent and severe mental illness in victims as physical torture does (26) – (27).

What’s more many previous administrations have formally made torture illegal while actually authorising it’s use from world war two to the Phoenix Programme in Vietnam and organised torture from Chile to Nicaragua and Colombia in the 1970s to 1990s, with the notorious US military ‘School of the Americas’ training Latin American militaries in torture techniques. (The US military gave up the name ‘School of the Americas’ due to it’s notoriety in 2000, renaming it the ‘Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co-operation’. This is likely to be a cosmetic change of the OSI and war on terror kind) (28) – (31).

The British government also formally banned hooding and attacking prisoners with dogs in the 1970s after scandals in Northern Ireland – yet was still using those methods plus severe beatings ,sometimes to death, in Iraq in 2003 to 2008 . So it remains to be seen whether making physical torture illegal will end the practice this time.

Bush and Condoleezza Rice also claimed that “We do not torture” and that they only used legal interrogation methods and obeyed the Convention against Torture to which the US was a signatory (32) – (34). The reality recorded by US veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, the ICRC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch was very different (35).

Obama has made it clear that waterboarding is among the banned torture techniques, but the torture methods actually used are always worse than those that are formally made legal or authorised. Neither waterboarding nor humiliation nor stress positions were the worst forms of torture under Bush. We know from American veterans that actual methods used from Iraq and Afghanistan to Guantanamo included beatings, breaking arms and legs with baseball bats, battering heads off concrete floors and electric shocks.

In fact there have been reports from the BBC, the New York Times , the Associated Press and Human Rights Watch of ‘psychological’ torture methods plus beating by the CIA or US Special forces continuing under Obama at secret US jails in Afghanistan, including one near to Bagram but separate from it, called the ‘Tor jail’ ‘black jail’ or Parwan facility. Methods reported including beating, sleep deprivation, being left naked in extreme heat or cold; and lack of enough food. The jail is referred to as a ‘transit facility’ rather than a prison or ‘detention center’ by the US military in order to justify not giving the ICRC access to prisoners held there (36) – (40).

Leon Panetta as Obama’s first head of the CIA also told congress he might ask the President for permission to use unspecified ‘tougher’ interrogation techniques than those specified in the US army field manual (41).

The fact that in May 2009 Obama replaced the highest ranking general in Afghanistan with General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded units which tortured prisoners by beatings with rifle butts, punching people in the spine and kicking them in the stomach in Iraq, was not encouraging either. When Obama finally sacked McChrystal it was for allowing his aides to speak insultingly of Obama and his Vice President. (42) – (44).

The descriptions of beatings with fists, feet and rifle butts; sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation with blacked out goggles and shackling with metal shackles by American units at ‘black sites’ in Iraq under Bush are similar to Afghans’ descriptions of the ‘black sites’ in Afghanistan under Obama (45) – (46).

Killing civilians by air strikes, drone strikes, night raids and ‘El Salvador Option’ torture and death squads

Photo - an Afghan child injured in US air strikes on Bala Boluk in Afghanistan under Obama

While Obama claimed he would end the heavy use of air strikes which have killed thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, in fact airstrikes killing dozens to hundreds of civilians at a time have continued, along with a massive expansion of drone strikes in Pakistan which also kill far more civilians than combatants (47) – (50).

Night raid death squads have killed large numbers of Afghans who turned out to be uninvolved in terrorism – including teenage boys. That is the nature of ‘war on terror’ methods which involve a bullet in the back of the head on mere suspicion rather than a trial with evidence put before a jury. (see this link – scroll down to sub-headings ‘Night Raids and the El Salvador Option moving from Iraq to Afghanistan’ and ‘sources for Night Raids and the El Salvador Option’).

The ‘El Salvador’ option of US trained native torture and death squads has continued in Iraq under Obama just as under Bush – and been extended to Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Also see this Guardian article on use of Afghan militias) (51)

Other Bush administration double standards also remain on place – on defending war crimes by US forces and their allies such as Israeli, British and Pakistani forces versus condemning war crimes by enemies of the US and its allies; on providing arms to the enemies of the US like Hezbollah (a crime) versus arming its allies like Israel, even as they too target and kill thousands of civilians (not an issue); on nuclear weapons produced in breach of the non-proliferation treaty by US allies (e.g Israel, Pakistan) versus by its enemies (e.g Iran, North Korea).

Talking about promoting freedom and democracy, while actually backing dictatorships – except where it suits US oil and arms companies

The bodies of protesters against dictatorship in Yemen, killed by the US and British trained Yemeni military

Obama has been good at making speeches about promoting democracy, but the fact that his Cairo speech was made in Egypt under the Mubarak dictatorship which he was still backing should have been a hint that he would be no different from Bush in continuing to talk a lot of rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy while actually funding and arming dictatorships rather than backing democracy protesters from Honduras to Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi and Yemen. The only calls for dictators to stand down coming from Obama or Hillary Clinton or their subordinates on these countries have been for them to stand down in favour of their deputies – a continuation of dictatorship or military rule under new figureheads.

The only dictatorships which the Obama administration opposes are the ones who are not US clients and were already on Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ (Iran and Syria) or who have haggled too much over oil prices while making noises about nationalisation and made American oil companies nervous of being expelled from the country (Gaddafi in Libya).

In Bahrain there has been no action to stop the killing of unarmed democracy protesters in the street or in ‘detention’. There has been no action against the Saudi monarchy for sending troops to help crush and torture and jail democracy protesters – just more arms sales. In Yemen the military have been killing unarmed protesters with sniper rifles, tanks and artillery for almost a year without any suggestion of the US ending military aid funding to the Yemeni military never mind intervening to stop it (in fact Clinton ruled out ending that aid early on and has never budged since).

Treating Palestinians as if they were all equivalent to Al Qa’ida

Photo : Gaza after Israeli attacks in December 2008 to January 2009, the one-sided 'Gaza war' - photo from Japan Focus

The false idea that Hamas and the Palestinians are equivalent to Al Qa’ida and so US support for Israel is supposedly protecting democracy against terrorism, has also continued under Obama.

While Obama did call for the blockade of Gaza to be ended he did and said nothing while Israeli forces killed a thousand Palestinian civilians mostly in deliberate attacks , except to say that he ‘understood’ why the Israelis were doing it due to the rockets fired from Gaza – which were the result of Israeli governments’ refusal to negotiate with and determination to blockade the elected Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas – and which had killed 1 Israeli civilian in the six months before the Gaza ‘war’ – and that’s on Israeli foreign ministry figures (The same figures show Israeli attacks killing Palestinian civilians predictably led to an increase in rocket attacks – which killed three civilians in the three weeks of ‘Operation Cast Lead’) (52) – (55).

Obama has continued to back Israeli governments refusing to negotiate with Hamas on the grounds that they refuse to accept fully recognising Israel before negotiations begin, ignoring Israeli Professor Yossi Alpher and former Israeli military intelligence head General Shlomo Gazit when they say that such a pre-condition on negotiations with Egypt or Jordan would have ensured no peace deal resulted (Alpher) and that the pre-conditions are ‘ludicrous or an excuse not to negotiate’ (Gazit).

Obama ‘the healer’ and would-be Lincoln compromises too far with the wrong people

Photo from Gawker

This may be because Obama is too focused on ‘healing the divisions’ among Americans that he sees as having been caused by the Bush years. He is too willing to compromise with the Republican party for the sake of ‘unity’, failing to see that the Republican party are now so extreme that compromising with them constantly can only lead to a continuing slide to the right that could well end with democracy in the US gone forever as a means of placating the Tea Party and the military-industrial complex, the big banks and the big firms.

Some American historians, like Kearns Goodwin, who wrote a biography of Lincoln called ‘Team of Rivals’ say Obama has modelled his administration on the Lincoln Administration. Lincoln brought all his political opponents into the administration in order to ensure there would be full debate of all policies, reasoning that this would lead to the best policies being produced by full debate. That’s not going to work with John McCain never mind Michelle Bachmann. The Republicans are not interested in co-operating with Obama for the good of the country – they’re only interested in blaming him for everything – including the results of their own actions.

The prospective Republican candidates for the 2012 Presidential election all look pretty awful, but Obama had better hope the Republicans choose one of the worst, because otherwise he may end up losing to a barely tolerable candidate due to his failure to end mass unemployment and economic depression and his failure to deliver on any of his 2008 election campaign pledges other than Health Insurance.

Obama’s temptation to use war on Iran as a distraction – and end up with a disaster worse than Iraq

Obama’s line on Iraq is virtually identical to Bush and Cheney’s – that under his Presidency the US will use any means necessary – i.e military force – to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons – and his administration, like Bush’s on Iraq, is adamant that no matter what evidence is presented on Iran not having built nuclear weapons, they’ll claim it is and is hiding the fact.

The Republicans’ re-capture of congress, which blocks any further action to create jobs or end the depression this side of an election, may be tempting Obama to try to have a ‘foreign policy success’ by taking action against Iran.

If he does that he will create a disaster more terrible than Iraq on the same dubious premises – that Iraq/Iraq has WMD/nuclear weapons and that it’s government would committ national suicide by provoking a nuclear counter-strike on itself by using WMD/nuclear weapons on nuclear armed states or their allies (the US/ Israel).

In fact both governments – Iran’s in 1988 and Saddam’s in 1991 – proved they were not willing to take that risk – the former making peace with a US backed Saddam Hussein rather than risk defeat when Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard Officers feared the US forces were going to fight alongside Saddam’s; and the latter not using chemical warheads for his scuds on Kuwait or Israel or Coaliton forces when he did have them, opting for conventional warheads instead to avoid nuclear retaliation (56) – (58).

If Obama makes the Iran war mistake he will have become George W. Bush Mark II in almost every way. As George Bush senior’s 1991 Iraq war showed it’s not guaranteed to win the next election either.

Obama is not solely to blame – assuming the struggle’s over when you elect a candidate is a mistake

Obama is not solely to blame for any of this. What he can do is partly dependent on who controls congress, what the media are saying and what the public are demanding most vocally. FDR would never have got the New Deal measures through congress against the lobbying of the richest and the biggest companies if it hadn’t been for demonstrations and occupations of banks and factories by people across the US. If enough Americans want Obama to push progressive reforms through congress they need to demand them more vocally than the Tea Party and the corporate lobbyists and AIPAC are demanding the opposite.

Having said that Obama has the most powerful political office in the US and possibly the world and is making a mistake by giving in to the Republicans and Fox News every time they demand he does so, as if they were rational or had good intentions.

Sources

(1) = NYT ‘Obama Drops Veto Threat Over Military Authorization Bill After Revisions’,http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/us/politics/obama-wont-veto-military-authorization-bill.html

(2) = Guardian.co.uk 15 Dec 2011 ‘Military given go-ahead to detain US terrorist suspects without trial’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/15/americans-face-guantanamo-detention-obama

(3) = Human Rights Watch 01 Dec 2011 ‘US: President Should Veto Detainee Bill’,http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/01/us-president-should-veto-detainee-bill

(4) = Wired 01 Dec 2011 ‘Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial’,http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/senate-military-detention/

(5) = LA Times 15 Dec 2011 ‘Congress approves $662-billion defense spending bill’, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/15/nation/la-na-congress-defense-20111216

Obama like Rumsfeld, gives up the name, but keeps ‘the thing’

(6) = New York Times 19 Feb 2002 ‘Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad’, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/international/19PENT.html?pagewanted=1

(7) = Reporters sans frontieres Update - 27 February 2002 ‘The Bush administration shuts down the OSI’ , http://arabia.reporters-sans-frontieres.org/article.php3?id_article=366

(8) = US Department of Defense news transcript 18 Nov 2002 ‘Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability En Route to Chile’, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3296

Guantanamo to Bagram, extra-ordinary rendition (kidnapping) and torture

(9) = AP Foreign 15 Sep 2009 ‘Obama admin fights Bagram detainee court access’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8708067 ‘The Obama administration argued late Monday that allowing terrorism detainees in Afghanistan to file lawsuits in U.S. courts challenging their detention would endanger the military mission in that country… In a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, the Justice Department said Bagram detainees should not be given equal rights to sue in the United States that the Supreme Court granted last year to detainees being held at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba…..the Obama administration stuck with Bush administration policy in a court filing Monday night that said the Bagram detainees' rights shouldn't extend as far as U.S. courtrooms…. Obama's Justice Department has sided with the congressional Republicans and put forward the same argument as the Bush administration. It said in Monday's 85-page filing that allowing Bagram detainees access to U.S. courts would divert military personnel at Bagram and "have serious adverse consequences for the military mission in Afghanistan."

(10) = AP 20 Feb 2009 ‘Obama: No rights for Bagram prisoners - Sides with Bush, says detainees can't challenge detention in U.S. courts’ , http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29308012/ns/politics-white_house/t/obama-no-rights-bagram-prisoners/#.TvFXlXpU2uI

(11) = Amnesty International 16 Sep 2009 ‘USA must grant Bagram detainees access to US courts’,http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/usa-must-grant-bagram-detainees-access-us-courts-20090916

(12) = Amnesty International 16 Sep 2009 ‘USA: Government opposes habeas corpus review for any Bagram detainees; reveals ‘enhanced’ administrative review procedures’,http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR51/100/2009/en/825cb177-59b8-4db6-a2b2-ac6874310ce3/amr511002009en.html

(13) Panetta Open to Tougher Methods in Some C.I.A. Interrogation,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/us/politics/06cia.html?scp=4&sq=Panetta&st=cse ; ‘Leon E. Panetta, the White House pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, …. Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of “rendition” — picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country.’

(14) = Der Spiegel (Germany) 21 Sep 2009 ‘Human Rights Lawyer on Bagram Prison ‘The Obama Administration Has Completely Failed’’,http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,650324,00.html

(15) = HRW 01 Jun 2010 ‘The Bagram Detainee Review Boards: Better, But Still Falling Short’,http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/06/02/bagram-detainee-review-boards-better-still-falling-short

(16) = See (3) above

(17) = LA Times ‘Court: No habeas rights for prisoners in Afghanistan’, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/21/nation/la-na-court-bagram-20100522 ; ‘The Obama administration has won the legal right to hold its terrorism suspects indefinitely and without oversight by judges — not at Guantanamo or in Illinois, but rather at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan……..In a 3-0 decision, the U.S. appeals court in Washington ruled for the administration Friday and said the Constitution and its right to habeas corpus does not extend to foreign prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan because it is a war zone. The judges dismissed claims from three prisoners who were taken to Bagram from Pakistan and Thailand and have been held for as long as seven years.’

(18) = Human Rights Watch 20 May 2005 - ‘Afghanistan: Killing and Torture by U.S. Predate Abu Ghraib ', http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/05/20/afghan10992.htm

(19) = NYT 20 May 2005 ‘In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths ’,http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?pagewanted=all

(20) = 11 Nov 2011 ‘Bagram: The other Guantanamo?’ , http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57323856/bagram-the-other-guantanamo/?tag=contentMain;contentBody ; Today, there are more than 3,000 detainees at Bagram, or five times the number (around 600) when President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. There are currently 18 times as many detainees at Bagram than at the U.S. military prison at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, whose prisoner population has dwindled from a peak of 780 to 170.

(21) = Al Jazeera 16 Nov 2009 ‘US unveils extended Bagram prison’, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2009/11/20091115114337109563.html

(22) = Salon.com 19 Sep 2011 ‘U.S. to build new massive prison in Bagram’ by Glenn Greenwald, http://www.salon.com/2011/09/19/bagram_7/

(23) = Amnesty International Australia 19 Mar 2009 ‘The Army Field Manual: Sanctioning Cruelty?’,http://www.amnesty.org.au/hrs/comments/20575/ ; ‘The amended Army Field Manual:Human Intelligence Collector Operations, has come under scrutiny by human rights organisations especially in relation to "Appendix M" which allows for isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation. These methods do not comply with the international law regulations prohibiting torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’

(24) = Center for Constitutional Rights ‘Close Torture Loopholes in the Army Field Manual’,http://ccrjustice.org/get-involved/action/close-torture-loopholes-army-field-manual ; ‘Appendix M of the Army Field Manual - a new section introduced in 2006, applicable only to "unlawful combatants," the category applied to detainees in Guantanamo, at secret CIA prisons, and elsewhere - allows the use of techniques such as prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and inducing fear and humiliation of prisoners. These techniques, especially when used in combination as permitted by the AFM, constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and in some cases, torture. These techniques have caused documented, long-lasting psychological and physical harm and were condemned by a bipartisan congressional report released last month, as well as by the Bush-appointed head of the military commissions at Guantanamo.’

(25) = Basolou, Metin (2007) ‘Torture vs Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment’in Archives of General Psychiatry Vol. 64 No. 3, March 2007, pages 277-285, http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/64/3/277 ; ‘Design and Setting A cross-sectional survey was conductedwith a population-based sample of survivors of torture fromSarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Banja Luka in RepublicaSrpska, Rijeka in Croatia, and Belgrade in Serbia……Conclusions Ill treatment during captivity, such as psychologicalmanipulations, humiliating treatment, and forced stress positions,does not seem to be substantially different from physical torturein terms of the severity of mental suffering they cause, theunderlying mechanism of traumatic stress, and their long-termpsychological outcome.’

(26) = Scientific American 23 Oct 2007 ‘Can a Lack of Sleep Cause Psychiatric Disorders?’, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-a-lack-of-sleep-cause , ‘Study shows that sleep deprivation leads to a rewiring of the brain's emotional circuitry…In fact, psychologist Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, says that "almost all psychiatric disorders show some problems with sleep.'' But, he says that scientists previously believed the psychiatric problems triggered the sleep issues. New research from his lab, however, suggests the reverse is the case; that is, a lack of shut-eye is causing some psychological disturbances.’

