<![CDATA[Immortal Technique: Unofficial Forum - All Forums]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/ Thu, 23 May 2013 19:27:11 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Mic Righteous - 3rd Degree]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Mic-Righteous-3rd-Degree Thu, 23 May 2013 18:56:09 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Mic-Righteous-3rd-Degree



Lyrics
Code:
http://pastebin.com/x8v5UAJR

Fire!]]>



Lyrics
Code:
http://pastebin.com/x8v5UAJR

Fire!]]> <![CDATA[The real roots of islamic Terrorism]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-The-real-roots-of-islamic-Terrorism Thu, 23 May 2013 16:20:26 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-The-real-roots-of-islamic-Terrorism Foreign policy decisions often arouse popular anger but it is naive to blame them for militant Islamism

Last week saw the release of a long-awaited "extremism toolkit" for schools entitled Learning Together to be Safe. It went out to schools across England and Wales and contains a number of important recommendations for teachers. One is that schools should have a nominated member of staff to whom other staff can report any concerns about grooming by extremist groups. This is not asking teachers to become spies or de-radicalisers but rather to be aware of radicalisation as a phenomenon.

The toolkit also bravely touches on the debate about "grievances" – the argument that UK foreign policy is the direct cause of Islamist extremism in the Muslim community. The implication behind this is that if foreign policy was changed or re-assessed then the terror threat would diminish overnight. This simple and naive assertion is flawed on various counts and shows a lack of understanding of Islamist extremism.

Before I comment on this any further I would like to make clear that I opposed the Iraq war from day one and was present at many of the anti-war rallies. I have also been critical of our government's response to the excesses of the Israeli state, while opposing all forms of terrorism too. One can be critical of foreign policy and can campaign to change it without having the urge to use it for the pursuit of narrow ideological goals.

Foreign policy decisions by governments around the world have always had the ability to arouse anger or frustration in their populations. This may manifest itself in street protests, political activism or a variety of other campaigns. Often, certain political groups use the opportunity to exploit the emotions of the masses by misconstruing the policy and presenting it through a certain political narrative. The individual policy is thus de-contextualised and viewed through an ideological prism so that it fits a pre-fabricated meta-narrative. In the case of Islamism, the narrative usually involves a great struggle between western powers and Islam – one in which Muslims must follow a certain action plan in order to emerge victorious. The consequent struggle, if taken on, cares very little about the initial grievance and more about the struggle against western hegemony.

It is only when an individual adopts that particular Islamist narrative that we have the potential for radicalisation. Furthermore, it is only when an individual adopts a specific militant strand of Islamism that we have the potential for terrorism. Meanwhile the "softer" strands of Islamism provide a political justification for such violent acts while hiding behind the "it's foreign policy" argument. (This is also a point that Marc Sageman makes in his book, Leaderless Jihad.) So it's more a case of foreign policy decisions being hijacked, misconstrued and exploited by extremists than them being the cause of radicalisation. This invites the question: would Islamist terrorism still exist without western interventions into the Muslim world? The answer, clearly, is yes.

Terrorism or political violence is an age-old tactic which is often adopted, though not exclusively, by strands of militant Islamists. Militant Islamist violence must not be confused with struggles for freedom or independence which are often nationalistic and don't carry a specific ideological world view. The objective of Islamist violence is never to address or correct grievances, nor is it to achieve independence from occupation. Rather it aims to achieve specific ideological goals which would exist with or without western intervention in Muslim countries. Islamists are obliged by their ideological world view to see the "infidel enemy" (read "west") as a competitor in their quest for world domination. As such they believe that it is their religious duty to ensure the political domination of Islamism.

How to achieve that vision then becomes a matter of tactics. Hence we have the militant strands that prefer direct action (al-Qaida), the revolutionary strands that prefer violence at a later stage, preferably after a coup (Hizb ut-Tahrir) and the more pragmatic strands that believe in achieving the Islamist vision by infiltrating democratic systems (the Muslim Brotherhood).

This world view is perhaps best illustrated by the following extract from the book Jihad in Islam, written by Abu Ala Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan:

Islam is not a normal religion like the other religions in the world, and Muslim nations are not like normal nations. Muslim nations are very special because they have a command from Allah to rule the entire world and to be over every nation in the world. Islam is a revolutionary faith that comes to destroy any government made by man. Islam doesn't look for a nation to be in better condition than another nation. Islam doesn't care about land or who owns the land. The goal of Islam is to rule the entire world and submit all of mankind to the faith of Islam. Any nation or power in this world that tries to get in the way of that goal Islam will fight and destroy. In order for Islam to fulfil that goal, Islam can use every power available every way it can be used to bring worldwide revolution. This is jihad.

In summary, the Islamist struggle is not motivated by grievances or a sense of oppression but rather by an ideology that seeks to dominate. Grievances are viewed as opportunities because they can be exploited and manipulated for the sake of furthering the cause. The grievance argument also gives Islamists the chance to cloud their political agenda in public and use it as something to hide behind when they feel the heat. Therefore, to suggest that grievances cause radicalisation plays into Islamist hands and allows them to present a more acceptable version of their position in public discourse. In either case it doesn't help those who are looking to sincerely address bad foreign policy decisions or those who may have suffered as a result of them.

Code:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/17/islam-religion
]]> Foreign policy decisions often arouse popular anger but it is naive to blame them for militant Islamism

Last week saw the release of a long-awaited "extremism toolkit" for schools entitled Learning Together to be Safe. It went out to schools across England and Wales and contains a number of important recommendations for teachers. One is that schools should have a nominated member of staff to whom other staff can report any concerns about grooming by extremist groups. This is not asking teachers to become spies or de-radicalisers but rather to be aware of radicalisation as a phenomenon.

The toolkit also bravely touches on the debate about "grievances" – the argument that UK foreign policy is the direct cause of Islamist extremism in the Muslim community. The implication behind this is that if foreign policy was changed or re-assessed then the terror threat would diminish overnight. This simple and naive assertion is flawed on various counts and shows a lack of understanding of Islamist extremism.

Before I comment on this any further I would like to make clear that I opposed the Iraq war from day one and was present at many of the anti-war rallies. I have also been critical of our government's response to the excesses of the Israeli state, while opposing all forms of terrorism too. One can be critical of foreign policy and can campaign to change it without having the urge to use it for the pursuit of narrow ideological goals.

Foreign policy decisions by governments around the world have always had the ability to arouse anger or frustration in their populations. This may manifest itself in street protests, political activism or a variety of other campaigns. Often, certain political groups use the opportunity to exploit the emotions of the masses by misconstruing the policy and presenting it through a certain political narrative. The individual policy is thus de-contextualised and viewed through an ideological prism so that it fits a pre-fabricated meta-narrative. In the case of Islamism, the narrative usually involves a great struggle between western powers and Islam – one in which Muslims must follow a certain action plan in order to emerge victorious. The consequent struggle, if taken on, cares very little about the initial grievance and more about the struggle against western hegemony.