(27) = John McGuffin (1974) ‘The Guinea Pigs’ (a book on the torture of suspected Republicans in Northern Ireland in the 1970s by the British military using beating, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation - many were mentally ill for the rest of their lives as a result)

(28) = Professor Marilyn B. Young (1990) ‘The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990’, pages 212-213 of paperback edition

(29) = Professor Greg Grandin (2007) ‘Empire’s Workshop : Latin America, the United States and the Rise of Imperialism’, Holt Paperbacks, New York, 2007, Chapter 3, especially pages 90-91, 101 and 116-117

(30) = BBC News 16 Dec 2000 ‘New image for US 'torture school'’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1072940.stm

(31) = see http://inplaceoffear.blogspot.com/2009/11/reality-of-us-counter-insurgency-so-far.html and sources for it

(32) = BBC News 07 Dec 2005 ‘US does not torture, Bush insists’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4415132.stm

(33) = CNN 05 Oct 2007 ‘Bush: 'This government does not torture'’, http://articles.cnn.com/2007-10-05/politics/bush.torture_1_interrogation-anti-torture-attorney-general-gonzales?_s=PM:POLITICS

(34) = NPR 10 Dec 2008 ‘Rice Says Successor Hillary Clinton Will 'Do Great'’, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98056219 ; ‘And Guantanamo wasn't sort of the only issue that tarnished the U.S. image. There is also the treatment of terror suspects, waterboarding, other methods of torture ...Well, you know that I'm going to have to object, because the United States has always kept to its international obligations, which include international obligations on the convention on torture. The United States, the president, was determined after Sept. 11 to do everything that was legal and within those obligations, international and domestic laws, to make sure that we prevented a follow-on attack.’

(35) = see this link and sources listed and linked to on it

(36) = BBC News 11 May 2010 ‘Red Cross confirms 'second jail' at Bagram, Afghanistan’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8674179.stm

(37) = NYT 28 May 2009 ‘Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base’, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/world/asia/29bagram.html

(38) = HRW 01 Jun 2010 ‘The Bagram Detainee Review Boards: Better, But Still Falling Short’,http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/06/02/bagram-detainee-review-boards-better-still-falling-short ;. ‘And recent reports of abuse have come from former detainees who claim to have been held at another detention site at Bagram, a detention facility the US has denied exists. It is only by reading between the lines of carefully worded US government statements that it becomes clear that there is indeed another facility at Bagram, which the US considers a transit center and not a detention facility. And so, while human rights observers watched mostly open proceedings in Parwan, a largely secret prison still operates just down the road.’

(39) = AP 08 April 2011 ‘AP Exclusive: Terror Suspects Held Weeks in Secret’, http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=13325716#.TvJ6cnpU2uI

(40) = BBC News 15 Apr 2010 ‘Afghans 'abused at secret prison' at Bagram airbase ’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8621973.stm ; ‘But witnesses told the BBC in interviews or written testimony that abuses continue in a hidden facility….Sher Agha and others we interviewed complained their cells were very cold.”… But sleep, according to the prisoners interviewed, is deliberately prevented in this detention site. "I could not sleep, nobody could sleep because there was a machine that was making noise," said Mirwais, who said he was held in the secret jail for 24 days. "There was a small camera in my cell, and if you were sleeping they'd come in and disturb you," he added. The prisoners, who were interviewed separately, all told very similar stories. Most of them said they had been beaten by American soldiers at the point of arrest before being taken to the prison. Mirwais had half a row of teeth missing, which he said was from being struck with the butt of a gun by an American soldier.’…In the new jail, prisoners were being moved around in wheelchairs with goggles and headphones on. The goggles were blacked out, and the purpose of the headphones was to block out all sound. Each prisoner was handcuffed and had their legs shackled.’

(41) = Panetta Open to Tougher Methods in Some C.I.A. Interrogation,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/us/politics/06cia.html?scp=4&sq=Panetta&st=cse ; ‘Leon E. Panetta, the White House pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, on Thursday left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules issued last month… In his testimony, Mr. Panetta said that under the rules issued by Mr. Obama, the C.I.A. is still allowed to detain and question terrorism suspects before transferring them to a military jail….

(42) = NYT 19 Mar 2006 ‘In Secret Unit's 'Black Room,' a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse ’, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html?pagewanted=print ; ‘In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball…… The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses. ….Task Force 6-26 …Originally known as Task Force 121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan, and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force 145.)….. Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics….. In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident…. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects…. In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness.

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command… General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.

(43) = HRW 22 Jul 2006 ‘"No Blood, No Foul" - Soldiers' Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq’, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/07/22/no-blood-no-foul

(44) = Esquire 19 May 2009 ‘Who the Hell Is Stanley McChrystal?’, http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/who-is-stanley-mcchrystal-051909 - interviews former members of McChrystal’s unit who told interviewers McChrystal guaranteed the ICRC would never get access to prisoners held by units at Camp Nama under his command

(45) = see (40) above

(46) = see (42) – (44) above

(47) = The Public Record 19 Oct 2009 ‘Report: Drone Strikes Increased Dramatically Under Obama’,http://pubrecord.org/world/5801/report-drone-strikes-increased/

(48) = thenews (Pakistan) 03 Jan 2011 ‘Drones killed 59pc civilians, 41pc terrorists’, http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=23631&Cat=2&dt=1/3/2011

(49) = guardian.co.uk 07 Oct 2010 ‘Obama's enthusiasm for drone strikes takes heavy toll on Pakistan's tribesmen’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/07/pakistan-drone-missile-obama-increased

(50) = Bureau of Investigative Journalism 18 Jul 2011 ‘US claims of ‘no civilian deaths’ are untrue’, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/07/18/washingtons-untrue-claims-no-civilian-deaths-in-pakistan-drone-strikes/

(51) = Guardian 22 Nov 2009 'US pours millions into anti-Taliban militias in Afghanistan', http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/22/us-anti-taliban-militias-afghanistan

Treating Palestinians as if they were all equivalent to Al Qa’ida

(52) = Amnesty International 02 Jul 2009 ‘Impunity for war crimes in Gaza and southern Israel a recipe for further civilian suffering’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/israeloccupied-palestinianterritoriesimpunity-war-crimes-gaza-and-southe , ‘The scale and intensity of the attacks on Gaza were unprecedented. Some 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians who took no part in the conflict were among the 1,400 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces……Most were killed with high-precision weapons, relying on surveillance drones which have exceptionally good optics, allowing those observing to see their targets in detail. Others were killed with imprecise weapons, including artillery shells carrying white phosphorus – not previously used in Gaza - which should never be used in densely populated areas….. Amnesty International found that the victims of the attacks it investigated were not caught in the crossfire during battles between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces, nor were they shielding militants or other military objects. Many were killed when their homes were bombed while they slept. Others were sitting in their yard or hanging the laundry on the roof. Children were struck while playing in their bedrooms or on the roof, or near their homes. Paramedics and ambulances were repeatedly attacked while attempting to rescue the wounded or recover the dead.’

(53) = Amnesty International Mar 2009 ‘ISRAEL/GAZA - OPERATION ‘CAST LEAD’: 22 DAYS OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION’, http://amnesty.name/en/library/asset/MDE15/015/2009/en/8f299083-9a74-4853-860f-0563725e633a/mde150152009en.pdf

(54) = See http://www.duncanmcfarlane.org/Israel-Palestine/thecoup/ and the sources listed and linked to in it on the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and Israeli government responses to them

(55) = Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs ‘Victims of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism since September 2000’, http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+since+2000/Victims+of+Palestinian+Violence+and+Terrorism+sinc.htm

Obama’s temptation to use war on Iran as a distraction – and end up with a disaster worse than Iraq

(56) = Takeyh, Ray (2006), ‘Hidden Iran - Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic, Times Books, New York, 2006 - pages 170-174 (on Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard officers persuading Khomeini to make peace with Saddam in 1988 out of fear US forces were joining war directly on his side)

(57) = Pollack, Kenneth M.(2004), ‘The Persian Puzzle', Random House, New York, 2005 paperback edition - pages 231-233 (on Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard officers persuading Khomeini to make peace with Saddam in 1988 out of fear US forces were joining war directly on his side)

(58) = Nye , Joseph S. & Smith , Robert K. (1992), ‘After the Storm' , Madison Books , London , 1992 , - pages 211-216 (on Saddam having chemical warheads for his scud missiles in 1991 but not using them)

Is Obama giving American private security contractors immunity from prosecution just like Bush did – Who will protect Iraqi civilians from them?

2011-12-15T19:31:00.004Z

The US under both Bush and Obama has used more mercenaries than even Gaddafi could afford - and they have allowed them to be just as above the law. There's no sign that the formal withdrawal from Iraq will change this as 5,000 'civilian' 'private security contractors' (actually armed mercenaries) stay under the command of the US State Department

Widespread US use of mercenaries (many being former US forces) for ‘plausible deniability’ of involvement and to make operations using them allow them immunity from prosecution led to the US demand that UN resolution 1970 on Libya should include a specific clause (clause 6) exempting nationals of states not party to the ICC (International Criminal Court) from prosecution except by their own state. This made both most of Gaddafi’s African mercenaries and former US special forces hired as ‘private contractors’ and operating in Libya, immune to prosecution by the ICC (1).

This was due to the US and other NATO governments sending former members of their special forces into Libya hired as ‘private security contractors’ (2).

Private military contractors in Iraq like Blackwater (renamed ‘Xe’ in the Obama era) and Dyncorp have been proven to be involved in numerous shootings of civilians there, many seemingly almost random (3).

The US mission in Iraq is now to be headed by the State Department rather than the US military, but private military contractors working for the State Department have an immunity from prosecution that is even more complete than the almost total immunity of those working for the Pentagon (4).

The total withdrawal of US troops seems to be the result of the Iraqi government refusing to accept Obama administration conditions that they would have immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

The Washington Post reported that ‘Iraqi leaders said last week that they want a small contingent of U.S. military trainers to remain, but without immunity from local prosecution, a condition the Obama administration has said it cannot accept. The administration has been planning to keep 3,000 to 5,000 military trainers in the country if the two sides can hammer out an agreement.’(5)

The Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Iraqi governments negotiated in 2008 (and which came into force in 2009) supposedly ended immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for private security contractors (or mercenaries) operating in the country (6).

However the UN working group on mercenaries reported in June this year that ‘It is not clear, however, whether this removal of immunity covers all contractors employed by the United States Government and whether it is fully applied in Iraqi courts’ (7).

This leaves the possibility of the kind of immunity from prosecution for mercenaries employed by the US State Department in Iraq that led to American employees of the US private security firm Dyncorp, employed by the State Department in Bosnia in the 1990s, to get off entirely unpunished after kidnapping 12 to 15 year old Bosnian girls and repeatedly raping them and buying and selling them as slaves (8) – (13).

This did not result in any prosecution of anyone involved in any court, nor has it ever stopped the British and US governments from continuing to employ Dyncorp in wars around the world (14) - (15).

It was as bad as anything the Serbs were alleged to have done in justifications given for war being necessary to stop such abuses.

The justification given for immunity from prosecution is to ‘protect American citizens’ from unfair convictions. Who will protect civilians from being shot by people placed above the law though? Who will protect young girls from American citizens in other countries when they’re placed above the law and turn out to be paedophiles and rapists?

(1) = IB Times 27 Feb 2011 ‘Full Text of UN Resolution imposing sanctions on Libya’,http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/116663/20110227/un-resolution-libya-sanctions-original-text-un-resolution-1970-2011.htm

(2) = Guardian 31 Mar 2011 ‘Libya: SAS veterans helping Nato identify Gaddafi targets in Misrata’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/31/libya-sas-veterans-misrata-rebels ; Former SAS soldiers and other western employees of private security companies are helping Nato identify targets in the Libyan port city of Misrata, the scene of heavy fighting between Muammar Gaddafi's forces and rebels, well-placed sources have told the Guardian.

(3) = Independent 14 Dec 2011 ‘Security firms involved in 200 shootings in Iraq’ , http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/security-firms-involved-in-200-shootings-in-iraq-6276688.html

(4) = Washington Post 08 Oct 2011 ‘State Department readies Iraq operation, its biggest since Marshall Plan’,http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/state-department-readies-iraq-operation-its-biggest-since-marshall-plan/2011/10/05/gIQAzRruTL_story.html , ‘The State Department is racing against an end-of-year deadline to take over Iraq operations from the U.S. military, throwing together buildings and marshaling contractors...an estimated 16,000 civilians under the American ambassador — the size of an Army division…To do so, the department is contracting about 5,000 security personnel.’

(5) = Washington Post 08 Oct 2011 ‘State Department readies Iraq operation, its biggest since Marshall Plan’,http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/state-department-readies-iraq-operation-its-biggest-since-marshall-plan/2011/10/05/gIQAzRruTL_story.html ; ‘Iraqi leaders said last week that they want a small contingent of U.S. military trainers to remain, but without immunity from local prosecution, a condition the Obama administration has said it cannot accept. The administration has been planning to keep 3,000 to 5,000 military trainers in the country if the two sides can hammer out an agreement.’

(6) = Independent 10 Jul 2008 ‘Security firms lose immunity in Iraq deal’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/security-firms-lose-immunity-in-iraq-deal-863931.html

(7) = UN News Centre 16 Jun 2011 ‘ Iraq should keep regulating private military and security firms, say UN experts’, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=38735&Cr=iraq&Cr1= , ‘The Group welcomed the fact that the 2009 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Iraq and the US contains a provision removing the immunity of some private foreign security contractors in Iraq. “It is not clear, however, whether this removal of immunity covers all contractors employed by the United States Government and whether it is fully applied in Iraqi courts,” they said. Among its recommendations, the experts urged the Iraqi Government to prioritize the adoption of legislation regulating security companies that has been pending since 2008.’

(8) = Kathryn Bolkovac & Carin Lynn (2011) ‘The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman's Fight for Justice’, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

(9) = Human Rights Watch Nov 2002 ‘HOPES BETRAYED : TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND GIRLS TO POST-CONFLICT BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA FOR FORCED PROSTITUTION ’, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/bosnia/ ; see especially ‘XI. SFOR CONTRACTOR INVOLVEMENT’, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/bosnia/Bosnia1102-11.htm#P1160_252276(covers involvement of Dyncorp employees contracted by the US State Department)

(10) = BBC News 28 Jan 2011 ‘Hard Talk - Kathryn Bolkovac, Whistleblower’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y26qv

(11) = BBC News 27 Jan 2011 ‘Bolkovac: Male colleagues purchased girls in Bosnia’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9377841.stm

(12) = Observer 29 Jul 2010 ‘British firm accused in UN 'sex scandal'’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/jul/29/unitednations , ‘A former United Nations police officer is suing a British security firm over claims that it covered up the involvement of her fellow officers in sex crimes and prostitution rackets in the Balkans….Kathryn Bolkovac, an American policewoman, was hired by DynCorp Aerospace in Aldershot for a UN post aimed at cracking down on sexual abuse and forced prostitution in Bosnia….She claims she was 'appalled' to find that many of her fellow officers were involved. She was fired by the British company after amassing evidence that UN police were taking part in the trafficking of young women from eastern Europe as sex slaves.’

(13) = Salon 06 Aug 2002 ‘Sex-slave whistle-blowers vindicated’, http://www.salon.com/2002/08/06/dyncorp/ , ‘Two former employees of DynCorp, the government contracting powerhouse, have won legal victories after charging that the $2 billion-a-year firm fired them when they complained that co-workers were involved in a Bosnia sex-slave trade.’

(14) = HRW 25 Nov 2002 ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina: Traffickers Walk Free’, http://www.hrw.org/news/2002/11/25/bosnia-and-herzegovina-traffickers-walk-free

(15) = Guardian 29 Nov 2002 ‘American firm in Bosnia sex trade row poised to win MoD contract’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/nov/29/military.politics ; ‘The American defence contractor forced to pay compensation to a UN police officer unfairly dismissed for reporting colleagues involved in the Bosnian sex trade is poised to be awarded its first contract by the British government, the Guardian has learned. …DynCorp, which was ordered to pay the sacked UN investigator Kathryn Bolkovac £110,000 by an employment tribunal on Tuesday, is part of a consortium that is set to be awarded preferred bidder status by the Ministry of Defence to supply support services for military firing ranges…..Mr Johnston's case included allegations of men having sex with girls as young as 12. His claims also concerned a nightclub in Bosnia frequented by DynCorp employees, where young women were sold "hourly, daily or permanently".

The formal US withdrawal from Iraq is deceptive ; and war on Iran on the same dodgy grounds remains on the table

2011-12-15T19:24:00.002Z

There’s been a lot of fanfare over the US withdrawal from Iraq, but in fact the US will keep 5,000 armed men in Iraq – many of them former US special forces – they just won’t be called US troops ; and they’ll be accompanied by CIA agents over-seeing US trained El Salvador style Iraqi death squads.

CNN reports that

‘Hundreds of nonmilitary U.S. personnel will remain in Iraq, including 1,700 diplomats, law enforcement officers and economic, agriculture and other professionals and experts, according to the State Department.

In addition, 5,000 security contractors will protect U.S. diplomats and another 4,500 contractors will serve other roles, such as helping provide food and medical services, until they can be done locally.’ (1)

These ‘private security contractors’ (a euphemism for mercenaries), working for companies like Dyncorp will include many former members of the US and British militaries and Special Forces, just as they have up until now. They have been responsible for some of the worst cases of random shootings of civilians in Iraq and the transfer of command of them from the Pentagon to the State Department will shift them from almost total immunity from prosecution to total immunity from prosecution.

They may become as immune to prosecution as the Dyncorp employees contracted by the US State Department in Bosnia who kidnapped young girls, raped them and used them as forced sex slaves, selling them to human traffickers (for details and sources on this click this link).

The reason that no US troops are being left turns out to be that the Iraqi government would not grant them immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

The US military also spent the last 8 years training up El Salvador style Iraqi 'police commandos' and 'special forces' in Iraq under both Bush and Obama - units responsible for the same torture and murder that the Salvadoran military carried out against rebels and civilians alike in the 1980s (3) – (5).

Some of the ‘diplomats’ operating from the vast US embassy in Baghdad, which is bigger than the Vatican and cost over $1 billion to build, will undoubtedly be CIA agents, as every major power uses embassies and diplomatic immunity as cover for intelligence operatives (6). Some of these will be CIA ‘handlers’ overseeing Iraqi death squads, just as in the past in Vietnam and countries across Latin and Central America.

So the Obama administration doesn't have much of a leg to stand on in demanding that no country 'destabilises' or 'interferes' in Iraq, unless by 'de-stabilises' they mean 'threatens to replace our puppet government with a different one' (7).

Obama may not use the phrase ‘war on terror’ any more, that doesn’t mean the death squads or the ‘extra-ordinary rendition’ for torture are over.

It doesn’t mean the calls for a re-run of the Iraq war, this time against Iran, is off either. The supposed justification is even identical– that the Iranian government and military would commit collective national suicide by using WMDs or nuclear weapons on nuclear armed states such as the US or Israel or their allies; or would commit national suicide by proxy by giving nuclear materials to terrorists.

This is despite the fact that Iran’s Ayatollahs and the Republican Guard showed in 1988 that they preferred an inglorious peace that allowed them to survive in power to glorious national martyrdom, just as Saddam showed the same during the 1991 Iraq war (when he did have chemical warheads for his scuds) by only using conventional warheads in scud missile attacks on Kuwait and Israel; and despite Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld and former US General John Abizaid saying we can live with a nuclear Iran, which, if it develops nuclear weapons, will want them for the same reason as the US and Israel – as a deterrent against attacks on it by others (8) – (9). Creveld also points out that US or Israeli intelligence have been claiming Iran was on the verge of building nuclear weapons for at least 20 years (10).

(1) = CNN 13 Dec 2011 ‘Obama says U.S. goal is successful Iraq’, http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/12/politics/obama-maliki/index.html

(2) = Washington Post 08 Oct 2011 ‘State Department readies Iraq operation, its biggest since Marshall Plan’,http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/state-department-readies-iraq-operation-its-biggest-since-marshall-plan/2011/10/05/gIQAzRruTL_story.html ; ‘Iraqi leaders said last week that they want a small contingent of U.S. military trainers to remain, but without immunity from local prosecution, a condition the Obama administration has said it cannot accept. The administration has been planning to keep 3,000 to 5,000 military trainers in the country if the two sides can hammer out an agreement.’

(3) = New York Times Magazine 01 May 2005 ‘The Way of the Commandos’, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ARMY.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

(4) = Shane Bauer ‘Iraq’s new death squad’ in The Nation 6th June 2009, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/bauer

(5) = See the blogpost linked below – the part under the sub-heading ‘Killing and torturing Iraqis’ and sources 16 to 41 on it http://inplaceoffear.blogspot.com/2010/09/are-iraqis-better-off-as-result-of-2003.html

(6) = Mother Jones 11 Jun 2011 ‘How Not to Withdraw from Iraq’http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/withdrawal-iraq-american-embassy-size

(7) = White House Office of the Press Secretary 12 Dec 2011 ‘Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister al-Maliki of Iraq in a Joint Press Conference’, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/12/remarks-president-obama-and-prime-minister-al-maliki-iraq-joint-press-co

(8) = Forward 24 Sep 2007 ‘The World Can Live With a Nuclear Iran’, http://www.forward.com/articles/11673/

(9) = CNN 18 Sep 2007 ‘Retired general: U.S. can live with a nuclear Iran’, http://articles.cnn.com/2007-09-18/world/france.iran_1_nuclear-weapon-nuclear-program-nuclear-fuel?_s=PM:WORLD

(10) = NYT 21 Aug 2004 ‘Sharon on the warpath : Is Israel planning to attack Iran?’, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/opinion/21iht-edcreveld_ed3_.html

Fracking Insane - scientific evidence shows fracking causes illness by contaminating water and air with methane gas and toxic chemicals

2011-12-13T03:38:00.011Z

The only reports saying it doesn’t are funded by the companies involved in fracking

Fracking or ‘hydraulic fracturing’ for shale gas has been being carried out for decades in the US and has now been approved by the British Coalition government (including Lib Dem minister Chris Hune) in Lancashire, including near Blackpool and by the Scottish SNP government in Scotland near Dumfries – with plans for more elsewhere (1) – (2).

This is either a major mistake due to governments being taken in by propaganda and supposedly objective scientific studies funded by the companies involved; or else they are selling out the people they're meant to represent.

Oil companies who want to carry out ‘fracking’ (hydraulic fracturing) for gas are constantly claiming that there is ‘no evidence’ that fracking causes pollution of ground water or drinking water and no evidence it causes illnesses due to chemical and methane gas poisoning.

That claim is completely false. There’s lots of evidence of methane gas pollution of drinking water and ground water caused by fracking, found over decades, right up to the present ; and some recent evidence of chemicals used in fracking polluting water supplies.

The Evidence that Fracking causes air and water pollution with methane gas and fracking chemicals and serious illness

There’s a 1987 US environmental Protection Agency report on methane pollution of water supplies due to fracking in the mid-1980s in the US (3).

Those details of that report were not publicised by the EPA at the time for the same reason that most investigations of the effects of fracking are withheld for decades in the US - because big companies involved in fracking threatened people with law suits and legal bills they couldn’t afford if they continued to mention it ; and offered massive pay outs for ‘sealed court’ settlements on the other hand.

There are also recent scientific studies of dozens of fracking operations which found that ‘In aquifers overlying the Marcellus and Utica shale formations of northeastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York, we document systematic evidence for methane contamination of drinking water associated with shale-gas extraction.’ (4)

There are also studies from 1999 to the present showing levels of methane in well water in areas where fracking has taken place being vastly greater than in other areas – often high enough to cause explosions (5) – (7).

The US EPA has also recently found evidence of pollution of water in Wyoming with chemicals used in fracking there (8).

The documentary film ‘gasland’, which showed people made seriously ill by air and water pollution and tapwater which could be set on fire as a result of fracking, is constantly attacked as ‘propaganda’ and ‘unscientific’ by the oil and gas companies and their lawyers. In fact it is supported by all of the above scientific evidence; and the main critics of Gasland have been revealed as industry front groups – especially Energy in Depth, whose funders are all companies involved in fracking (9) – (10).

BBC reports from Pennsylvania show the same problem – tapwater so full of methane and other chemicals that it can be set on fire – as the Gasland documentary did , as well as the same serious illnesses among residents within days of fracking beginning, including barium poisoning (11).

Many of the supposedly objective scientific studies of fracking which claim there’s no evidence it pollutes water supplies are directly or indirectly funded by the oil and gas companies involved in fracking.

Even one of these studies (by the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh) admits that ‘Air pollution is another factor that must be taken into consideration. Near the end of the well development, there is a practice called flaring that is used to get rid of the waste gas that is not able to be used. The excess gas is essentially set ablaze, leaving flames spewing far into the sky, burning for days on end, and emitting a significant amount of noxious gases.’ (12)

The Swanson study quotes it’s ‘additional resources’ as including another supposedly objective academic study ‘The Economic Impacts of the Marcellus Shale: Implications for New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia’ which was a study funded by the ‘Marcellus Shale Coalition’, which factcheck.org found is in fact a trade association of companies involved in fracking for gas in the US (13) – (15).

A look at the full members of the Marcellus Shale Coalition and the funders of Energy in Depth shows they are the same companies (16) – (17).

Reports by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette found the Universities of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania are among those who refuse to provide details on what departments and studies were funded by private companies, let alone which private companies; and that campus associations and other proxy groups of these universities are taking money from the oil and gas companies for fracking operations on land owned by the universities, giving their studies of fracking another source of bias and conflict of interest (18) – (19).

Unsurprisingly the Swanson report ends with the standard (and false) industry line that ‘It is important to note that not one case of pollution due to hydraulic fracturing has ever been recorded, though there have been occurrences due to other stages of the drilling process’ (my emphasis) (20)

The second part of the sentence seems to be making a distinction which in practice reveals how dishonest the first part of the sentence is. It’s just a semantic trick - playing with words by pretending that the stage of the fracking process which causes methane gas or chemical pollution of water supplies makes any difference.

The costs of fracking vastly outweigh the benefits

What will the costs be in terms of polluting farmland and drinking water supplies if fracking is allowed to continue? What will the cost be to the NHS and in lives of making large numbers of people ill , requiring treatment and unable to work, from methane and chemical pollution of drinking water and air due to fracking? What will be the cost in lives as people start dying due to fracking pollution of air and water supplies? How can jobs for some justify illness and death for far more people?

Is the plan perhaps that the number of people who die will reduce the unemployment statistics in the long run and that any who become too ill to work in the meantime will be classed as disabled rather than unemployed?

Any local council or national government giving permission for fracking is failing to protect the health and lives of it’s own people and is opening itself up to legal action and massive costs in the future, plus the responsibility for allowing the illness and death of large numbers of people and pollution that may last long after any jobs provided by fracking are gone. We have other industries we can create jobs and provide energy with – wind power, wave power and tidal power.

The economic benefit of the jobs created will be cancelled out by the bill in illness, death and increased food costs as polluting ground water will also reduce food production by killing crops and animals.

With climate change increasing droughts and the spread of desert and water use draining acquifers and rivers to the point they can’t recover across the world from California to the Middle East, water may be the ‘blue gold’ of the twenty first century (21) – (23). Permanently polluting it for gas supplies that may last only a few decades is not wise either.

What You Can Do

In Scotland:

Email First Minister Alec Salmond on this address - Alex.Salmond.msp@scottish.parliament.uk and the Scottish cabinet scottish.ministers@scotland.gsi.gov.uk citing the scientific evidence from the US that fracking causes air and water pollution and serious illnesses and asking them to ban fracking in Scotlandon those grounds .

Please also forward this email, or send an email with a link to this blog post to everyone you know who might sign.

In Wales:

Email the First Minister carwyn.jones@wales.gsi.gov.uk

Please also forward this email, or send an email with a link to this blog post to everyone you know who might sign.

In England or anywhere in the UK

Sign the UK government e-peitition calling for total ban on fracking in the UK, and/or the petition for a moratorium until further study .

You can email Prime Minister David Cameron on this link or write to him by post on the address on this link.

You can email UK Energy Minister Chris Huhne at this address ps.chris.huhne@decc.gsi.gov.uk.

To contact your local councillor, MP, MSP or member of the London, Welsh or Northern Ireland Assemblies go to this link.

Support the campaign to get 38 degrees to start a campaign against fracking in Scotland, England and Wales – add a comment and give 3 votes to the suggestion (this is not vote rigging – 38 degrees allows people 7 votes on what campaign suggestions it should take up at any time).

Please also forward this email, or send an email with a link to this blog post, to everyone you know who might sign.

In the US

You can contact your elected representatives at any level of government through the contact details on this website , refer them to the studies showing fracking causes air and water pollution and serious illnesses and ask them to call for a ban on it.

There are also petitions you can sign up to including Save the Water Table’s petition to ban fracking.

Please also forward this email, or send an email with a link to this blog post, to everyone you know who might sign.

Sources

(1) = Guardian.co.uk 02 Nov 2011 ‘Fracking 'probable' cause of Lancashire quakes’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/02/fracking-cause-lancashire-quakes

(2) = Scotland on Sunday 05 Nov 2011 ‘Fracking’ for gas given the green light’, http://www.scotsman.com/scotland-on-sunday/scotland/fracking_for_gas_given_the_green_light_1_1950654

(3) = US Environmental Protection Agency 1987 ‘Report to Congress – Management of Wastes from the Exploration, Development and Production of Crude Oil, Natural Gas and Geothermal Energy – Volume 1 of 3 – Oil and Gas’,http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/drilling-down-documents-7.html

(4) = Osborn, Stephen G et al (2011) ‘Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing’in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 17, 2011 vol. 108 no. 20 8172-8176http://www.pnas.org/content/108/20/8172.short

(5) = Holzman, DC (2011) ‘Methane Found in Well Water Near Fracking Sites’ in Environ Health Perspectives 119 (01 Jul 1999),http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.119-a289

(6) = AP 5/9/2011 ‘Methane in water near gas drilling sites, study finds’,http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42964307/ns/us_news-environment/t/methane-water-near-gas-drilling-sites-study-finds/#.TuPXPHpU2uI

(7) = CNN money 10 May 2011 ‘Tainted drinking water found near gas wells’, http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/09/news/economy/natural_gas_fracking_duke/index.htm

(8) = Bloomberg 12 Dec 2011 ‘Wyoming’s Tainted Water Puts Pressure on EPA to Act on Gas Fracking’,http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-12/wyoming-s-tainted-water-pressures-epa-on-to-act-on-gas-fracking.html

(9) = http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/

(10) = The Independent Petroleum Association of America 05 Jun 2009 ‘Hydraulic Fracturing under attack’,http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/HFUnderFire.pdf , ‘The "Energy In Depth" project would not be possible without the early financial commitments of: El Paso Corporation, XTO Energy, Occidental Petroleum, BP, Anadarko, Marathon, EnCana, Chevron, Talisman, Shell, API, IPAA, Halliburton, Schlumberger and the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.’

(11) = BBC news 28 Nov 2011 ‘How fracking affects a community in Pennsylvania’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-15919248

(12) = Korey A. Kirker & Ryan N. Burger (2011) ‘JUST THE FRACKING FACTS’, Swanson School of Engineering 9 April 20011, University of Pittsburgh , Eleventh Annual Freshman Conference, http://136.142.82.187/eng12/history/spring2011/pdf/1267.pdf

(13) = see (10) above)

(14) = Condisine, Timothy J et al (2011) ‘The Pennsylvania Marcellus Natural Gas Industry: Status, Economic Impacts, and Future Potential’, Pennsylvania State University College of Earth and Mineral Sciences Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering http://marcelluscoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Final-2011-PA-Marcellus-Economic-Impacts.pdf , p ii ‘Acknowledgements The authors of this study acknowledge that the Marcellus Shale Coalition provided the funding for this study.’

(15) = Factcheck.org 14 Oct 2011 ‘Just the Fracking Facts’, http://www.factcheck.org/2011/10/just-the-fracking-facts/

(16) = Marcellus Shale Coalition – Full Members, http://marcelluscoalition.org/about/full-members/

(17) = See (10) above

(18) = Pittsburgh Post Gazette 07 Nov 2011 ‘Corporate funding of Marcellus Shale studies at universities raises alarms’http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11311/1188150-503.stm#ixzz1gApAdRyG (details companies involved in fracking funding studies of fracking at American universities, some of whom refuse to provide details of who funds research – including Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pittsburgh)

(19) = Pittsburg Post Gazette 06 Nov 2011 ‘Drilling on Campus: Marcellus Shale boom puts colleges at crossroads’, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11310/1187594-113.stm#ixzz1gB2BK1jO (details how students associations and campus groups in Pennsylvania university are selling drilling rights for fracking operations to companies on campus)

(20) = See (12) above

(21) = Reuters 14 Dec 2009 ‘California aquifers seen rapidly losing water’, http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/12/15/us-water-california-idUSTRE5BE0FP20091215

(22) = US geological survey ‘Groundwater depletion’, http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html

(23) = BBC News 06 Oct 2009 ‘Jordan faces up to water crisis’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8292228.stm

Not everyone working in finance or banking is to blame; but we're not all equally responsible for the financial crisis either

2011-12-12T23:34:00.004Z

Some of my posts might give the impression I blame all London financial workers for the financial crisis and think any employment in that sector is morally wrong. That’s not the case of course.

The top management of banks are responsible; anyone involved in futures trading in food and then buying up food supplies to drive up the price is doing something immoral; and futures trading and currency trading for profit should be banned.

Anyone taking commissions or fees to get people to take out mortgages they couldn’t afford was doing something wrong. So was anyone taking payments to buy or sell ‘collateral debt obligations’ or other dodgy financial instruments.

There are plenty of people employed in banks or as financial advisers who weren’t involved in any of this though and should not be blamed for the actions of others.

I don’t accept the argument that everyone is equally responsible for the financial crisis, or that only governments were responsible for de-regulating.

A bank manager or mortgage broker will usually be better educated and have far more inside knowledge to judge whether a mortgage or loan can be repaid than desperate people trying to get their own home or a loan to tide them over. Many of the former also took commission payments or fees on these transactions, so they knew they would benefit personally from it no matter what happened in the long run.

The top management of the banks and hedge funds and others – and their lobbyists- lobbied for deregulation and then used it to committ fraud on a massive scale; and they’ve not stopped lobbying against re-regulation.

However responsibly advising people on investments is not immoral; nor is organising loans on reasonable interest rates to people or businesses, nor working as a cashier in a bank.

The average figures for city of London financial sector pay and bonuses almost certainly hide big gaps between people at the top and bottom of many banks and other institutions too.

A sense of entitlement doesn’t mean wanting a job and a pension , Sir Roger Carr, it means unlimited greed at the expense of others

2011-12-10T00:19:00.005Z

Many of the same people who are paying themselves salaries from several hundred thousands to millions every year, plus the same again in bonuses, are condemning public sector employees for their ‘sense of entitlement’ in wanting jobs and pensions; and the unemployed for wanting to have enough money to eat. One of them is Sir Roger Carr, the head of the CBI (Confederation of British Industry).