It is only when an individual adopts that particular Islamist narrative that we have the potential for radicalisation. Furthermore, it is only when an individual adopts a specific militant strand of Islamism that we have the potential for terrorism. Meanwhile the "softer" strands of Islamism provide a political justification for such violent acts while hiding behind the "it's foreign policy" argument. (This is also a point that Marc Sageman makes in his book, Leaderless Jihad.) So it's more a case of foreign policy decisions being hijacked, misconstrued and exploited by extremists than them being the cause of radicalisation. This invites the question: would Islamist terrorism still exist without western interventions into the Muslim world? The answer, clearly, is yes.

Terrorism or political violence is an age-old tactic which is often adopted, though not exclusively, by strands of militant Islamists. Militant Islamist violence must not be confused with struggles for freedom or independence which are often nationalistic and don't carry a specific ideological world view. The objective of Islamist violence is never to address or correct grievances, nor is it to achieve independence from occupation. Rather it aims to achieve specific ideological goals which would exist with or without western intervention in Muslim countries. Islamists are obliged by their ideological world view to see the "infidel enemy" (read "west") as a competitor in their quest for world domination. As such they believe that it is their religious duty to ensure the political domination of Islamism.

How to achieve that vision then becomes a matter of tactics. Hence we have the militant strands that prefer direct action (al-Qaida), the revolutionary strands that prefer violence at a later stage, preferably after a coup (Hizb ut-Tahrir) and the more pragmatic strands that believe in achieving the Islamist vision by infiltrating democratic systems (the Muslim Brotherhood).

This world view is perhaps best illustrated by the following extract from the book Jihad in Islam, written by Abu Ala Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan:

Islam is not a normal religion like the other religions in the world, and Muslim nations are not like normal nations. Muslim nations are very special because they have a command from Allah to rule the entire world and to be over every nation in the world. Islam is a revolutionary faith that comes to destroy any government made by man. Islam doesn't look for a nation to be in better condition than another nation. Islam doesn't care about land or who owns the land. The goal of Islam is to rule the entire world and submit all of mankind to the faith of Islam. Any nation or power in this world that tries to get in the way of that goal Islam will fight and destroy. In order for Islam to fulfil that goal, Islam can use every power available every way it can be used to bring worldwide revolution. This is jihad.

In summary, the Islamist struggle is not motivated by grievances or a sense of oppression but rather by an ideology that seeks to dominate. Grievances are viewed as opportunities because they can be exploited and manipulated for the sake of furthering the cause. The grievance argument also gives Islamists the chance to cloud their political agenda in public and use it as something to hide behind when they feel the heat. Therefore, to suggest that grievances cause radicalisation plays into Islamist hands and allows them to present a more acceptable version of their position in public discourse. In either case it doesn't help those who are looking to sincerely address bad foreign policy decisions or those who may have suffered as a result of them.

Code:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/17/islam-religion
]]> <![CDATA[The Arab Peace Initiative]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-The-Arab-Peace-Initiative Thu, 23 May 2013 15:34:43 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-The-Arab-Peace-Initiative The Arab Peace Initiative



No, We Can't

An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country, a British statesman famously wrote some 400 years ago. That is true, of course, for all diplomats.

The question is whether the diplomat lies only to others, or also to himself.

I am asking this these days when I follow the arduous efforts of John Kerry, the new American foreign secretary, to jump-start the Israeli-Arab “peace process”.

Kerry seems to be an honest man. A serious man. A patient man. But does he really believe that his endeavors will lead anywhere?

True, this week Kerry did achieve a remarkable success.

A delegation of Arab foreign ministers, including the Palestinian, met with him in Washington. They were led by the Qatari prime minister – a relative of the Emir, of course – whose country is assuming a more and more prominent role in the Arab world.

At the meeting, the ministers emphasized that the Arab Peace Initiative is still valid.

This initiative, forged 10 years ago by the then Saudi Crown Prince (and present King) Abdullah, was endorsed by the entire Arab League in the March 2002 Summit Conference in Beirut. Yasser Arafat could not attend, because Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that if he left the country, he would not be allowed to return. But Arafat officially accepted the initiative.

It will be remembered that soon after the 1967 war, the Arab Summit Conference in Khartoum promulgated the Three Noes: No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel. The new initiative was a total reversal of that resolution, which was born out of humiliation and despair.

The Saudi initiative was reaffirmed unanimously in the 2007 Summit Conference in Riyadh. All Arab rulers attended, including Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine who voted in favor, excluding only Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

The initiative says unequivocally that all Arab countries would announce the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, sign peace treaties with Israel, and institute normal relations with Israel. In return, Israel would withdraw to the June 4, 1967 border (the Green Line). The State of Palestine, with its capital in East Jerusalem, would be established. The refugee problem would be solved by agreement (meaning agreement with Israel).

As I wrote at the time, if anyone had told us in May 1967 that the Arab world would make such an offer, they would have been locked up in an institution for the mentally ill. But those of us who advocated the acceptance of the Arab initiative were branded as traitors.

In his conference with the Arab ministers this week, John Kerry succeeded in pushing them a step further. They agreed to add that the 1967 Green Line may be changed by swaps of territories. This means that the large settlements along the border, where the great majority of the settlers reside, would be annexed to Israel, in return for largely inferior Israeli land.

When the initiative was first aired, the Israeli government was desperately looking for a way out.

The first excuse that sprang to mind – then as always – was the refugee problem. It is easy to create panic in Israel with the nightmare of millions of refugees “flooding” Israel, putting an end to the Jewishness of the Jewish State.

Sharon, the Prime Minister at the time, willfully ignored the crucial clause inserted by the Saudis into their plan: that there would be an “agreed” solution. This clearly means that Israel was accorded the right to veto any solution. In practice, this would amount to the return of a symbolic number, if any at all.

Why did the initiative mention the refugees at all? Well, no Arab could possibly publish a peace plan that did not mention them. Even so, the Lebanese objected to the clause, because it would leave the refugees in Lebanon.

But the refugees are always a useful bogeyman. Then and now.

One day before the original Saudi initiative was submitted to the Beirut Summit, on March 27, 2002, something terrible happened: Hamas terrorists carried out a massacre in Netanya, with 40 dead and hundreds wounded. It was on the eve of Passover, the joyous Jewish holiday.

The Israeli public was inflamed. Sharon immediately responded that In these circumstances, the Arab peace initiative would not even be considered. Never mind that the atrocity was committed by Hamas with the express purpose of sabotaging the Saudi initiative and undermining Arafat, who supported it. Sharon mendaciously blamed Arafat for the bloody deed, and that was that.

Curiously – or maybe not – a similar thing happened this week. On the very day the upgraded Arab initiative was published, a young Palestinian killed a settler with a knife at a checkpoint – the first Jew killed in the West Bank for more than a year and a half.

The victim, Evyatar Borowsky, was the 31-year old father of five children – usual for an orthodox man. He was a resident of the Yitzhar settlement near Nablus, perhaps the most extreme anti-Arab settlement in the entire West Bank. He looked like the quintessential ideological settler – blond, bearded, with East-European looks, long payot (side locks), and a large colored kippah. The perpetrator came from the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. He was shot and severely injured. He is now in an Israeli hospital.