Last month the Independent reported Sir Roger telling a conference sponsored by Barclays bank’s corporate division that

“Most of us... have grown up in the West with a sense of entitlement – to jobs, opportunity, wealth,” he said. “What's happening all around us is a cultural cold shower, a move from entitlement, a recognition that things have changed, nothing is by right: we have to earn our place in a vigorously competitive world as individuals and as nations.”

adding that “We need to encourage all those in positions of authority – government, opposition, regulators and commentators – to stop the demonisation of industry: banking, energy or defence.” (1)

Because of course it’s “demonisation” to place the blame for the crisis on the people who actually caused it, who demanded deregulation, got it and used it to commit fraud on a massive scale – often by buying and selling worthless ‘assets’ like collateral debt obligations and demanding a commission on each sale.

In Carr’s world, if regulators so much as criticise these industries now, never mind actually regulate them (little sign of that) that’s ‘demonisation’.

Demonising energy industry executives’ sense of entitlement

Since 2004 Sir Roger has been chairman of Centrica, which owns British Gas, of which Scottish Gas is a subsidiary.

According to Centrica’s website, Carr’s salary in 2010 was £470,000, up from £450,000 in 2009, while in 2011 there was an average fall of 4.5% for everyone employed in the UK(far more for those made unemployed). Carr earned an absolute amount 18 times higher than median earnings in the UK of around £26,000 for most people in 2010 and 2011(2) – (4).

That’s only the pay for one of his four paid jobs, which, according to the CBI website, also include ‘deputy chairman & senior independent director of the Court of the Bank of England... senior advisor to KKR - the world's largest private equity company’ and ‘visiting fellow of Said Business School, University of Oxford’.

The Bank of England jobs seem to pay at least £150,000 a year based on the bank’s annual report, bringing Carr’s annual income to a minimum of £620,000 in 2010, or 23 times median earnings, without including his pay from KKR or the University of Oxford (5) .

Sam Laidlaw, the Chief Executive of Centrica, had a basic salary of £2 million in 2010. He also had shares and pension payments worth between £2 millionand £8million. That makes Laidlaw’s pay somewhere between 76 and 380 times median earnings in the UK (6) – (7).

I’d be surprised at his lack of self-consciousness in accusing the majority of people of ‘a sense of entitlement’ in these circumstances, but as the late American economist J.K Galbraith often pointed out, people making huge amounts of money often convince themselves this must be due to their own genius rather than to any unfairness or fault in the system they work in – and that anyone who has far less must have less due to their moral failings.

British Gas is one of the ‘big six’ British energy companies found to have continually increased it’s prices above rises in it’s costs, to have maintained price increases permanently after short term increases in the price of buying gas wholesale and to have failed to pass on anything like the full reduction in wholesale costs when prices fell.

A study by Manchester University found that‘In the first six months of 2004, retail electricity prices were on average £1.93 per 100 kilowatt hour higher than the wholesale measure. By 2010 this gap had more than doubled, to over £4. It narrowed in 2011 as a result of well-publicised cost increases in the wholesale market, but averaged £2.73 in summer – even before the price rises passed on to householders by the big six this autumn….. around 80% of the winter price spike was passed to the consumer price, but when wholesale markets fell in summer, retail prices moved far less – only around 50% of the amount… The data also shows that when wholesale prices suddenly spike – as they did in 2009 – consumer prices rapidly follow suit. However, prices fall back more slowly and to a lesser degree after the wholesale price spike abates.’ (8)

In short, profiteering on gas prices when the majority are suffering pay cuts in real terms and the poorest and pensioners are having to choose whether to heat their homes or eat.

Not only that, but an estimated 2,700 people in Britain will die this winter due to cold – due to being unable to afford to heat their homes(9).

That makes Sir Roger’s condemnation of the ‘sense of entitlement’ of others ring very hollow. In fact it makes it sound like the massive arrogance and smugness of someone who feels entitled to profit at everyone else’s expense – much like the hedge fund managers and the bank chief executives and government ministers.

It also makes his claim that the regulators are demonising the energy industry sound pretty far fetched ; and difficult to understand why a government which claims “we’re all in it together” thought he deserved to be given a knighthood in January this year.

Demonising the Defence Industry

Now I find myself itching at the fingertips to demonise the defence industry some, partly because it’s just so easy.

It has been arming murdering dictatorships like Saddam Hussein’s (in the 1970s and 1980s) and the Saudis (today). If the dictators fail to pay then the Arms Export Credit Guaranteesystem means the taxpayer in the UK pays the bill, as they did after the 1991 war with Saddam.

Until well into the Arab Spring British arms companies were also arming the dictatorships shooting protesters across the Arab world, with the approval of the Cameron government (10).

The defence industry gets government subsidies on a scale which most civilian manufacturing companies can only dream of – including the continuation of the construction of two of the largest aircraft carriers ever built by BAEsystems.

The excuse given by David Cameron is that the last government supposedly drafted the contracts in a way that would make cancellation more expensive than paying for both to be completed. Yet when the National Audit Office questioned this and requested documents on the cost and the terms of the contract, Cameron refused to let them see any of them. When the NAO got hold of some documents, they found the cost has increased from £3.65 billion in 2007 to £6 billion today and probably £10 billion in the end. One will be ‘left in a state of “extended readiness”(i.e left to rust) when it’s finished in 2016, while the other won’t have any planes till 2020, when it’ll have just 6, then 12 in 2023(11) – (14).

That’s just one example of how the MoD subsidises arms companies for billions at taxpayers’ expense every year, using money that could provide services, fund research and development of new technologies and medicines, or provide loans to civilian industries that provide far more jobs.

Here are a couple of others.

The senior management of the banking, financial, energy and defence industries seem to think it’s clever to try to turn accusations of a ‘sense of entitlement’ back onto the majority. It lacks any credibility.

(1) = Independent 22 Nov 2011 ‘CBI president attacks 'sense of entitlement' ’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cbi-president-attacks-sense-of-entitlement-6265921.html

(2) = Centrica Annual Report and Accounts 2010 – Financials – Summary Reports -Directors' emoluments, pension benefits and interests in shares’ , http://www.centrica.com/files/reports/2010ar/index.asp?pageid=49

(3) = Guardian.co.uk 23 Nov 2011 ‘UK incomes fall 3.5% in real terms, ONS reveals’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/23/uk-household-earnings-fall?commentpage=last#end-of-comments(including people in part-time jobs, fall is 4.5% including inflation – a 0.5% rise minus 4.5% inflation)

(4) = Office for National Statistics ‘2011 Annual Survey of Hours and Earning -Median full-time gross annual earnings’, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ashe/annual-survey-of-hours-and-earnings/ashe-results-2011/ashe-statistical-bulletin-2011.html#tab-Annual-earnings

(5) = Bank of England Annual Report 2010 - Remuneration of Governors, Directors and MPC members, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/annualreport/2010/renumeration2010.pdf (page 40 under sub-heading ‘Other senior executives’)

(6) = See (2) above

(7) = Centrica – Governance - Aligning rewards with results - Remuneration mix', http://www.centrica.com/files/reports/2010ar/index.asp?pageid=54 (shows salary makes up only about 20% of executives total annual payments)

(8) = guardian.co.uk 02 Dec 2011 ‘Big six energy firms face fresh accusations of profiteering’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/02/energy-firms-accusations-profiteering-electricity

(9) = guardian.co.uk 19 Oct 2011 ‘Fuel poverty 'will claim 2,700 victims this winter'’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/oct/19/fuel-poverty-2700-victims-winter

(10) = guardian.co.uk 21 Jul 2011 ‘MP attacks Hague over review of arms sales to Arab regimes’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/21/uk-arms-sales-middle-east , ‘Senior MPs have delivered a severe rebuke to the government over its approval of the sale of a wide range of arms, including sniper rifles, machine guns and "crowd control goods" to countries in the Middle East and north Africa……….Britain supplied the weapons despite official guidelines stating that exports of equipment that could be used for internal repression must be blocked. In a damning report earlier this year, the Commons arms export controls committees demanded an urgent review of exports to "authoritarian regimes worldwide"………..They referred specifically to the Mubarak and Gaddafi regimes in Egypt and Libya, to Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Observers said military trucks sent by the Saudis to help suppress demonstrations in Bahrain were British.’

(11) = Guardian 07 Jul 2011 ‘National Audit Office challenges £6bn project to build aircraft carriers’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/07/nao-report-aircraft-carriers-navy

(12) = guardian.co.uk 11 Jul 2011 ‘David Cameron 'prevented independent watchdog seeing aircraft carrier papers'’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/11/david-cameron-aircraft-carriers

(13) = Channel 4 News 07 Jul 2011 ‘Guardian 07 Jul 2011 ‘Full fact check : the real cost of cancelling aircraft carriers’http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-the-real-cost-of-cancelling-aircraft-carriers/7210; ‘In 2007, the Labour government decided to build two 65,000-ton Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers at an estimated cost of £3.65bn….But since then, costs have spiralled dramatically, with the projected outlay now thought to be £6.24bn for just one fully operational carrier, the Queen Elizabeth…..The second ship – the Prince of Wales – will be built, but left in a state of “extended readiness”, meaning that fighter planes won’t be able to launch from or land on its deck…..It gets worse: the NAOnow thinks the eventual bill for the programme “will significantly exceed £10 billion”.’

(14) = Guardian 29 Nov 2011 ‘MPs warn Royal Navy's carriers will be costly, late, and of limited use’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/29/royal-navy-carriers-impaired-use-public-accounts-committee ; government admits one carrier to be mothballed on construction in 2016, one to have no planes on it till 2020, when it will have only 6, raised to 12 in 2023

If you’re blaming public sector employees, the unemployed or immigrants, you’re being divided and conquered by the real culprits

2011-12-09T23:30:00.006Z

While the majority of people in employment in the UK have had pay rises below inflation, effective cuts of an average of 4.5% ; the average city (i.e London financial sector) employee has seen their pay increase by 12% in the last six months, while managing directors have had a 21% increase (1) – (2). That’s equivalent to 19% and 37% rises in a year, after inflation. So the real division on pay and conditions is not public vs private sector, but ‘the city’ and top bank executives versus everyone else.

The endless rhetoric about supposedly ‘privileged’ public sector workers and unemployed ‘scroungers’ (while there are at least 6 people unemployed for every job vacancy) is just crude divide and conquer tactics.

The average London financial sector employee will get paid £83,000 plus a £20,000 bonus – or £103,000, compared to a median wage of £26,000 for the UK as a whole (3) – (4).

Around 710,000 public sector workers have either lost their job or are about to lose it, along with many people in the private sector who’ve lost their jobs due to the knock on effects of a fall in consumer demand caused by the reduced income of the now unemployed public sector workers, or because banks have refused their business routine bridging loans.

It’s not so good either, if you are on a low income and live in socially rented housing, with the government having capped housing benefit and allowed rents in the social sector to rise to 80% of private sector rates, which are also rising as less people can afford to buy their own house, resulting in more renting (5) – (7). In fact many people who relied on social housing are being made homeless – and in the case of the others taxpayers are being forced to pay more to support them by the lifting of the cap on how much landlords in the ‘social’ sector can charge.

So the Coalition’s policies are good for a small minority – mostly in the markets or the city, advertising, public relations and media ownership, at the expense of the vast majority. It talks about the need to ‘protect’ the city and ‘maintain market confidence’, rewarding the people who caused the crisis, while punishing people who do jobs that benefit other people (8).

That’s why it’s been vital for the political success of the Conservative party (and their allies in the ‘city’ or ‘markets’ and banks) that the majority who are suffering should be divided from one another to eliminate the risk of the majority uniting against the small minority in whose interests the Conservatives are acting.

The unemployed as ‘scroungers’ – even though there aren’t nearly enough jobs for all of them

Decades of propaganda from tabloids owned by billionaires and from a Conservative party (and sometimes a New Labour party) largely funded by billionaires and multi-millionaires has been devoted to creating scapegoats – targets to divert blame away from the people who have the actual power and wealth.

One target has been the unemployed – supposedly all parasites who don’t want to work, despite the fact that the figures show there have never been enough jobs for all the unemployed during economic booms never mind during the worst recession since the 1930s.

The Office for National Statistics figures for July to October 2011 show that there were 462,000 job vacancies, compared to 2.62 million people unemployed – around 6 people unemployed for every job (and due to many methods of fiddling the figures developed by governments over the years, that is almost certainly an underestimate of the number of people unemployed) (9) – (10).

It’s undoubtedly true that a minority don’t want to work. If there are no jobs available for them even if they did want to, that’s pretty academic though.

The Daily Mail was outraged that Chancellor George Osborne increased benefits in line with inflation – by 5.2%, talking about this as a ‘big rise’ – it’s not. It only stops them being reduced by inflation – in practice they stay at the same level – about £60 a week – rather than being cut.

The propaganda seems to work as intended though, dividing the employed from the unemployed and even getting some of each to vote entirely against their own interests in and in the interests of billionaires and big multinational companies, on the assumption that any ‘benefit reforms’ will target only the undeserving, lazy unemployed and not them.

Which is more of a parasite? Someone on unemployment benefit getting £60 a week? Or a large company, a primary PFI contractor, which gets taxpayers to pay it dozens of times the amount they would pay in interest on a loan to fund construction of a new hospital or school? There’s no doubt the latter get a lot more public money for nothing.

Immigrants and the EU

Then there are immigrants – who don’t get any benefits unless granted refugee status – and then get benefits well below those given to British citizens. They, like the EU, are foreign – and so an easy target to deflect blame on to. The city traders who helped cause the crisis are British; and so supposedly on our side, even after causing the entire problem and being grossly over-paid for jobs many of which harm the majority of people.

Public sector Vs Private Sector

Finally there are the supposedly ‘cushy’ jobs held by public sector workers with ‘gold plated’ pensions. Osborne talks about public sector workers being ‘paid for’ by workers in the private sector, as if public sector workers aren’t doing vital jobs looking after NHS patients, saving people from fires, arresting criminals, teaching children; and as if public sector workers don’t pay tax at the same rate as private sector employees.

While Cameron and Osborne sack hundreds of thousands of these people to keep ‘the markets; who caused the crisis happy, Cameron has pledged to protect ‘the city’ against any EU actions that might reduce their profits.

There are some private sector workers who do vital jobs – there are a lot who fit the description ‘parasite’ very well though – the hedge fund managers trading in food futures traders in ‘the city’ who effectively spend their time betting that the price of food will rise, then buying up food to ensure it does, causing starvation for many of the poorest people in the world and hunger even for some of the poorest here.

What I don’t understand is how so many people are so easily conned over and over again? How long will they continue to fall for such obvious divide and conquer tactics and be diverted into pointless arguments between the middle class and the working class, between the employed and the unemployed, between public sector workers and private sector workers?

(New Labour government ministers who were on a pay of over £100,000 a year and many of them – including Tony Blair – formerly lawyers – also played the ‘middle class’ vs ‘working class’ divide and conquer card, pretending that lawyers turned MPs and government ministers were working class heroes.)

The vast majority of people working in the public and private sectors, even up to the managers of small and medium sized businesses, are doing work that does benefit society as a whole and are paid a fraction of what the bank and hedge fund managers get.

Yet while bank managers and the heads of the biggest firms are paying themselves between millions and tens of millions a year, plus the same again in bonuses, often at taxpayers’ expense in bailed out banks, the Conservatives’ tactics of divide and rule ensure many peoples’ anger is directed not at the real parasites, but at other people who are also their victims.

(1) = Astbury Marsden Compensation Survey 2011 – Banking Infrastructure London,http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:tN8-iJkGpa8J:www.astburymarsden.com/documents/Astbury%2520Marsden%2520Compensation%2520Survey%25202011_Banking%2520Infrastructure%2520London%2520small.pdf+Astbury+Marsden+report+city+pay&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjCp35WxasQC0uKU6hyPufcF3PKQgqywr0k1qNAEGK_4wMSeFBhohPhKrGo7oTiY4RLukF4E51KGYTxH6kmRfhX-1zs80hIKdv6Ckao6ZzZxFrjD6HI5anmt52lZR3QiNTc0ttx&sig=AHIEtbS9vlPCGJzgvi4HFde7s45wAlnw_w

(2) = guardian.co.uk 23 Nov 2011 ‘UK incomes fall 3.5% in real terms, ONS reveals’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/23/uk-household-earnings-fall?commentpage=last#end-of-comments(including people in part-time jobs, fall is 4.5% including inflation – a 0.5% rise minus 4.5% inflation)

(3) = Guardian 28 Nov 2011 ‘Banks under fresh pressure to curb bonus and dividend payouts’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/28/banks-curb-bonuses-dividends

(5) = BBC News 27 Oct 2010 ‘No change to housing benefit plan – Cameron’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11633163

(6) = guardian.co.uk 22 Nov 2011 ‘Housing strategy prices people out of homes’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/22/housing-strategy-prices-people-homes

(7) = guardian.co.uk 16 Sep 2011 ‘UK rents rise by record amount in August’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/sep/16/rents-rise-record-amount-august

(8) = Guardian 07 Dec 2011 ‘David Cameron threatens veto if EU treaty fails to protect City of London’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/07/cameron-threatens-veto-eu-treaty

(9) = Office for National Statistics ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2011’, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2011/index.html

(10) = Labour market statistics: 16 Nov 2011 – Vacancies - http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2011/statistical-bulletin.html#tab-Vacancies

Neither Cameron’s concern for the City of London financial traders who caused the crisis nor Eurozone balanced budgets will solve the real problems

2011-12-09T22:54:00.000Z

It’s hard to know which is worse between David Cameron’s concern for regulations that might harm the ‘City of London’ - i.e the stock market traders, hedge fund managers and bank executives who caused the crisis - at the expense of everyone else; or the Eurozone governments’ fantasy that balanced budgets will solve everything.

Both ignore the actual causes of the crisis – deregulation of the financial sector leading to massive fraud causing a crisis when it was discovered and global recession.

In addition the Eurozone ‘fiscal unity’ plan ignores the fact that trade between countries with stronger and weaker economies will inevitably lead to trade imbalances and so deficits in the governments of the weaker economies unless there is major redistribution from wealthier to poorer economies, invested in development.

The Franco-German plan at least recognises that re-regulation of the financial sector is necessary to avoid another crisis, even if it doesn’t go far enough in re-regulating.

Balanced budgets will do nothing to prevent another banking crisis, because it doesn’t prevent debts being run up by the banks and other ‘financial institutions’ in the private sector again, nor does it stop them developing and fraudulently trading new ‘financial instruments’.

A balanced budget does nothing to guarantee a strong economy either. In fact it may prevent borrowing to invest in developing new technologies and infrastructure that would lead to development in the future; and it prevents governments ending recessions through stimulus packages.

Why would any national government give up control of how much it taxes and borrows to the Euro-zone?

Even states of the US in a federal system don't give up that power (though extreme free market ideology has led many of them to practically abolish taxes, leading to bankruptcy at the state level in California and elsewhere).

There is pretty much no chance of the Greek, Spanish, Portugese or Italian public approving of the fiscal unity plan in referenda even if it gets through their parliaments; and even the French are intensely nationalistic and unlikely to give up that much sovereignty.

Some French and German politicians have already suggested Greece might wish to leave the euro - so perhaps the fiscal unity plan is intended to force the weaker economies out of the euro-zone, leaving it with maybe France, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Why is there a focus solely on levels of debt when Germany's debt as a percentage of GDP in 2011 is expected to be 81.1% of GDP according to German government projections (1). So how can it lecture Greece or Italy on debt? Like other European countries, it's debt only became a critical problem due to the recession which resulted from the financial crisis.

So I don’t blame Cameron for refusing to sign up to the fiscal unity deal – I blame him for only defending the interests of city traders who have retained incomes including bonuses averaging over £100,000 a year , including a 12% average pay increase in the last six months (equivalent to 19% in the last year when 5% inflation is taken into account), while he sacks hundreds of thousands of public sector employees on a fifth or less of that wage who provide healthcare, education, policing and emergency services while many city traders profit from the suffering of others and are grossly over-paid for jobs that do more harm than good to other people (2) - (3).

City of London financial traders are the last people who need protected from ‘bureaucracy’ – they need reined in hard, with regulators coming down on them like a ton of bricks to prevent them causing another crisis - and if the government really want to tax the 'haves' and not the 'have nots', they'd be better raising taxes on city traders rather then sacking teachers and nurses.

(1) = Wall Street Journal 28Oct 2011 ‘German Government Now Sees '11 Debt-To-GDP Ratio At 81.1%-Spokesman’, http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20111028-713887.html

(2) = Astbury Marsden Compensation Survey 2011 – Banking Infrastructure London,http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:tN8-iJkGpa8J:www.astburymarsden.com/documents/Astbury%2520Marsden%2520Compensation%2520Survey%25202011_Banking%2520Infrastructure%2520London%2520small.pdf+Astbury+Marsden+report+city+pay&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjCp35WxasQC0uKU6hyPufcF3PKQgqywr0k1qNAEGK_4wMSeFBhohPhKrGo7oTiY4RLukF4E51KGYTxH6kmRfhX-1zs80hIKdv6Ckao6ZzZxFrjD6HI5anmt52lZR3QiNTc0ttx&sig=AHIEtbS9vlPCGJzgvi4HFde7s45wAlnw_w

(3) = Guardian 28 Nov 2011 ‘Banks under fresh pressure to curb bonus and dividend payouts’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/28/banks-curb-bonuses-dividends

We shouldn't listen to the markets who caused the crisis - time the markets were forced to listen to the majority

2011-11-30T15:18:00.008Z

Chancellor George Osborne says his economic policy is aimed at maintaining market confidence – and even his political opponents debate on his terms of “what the markets want”. If “the markets” – an impersonal sounding euphemism for stock market traders, hedge funds and bank executives - could be trusted to make the right decisions, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.

They caused it by demanding deregulation, getting it from governments ideologically driven to “listen to the markets”; and using it to create fraudulent “assets” like collateral debt obligations (a name designed to hide the fact that they were many bad debts packaged together and dressed up as good ones), then selling them to others or buying them and treating them as assets.

Most of them were euphorically confident that this was unprecedented genius that couldn't go wrong and would lead to everlasting and ever accelerating economic growth - right up until the crash - and this wasn't the first time - most of "the markets" believe this every time, never learning from experience. The minority who questioned these practices were laughed at or accused of maliciously trying to destroy others' incomes

No government has made any serious attempt to re-regulate the banks or financial sector since. They’re still out of control and still driven by short term greed, irrational swings between euphoria and panic; and now a selfish determination that everyone else should pay for the hole in their accounts created when everyone realised that marvellous new “financial products” or “financial instruments” like CDOs were worthless frauds.

“The markets” have no idea what policies will benefit the majority in the long term and no interest in the effects on the majority, they only care about how much profit or loss they might make right now. Getting a vote of confidence from a market 'rally' is like getting praise from a drug addict for securing them another hit. It means nothing in terms of the long term, the real problems or the real economy.

That’s why they tell us that we’re supposedly all equally to blame, that “we’re all in it together” and that “market confidence must be maintained”. Bank chief executives continue to award themselves annual incomes of millions a year topped off with millions in bonuses while accusing nurses, teachers and doctors of a “sense of entitlement” for wanting to keep their jobs and pensions.

The solution is to stop listening to “the markets”, start repudiating the debts we supposedly owe them; and demand interest payments on the bail-outs, plus repayment of capital. Governments can loan directly to businesses rather than subsidising banks to do it through quantitative easing.

Keeping on giving in to the people who caused the problem is dangerous and brings no benefits.

The Spanish government agreed to the markets’ demand for austerity measures including sacking public sector employees to avoid having their credit rating cut, then private credit rating agencies cut Spain’s credit rating anyway, citing unemployment as one of the reasons. The private credit rating agencies have a conflict of interest too – as many of them receive payments from the creditors for reports on creditworthiness.

Allowing uncontrolled and unlimited greed is not good, it does not benefit everyone. It brought us the Great Depression and the current crisis, just as it brought the South Sea Island Bubble and Tulipomania in the 18th century long before there was any real government regulation or intervention in the economy , any significant number of people employed in the public sector (other than police, soldiers and tax collectors).

The only period of economic stability (at least for the developed world) was between the end of World War Two when the markets were put under stricter government regulation and the 1970s – when it ended due to fuel price rises caused by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the subsequent OPEC oil price rises on the one hand – and deregulation like British Prime Minister Edward Heath’s scrapping of controls on capital transfers to and from the UK.

The only way to stop one crisis keeeping on turning into another - from financial crisis to recession to euro zone crisis and on and on - is to stop listening to "the markets" and start telling them what government and society will tolerate them doing and what they'll be jailed for

Saif Al Gaddafi & Megrahi Vs Moussa Koussa - Patsies vs Real Criminal aided and abetted by the US government?

2011-11-23T22:13:00.004Z

(the latter a proven torturer and Gaddafi’s intelligence chief at the time of the Lockerbie bombing but “free to travel to and from the UK as he wishes”)

The propagandists tell us that Saif Al Gaddafi is a war criminal who must be brought to justice for the torture and killing of civilians. Yet Gaddafi’s torturer in chief Moussa Koussa, who has been identified by survivors as having personally tortured them himself, faces no ICC charges after he defected from the Gaddafi regime once he realised the writing was on the wall for it. British government spokespeople told the BBC that Koussa is “a free individual, who can travel to and from the UK as he wishes” and allowed him to go into exile in Qatar, another US allied dictatorship which refuses to extradite him (1) – (3).

Koussa had a parallel in Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s Vice President and torturer in chief, who was the favoured candidate of the US government and it’s allies to take over from Mubarak. He, like Koussa, was one of the people that the CIA and MI6 contract out to for torture of prisoners kidnapped illegally under “extra-ordinary rendition” procedures (really just a vaguely legalistic sounding term to cover up illegal kidnapping and torture).

Muammar Gaddafi was certainly guilty of ordering massacres of civilians and torture, but the brutal, sickening, way he was killed did not suggest those who replace him will be any better. The Libyan rebels respond that ‘Gaddafi was a monster’.

Well, if you’re looking for a definition of a monster, a sadist who stabs an unarmed prisoner in the anus with a knife or metal rod to torture them before killing them, as one of the men who captured Gaddafi did, is a pretty good definition. One monster behaving like a monster to another is not justice, it’s just another atrocity (4).

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch confirm that the rebels have already been involved in torturing and killing prisoners and suspected Gaddafi supporters, though so far not nearly as many as were killed or tortured by Gaddafi’s forces. The way Gaddafi was treated does not suggest this will become a smaller problem (5).

If Saif Al Gaddafi is tortured and is not given a fair trial it will be another sign to the world that the Libyan rebels are at least as bad as Gaddafi’s killers were – and if at the same time Koussa, who co-operated with the US and its allies in torturing people based on mere suspicion is allowed to go free, the US government and it’s allies will look like total hypocrites with no moral standing, desperate to have people like Saif, who might reveal it’s involvement in these crimes, silenced, not for his crimes, but to cover up theirs and Koussa’s.

There are plenty of people who knew Saif who say he was attempting to make reforms which his father and hardliners in the regime refused to implement (6).

Then he was forced to make a choice between turning on his own father and helping people who were trying to kill him, or else backing a dictatorship that was killing it’s own people. Can anyone pretend that that would be an easy choice to make if they were put in the same position?

If there is evidence that Saif was involved in ordering torture and murders of civilians then by all means give him a fair trial with witnesses for the defence and prosecution and if he’s found guilty, jail him for it.

Incidentally Koussa, who claims Gaddafi ordered Lockerbie, was Gaddafi’s head of intelligence at the time of Lockerbie – so if the US and British governments believe him, why are they letting him go free, since he would be guilty of that atrocity? Too many people are tripping over their own lies here.

There are many reasons to doubt that another US and British scapegoat – Abdul Baset Al Megrahi – was ever involved in the Lockerbie bombing. His trial was a sham with bribed witnesses, no jury and evidence tampered with according to Scots Law Professor Robert Black, UN Observer Dr. Hans Koechler and Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the bombing.

Is Saif a real war criminal or just another patsy set up by the US and it’s allies? Unless he gets a fair trial, I’d have to suspect it could be the latter.

(1) = BBC News 26 Oct 2011 ‘Gaddafi spy chief Koussa 'tortured' Libya prisoners’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15415793

(2) = BBC News 13 Apr 2011 ‘Moussa Koussa, ex-Gaddafi aide, leaves for Doha talks’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13049308 ‘The most high-profile minister to flee Libya, Moussa Koussa, has left the UK for Qatar, the Foreign Office has said. The former foreign minister had been staying at an undisclosed location in the UK after travelling from Tunisia.

An FCO spokesman said it was understood he would meet the Qatari government and a range of other Libyan representatives in the capital city Doha. A spokesman said Moussa Koussa was "a free individual, who can travel to and from the UK as he wishes".’

(3) = BBC News 23 Oct 2011 ‘Libyan spy chief tracked to Qatar’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15417947

(4) = ‘Libyan rebels 'guilty of torture' says Amnesty’ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/libyan-rebels-guilty-of-torture-says-amnesty-2353988.html , ‘Rebels fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi carried out unlawful killings and torture, human rights group Amnesty International has said….A report based on three months of investigation in Libya, said the crimes of Gaddafi loyalists were far worse than those of the former rebels, who now hold power in Tripoli:….But it said the crimes of the rebels were not insignificant…."Members and supporters of the opposition, loosely structured under the leadership of the National Transitional Council (NTC) ... have also committed human rights abuses, in some cases amounting to war crimes, albeit on a smaller scale," the Amnesty report said.’

(5) = Channel 4 News 25 Oct 2011 ‘Gaddafi buried at dawn in ‘secret’ location’, http://www.channel4.com/news/gaddafi-buried-at-dawn-in-secret-location (scroll down to video and then see under sub-heading ‘Concerns over human rights abuses)

(6) = Time 19 Nov 2011 ‘The Capture of Gaddafi's Son: The Reformer Who Refused to Reform’, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2099890,00.html?xid=gonewsedit , ‘Sawani, who has a political-science doctorate from the University of Canterbury, had been hired by Saif in 2007 to oversee sweeping political reforms in Libya — changes that Saif has long claimed were blocked by his father's hard-liners. In interviews in February 2010 and in March this year, Saif told me that his strong efforts to bring democracy to Libya had been stymied by the Gaddafi regime.’

Repeating the Mistakes of the Past in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain & Saudi – Backing murdering dictatorships to the end will backfire on the US UK & France

2011-11-23T19:20:00.011Z

The US government and it’s allies are about to end up on the wrong side of history by backing dictatorships to the last gasp as they kill their own people, as they did with the Shah of Iran in 1979; and so ensuring, as in Iran, that the new governments will have every reason to be hostile to them for decades to come, as in Iran.

They’re also increasing support for the Islamic extremists they claim to be trying to weaken – nothing boosted Khomeini more than the US backing the Shah as he had his own people killed.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter, on a visit to Iran, made the following statement in a speech to the Shah – the western backed dictator of the country. “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world”(1).

Two years later the Shah had been overthrown and replaced by a government hostile to the US, which gained much of it’s support from the US government backing the Shah to the last moment, even as he had his army shoot hundreds of unarmed protesters dead (2).

Carter, like Obama, was seen as a dove and a progressive, but backed a dictatorship carrying out massacres to the last, just as Obama and Clinton are doing in Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen. (There’s even a widespread myth on the right in the US that Carter didn’t back the Shah to the end).

Earlier this year, just before Mubarak was overthrown by pro-democracy protesters in Egypt, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people” (3). Meanwhile Mubarak’s police were shooting protesters dead in the street, torturing others and Mubarak fell – and so did the US government’s favoured successor Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s Vice President and notorious torturer in chief.

Now the US government and it’s allies are backing General Tantawi (Mubarak’s Defence Minister for 20 years) and a military regime – and even as it’s on the point of falling, they’ve not ended military aid, political support or ‘crowd control’ arms supplies to it. There are similar situations in Bahrain and Yemen, where the US and it’s allies have only called for the dictator Saleh to stand down in favour of his Vice President – following their usual practice of dropping figureheads when they become a liability but continuing support for dictatorships under their deputies.

The US, British and French governments pose as defenders of freedom and democracy, but in fact only back the overthrow of dictatorships where those dictatorships are hostile to them (e.g Syria) or demanding an increased share of oil profits from NATO governments’ oil companies (Libya).

The focus on Libya and Syria is partly about distracting attention for backing for other NATO government backed dictatorships as they massacre pro-democracy protesters ; and partly about distracting from mass unemployment and inequality permitted by governments bought up by senior bankers, big companies and billionaires at home.

The contrast between US, British and French government statements and the tone of media coverage of the torture and killing of protesters in Syria and Libya could not be more different to their statements on exactly the same situations in Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, where they support the dictatorships.

In the first case the calls for military action and the end of the dictatorships never end – in the latter the most that’s ever called for is a dictator to be replaced by their Vice President or one of their Generals – maintaining the dictatorship, the torture and the killings under a new figure-head. British arms sales and training of militaries in many of these dictatorships has never ended either (the only exceptions being a suspension of British arms sales to Bahrain, Libya and Syria). US military aid to Yemen and Egypt has never ended either, despite constant killings of unarmed protesters by those countries’ militaries.

British government claims that it is not arming dictatorships are shown to be lies by it’s granting of arms export licences to Egypt this year and it’s invitations to representatives of the Egyptian, Saudi and Yemeni dictatorships and their militaries in September this year.

Egypt

General Tantawi - Mubarak crony and his current replacement as dictator of Egypt

In Egypt , British Prime Minister David Cameron pretended that the Mubarak’s Generals taking over from Mubarak and Suleiman was democratisation and visited Egypt, Kuwait and other dictatorships to proudly promote British arms sales to the dictatorships of these countries while making the ridiculous claim that “small democracies like Kuwait” need help to arm themselves (4) – (6).

Kuwait has never, ever, been a democracy. Even the US State Department’s reports say it’s an absolute monarchy with a token parliament that has no power whatsoever – and Human Rights Watch reports show that it’s record on human rights and democracy has been getting worse, not better (7) – (12).

As the Egyptian military pile up the bodies of democracy protesters they’ve killed in Tahrir Square, Amnesty International reports that the Egyptian military government has used exactly the same methods as the Mubarak government used – torture, jail without fair trial, killings of opposition supporters by the military, the police and hired plain clothes thugs – but on a larger scale (13) – (14).

The army is trying to whip up violence against the Coptic Christian minority in order to be able to claim that it has had to step in to restore order and protect minorities from extremists – but Coptic Christian marchers in the last march supposedly attacked by Muslim extremists say it was hired government thugs and the army who were firing at them and killing them and running them over with armoured personnel carriers – claims confirmed by videos of those events (15).

Even after this the US government didn’t end military aid funding to the Egyptian military.

The face of General Tantawi, the head of the grandly named ‘High Military Council’, has already been put up on posters across Cairo calling on him to stand for President in the promised elections, supposedly due to popular acclamation. The posters are being promoted by a group calling itself ‘Egypt First’ which is an obvious front group for the military (16).

This flies in the face of military promises that they would field no General as a candidate in elections. On the HMC’s record so far elections will involve arresting opposition candidates and using the police and hired thugs to attack opposition campaigners and voters to ensure a Tantawi win – just as under Mubarak, who held similar elections.