Before the incident, Netanyahu had been hard at work to formulate a statement that would reject the peace initiative without insulting the Americans. After the killing, he decided that there was no need. The terrorist has done his job. (As an old Jewish saying goes: “The work of the righteous one is done by others”.)

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who is in charge of the (nonexistent) negotiations with the Palestinians, and President Shimon Peres welcomed the Arab statement. But Livni’s influence in the government is next to nil, and Peres is by now a joke in Israel.

If the American Secretary of State really believes that he can nudge our government slowly and gradually to “meaningful” negotiation with the Palestinians, he is deluding himself. If he does not believe it, he is trying to delude others.

There have been no real negotiations with the Palestinians since Ehud Barak came back from the Camp David conference in 2000, waving the slogan “We Have No Partner for Peace”. With this he destroyed the Israeli peace movement and brought Ariel Sharon to power.

Before that, there were no real negotiations either. Yitzhak Shamir announced that he was happy to negotiate for ever. (Shamir, by the way, declared that it was a virtue to “lie for the fatherland”.) Documents were produced and gathered dust, conferences were photographed and forgotten, agreements were signed and made no real difference. Nothing moved. Nothing – apart from settlement activity, that is.

Why? How would anyone entertain the belief that from now on everything would be different?

Kerry will elicit some more words from the Arabs. Some more promises from Netanyahu. There may even be a festive opening of a new round of negotiations, a great victory for President Obama and Kerry.

But nothing will change. Negotiations will just drag on. And on. And on.

For the same reason that there has been no movement in the past, there will be no movement in the future – unless…

Unless. Unless Obama takes the bull by the horns, which, it seems, he is exceedingly unwilling to do.

The horns of the bull are the horns of the dilemma, on which Israel is sitting.

It is the historic choice facing us: Greater Israel or Peace?

Peace, any conceivable peace, the very basis of the Arab Initiative, means Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories and the establishment of the State of Palestine in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem. No ifs, no buts, no perhapses.

The opposite of peace is Israeli rule over the whole of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, in one form or another. (Lately, some despairing Israeli peaceniks have been embracing this, in the absurd hope that in this Greater Israel, Israel would grant equality to the Arabs.)

If President Obama has the will and the power to compel the government of Israel to make this historic decision and choose peace, may the political price for the president be as it may, then he should proceed.

If this will and this power do not exist, the whole great peace effort is an exercise in deception, and honorable men should not indulge in it.

They should honestly face the two sides and the world and tell them:

No, We Can’t.



May 3-5, 2013
Uri Avnery
CounterPunch]]> The Arab Peace Initiative



No, We Can't

An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country, a British statesman famously wrote some 400 years ago. That is true, of course, for all diplomats.

The question is whether the diplomat lies only to others, or also to himself.

I am asking this these days when I follow the arduous efforts of John Kerry, the new American foreign secretary, to jump-start the Israeli-Arab “peace process”.

Kerry seems to be an honest man. A serious man. A patient man. But does he really believe that his endeavors will lead anywhere?

True, this week Kerry did achieve a remarkable success.

A delegation of Arab foreign ministers, including the Palestinian, met with him in Washington. They were led by the Qatari prime minister – a relative of the Emir, of course – whose country is assuming a more and more prominent role in the Arab world.

At the meeting, the ministers emphasized that the Arab Peace Initiative is still valid.

This initiative, forged 10 years ago by the then Saudi Crown Prince (and present King) Abdullah, was endorsed by the entire Arab League in the March 2002 Summit Conference in Beirut. Yasser Arafat could not attend, because Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that if he left the country, he would not be allowed to return. But Arafat officially accepted the initiative.

It will be remembered that soon after the 1967 war, the Arab Summit Conference in Khartoum promulgated the Three Noes: No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel. The new initiative was a total reversal of that resolution, which was born out of humiliation and despair.

The Saudi initiative was reaffirmed unanimously in the 2007 Summit Conference in Riyadh. All Arab rulers attended, including Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine who voted in favor, excluding only Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

The initiative says unequivocally that all Arab countries would announce the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, sign peace treaties with Israel, and institute normal relations with Israel. In return, Israel would withdraw to the June 4, 1967 border (the Green Line). The State of Palestine, with its capital in East Jerusalem, would be established. The refugee problem would be solved by agreement (meaning agreement with Israel).

As I wrote at the time, if anyone had told us in May 1967 that the Arab world would make such an offer, they would have been locked up in an institution for the mentally ill. But those of us who advocated the acceptance of the Arab initiative were branded as traitors.

In his conference with the Arab ministers this week, John Kerry succeeded in pushing them a step further. They agreed to add that the 1967 Green Line may be changed by swaps of territories. This means that the large settlements along the border, where the great majority of the settlers reside, would be annexed to Israel, in return for largely inferior Israeli land.

When the initiative was first aired, the Israeli government was desperately looking for a way out.

The first excuse that sprang to mind – then as always – was the refugee problem. It is easy to create panic in Israel with the nightmare of millions of refugees “flooding” Israel, putting an end to the Jewishness of the Jewish State.

Sharon, the Prime Minister at the time, willfully ignored the crucial clause inserted by the Saudis into their plan: that there would be an “agreed” solution. This clearly means that Israel was accorded the right to veto any solution. In practice, this would amount to the return of a symbolic number, if any at all.

Why did the initiative mention the refugees at all? Well, no Arab could possibly publish a peace plan that did not mention them. Even so, the Lebanese objected to the clause, because it would leave the refugees in Lebanon.

But the refugees are always a useful bogeyman. Then and now.

One day before the original Saudi initiative was submitted to the Beirut Summit, on March 27, 2002, something terrible happened: Hamas terrorists carried out a massacre in Netanya, with 40 dead and hundreds wounded. It was on the eve of Passover, the joyous Jewish holiday.

The Israeli public was inflamed. Sharon immediately responded that In these circumstances, the Arab peace initiative would not even be considered. Never mind that the atrocity was committed by Hamas with the express purpose of sabotaging the Saudi initiative and undermining Arafat, who supported it. Sharon mendaciously blamed Arafat for the bloody deed, and that was that.

Curiously – or maybe not – a similar thing happened this week. On the very day the upgraded Arab initiative was published, a young Palestinian killed a settler with a knife at a checkpoint – the first Jew killed in the West Bank for more than a year and a half.

The victim, Evyatar Borowsky, was the 31-year old father of five children – usual for an orthodox man. He was a resident of the Yitzhar settlement near Nablus, perhaps the most extreme anti-Arab settlement in the entire West Bank. He looked like the quintessential ideological settler – blond, bearded, with East-European looks, long payot (side locks), and a large colored kippah. The perpetrator came from the Palestinian town of Tulkarm. He was shot and severely injured. He is now in an Israeli hospital.