In Egypt as in Yemen they have never called for an end to the dictatorships – only for a change of figurehead at the top of them when it became clear that Mubarak and Saleh had become liabilities rather than assets (scroll down to sub-heading ‘Suleiman the torturer as Mubarak Mark II ?’).

The pretence is that getting rid of the dictator and replacing him with his vice President or his Generals is democratisation. Of course it’s not. General Tantawi is the new ruler of Egypt and plans to rig the next election with continuing jailing, torture and killing of pro-democracy protesters and opposition party supporters and candidates in exactly the same way Mubarak ran elections.

Yet government approved British arms sales to Egypt have never ended; and Egyptian officials were invited to an arms fair in London this September (17) – (19).

Tantawi was Mubarak’s Defence Minister for 20 years and his days are now as numbered as Mubarak’s. The Egyptian military will not survive this – and British and American backing for them will backfire badly if it continues as they will end up facing a government made up of the friends and colleagues of people the Egyptian military jailed, tortured or killed.

Yemen

Photo: Dead and wounded protesters killed in Yemen by US and British trained and funded military units

In Yemen, where the US and British trained and funded military killed dozens of unarmed civilian protesters in the last few weeks – as they have every week since the Arab Spring began – there is no end US and British support for the military units doing the killing. The BBC reported in March that ‘While some other military units have joined the opposition, the elite US- and British-trained troops, headed by Mr Saleh's son and nephew, remain loyal to the president.” (20)

In September Amnesty International reported that ‘security forces used snipers and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) against protesters marching to demand the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.,,Around 26 people were killed on Sunday.’ (21)

AP reported 20 more killed on 20^th October (22).

On 25th October AFP reported ‘In Sanaa and in Yemen's second largest city Taez at least 15 people were killed, according to medical officials and tribal sources…..A seven-year-old child and a woman were among seven people killed in Taez, after what residents said was random shelling by government forces of neighbourhoods.’ (23).

The Arabic Al Arabiya newspaper reported that this was due to ‘mortars and artillery, hitting a hospital and a square where anti-government demonstrators were taking part in the Muslim Friday prayers’ (24)

On November 11^th the US government’s Voice of America news service reported that ‘Yemeni government forces have killed at least six civilians in Taiz, the country's second largest city….Medical officials and witnesses say the civilians were killed early Friday after forces renewed shelling in Taiz, where protesters have been calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh's departure.’ (25)

Yet US military aid to Yemen has continued through almost a full year of this ; as have British arms sales which have also more than doubled in value from £300,000 worth in 2010 to £800,000 in 2011 ; and there’s not a word from the British or American or French governments on ending military aid to Yemen, never mind taking military action to stop the massacre of civilians there which has now been going on for 9 months; plus Yemen’s dictatorship was also invited to arms sales events in London in September this year (26) – (29).

(The £800,000 of arms or dual-use equipment sales to Yemen in 2011 were exported on a single licence, presumably so that British government spokesmen can say they reduced the number of export licences approved in 2011 to one, to sound as if less arms have been exported).

The most the US and it’s allies have come up with is a UN resolution based on a plan created by the Saudi dominated Gulf Co-Operation Council calling for Saleh to step down in favour of his Vice President and some waffle about the “need for dialogue” between the protesters and the government – in other words, as in Egypt, the US government and it’s allies have an aim of keeping the dictatorship but switching dictators to get rid of the one that’s become a liability (30) – (31).

While demanding Saif Al Gaddafi be handed over for trial for war crimes, the US government and it’s allies put forward a UN resolution that gives President Saleh and his allies total immunity from prosecution after months of having unarmed demonstrators killed every week (32).

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia

In Bahrain – another absolute dictatorship that has been torturing, jailing and killing pro-democracy protesters, the US government and it’s allies have similarly never called for the dictatorship to go, never called for action to stop the killing, Instead, as in Yemen and Egypt they call for “restraint from both sides”, express “deep concern” – and keep on backing the dictatorship.

The Saudi military has played a big role in Bahrain – the Saudi monarchy sent them in to help crush the protesters out of fear of a) constitutional monarchy (apparently even this is too much like democracy for the Saudi monarchy) and b) a Shia uprising (much of Saudi Arabia’s oil is in parts of Saudi with a large Shia Muslim population, while the monarchy are radical Wahabbi Sunni Muslims.)

The British government and military have continued training and arming Saudi Arabia’s forces all through this, including in the use of sniper rifles, knowing Saudi troops may then use them in Bahrain, train the Bahraini military in turn, or use them on Saudi pro-democracy protesters if protests begin (33).

A British Parliamentary Select committee was reported as finding that ‘military trucks sent by the Saudis to help suppress demonstrations in Bahrain were British.’ (34).

Bahrain, Libya and Syria are the only countries in which arms sales from the UK seem to have been suspended.

Only look at what we’re doing in Libya and Syria

The war in Libya and the constant demands for action on the similar mass torture and killing of civilians in Syria have never been about protecting civilians or promoting democracy or human rights, but about overthrowing governments which were either not clients of the US and it’s allies (Syria) or which were demanding a higher share of profits from oil companies (Libya).

Gaddafi was a dictator who had civilians tortured and killed, so is Assad – but so are all the dictatorships the US and it’s allies back – in Saudi, Bahrain, Yemen and Egypt.

The war in Libya served a propaganda function for NATO governments in distracting their past (and present) support for murdering, torturing dictatorships – from their past support for (and involvement in) torture by Gaddafi’s torturers ; to the French government’s offer to send riot police to help the Ben Ali dictatorship crush the first Arab Spring protests in Tunisia ; and continuing support for the dictatorships massacring people right now in Egypt and Yemen (35).

Standard power politics – attacking governments who don’t do what they’re told and backing ones that do no matter whether they’re torturing and murdering civilians or not – is presented as if it was high principle.

Because we can’t do everything are you saying we should do nothing where we can do something?

This is the standard propaganda line of NATO governments when asked why they are overthrowing some torturing dictatorships that are massacring their people while actively supporting and arming others. Of course they could do something easily in the cases of the dictatorships they continue to support – they could condemn them, demand they stop killing, torturing and jailing their people, end all military aid and arms sales to them and demand free and fair elections. They don’t. They’ve temporarily halted arms exports to Bahrain and reduced the number approved to Egypt, which is welcome, but their only calls for change are for one dictator to step down in favour of another.

So, no, we’re not saying you should do nothing – we’re saying you should stop supporting dictatorships, torture and massacre in some countries while only selectively opposing them in a handful of others who aren’t your client regimes – and you should stop trying to dress up cold-blooded power politics that has no concern for human suffering or human life, never mind democracy or human rights, as if it was high principle.

Given the hugely different treatment of people and governments guilty of exactly the same crimes, can anyone really believe the NATO governments’ motivations really have anything to do with human rights, freedom or democracy?

Arms Fair events in London, September 2011, 9 months into dictatorships massacring protesters, most murdering dictatorships welcome

The Economist, Channel 4 News and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade all reported on that various arms fairs and arms sale events held by the British government and British arms companies in September this year. The governments invited included ‘Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Vietnam’ as well as Yemen (36) – (37).

Every single one is either a dictatorship or a one party state (Vietnam) with the exception of Nigeria, which is technically a democracy, but in practice a plutocracy where foreign firms can effectively hire government troops and private security forces to attack anyone who opposes them – and massacres of unarmed civilians by government forces are regular occurrences.

Are the profits for a few arms companies worth the torture and deaths of so many people? Will they be worth it if they alienate people from the majority in these countries who will form the new governments in these countries and so harm our foreign and trade relations with them for decades to come, as happened in Iran? Is it worth it if by backing dictatorships that murder their own people we boost support for radical Islamists at the expense of more moderate democrats?

Sources

Repeating the Mistakes of the Past

(1) = Freedman, Lawrence (2008) 'A Choice of Enemies', Weidenfield & Nicolson, London, 2008, Ch 4, page 66

(2) = Pollack, Kenneth M.(2004), ‘The Persian Puzzle', Random House, NY, 2005 paperback, Ch5, p127-140

(3) = Reuters 25 Jan 2011 ‘US urges restraint in Egypt, says government stable’, http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE70O0KF20110125

Egypt

(4) = Independent 22 Feb 2011 ‘Cameron attacked for Egypt visit with defence sales team in tow’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cameron-attacked-for-egypt-visit-with-defence-sales-team-in-tow-2221695.html , ‘David Cameron faced charges of hypocrisy last night after he arrived for a tour of the Gulf with some senior figures from the defence industry…. After leaving Britain early, Mr Cameron became the first world leader to visit Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was toppled…. Mr Cameron is still taking a large delegation from business and industry, including eight representatives of defence firms attempting to secure contracts in the Gulf states. Among them are: Ian King, chief executive of BAE Systems; Alastair Bisset, group international director at QinetiQ; and Rob Watson, regional director of Rolls-Royce.

(5) = guardian.co.uk 21 Feb 2011 ‘David Cameron arrives in Egypt to meet military rulers’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/21/david-cameron-visits-egypt , ‘David Cameron has flown into Cairo amid tight security, becoming the first world leader to visit Egypt since Hosni Mubarak was ousted as president in the revolution 10 days ago….Cameron is due to meet Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak's minister of defence, who is the head of the supreme council of the armed forces….Arms sales are expected to be on the agenda throughout the week, and Cameron insisted there was no contradiction in promoting trade and pushing for political reform, the two themes of the rest of his Middle East trip.’

(6) = guardian.co.uk 22 Feb 2011 ‘David Cameron hits out at critics of Britain's arms trade’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/22/david-cameron-britain-arms-trade

(7) = US Department of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs ‘Background Note : Kuwait’, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35876.htm

(8) = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Kuwait

(9) = Human Rights Watch 21 Jul 2010 ‘Operation Roll Back Kuwaiti Freedom’, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/07/23/operation-roll-back-kuwaiti-freedom

(10) = Human Rights Watch 11 Dec 2010 ‘Kuwait: Permit Peaceful Political Gatherings - Security Forces Violently Disperse Parliamentarians and Professors’, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/12/10/kuwait-permit-peaceful-political-gatherings

(11) = Human Rights watch 31 Jan 2011 ‘Kuwait: Free Speech and Assembly Under Attack’,http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/01/31/kuwait-free-speech-and-assembly-under-attack

(12) = Human Rights Watch World Report 2011: Kuwait , http://www.hrw.org/en/world-report-2011/kuwait ; ‘Freedom of expression markedly deteriorated in 2010. The government continued criminally prosecuting individuals based on nonviolent political speech, denied academics permission to enter the country for conferences and speeches, and cracked down on public gatherings. In April state security forces summarily deported over 30 Egyptian legal residents of Kuwait after some of them gathered to support Egyptian reform advocate Mohammed El Baradei.

In May prominent writer and lawyer Mohammad al-Jassim was detained for over 40 days and charged with "instigating to overthrow the regime, ...slight to the personage of the emir [the ruler of Kuwait],... [and] instigating to dismantle the foundations of Kuwaiti society" over his blog posts criticizing the prime minister. A judge released al-Jassim in June and adjourned the case until October.’

(13) = Independent 22 Nov 2011 ‘Dozens die, the cabinet teeters – and chaos rules’,http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/dozens-die-the-cabinet-teeters--and-chaos-rules-6265837.html , ‘At one point, the police appeared to fire live rounds in the direction of protesters…. five activists could then be seen…carrying a limp middle-aged man…Dr Magdy also said he had seen one dead body, of a person who appeared to have been hit by a live bullet directly through the spleen. "All we're asking for is our freedom," said Hassan Hani… Disturbing footage has since been uploaded on to the internet showing troops and police violently beating a man who appeared to have already been unconscious. Another showed an apparently lifeless protester being dragged across the square and dumped next to a pile of other bodies.’

(14) = Amnesty International Nov 201 ‘Egypt: Military rulers have 'crushed' hopes of 25 January protesters’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/egypt-military-rulers-have-crushed-hopes-25-january-protesters-2011-11-22,‘Egypt's military rulers have completely failed to live up to their promises to Egyptians to improve human rights and have instead been responsible for a catalogue of abuses which in some cases exceeds the record of Hosni Mubarak, Amnesty International said today in a new report…. The report's release follows a bloody few days in Egypt that has left many dead and hundreds injured after army and security forces violently attempted to disperse anti-SCAF protesters from Cairo’s Tahrir square………. “By using military courts to try thousands of civilians, cracking down on peaceful protest and expanding the remit of Mubarak's Emergency Law, the SCAF has continued the tradition of repressive rule which the January 25 demonstrators fought so hard to get rid of," said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Acting Director.’

(15) = BBC News 10 Oct 2011 ‘Egypt clashes: Copts mourn victims of Cairo unrest’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15242413 , ‘Thousands of Egyptian Coptic Christians have gathered for the funerals of protesters killed during clashes with security forces in Cairo on Sunday. Many mourners expressed anger at the army, which they blame for the deaths.The protesters say they were attacked by thugs before the security forces fired on them and drove military vehicles into the crowds.’

(16) = Reuters 26 Oct 2011 ‘Posters back Egyptian army chief for president’, http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL5E7LQ3G720111026

(17) = CAAT Country Data Egypt - Approved UK export licences’, http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countrydata/?country_selected=Egypt, shows 6 approved arms export licences to Egypt in first quarter of 2011

(18) = guardian.co.uk 21 Jul 2011 ‘MP attacks Hague over review of arms sales to Arab regimes’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/21/uk-arms-sales-middle-east , ‘Senior MPs have delivered a severe rebuke to the government over its approval of the sale of a wide range of arms, including sniper rifles, machine guns and "crowd control goods" to countries in the Middle East and north Africa……….Britain supplied the weapons despite official guidelines stating that exports of equipment that could be used for internal repression must be blocked. In a damning report earlier this year, the Commons arms export controls committees demanded an urgent review of exports to "authoritarian regimes worldwide"………..They referred specifically to the Mubarak and Gaddafi regimes in Egypt and Libya, to Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Observers said military trucks sent by the Saudis to help suppress demonstrations in Bahrain were British.’

(19) = Channel 4 News 13 Sep 2011 ‘Arms fair opens in London amid protests’ , http://www.channel4.com/news/arms-fair-opens-in-london-amid-protests ,‘The countries invited from "authoritarian" regimes, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit are: Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Vietnam.’

Yemen

(20) = BBC 26 Mar 2011 ‘Saleh departure in Yemen: A matter of 'when', not 'if'’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12868544 , ‘second last sentence reads ‘While some other military units have joined the opposition, the elite US- and British-trained troops, headed by Mr Saleh's son and nephew, remain loyal to the president.’

(21) = Amnesty International 19 Sep 2011 ‘Yemen violence surges as protesters are killed’,http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/yemen-violence-surges-protesters-are-killed-2011-09-19 , ‘The Yemeni authorities must immediately stop the killing of peaceful protesters by security forces, Amnesty International said today following reports that dozens of people have been shot dead in the capital Sana'a since Sunday….Hundreds more are said to have been injured after security forces used snipers and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) against protesters marching to demand the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.,,Around 26 people were killed on Sunday. The continuing violence has seen more killed in Sana'a today.

(22) = AP 22 Oct 2011 ‘Clashes in Yemeni capital kill 20’, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45000453/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/clashes-yemeni-capital-kill/#.TsvornKKyuI , ‘Clashes between Yemeni government troops and a renegade army unit killed at least 20 people, including three civilians, in the capital Sanaa on Saturday, officials said.’

(23) = Al Arabiya 11 Nov 2011 ‘At least 15 Yemenis killed as Saleh’s loyalist forces shell southern city of Taez’, http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/11/11/176529.html

(24) = AFP 25 Oct 2011 ‘15 dead as Yemen truce fails, Saleh says ready to go’, http://news.yahoo.com/five-civilians-killed-yemen-protests-110515565.html , ‘In Sanaa and in Yemen's second largest city Taez at least 15 people were killed, according to medical officials and tribal sources…..A seven-year-old child and a woman were among seven people killed in Taez, after what residents said was random shelling by government forces of neighbourhoods. The interior ministry said four policemen also died.’

(25) = Voice of America news 11 Nov 2011 ‘Yemeni Government Forces Kill 6 Civilians’, http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2011/11/11/yemeni-government-forces-kill-6-civilians/

(26) = AFP 05 Apr 2011 ‘No plans to suspend military aid to Yemen: US’, http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/05/no-plans-to-suspend-military-aid-to-yemen-us/

(27) = Reuters 05 Apr 2011 ‘U.S. urges Yemen transition, no aid cut-off-Pentagon’,http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/05/us-yemen-usa-pentagon-idUSTRE7346V720110405

(28) = CAAT Country Data Yemen, http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countrydata/?country_selected=Yemen ,(shows £800,000 worth of arms export licences approved in 2011 – more than twice the value of approved arms exports in 2010)

(29) = Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) 09 Sep 2011 ‘Government tries to hide embarrassing truth about arms fair invitees’, http://www.caat.org.uk/press/archive.php?url=20110909prs ‘On Thursday, 8 September, the government supported events promoting arms sales to countries including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.’

(30) = AP 15 Nov 2011 ‘UN envoy: Yemen president should transfer power’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9947242 , ‘Yemen's embattled president must speed up reforms and begin a transfer of power according to a plan backed by the international community, said a U.N. envoy on Monday. …..Jamal Benomar visited Yemen for a week to promote a Gulf-backed proposal that calls for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to transfer power to his vice president in exchange for immunity from prosecution.’