Before the incident, Netanyahu had been hard at work to formulate a statement that would reject the peace initiative without insulting the Americans. After the killing, he decided that there was no need. The terrorist has done his job. (As an old Jewish saying goes: “The work of the righteous one is done by others”.)

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who is in charge of the (nonexistent) negotiations with the Palestinians, and President Shimon Peres welcomed the Arab statement. But Livni’s influence in the government is next to nil, and Peres is by now a joke in Israel.

If the American Secretary of State really believes that he can nudge our government slowly and gradually to “meaningful” negotiation with the Palestinians, he is deluding himself. If he does not believe it, he is trying to delude others.

There have been no real negotiations with the Palestinians since Ehud Barak came back from the Camp David conference in 2000, waving the slogan “We Have No Partner for Peace”. With this he destroyed the Israeli peace movement and brought Ariel Sharon to power.

Before that, there were no real negotiations either. Yitzhak Shamir announced that he was happy to negotiate for ever. (Shamir, by the way, declared that it was a virtue to “lie for the fatherland”.) Documents were produced and gathered dust, conferences were photographed and forgotten, agreements were signed and made no real difference. Nothing moved. Nothing – apart from settlement activity, that is.

Why? How would anyone entertain the belief that from now on everything would be different?

Kerry will elicit some more words from the Arabs. Some more promises from Netanyahu. There may even be a festive opening of a new round of negotiations, a great victory for President Obama and Kerry.

But nothing will change. Negotiations will just drag on. And on. And on.

For the same reason that there has been no movement in the past, there will be no movement in the future – unless…

Unless. Unless Obama takes the bull by the horns, which, it seems, he is exceedingly unwilling to do.

The horns of the bull are the horns of the dilemma, on which Israel is sitting.

It is the historic choice facing us: Greater Israel or Peace?

Peace, any conceivable peace, the very basis of the Arab Initiative, means Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories and the establishment of the State of Palestine in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem. No ifs, no buts, no perhapses.

The opposite of peace is Israeli rule over the whole of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, in one form or another. (Lately, some despairing Israeli peaceniks have been embracing this, in the absurd hope that in this Greater Israel, Israel would grant equality to the Arabs.)

If President Obama has the will and the power to compel the government of Israel to make this historic decision and choose peace, may the political price for the president be as it may, then he should proceed.

If this will and this power do not exist, the whole great peace effort is an exercise in deception, and honorable men should not indulge in it.

They should honestly face the two sides and the world and tell them:

No, We Can’t.



May 3-5, 2013
Uri Avnery
CounterPunch]]> <![CDATA[WikiLeaks: Was Chavez Right About U.S. Meddling?]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-WikiLeaks-Was-Chavez-Right-About-U-S-Meddling Thu, 23 May 2013 15:29:26 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-WikiLeaks-Was-Chavez-Right-About-U-S-Meddling WikiLeaks: Was Chavez Right About U.S. Meddling?



[Image: chavez2-300x204.jpg]



It's no secret that U.S. media loathed the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Much of that was purely political; sure, Chavez could have given shorter speeches and been nicer to his political opponents–but it's hard to imagine that would have mattered much to, say, the Washington Post editorial board.

One thing that turned up constantly in Chavez coverage over the years was his suspicion that the United States government was looking to undermine his rule. As a Washington Post news article (1/10/13) put it:

Quote:A central ideological pillar of Chavez's rule over 14 years has been to oppose Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington, which he accuses of trying to destabilize his government.

"I think they really believe it, that we are out there at some level to do them ill," said Charles Shapiro, president of the Institute of the Americas, a think tank in San Diego.

As ambassador to Venezuela from 2002 to 2004, Shapiro met with Chavez and other high- ranking officials, including [Vice President Nicolas] Maduro. But the relationship began to fall apart, with Chavez accusing the United States of supporting a coup that briefly ousted him from power. U.S. officials have long denied the charge.

Shapiro recalled how Maduro made what he called unsubstantiated accusations about CIA activity in Venezuela, without ever approaching the embassy with a complaint. He said that as time went by, the United States became a useful foil for Chavez and most Venezuelan officials withdrew contact.

"A sure way to ruin your career, to become a backbencher, was to become too friendly with the U.S. Embassy," Shapiro said.


There was, as I argued at the time, plenty of evidence that this was more than a hunch; there was U.S. involvement in the 2002 coup that removed Chavez from power. And a newly released WikiLeaks cable fleshes out some more details about the intentions behind U.S. policy.

As a short write-up in the Hill notes (4/5/13), the 2006 cable,

Quote:signed by then-Ambassador William Brownfield, outlines a five-point strategy that includes "penetrating Chavez's political base," "dividing Chavismo," "protecting vital U.S. business" and "isolating Chavez internationally." Those goals are to be obtained by strengthening "democratic institutions," according to the cable.


That strategy was, according to the cable, to be carried out via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI).

The cable has received almost no media coverage. I wonder why.



April 8, 2013
Peter Hart
FAIR]]> WikiLeaks: Was Chavez Right About U.S. Meddling?



[Image: chavez2-300x204.jpg]



It's no secret that U.S. media loathed the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Much of that was purely political; sure, Chavez could have given shorter speeches and been nicer to his political opponents–but it's hard to imagine that would have mattered much to, say, the Washington Post editorial board.

One thing that turned up constantly in Chavez coverage over the years was his suspicion that the United States government was looking to undermine his rule. As a Washington Post news article (1/10/13) put it:

Quote:A central ideological pillar of Chavez's rule over 14 years has been to oppose Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington, which he accuses of trying to destabilize his government.

"I think they really believe it, that we are out there at some level to do them ill," said Charles Shapiro, president of the Institute of the Americas, a think tank in San Diego.

As ambassador to Venezuela from 2002 to 2004, Shapiro met with Chavez and other high- ranking officials, including [Vice President Nicolas] Maduro. But the relationship began to fall apart, with Chavez accusing the United States of supporting a coup that briefly ousted him from power. U.S. officials have long denied the charge.

Shapiro recalled how Maduro made what he called unsubstantiated accusations about CIA activity in Venezuela, without ever approaching the embassy with a complaint. He said that as time went by, the United States became a useful foil for Chavez and most Venezuelan officials withdrew contact.

"A sure way to ruin your career, to become a backbencher, was to become too friendly with the U.S. Embassy," Shapiro said.


There was, as I argued at the time, plenty of evidence that this was more than a hunch; there was U.S. involvement in the 2002 coup that removed Chavez from power. And a newly released WikiLeaks cable fleshes out some more details about the intentions behind U.S. policy.

As a short write-up in the Hill notes (4/5/13), the 2006 cable,

Quote:signed by then-Ambassador William Brownfield, outlines a five-point strategy that includes "penetrating Chavez's political base," "dividing Chavismo," "protecting vital U.S. business" and "isolating Chavez internationally." Those goals are to be obtained by strengthening "democratic institutions," according to the cable.


That strategy was, according to the cable, to be carried out via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI).

The cable has received almost no media coverage. I wonder why.