(31) = guardian.co.uk 23 Nov 2011 ‘Yemen president arrives in Saudi Arabia to sign power transfer deal’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/23/yemen-president-power-transfer-deal

(32) = Amnesty International 22 Oct 2011 ‘UN Security Council resolution on Yemen falls short ’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/un-security-council-resolution-yemen-falls-short-2011-10-22

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia

(33) = Observer 29 May 2011 ‘UK training Saudi forces used to crush Arab spring’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/28/uk-training-saudi-troops , ‘Britain is training Saudi Arabia's national guard – the elite security force deployed during the recent protests in Bahrain – in public order enforcement measures and the use of sniper rifles… In response to questions made under the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that British personnel regularly run courses for the national guard in "weapons, fieldcraft and general military skills training, as well as incident handling, bomb disposal, search, public order and sniper training". The courses are organised through the British Military Mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, an obscure unit that consists of 11 British army personnel under the command of a brigadier…. Bahrain's royal family used 1,200 Saudi troops to help put down demonstrations in March.’

(34) = guardian.co.uk 21 Oct 2011 ‘MP attacks Hague over review of arms sales to Arab regimes’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/21/uk-arms-sales-middle-east

Only look at what we’re doing in Libya and Syria

(35) = Independent 27 Jan 2011 ‘World Focus: France favoured autocracy as a bulwark against radical Islam ’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-focus-france-favoured-autocracy-as-a-bulwark-against-radical-islam-2189240.html

Arms Fair in London, September 2011, all murdering dictatorships welcome

(36) = Channel 4 News 13 Sep 2011 ‘Arms fair opens in London amid protests’ , http://www.channel4.com/news/arms-fair-opens-in-london-amid-protests ,‘The countries invited from "authoritarian" regimes, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit are: Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Vietnam.’

(37) = Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) 09 Sep 2011 ‘Government tries to hide embarrassing truth about arms fair invitees’, http://www.caat.org.uk/press/archive.php?url=20110909prs ‘On Thursday, 8 September, the government supported events promoting arms sales to countries including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.’

Citigroup aren’t fit to give advice on banking never mind energy policy

2011-11-07T22:35:00.004Z

One of the main critics of government investment in renewable energy in Scotland – the Citigroup investment bank – failed to predict the financial crisis, was one of the four banks most involved in and hardest hit by the sub-prime mortgage crisis – and invests heavily in tar sands, oil and coal (1). Given it’s inability to know what it should invest in itself in it’s own area of expertise – banking – why should anyone accept Citigroup as experts in an entirely separate area – energy policy?

The New York Times website reports that Citigroup required not one but three government bail-outs in the US, totalling $45 billion. The US Securities and Exchanges commission also charged Citigroup with telling investors it had invested only $13 billion in subprime mortgages, when the real figure was $50 billion (2).

This makes me less inclined to take their advice on anything. These are bankers who can’t run a bank and lie to investors, offering advice (with likely ulterior motives) on energy policy – something they have no expertise in.

Their other ulterior motive is likely to be their own heavy investment in coal, oil and tar sands compared to a relatively tiny stake in renewable. The Rainforest Action Network found that in 2010 Citigroup invested $34 billion in the former and less than 2% of that amount in renewables , including heavy investments in tar sand projects in Canada (3).

It could well be that some of the investment banks who are writing reports praising the Scottish government’s renewable energy targets also have ulterior motives (perhaps having invested in renewable themselves) and wanting to promote them as a result.

There are other more reputable groups criticising the Scottish government’s renewable energy target of 100% by 2020 as being unrealistic and likely to increase fuel poverty – like the Institution of Mechanical Engineers - but I still wouldn’t trust a company with a record like Citigroup’s to advise me on picking my nose never mind on energy policy.

(1) = CNN 15 Oct 2007 ‘Citi profits tumble as execs scramble’, http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/15/news/companies/citigroup_earnings/index.htm , ‘Citigroup is among a handful of banks that have been hard hit by this summer's subprime mortgage crisis. Three other banks - JPMorgan Chase (Charts, Fortune 500), Washington Mutual (Charts, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (Charts, Fortune 500) - are scheduled to report quarterly results this week.’

(2) = NYT.com Business 19 Oct 2011 > Companies > Citigroup Inc, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/citigroup_inc/index.html

(3) = Dirty Oil Sands blog 11 Mar 2011 ‘Citi needs an intervention’ By Brant Olson | Rainforest Action Network, http://dirtyoilsands.org/blog/article/citi_needs_an_intervention

(4) = Institution of Mechanical Engineers ‘Scottish Energy 2020? A target too far?’,http://www.imeche.org/Scottish-Energy-2020?WT.mc_id=HP_110661

The real Adam Werritty and Liam Fox scandal is the British government promoting arms sales to a government that ordered the massacre of civilians

2011-10-14T01:42:00.008+01:00

Most media coverage and political debate over the Adam Werritty scandal is surreal and bizarre in treating Werrity’s status as the serious issue while not even mentioning that Werritty, Defence Minister Liam Fox and the British government are promoting arms sales to a Sri Lankan President who ordered war crimes including shelling civilians and hospitals with artillery after telling them they should move to what the Sri Lankan military and government had told civilians and aid agencies would be “safe zones”, followed by massacres of Tamil Prisoners of War and of civilians, including children and aid workers. At least 7,000 civilians have been killed so far. (This is all recorded in multiple investigations by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN, as well as by soldiers in the Sri Lankan military who were eye witnesses and heard the orders given.)

Channel 4 News in the UK is the only exception I’ve found so far – they have covered the war crimes issue.

British MPs found that the previous Labour government in Britain also approved arms sales to Sri Lanka during ceasefires in the war. In fact that wasn’t the whole truth – the British government sold £13.6 million of arms including armoured cars, machinegun components and semi-automatic pistols to the Sri Lankan government at the height of the civil war. So British arms were almost certainly used to commit the massacres and more sold to them now may be used for future massacres and continuing disappearances. The bodies of the disappeared are being discovered constantly.

The almost total silence on it in most media reports and opinion columns is despite the video footage and photos of Adam Werrity, standing alongside Liam Fox, shaking hands with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa which have been taken to be important because they show Werrity had taken part in official meetings with members of other governments.

In December 2010 Channel 4 News reported that

‘The Defence Secretary made five trips to Sri Lanka in the past three years, all while in opposition. Each trip was paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

On 2nd December, the Defence Secretary held a private meeting with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in London's Dorchester Hotel, while he was on a private visit to Britain. The visit was aborted when a Tamil pressure group sought the arrest of one his entourage on war crimes charges.

The meeting was portrayed by the Sri Lankan government as a diplomatic coup on its official websites, which displayed prominent pictures of the President and Dr Fox warmly shaking hands.

Among matters reportedly discussed between the two were investment opportunities in the north of the island, where many of the alleged atrocities took place.’

More recently they reported that :

‘Highly-placed souces in Sri Lanka have told Channel 4 News that Liam Fox and Adam Werritty have both visited Sri Lanka every year now for a decade. And every time Dr Fox has gone there, Mr Werritty’s been with him – even while on holiday….

….Three highly placed sources in Sri Lanka independently allege that Adam Werritty’s frequent visits to the island were to do with arms deals – and that he stayed there, it’s alleged, at Sri Lankan government expense….. The sources have claimed that Mr Werritty acted as an interlocutor for a senior figure in the regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. This senior figure reportedly discussed with Mr Werritty whether he could lobby the British government over the supply of arms, security equipment and aviation parts.’

Rajapaksa arrested the General who headed the campaign, not for war crimes, but for standing against him in the subsequent Presidential elections and for revealing that the orders for the massacres came from Rajapaska’s Defence Minister.

Yet Fox and the British government are both promoting the sale of British arms to Rajapaska’s government and giving him political support by going on state visits to Sri Lanka.

Compared to all this I really couldn’t give a toss whether Werritty had security clearance ; and care even less about innuendo about whether he and Fox might be gay lovers or not.

On this issue much of the media and many politicians seem to have no moral compass, no sense of proportion and an amazing ability to fixate endlessly on trivia while ignoring the British government arming and supporting war criminals who ordered the deliberate killing of thousands of civilians and aid workers.

Labour Party MPs, many of whom were silent or stayed in cabinet as Ministers while the government armed Sri Lankan forces at the height of the massacres, make no mention of them when criticising Fox, Werritty and Cameron.

The new Labour Defence Spokesman, Jim Murphy MP, a typical Blairite and party hack, never mentions them because he knows he was part of a government that did the same. In his letter to Cameron he only mentions conflicts of interest and risks to ‘national security’ – not a word about arming war criminals with arms used to massacre civilians. It seems we can’t expect much improvement from the Labour party leadership under Milliband.

Sources

Channel 4 News 11 Oct 2011 ‘Liam Fox friend Adam Werritty accused over Sri Lanka arms deal’, http://www.channel4.com/news/liam-fox-friend-accused-over-sri-lanka-arms-deal

Channel 4 News 15 Jun 2011 ‘Killing fields video evidence ‘builds case for war crimes’’, http://www.channel4.com/news/killing-fields-video-evidence-builds-case-for-war-crimes

Channel 4 News 27 Jul 2011 ‘Sri Lanka ‘war crimes’ soldiers ordered to ‘finish the job’, http://www.channel4.com/news/sri-lanka-war-crimes-soldiers-ordered-to-finish-the-job

Channel 4 News 04 Oct 2011 ‘Liam Fox quizzed about friend’s access to MoD’, http://www.channel4.com/news/liam-fox-quizzed-about-friends-access-to-mod

HRW / The Guardian 21 Jan 2010 ‘Uncovering Sri Lanka's war crimes’, http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/01/22/uncovering-sri-lankas-war-crimes and http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/21/sri-lanka-war-crimes-investigation

Guardian 30 March 2010 ‘MPs call for review of arms exports after Israeli assault on Gaza’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/30/arms-british-gaza-assault (also covers sales to Sri Lanka)

Times 02 Jun 2009 ‘Britain sold weapons to help Sri Lankan army defeat Tamil Tigers ’, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article2610539.ece

HRW 08 May 2009 ‘Sri Lanka: Repeated Shelling of Hospitals Evidence of War Crimes’,http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/05/08/sri-lanka-repeated-shelling-hospitals-evidence-war-crimes

HRW 03 Aug 2011 ‘Sri Lanka : No Justice in massacre of aid workers’, http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/08/03/sri-lanka-no-justice-massacre-aid-workers

HRW 23 May 2011 ‘Sri Lanka: Military Conference to Whitewash War Crimes’, http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/05/23/sri-lanka-military-conference-whitewash-war-crimes

Human Rights Annual Report 2010 – Country Report – Sri Lanka,http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/related_material/Sri%20Lanka.pdf

Amnesty International 26 Apr 2011 ‘UN must act now on Sri Lanka war crimes report’,http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/un-must-act-now-investigate-war-crimes-sri-lanka-2011-04-21

Guardian.co.uk 09 Oct 2011 ‘Liam Fox allegations: Letter from Jim Murphy to David Cameron’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/09/liam-fox-jim-murphy-letter?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

The Iranian government did not plot a terrorist bombing in the US that would have ensured their own overthrow by US forces

2011-10-13T04:53:00.004+01:00

The supposed Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador along with 150 Americans by a terrorist bombing of a restaurant on US soil is ludicrously paper thin war propaganda (1) – (2).

Why would senior members of the Iranian government or military plot an attack which, if it succeeded, would ensure their overthrow by the US military after September 11^th style anger in the US ; and likely lead to many Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guard officers being either killed or jailed? (3).

The US, Israeli and Saudi governments by contrast have everything to gain from making this scenario up ; control of the second largest oil reserves in the world ; eliminating a rival for influence in the Middle East; and a distraction from domestic economic problems.

Obama’s poll rating fell to 41% a few months ago and hasn’t moved since due to the stalled US economy and high unemployment, which he can’t do much about it as long as the Republicans control congress (4). There’s a Presidential election next year. President Bush senior in 1990, faced with similar problems, made war on Iraq to try to restore his poll ratings. He still lost the next election.

The US charges call plastic explosives “weapons of mass destruction”, a propaganda phrase also used to whip up support for war on Iraq, despite the fact that it has previously referred solely to nuclear, chemical or biological weapons (5).

The US going to the UN for a resolution against Iran as a fig leaf for having tried diplomacy is also de ja vu all over again (6).

The whole thing reeks of Iraq war style propaganda and similar US government made conspiracy theories like the mythical alliance between Saddam and Al Qa’ida.

If the plot existed at all it was likely the idea of FBI agents, who have started to make a habit of posing as Al Qa’ida operatives and offering poor and unemployed Americans vast amounts of money to carry out terrorist attacks, then arresting them and having them jailed when they do. There’s a word for that – it’s called entrapment and as one American woman said they haven’t identified a terrorist cell in these cases they’ve created one just to boost their own careers (7).

(1) = Independent 12 Oct 2011 ‘US accuses Iran of bomb plot to kill Saudi ambassador in Washington’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-accuses-iran-of-bomb-plot-to-kill-saudi-ambassador-in-washington-2369220.html

(2) = Bloomberg 12 Oct 2011 ‘U.S. Accuses Iran of Sponsoring Plot to Kill Saudi Official’,http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-12/u-s-accuses-iran-of-sponsoring-plot-to-kill-saudi-official.html ; ‘When the informant expressed concern that 100 to 150 people could be injured in a bombing of the restaurant, including “senators who dine there,” Arbabsiar said “no big deal,” the U.S. said in the complaint.’

(3) = Bloomberg 12 Oct 2011 ‘U.S. Accuses Iran of Sponsoring Plot to Kill Saudi Official’,http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-12/u-s-accuses-iran-of-sponsoring-plot-to-kill-saudi-official.html ; ‘The alleged plot was “directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday. “High-up officials in those agencies, which is an integral part of the Iranian government, were responsible.”’

(4) = Gallup 07 Oct 2011 ‘Obama's September Approval Rating Remains at Term-Low 41%’,http://www.gallup.com/poll/149966/obama-september-approval-rating-remains-term-low.aspx

(5) = Bloomberg 12 Oct 2011 ‘U.S. Accuses Iran of Sponsoring Plot to Kill Saudi Official’,http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-12/u-s-accuses-iran-of-sponsoring-plot-to-kill-saudi-official.html ; ‘Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, and Gholam Shakuri were charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, in this case C-4 plastic explosives, to murder Ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir and attack Saudi installations in the U.S. in a plan hatched earlier this year. Targets included “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country,” the U.S. said in a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court.

The plotters, one of whom is in U.S. custody, also targeted Israel’s embassy in Washington, as well as the embassies of Israel and Saudi Arabia in Argentina, according to a federal law enforcement official familiar with the matter.

(6) = AFP 12 Oct 2011 ‘US seeks Security Council support for Iran action’, http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gR7JgD6nBBVFODzZfeiH-Sde-ecg?docId=CNG.31489099dea4e6b34171e1a5ec101a16.bc1 ‘The United States on Wednesday sought UN Security Council support for action to hold Iran "accountable" for an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, diplomats said.

France and Britain have already given strong backing to the US government. But the US administration will also be sending delegations to Beijing and Moscow to give details of the investigation, diplomats said.’

(7) = Newsnight BBC2 08 Sep 2011 ‘Have US anti-terror tactics strayed into entrapment?’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/9584637.stm

Any third round of quantitative easing money should by-pass the banks and go straight to businesses and people to restore employment and growth

2011-10-11T00:28:00.004+01:00

then we have to deal with our energy and waste crises

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee have said there may be a third round of Quantitative Easing, after the first two failing to provide any benefit except increasing the banks’ reserves (1).

They failed because the banks are not passing the money on in loans at an interest rate that businesses can afford, partly because they’re afraid of not having big enough reserves to meet another crisis; and partly because their top managers have decided they can get off with that because politicians aren’t willing to risk any bank going under in case it sets off others like a string of dominoes and they take the rest of the economy with them.

Quantitative easing has been much derided because it’s a euphemism for printing money, but printing money is not always a bad idea – it depends on the circumstances and who the money is going to.

Printing money when inflation is low, deflation is a serious risk and the economy is on the edge of another recession and banks are refusing to loan is not unreasonable. Since banks across Europe are private creditors of the Greek government, which may be forced to default on it’s debts unless it’s creditors forgive the majority of them (with either option involving losses for the banks), quantitative easing is also seen as a way of ‘recapitalising’ the banks (i.e boosting their reserves) to avoid runs on them in the event of a default.

However if we’re going to print more money it should go in loans directly from the government to small and medium sized businesses at reasonable interest rates to boost employment; and in payments to the unemployed, the disabled and people on low and middle incomes. That way it can keep viable existing businesses going, start new ones and increase demand in the economy, rather than just padding out banks’ reserves. It would also involve a modest redistribution of some of the wealth spent on bank bail-outs back to the majority.

This could restore growth and employment levels in the short term, but we also need to re-regulate the banks, undoing decades of de-regulation from the 1980s on, or else another financial crisis could happen at any time.

That could restore at least some of the economic stability of the early post-1945 period. However we also face problems now that we didn’t face then.

Avoiding an Energy Crisis

There is the coming crisis of energy as remaining oil reserves becoming increasingly costly in money and energy to extract, along with increasing demand from China and Asia. To meet this we need increased taxes on oil and energy use to reduce waste of energy. We also need government subsidies and tax breaks for research and development of new energy sources.

Basically, long before oil reserves run out, we will hit ‘Peak Energy’ running short of energy due to the increasing energy costs of extracting oil. In the 1930s when we were extracting mostly the easiest to get at and easiest to refine oil reserves there was a return of 100 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil used to extract it (in fuel for vehicles, drilling, setting up pipelines, oil tankers etc). Today that has fallen to about 11 to 18 barrels for every 1 barrel used. (For more on ‘Peak Energy’ and ‘Net Energy’ see Mandy Meikle’s blog post here and Chris Martenson’s here, as well as this one).

That’s before you even take into account the climate change and other pollution caused.

If you think petrol prices are already high you’re right. However we can’t afford to reduce them if we want to make alternatives to oil based transport and electricity economically viable to develop soon enough to avoid a Peak Energy crisis – and if we don’t do that we’re going to be looking at rationing electricity and being unable to get anywhere by car, train or bus at all except at insane prices at best - and societal collapse into some kind of former Yugoslavia or Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome at worst. Either will make expensive petrol look like a picnic.