April 8, 2013
Peter Hart
FAIR]]> <![CDATA[U.S. Sergeant on SEAL team 'shoots dead nine sleeping Afghan children]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-U-S-Sergeant-on-SEAL-team-shoots-dead-nine-sleeping-Afghan-children Thu, 23 May 2013 10:11:13 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-U-S-Sergeant-on-SEAL-team-shoots-dead-nine-sleeping-Afghan-children U.S. and British officials warn of reprisals against troops after massacre
Taliban vows to avenge deaths, saying more than one soldier involved
Shooter identified as Army staff sergeant from Fort Lewis, Washington
Base regarded as 'most troubled in the military' with history of killings
'Entered three homes, shot 16 dead after suffering mental breakdown'
Nine children and three women among those reported dead
Relative: He 'poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them'


NATO troops in Afghanistan are on high alert after the Taliban vowed to avenge the deaths of 16 innocent civilians - including nine children and three women - who were shot and killed by a rogue U.S. soldier who opened fire after suffering a 'mental breakdown' early Sunday morning.
The Army staff sergeant, stationed at a U.S. base in Kandahar, entered three Afghan family’s homes at 3am and began the vicious killing spree. Relatives of the dead said he then 'poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.'
The shooter is an Army staff sergeant from Fort Lewis-McChord in Washington state, and was believed to have acted alone.
Military officials are investigating the incident and working to discover what made the soldier - believed to be a father of three - snap to such extremes that he would embark on a killing mission.
With tensions rising in the region, U.S. and British officials said they were now braced for a backlash as the Taliban claimed the killings were the work of 'more than one soldier'.
Militants condemned the 'blood-soaked and inhumane crime' by 'sick-minded American savages' on its website and vowed to take revenge 'for every single martyr with the help of Allah'.


Initial reports indicated the gunman returned to his base after the shooting, calmly turned himself in and was taken into custody at a NATO base in Afghanistan.
In a statement, Afghan President Hamid Karzai left open the possibility of more than one shooter. He initially spoke of a single U.S. gunman, then referred to 'American forces' entering houses.

The statement quoted a 15-year-old survivor named Rafiullah, shot in the leg, as telling Karzai in a phone call that 'soldiers' broke into his house, woke up his family and began shooting them.
Mr Karzai condemned the attacks as 'an assassination' and furiously demanded an explanation from the U.S. He has also demanded the gunman be handed over so he can stand trial.

Ughhh. Too much to copy -,-
Read it here]]> U.S. and British officials warn of reprisals against troops after massacre
Taliban vows to avenge deaths, saying more than one soldier involved
Shooter identified as Army staff sergeant from Fort Lewis, Washington
Base regarded as 'most troubled in the military' with history of killings
'Entered three homes, shot 16 dead after suffering mental breakdown'
Nine children and three women among those reported dead
Relative: He 'poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them'


NATO troops in Afghanistan are on high alert after the Taliban vowed to avenge the deaths of 16 innocent civilians - including nine children and three women - who were shot and killed by a rogue U.S. soldier who opened fire after suffering a 'mental breakdown' early Sunday morning.
The Army staff sergeant, stationed at a U.S. base in Kandahar, entered three Afghan family’s homes at 3am and began the vicious killing spree. Relatives of the dead said he then 'poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.'
The shooter is an Army staff sergeant from Fort Lewis-McChord in Washington state, and was believed to have acted alone.
Military officials are investigating the incident and working to discover what made the soldier - believed to be a father of three - snap to such extremes that he would embark on a killing mission.
With tensions rising in the region, U.S. and British officials said they were now braced for a backlash as the Taliban claimed the killings were the work of 'more than one soldier'.
Militants condemned the 'blood-soaked and inhumane crime' by 'sick-minded American savages' on its website and vowed to take revenge 'for every single martyr with the help of Allah'.


Initial reports indicated the gunman returned to his base after the shooting, calmly turned himself in and was taken into custody at a NATO base in Afghanistan.
In a statement, Afghan President Hamid Karzai left open the possibility of more than one shooter. He initially spoke of a single U.S. gunman, then referred to 'American forces' entering houses.

The statement quoted a 15-year-old survivor named Rafiullah, shot in the leg, as telling Karzai in a phone call that 'soldiers' broke into his house, woke up his family and began shooting them.
Mr Karzai condemned the attacks as 'an assassination' and furiously demanded an explanation from the U.S. He has also demanded the gunman be handed over so he can stand trial.

Ughhh. Too much to copy -,-
Read it here]]> <![CDATA[A Kodak moment]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-A-Kodak-moment Thu, 23 May 2013 05:54:28 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-A-Kodak-moment
So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.

You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope.

We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?

I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron.

We can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.

ref]]>
So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.

You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope.

We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?

I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron.

We can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.

ref]]> <![CDATA[Police Brutality... Handled the way it should be]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Police-Brutality-Handled-the-way-it-should-be Thu, 23 May 2013 02:39:09 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Police-Brutality-Handled-the-way-it-should-be

]]>

]]> <![CDATA[Looking for this girl]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Looking-for-this-girl Thu, 23 May 2013 00:31:08 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Looking-for-this-girl



Priya, have ya seen her? did you record this?!?]]>



Priya, have ya seen her? did you record this?!?]]> <![CDATA['Soldier beheaded' in London machete attack]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Soldier-beheaded-in-London-machete-attack Wed, 22 May 2013 23:50:57 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Soldier-beheaded-in-London-machete-attack
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d0f_1369235265




A man reported to be a serving soldier has been hacked to death in Woolwich, south east London, in what is being treated as a terrorist attack.

Dozens of weapons - including a number of knives - and pools of blood could be seen on the ground in John Wilson Street, where a man said to be wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt was attacked by two men.

Witnesses say the pair appeared to deliberately drive their car at the victim, before getting out with various bladed weapons and launching their attack.

As the victim lay motionless in the middle of the road, witnesses say they heard the pair chanting "Allahu akbar" - and inviting passers-by to take photographs of them.

As soon as armed police arrived at the scene, witnesses say at least one of the alleged attackers began approaching the officers - who opened fire and shot the pair. The men were taken to separate hospitals with gunshot wounds.

Prime Minister David Cameron described the incident as "shocking and horrifying" and said there were "strong indications that it is a terrorist incident"

He told a news conference in Paris that Britain had previously faced terror attacks such as the one in Woolwich, adding: "We will never buckle in the face of it."

He is cutting short a trip to Paris to return to London and will attend a Thursday morning meeting of the Government's Cobra emergency committee - which had convened in the hours after the incident on Wednesday afternoon.

Video has emerged that appears to show one of two alleged attackers - with blood-stained hands and holding two bladed weapons - attempting to justify the attack.

"I apologise that women had to witness this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same," he said.

Photographs taken at the scene show three people lying on the ground. Their condition was not clear. A car that appeared to have crashed on the pavement could also be seen.

Officials wearing full army uniform were seen entering Plumstead Police Station this evening and confirmed they were there in connection with the case.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed one person had died following the incident and said the Independent Police Complaints Commission had now taken over the investigation, which is standard practice in cases where armed police fire their weapons.

The commissioner of the Met, Bernard Hogan-Howe, said: "On the streets of London, a terrible murder has occurred.

"We ask that people give us the opportunity to thoroughly investigate this crime, to make sure we get to the bottom of who committed it and why."

Commander Simon Letchford, also from the Met, said officers were called to the road at 2.20pm.

"One man was being assaulted by two other men," he said.

"A number of weapons were reportedly being used in the attack, and this included reports of a firearm.

"Officers including local Greenwich officers arrived at the scene and shortly after firearms officers arrived on the scene.

"On their arrival at the scene they found a man, who was later pronounced dead. At this early stage I am unable to provide any further information about the man who has died.

"Two men, who we believe from early reports to have been carrying weapons, were shot by police. They were taken to separate London hospitals, they are receiving treatment for their injuries."

Nigel Foran, who saw the incident as he returned home from shopping, described a scene of confusion.

He told Sky News: "We saw a man running towards the police officers and then we heard a couple of gunshots.

"He went to the floor and was surrounded while officers drew their stun guns. After that, all the people who were watching ran away when they heard the gunshots."

The Ministry of Defence said it was urgently looking at the reports that the incident involved a soldier.

Greenwich and Woolwich MP Nick Raynsford had earlier told Sky News he believed the deceased was a serving soldier.

He said he had spoken to both borough commander Richard Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Bob Christopher at Royal Artillery Barracks - which is around a mile from the scene of the attack.

"We think a serving soldier was the victim. We don't know the circumstances surrounding the incident."

Help for Heroes, the charity whose t-shirt witnesses said the victim was wearing, said: "Help for Heroes is appalled to hear that a man, believed to be a serving soldier, has been brutally murdered in Woolwich today.

"We are desperately saddened to hear of this sickening attack and offer our thoughts and prayers to his family, colleagues and friends."

Schools in the area were placed on lockdown.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson posted on his Twitter account: "This afternoon's attack in Woolwich is a sickening deluded and unforgivable act of violence."

http://news.sky.com/story/1094380/woolwi...ror-attack


Woolwich: Riot Police Contain EDL Supporters

[Image: bk5je9-cyaajtbn-1-522x293.jpg]

10:52pm UK, Wednesday 22 May 2013

English Defence League supporters have thrown missiles at police in Woolwich after a machete attack that left one man dead.

A group of between 75 and 100 men gathered at The Queen's Arms pub on Burrage Grove, where they sang nationalistic songs.

Sky News correspondent Alistair Bunkall, who is at the scene, said: "As soon as the EDL got into the town centre ... it became not only a lot harder for the police to try and contain anything, but also the aggression (increased) quite considerably.

"A few missiles have been thrown, glass bottles and the like. The police are trying to surround them and they've been charging them as well with batons."

It came after two men were arrested following separate attacks on mosques hours after the suspected terrorist incident in Woolwich.

A 43-year-old man is in custody on suspicion of attempted arson after reportedly walking into a mosque with a knife in Braintree, Essex.

Local MP Brooks Newmark said on this Twitter account: "Local mosque in Braintree attacked by man with knives and incendiary device. Man arrested. No one injured.

"Just met with leaders of local mosque in Braintree which was attacked this evening. Thanked local police for their swift response."

Essex Police confirmed a 43-year-old from Braintree had been arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and attempted arson after the incident in Silks Way at 7.15pm.

Meanwhile police in Kent were called to reports of criminal damage at a mosque in Canterbury Street, Gillingham, at 8.40pm.

A spokesman said a man was in custody on suspicion of racially-aggravated criminal damage.

http://news.sky.com/story/1094514/woolwi...supporters]]>
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d0f_1369235265




A man reported to be a serving soldier has been hacked to death in Woolwich, south east London, in what is being treated as a terrorist attack.

Dozens of weapons - including a number of knives - and pools of blood could be seen on the ground in John Wilson Street, where a man said to be wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt was attacked by two men.

Witnesses say the pair appeared to deliberately drive their car at the victim, before getting out with various bladed weapons and launching their attack.

As the victim lay motionless in the middle of the road, witnesses say they heard the pair chanting "Allahu akbar" - and inviting passers-by to take photographs of them.

As soon as armed police arrived at the scene, witnesses say at least one of the alleged attackers began approaching the officers - who opened fire and shot the pair. The men were taken to separate hospitals with gunshot wounds.

Prime Minister David Cameron described the incident as "shocking and horrifying" and said there were "strong indications that it is a terrorist incident"

He told a news conference in Paris that Britain had previously faced terror attacks such as the one in Woolwich, adding: "We will never buckle in the face of it."

He is cutting short a trip to Paris to return to London and will attend a Thursday morning meeting of the Government's Cobra emergency committee - which had convened in the hours after the incident on Wednesday afternoon.

Video has emerged that appears to show one of two alleged attackers - with blood-stained hands and holding two bladed weapons - attempting to justify the attack.

"I apologise that women had to witness this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same," he said.

Photographs taken at the scene show three people lying on the ground. Their condition was not clear. A car that appeared to have crashed on the pavement could also be seen.

Officials wearing full army uniform were seen entering Plumstead Police Station this evening and confirmed they were there in connection with the case.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed one person had died following the incident and said the Independent Police Complaints Commission had now taken over the investigation, which is standard practice in cases where armed police fire their weapons.

The commissioner of the Met, Bernard Hogan-Howe, said: "On the streets of London, a terrible murder has occurred.

"We ask that people give us the opportunity to thoroughly investigate this crime, to make sure we get to the bottom of who committed it and why."

Commander Simon Letchford, also from the Met, said officers were called to the road at 2.20pm.

"One man was being assaulted by two other men," he said.

"A number of weapons were reportedly being used in the attack, and this included reports of a firearm.

"Officers including local Greenwich officers arrived at the scene and shortly after firearms officers arrived on the scene.

"On their arrival at the scene they found a man, who was later pronounced dead. At this early stage I am unable to provide any further information about the man who has died.

"Two men, who we believe from early reports to have been carrying weapons, were shot by police. They were taken to separate London hospitals, they are receiving treatment for their injuries."

Nigel Foran, who saw the incident as he returned home from shopping, described a scene of confusion.

He told Sky News: "We saw a man running towards the police officers and then we heard a couple of gunshots.

"He went to the floor and was surrounded while officers drew their stun guns. After that, all the people who were watching ran away when they heard the gunshots."

The Ministry of Defence said it was urgently looking at the reports that the incident involved a soldier.

Greenwich and Woolwich MP Nick Raynsford had earlier told Sky News he believed the deceased was a serving soldier.

He said he had spoken to both borough commander Richard Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Bob Christopher at Royal Artillery Barracks - which is around a mile from the scene of the attack.

"We think a serving soldier was the victim. We don't know the circumstances surrounding the incident."

Help for Heroes, the charity whose t-shirt witnesses said the victim was wearing, said: "Help for Heroes is appalled to hear that a man, believed to be a serving soldier, has been brutally murdered in Woolwich today.