Having said that, far more of the taxes on petrol should be going to improving public transport and reducing thecost of using it. It’s no use telling people to use public transport more while making it more and more unaffordable and over-crowded and without more railway stations opened and more trains running.

The Rubbish and pollution Crises

On top of this there is a waste management crisis as we run out of space for landfill of rubbish (which in any case can pollute groundwater and release methane and other gases harmful to people living nearby). Government responses so far have focused on either shipping waste to developing countries which don't have the same regulations, causing illnesses and deaths there, or else incinerators as the cheapest option in the short term and a quick fix, ignoring the waste of energy and resources (especially oil based plastics) involved and the toxic emissions. These emmisions are likely to increase the incidence of cancers, especially among children and may pollute farmland and so food and water supplies.

Instead we should have a recycling tax on all companies in Scotland or the UK, with companies producing the least waste and the most easily recyclable products and packaging paying a lower rate – plus an import tax on foreign imports that don’t meet the same standards. Recyclable or re-useable products can then be given back to firms for re-use at no further charge, their recycling and delivery funded by the tax.

Taxing the businesses that produce products and packaging which can't be cheaply and safely recycled is the only way to impose a financial cost linked to the cost in terms of peoples' health, lives and environment which will force the worst companies to change their behaviour and allow the better ones, who were already making an effort, to avoid being put out of business by firms who only look at their own costs and profit

We have to act to prevent all the crises - we can't pick and choose which to deal with as if the others don't matter

To get a political climate in which we can deal with the energy and waste crises we first have to avert a second longer and deeper recession in which hunger, poverty and mass unemployment would lead to lots of suffering themselves and could lead to 1930s style politics with the extreme right and/or extreme left gaining support. People who are left scared about whether they can feed themselves and their children and avoid losing their homes will ignore everything else to get those and will be vulnerable to propaganda.

Providing them with some security in the short term has to be the number one priority, but as soon as that’s done we have to start dealing with the energy and waste crises before they lead to disasters just as bad.

(1) = Guardian.co.uk 09 Oct 2011 ‘Third round of quantitative easing possible, says MPC member’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/09/third-round-quanititative-easing-possible

Why Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' application for UN membership and forming a coalition with Hamas is the right move

2011-09-23T13:32:00.013+01:00

Why the Palestinian bid for UN membership is the right move even though it will fail today

Today Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is applying to the UN for a Palestinian state. It’s a membership application which the UN is over 60 years late in granting due to repeated US vetoes (and almost certainly another today, though the General Assembly will vote in favour along with the majority of the Security Council). The same UN resolution that established a Jewish state in the former British Mandate (effectively colony) of Britain in Palestine also established a Palestinian state, but it has long since been entirely annexed by Israel (with the exception of Gaza, which is under blockade and constant attack). The West Bank, given to Palestinians by Jordan after Israel occupied it, has much of it (and the vast majority of it’s vital water supplies and farmland) taken by Israeli troops and settlers.

Abbas is well aware that the US will veto Palestinian membership at the UN. He knows that Israeli government funded lobbying, political donations and media propaganda from AIPAC (the American-Israeli Public Accounts Committee) and others means the US congress is bought up and US Presidents fear losing votes at home by opposing Israel. His move is still the right one though. It has got Israel-Palestine on the UN and the international media agenda. It's brought attention to the fact that Israeli governments, whether led by the Labor or Likud parties, are not willing to make any concessions in bilateral negotiations with Palestinians - and that no agreement that doesn't include Hamas can hold, any more than an international agreement negotiated with a US President but not approved by an elected Republican controlled congress could

That's why Obama and David Cameron's claims that this is the "wrong way" to try and get UN membership and a real Palestinian state is nonsense, largely motivated by fear of Israeli propaganda groups in their own country and funding for their parties from these groups. Palestinians have been trying to get concessions in bilateral negotiations for decades and haven't got anything because Israel is militarily far stronger and the most powerful foreign governments, instead of putting pressure on Israel to give the weaker side something, have made the scales even more imbalanced by wieghing in on the Israeli side

A majority of governments in the UN and the majority of world public opinion is overwhelmingly in favour of giving Palestinians a full, sovereign state on roughly the 1967 borders. So the UN and bringing international pressure on Israel to make concessions is the way forward.

Israeli government propaganda on how Palestinians supposedly rejected generous peace offers

There’s a story that claims Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinians 95% of the West Bank in the Taba negotiations in January 2001. In fact Barak offered 76% in three parts surrounded by Israeli troops and settlements (1). Barak’s negotiator , Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, said the offer was “bullshit… not aimed to reach an agreement” but to “convince Israeli Arabs to vote” for Barak in imminent elections (2).

Some people claim Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “said he will accept a Palestinian state”. In fact he’s said Israel would keep settlements and troops inside and on the borders of the Palestinian “state”, which would have no military (3) - (4). It’s Oslo and Taba again – an offer of poor inner city apartheid style ‘homelands’ surrounded by Israeli troops and settlements.

Violence – Far More Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli forces than Israelis killed by terrorism

This is not to mention the fact that Israeli military artillery attacks, raids, bombing, kidnappings of Palestinian MPs and "targeted assassinations" (often by air strike on family homes) in Gaza have never ended. Nor have Israeli military shootings of unarmed Palestinians and children and teenagers for throwing stones in the West Bank ended. Nor have settlements or bulldozing of Palestinian houses. This is part of a long pattern of Israeli military indiscriminate fire combined with some clearly deliberate targeting of civilians - including Palestinian children shot in the head by snipers in the street, in school or in their homes, which is as much terrorism as anything Hamas or Islamic Jihad's armed wings do.

In December 2008 to January 2009 after Palestinian rockets killed one Israeli, Israeli air strikes, artillery shelling and ground forces in Gaza killed 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians with no involvement in the rocket fire - 300 of them children in war crimes reported by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B'T selem (5) - (6).

This, like Israeli military operations in Lebanon has been excused on the grounds that Hamas and Hezbollah supposedly caused all the civilian deaths by hiding among civilians. However Human Rights Watch reports based on research on the ground by former members of the US military found that in fact Israeli forces have repeatedly both deliberately targeted civilians in some cases and failed to make any attempt to avoid killing them in others (e.g by bombing houses with 1,000 pound bombs, shelling built up areas with heavy artillery). (See the blog post on this link (the section sub-titled 'Lie Three - Israeli Forces Don't Target Civilians' and sources 21 to 45 listed in it

B'Tselem also found that Israeli forces used Palestinian civilians as human shields forced to walk ahead of them at gunpoint, just as they had in Jenin and Nablus in 2002 (7).

Human Rights Watch investigators found Israeli forces shot and killed unarmed Palestinians including women and children who were waving white flags in multiple incidents during the Gaza war and found no evidence to substantiate Israeli military claims that Hamas fighters hid behind civilians (8).

The stated reason for the offensive (which began shortly before elections while the incumbent Labor government were behind the Likud opposition in the polls) was to prevent Palestinian terrorist groups' rocket fire out of Gaza. However the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website shows that in the six months before the Israel 'Operation Cast Lead' offensive (or 'Gaza war') only one Israeli civilian was killed by rocket fire from Gaza. Predictably the Israeli offensive led to a massive increase in rocket attacks in response, with three Israeli civilians killed by rocket fire from Gaza in the first three weeks of the offensive according to the same Israeli MFA website - an 2,400% increase in the rate Israeli civilians were being killed from 1 every 24 weeks to 1 every week - clearly a massive failure and counter-productive even before considering Palestinian civilian deaths.(9) Electorally it was a short-lived success though- Labor pulled ahead in the polls by looking supposedly 'tough on terrorism', but went on to lose to Likud in the elections anyway.

Israeli experts, including former Shin Bet and Mossad intelligence heads say accept Hamas offers of negotiations without preconditions

Israeli governments - whether led by the Labor, Kadima or Likud parties - have refused to recognise the result of the 2006 Palestinian democratic parliamentary elections which Hamas won, refusing repeated offers of negotiation from Hamas on the basis of the 1967 borders, imposing sanctions on the entire Palestinian Authority and collaborating with Mubarak and Bush to arm Fatah to produce a Palestinian civil war. Former heads of Israel’s Mossad and Shin Bet military intelligence are among those Israelis with the full facts who say negotiations with Hamas should begin without preconditions.

Even the former head of Israel's Shin Bet military intelligence, Shlomo Gazit, has called the pre-conditions the Israeli government has placed on negotiations "ridiculous, or an excuse not to negotiate" (quoted in the Jewish newspaper 'Forward') (10).

Efraim Halevy, former head of Mossad, says Israel should negotiate with Hamas who have shown they will keep peace agreements in the past (11).

Israeli historian and IDF veteran Avi Shlaim has written that "The only way for Israel to achieve security is…through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with [Israel] within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years." and that "In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas. ….It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions." (12)

Israeli professor Yossi Alpher has pointed out that Israel did not demand full recognition before negotiations even began when negotiating peace with Egypt or Jordan - and that if it ihad there would probably never been peace.(13)

Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami is among many Israelis saying full recognition should be the end point of negotiations, it can't be a precondition for them.(14)

No agreement that excludes Hamas, who won the last Palestinian parliamentary elections, can hold. It’s like demanding a US Democrat President make an international agreement that excludes any input from a Republican controlled congress - unrealistic and undemocratic.

Israel elects war criminals, Palestinians elect terrorists – time for war criminals and terrorists to sit down and end the killing with a peace that provides Palestinians with a real state on roughly the 1967 borders

Meir Dagan, who was sacked as head of Mossad in June this year by Netanyahu, says Netanyau and his Defence Minister Ehud Barak are "irresponsible" in their refusal to make serious concessions for peace with the Palestinians and "reckless" in pushing for war with Iran (15).

Dagan was appointed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (and never sacked by him) so he's not exactly a liberal or dove. Sharon was a serial war criminal (which is as usual for Israeli Prime Ministers as for Palestinian leaders to be on the political wing of groups with armed terrorist wings). What was unusual was that he committed probably more war crimes (including personally targeting and killing civilians) than any other Israeli Prime Minister. These ranged from involvement in terrorism by Zionist militias against Arabs and the British before 1948, through to massacres during the 1948 war, massacres of villagers like that at Qibya in the West Bank in 1953 ( a massacre which Sharon personally took part in as an officer) and the killing of Egyptian prisoners of war and Sudanese migrant workers during the 1956 Suez war with Egypt (16) - (19). Most notoriously he was the architect of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon when he broke a ceasefire agreement under which PLO forces left by allowing Phalangist (fascist Christian Lebanese) militias to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to massacre civilians. Even an Israeli government inquiry found him personally responsible for the massacre (20). He continued ordering war crimes as Israeli Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006, including bulldozing Palestinian houses with people inside them and having Palestinian civilians, wounded fighters and ambulance crews shot in Jenin and Nablus in April 2002.

Yet Sharon was treated by US Presidents as an “ally against terrorism” and never seemed to see the hypocrisy when he condemned Palestinian terrorist attacks targeting civilians.

Nor did anyone place sanctions on Israel or refuse to negotiate with Israel until Sharon was no longer Prime Minister. Given this how can Israel and the US have a veto on who Palestinians elect. There is no side with clean hands in this conflict. All of them have blood on them. Negotiations without pre-conditions are the only way to end it.

There’s no excuse for targeting civilians, but Israel’s military has killed more civilians than all Palestinian terrorist groups combined.

Many Israeli politicians were terrorists to get their own state in the 1940s

In the late 1930s and 1940s when Zionist terrorists were killing British and Arab soldiers and civilians to get their own state, one Zionist newspaper (that of the 'Lehi' Jewish underground in Palestine) claimed “terrorism is …part of the political battle…against the occupier”. Future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzakh Shamir (he was Israeli Prime Minister twice), who ordered the assassination of UN envoy Bernadotte Folke in 1948, said that killing British soldiers by terrorism or killing civilians in “professional warfare” was “the same from a moral point of view”. So much for the differences between the Israeli government and Palestinian terrorist groups. When they had no state they did the same (21) - (23).

Sources

(1) = Professors Mearsheimer, John J. & Walt. Stephen (2007) ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’,Chapter 3, page 104 of hardback edition

(2) = Clayton E. Swisher (2004) ‘The Truth about Camp David’ Nation Books, New York, 2004, Chapter 14 / Epilogue – The Politics of Blame, page 403 (read this page online at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=U5INKlOqNeAC&pg=PA403&lpg=PA403&dq=Amnon+Taba+bullshit&source=bl&ots=9j1oDMtnPY&sig=sKPEp-SX6QOjcyCJx-vj3Kdy5kM&hl=en&ei=Zd14Ts77Doiq8AO1_eyGDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Amnon%20Taba%20bullshit&f=false )

(3) = Globe & Mail (Canada) 24 May 20011 ‘Transcript of Prime Minister Netanyahu's address to U.S. Congress’,http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/transcript-of-prime-minister-netanyahus-address-to-us-congress/article2032842/ , “In any real peace agreement, in any peace agreement that ends the conflict, some settlements will end up beyond Israel's borders. Now the precise delineation of those borders must be negotiated. We'll be generous about the size of the future Palestinian state. But as President Obama said, the border will be different than the one that existed on June 4th, 1967…. Israel will not return to the indefensible boundaries of 1967....Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel….But Israel under 1967 lines would be only nine miles wide. So much for strategic depth. So it's therefore vital -- absolutely vital -- that a Palestinian state be fully demilitarized, and it's vital -- absolutely vital -- that Israel maintain a long-term military presence along the Jordan River.”

(4) = Haaretz 14 Jun 2009 ‘Full text of Netanyahu's foreign policy speech at Bar Ilan’,http://www.haaretz.com/news/full-text-of-netanyahu-s-foreign-policy-speech-at-bar-ilan-1.277922 , ‘I spoke tonight about the first principle - recognition. Palestinians must truly recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. The second principle is demilitarization. Any area in Palestinian hands has to be demilitarization, with solid security measures.’

(5) = Amnesty International 02 July 2009 ‘Impunity for war crimes in Gaza and southern Israel a recipe for further civilian suffering’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/impunity-war-crimes-gaza-southern-israel-recipe-further-civilian-suffering-20090702

(6) = Amnesty International 02 Jul 2009 ‘Israel/Gaza: Operation "Cast Lead": 22 days of death and destruction’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/015/2009/en

(7) = B'T selem 2009 'B'Tselem's investigation of fatalities in Operation Cast Lead', http://www.btselem.org/download/20090909_cast_lead_fatalities_eng.pdf

(8) = HRW 13 Aug 2009 'Israel: Investigate ‘White Flag' Shootings of Gaza Civilians',http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/08/13/israel-investigate-white-flag-shootings-gaza-civilians

(9) = Israel Foreign Ministry ‘Victims of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism since September 2000’, http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+since+2000/Victims+of+Palestinian+Violence+and+Terrorism+sinc.htm

(10) = Forward 09 Feb 2007 ‘Experts Question Wisdom of Boycotting Hamas’, http://www.forward.com/articles/10055/

(11) = Interview with Efraim Halevy in Mother Jones Magazine 10 Feb 2008 ‘Israel's Mossad, Out of the Shadows’, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/02/israels-mossad-out-shadows

(12) = Guardian 07 Jan 2009 ‘How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine by Professor Avi Shlaim ‘Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas. ….It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions.’

(13) = Forward 20 Oct 2006 ‘Preconditions for a Problematic Partner’, http://www.forward.com/articles/5948/

(14) = Times 26 Feb 2009 ‘Peace will be achieved only by talking to Hamas’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article5804266.ece

(15) = guardian.co.uk 03 Jan 2011 'Israel government 'reckless and irresponsible' says ex-Mossad chief', http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/03/israel-government-reckless-mossad-chief

(16) = Ilan Pappe (2006)'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', One World, Oxford, 2006 - on the massacres of Palestinians by Zionist militias (many of whom would become the Israeli military and politicians) during the 1948 war)

(17) = Finkelstein, Norman (2003) 'Image and Reality of the Palestinian Conflict' (2nd edition), Verso, London and New York, 2003, Chapter 3 (massacres by Zionist/Israeli forces during the 1948 war and the 'Plan D' behind them to drive out as many Arabs as possible)

(18) = LA Times 16 Aug 1995 'Israel to Probe Deaths of Egyptian POWs in '56 : Sinai: At Cairo's request, defense officials will investigate general's claim that scores were shot.'http://articles.latimes.com/1995-08-16/news/mn-35764_1_defense-officials

(19) = Shlaim, Avi (2000) 'The Iron Wall - Israel and the Arab World', Penguin paperback, London, 2001,Ch2, pages 90 -93 (on the 1953 Qibya massacre by an Israeli unit led by Sharon in the West Bank, then part of Jordan)

(20) = Shlaim, Avi (2000) 'The Iron Wall - Israel and the Arab World', Penguin paperback, London, 2001, Ch10, p416 - 417 (on Sharon and Sabra and Shatila massacres)

(21) = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing (bombing of the King David Hotel by Zionist militias) ; also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_%28group%29#British_police_station_in_Haifa (truck bombing of British police station in Palestine by the Lehi Zionist militia in 1947)

(22) = Heller, Joseph (1995) ‘The Stern Gang – Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949’ Frank Cass paperback edition, p115 (on Lehi militia’s newspaper article - full quote can be read online on this link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_%28group%29#Goals_and_methods )

(23) = Bethell, Nicholas (1979) , The Palestine Triangle: The Struggle between British, Jews, and the Arabs, 1935–48, Deutsch, 1979 page 278 (Shamir quote - full quote can be read online on this link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_%28group%29#Goals_and_methods )