"We are desperately saddened to hear of this sickening attack and offer our thoughts and prayers to his family, colleagues and friends."

Schools in the area were placed on lockdown.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson posted on his Twitter account: "This afternoon's attack in Woolwich is a sickening deluded and unforgivable act of violence."

http://news.sky.com/story/1094380/woolwi...ror-attack


Woolwich: Riot Police Contain EDL Supporters

[Image: bk5je9-cyaajtbn-1-522x293.jpg]

10:52pm UK, Wednesday 22 May 2013

English Defence League supporters have thrown missiles at police in Woolwich after a machete attack that left one man dead.

A group of between 75 and 100 men gathered at The Queen's Arms pub on Burrage Grove, where they sang nationalistic songs.

Sky News correspondent Alistair Bunkall, who is at the scene, said: "As soon as the EDL got into the town centre ... it became not only a lot harder for the police to try and contain anything, but also the aggression (increased) quite considerably.

"A few missiles have been thrown, glass bottles and the like. The police are trying to surround them and they've been charging them as well with batons."

It came after two men were arrested following separate attacks on mosques hours after the suspected terrorist incident in Woolwich.

A 43-year-old man is in custody on suspicion of attempted arson after reportedly walking into a mosque with a knife in Braintree, Essex.

Local MP Brooks Newmark said on this Twitter account: "Local mosque in Braintree attacked by man with knives and incendiary device. Man arrested. No one injured.

"Just met with leaders of local mosque in Braintree which was attacked this evening. Thanked local police for their swift response."

Essex Police confirmed a 43-year-old from Braintree had been arrested on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and attempted arson after the incident in Silks Way at 7.15pm.

Meanwhile police in Kent were called to reports of criminal damage at a mosque in Canterbury Street, Gillingham, at 8.40pm.

A spokesman said a man was in custody on suspicion of racially-aggravated criminal damage.

http://news.sky.com/story/1094514/woolwi...supporters]]> <![CDATA[Bodybuilding Supplement Info Depository]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Bodybuilding-Supplement-Info-Depository Wed, 22 May 2013 21:59:36 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Bodybuilding-Supplement-Info-Depository For all you powerlifters / bodybuilders / strongmen / other strength atheles out there I thought I'd give a quick tour of the supplements I've used, their effects, pros / cons, value and my general opinion on the different array of products out there.

Whey Protein

Whey Protein Powder is the heart of weightlifting supplementation. It has been around since the start of the bodybuilding hype in the 1930's, and has been hitting the market hard ever since.

Whey protein is a by-product of cheese-production, is 100% natural and comes with zero side-effects except for an uneasy digestive system if taken in excess. Whey is currently the fastest digesting protein known to the health industry, which makes it a perfect candidate for a post-workout supplement.

If you are unable to eat the comprehensive amounts of protein required for optimal muscle recovery, Whey protein is a great and relatively cheap product to be supplementing. Attempt to get at least 60% of your protein through solid foods however.

Recommended dosage: up to 40% of 1-1.5g of protein per lb of bodyweight.

Recommended Timing: For breakfast / Post workout

Product's I've Tried:

Source Nutrition Whey Protein 3kg

Casein Protein

Casein Protein is, contrary to Whey protein, the slowest digesting protein available. Good natural sources of Casein protein are eggs and milk.

Casein Protein Powder is a tad more expensive than Whey Protein Powder, however may well be worth it, depending on your diet and schedule.

Research shows that a combination of Whey and Casein protein supplementation grants you better results than consuming simply one.

Recommended dosage: Same as Whey

Recommended Timing: Prior to going to bed / Mid day

Gainer Powder

Gainer Powder is a mix of Carbohydrate and Protein sources. The typical gainer has a 3:1 ratio of Carbs and Protein, granting you far more carbohydrates than protein per gram of powder.

The Carbohydrates in Gainer protein is typically from maltodextrin, a fast digesting carb source, which is found in a large array of pre-made food products. The downside of maltodextrin is that it is a simple carb source, it contains minimal amounts of vitamins and minerals which would assist your body to absorb the carbohydrates, and excess consumption of maltodextrin has been linked to cardiovascular health issues - especially among people who are in little physical activity.

The Protein in gainer products is regularly healthy Whey Protein.

The combination between the fast digesting carbs and protein makes the gainer a great product to consume post-workout, however a whey protein shake and a bunch of bananas will give you the same effect, without the risks. (Do note that the "risks" are very minimal, and eating a hamburger will serve the same purpose)

Products I've tried:

PF - Big Mass Gainer 3kg

Fitnessplanet - Gainer 4kg

Self Omninutrition - Active Whey Gainer


Pre-Workout Supplements

Glutamine

Creatine

Carnatine

Healthy Fat Supplements

BCAA's

Joint Pain Supplements

I'll add more to the recipeatory in the following days, stay tuned and do share your own opinions on any supplements you've encountered. I realize that the health and fitness section at this forum isn't all that large, however hopefully I can spark some interest Smiley.
]]> For all you powerlifters / bodybuilders / strongmen / other strength atheles out there I thought I'd give a quick tour of the supplements I've used, their effects, pros / cons, value and my general opinion on the different array of products out there.

Whey Protein

Whey Protein Powder is the heart of weightlifting supplementation. It has been around since the start of the bodybuilding hype in the 1930's, and has been hitting the market hard ever since.

Whey protein is a by-product of cheese-production, is 100% natural and comes with zero side-effects except for an uneasy digestive system if taken in excess. Whey is currently the fastest digesting protein known to the health industry, which makes it a perfect candidate for a post-workout supplement.

If you are unable to eat the comprehensive amounts of protein required for optimal muscle recovery, Whey protein is a great and relatively cheap product to be supplementing. Attempt to get at least 60% of your protein through solid foods however.

Recommended dosage: up to 40% of 1-1.5g of protein per lb of bodyweight.

Recommended Timing: For breakfast / Post workout

Product's I've Tried:

Source Nutrition Whey Protein 3kg

Casein Protein

Casein Protein is, contrary to Whey protein, the slowest digesting protein available. Good natural sources of Casein protein are eggs and milk.

Casein Protein Powder is a tad more expensive than Whey Protein Powder, however may well be worth it, depending on your diet and schedule.

Research shows that a combination of Whey and Casein protein supplementation grants you better results than consuming simply one.

Recommended dosage: Same as Whey

Recommended Timing: Prior to going to bed / Mid day

Gainer Powder

Gainer Powder is a mix of Carbohydrate and Protein sources. The typical gainer has a 3:1 ratio of Carbs and Protein, granting you far more carbohydrates than protein per gram of powder.

The Carbohydrates in Gainer protein is typically from maltodextrin, a fast digesting carb source, which is found in a large array of pre-made food products. The downside of maltodextrin is that it is a simple carb source, it contains minimal amounts of vitamins and minerals which would assist your body to absorb the carbohydrates, and excess consumption of maltodextrin has been linked to cardiovascular health issues - especially among people who are in little physical activity.

The Protein in gainer products is regularly healthy Whey Protein.

The combination between the fast digesting carbs and protein makes the gainer a great product to consume post-workout, however a whey protein shake and a bunch of bananas will give you the same effect, without the risks. (Do note that the "risks" are very minimal, and eating a hamburger will serve the same purpose)

Products I've tried:

PF - Big Mass Gainer 3kg

Fitnessplanet - Gainer 4kg

Self Omninutrition - Active Whey Gainer


Pre-Workout Supplements

Glutamine

Creatine

Carnatine

Healthy Fat Supplements

BCAA's

Joint Pain Supplements

I'll add more to the recipeatory in the following days, stay tuned and do share your own opinions on any supplements you've encountered. I realize that the health and fitness section at this forum isn't all that large, however hopefully I can spark some interest Smiley.
]]> <![CDATA[Whatever happened to crack babies?]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Whatever-happened-to-crack-babies Wed, 22 May 2013 15:17:42 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Whatever-happened-to-crack-babies



video]]>



video]]> <![CDATA[Diablo 3 hyperinflation]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Diablo-3-hyperinflation Wed, 22 May 2013 12:49:23 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Diablo-3-hyperinflation I purchased most of my gear for around 5 mil [gold] early on. I’ve been farming for awhile [and] have saved around 30 million gold [but now] I can’t upgrade the gear I have ... Where is all this money coming from? Why is everything so expensive?[5]





...As virtual fantasy worlds go, Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 3 is particularly foreboding. In this multiplayer online game played by millions, witch doctors, demon hunters, and other character types duke it out in a war between angels and demons in a dark world called Sanctuary. The world is reminiscent of Judeo-Christian notions of hell: fire and brimstone, with the added fantasy elements of supernatural combat waged with magic and divine weaponry. And within a fairly straightforward gaming framework, virtual “gold” is used as currency for purchasing weapons and repairing battle damage. Over time, virtual gold can be used to purchase ever-more resources for confronting ever-more dangerous foes.

But in the last few months, various outposts in that world — Silver City and New Tristram, to name two — have borne more in common with real world places like Harare, Zimbabwe in 2007 or Berlin in 1923 than with Dante’s Inferno. A culmination of a series of unanticipated circumstances — and, finally, a most unfortunate programming bug — has over the last few weeks produced a new and unforeseen dimension of hellishness within Diablo 3: hyperinflation.

Aftermath

Blizzard quickly closed the in-game auction houses and audited transactions which took place during the blowout, banning players who took advantage of the bug and donating the proceeds of certain sales to charity. The gold stack size was also moved back from 10M to 1M. One week later, on May 15th, the above-cited items were quoted at the following, approximate virtual gold prices: radiant star amethyst, 26.1M; radiant square ruby, 375K; flawless square topaz, 8,600; star emerald, 797K; tome of jewelcrafting, 1,350.

In May of 2012, the price of virtual gold was approximately $30/100,000 or $0.0003/gold. As this article was completed — and bearing in mind that these prices may be erroneous, stale, or merely indications of interest — one site showed Diablo 3 gold being offered by four third party sellers at an average price of $1.09/20M, or $0.0000000545/gold: one ten-thousandth its market price one year earlier.In the RMAH, virtual gold was priced at $0.39/1M.

Remembering that game economies are private and players are voluntary members, there’s no explicit mandate to ensure rigid inflation control as one often sees (however rarely pursued) in public economies. That said, knowing that gaming experiences can be upended by economic missteps, there is a clear business interest for gaming firms in keeping virtual currencies and the greater economies as a whole stable.

Frequently, hyperinflationary episodes have ended by substituting a currency outside the political and central banking control of a nation for the sovereign currency. During the early 1990s, during Serbia’s hyperinflation,

[t]he authorities could not print enough cash to keep up. On Jan 6th, 1994, the dinar officially collapsed. The government declared the German mark legal tender … [which] end[ed] the hyperinflation.
Two obvious solutions for managers of virtual economies include more vigilant bot restrictions and close — indeed, real-time — monitoring of faucet output, sink absorption, prices, and user behaviors. More critically, though, whether structured as auctions or exchanges, markets must be allowed to operate freely, without caps, floors, or other artificialities. Unrestricted (real) cash auctions would for the most part preempt and obviate black markets.

One also surmises, considering the level of planning that goes into designing and maintaining virtual gaming environments, that some measure of statistical monitoring and/or econometric modeling must have been applied to Diablo 3’s game world. The Austrian School has long warned of the arrogance and naïveté intrinsic to applying rigid, quantitative measures to the deductive study of human actions. Indeed; if a small, straightforward economy generating detailed, timely economic data for its managers can careen so completely aslant in a matter of months, should anyone be surprised when the performance of central banks consistently breeds results which are either ineffective or destabilizing?

By no means does this analysis intend to equate the actions of virtual gaming firms with the policies of governments or central banks, or to malign their indisputably talented managers, designers, and programmers. While their actions may ultimately generate similar outcomes, central planners seek and wield power whereas the actions of commercial gaming interests are undertaken to compete with other online entertainment providers by delicately balancing opportunities for newer players with the need to continually challenge experienced players.

By all accounts Diablo 3 is a great game; one hopes that with this episode passed, it will reacquire its former glory. But while decision-makers at online gaming firms can and should be forgiven for not anticipating the perilous and unpredictable torsions of rapidly expanding money supplies, the events of the last week provide a stark reminder of the power and inescapability of the laws of economics.

ref]]> I purchased most of my gear for around 5 mil [gold] early on. I’ve been farming for awhile [and] have saved around 30 million gold [but now] I can’t upgrade the gear I have ... Where is all this money coming from? Why is everything so expensive?[5]





...As virtual fantasy worlds go, Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 3 is particularly foreboding. In this multiplayer online game played by millions, witch doctors, demon hunters, and other character types duke it out in a war between angels and demons in a dark world called Sanctuary. The world is reminiscent of Judeo-Christian notions of hell: fire and brimstone, with the added fantasy elements of supernatural combat waged with magic and divine weaponry. And within a fairly straightforward gaming framework, virtual “gold” is used as currency for purchasing weapons and repairing battle damage. Over time, virtual gold can be used to purchase ever-more resources for confronting ever-more dangerous foes.

But in the last few months, various outposts in that world — Silver City and New Tristram, to name two — have borne more in common with real world places like Harare, Zimbabwe in 2007 or Berlin in 1923 than with Dante’s Inferno. A culmination of a series of unanticipated circumstances — and, finally, a most unfortunate programming bug — has over the last few weeks produced a new and unforeseen dimension of hellishness within Diablo 3: hyperinflation.

Aftermath

Blizzard quickly closed the in-game auction houses and audited transactions which took place during the blowout, banning players who took advantage of the bug and donating the proceeds of certain sales to charity. The gold stack size was also moved back from 10M to 1M. One week later, on May 15th, the above-cited items were quoted at the following, approximate virtual gold prices: radiant star amethyst, 26.1M; radiant square ruby, 375K; flawless square topaz, 8,600; star emerald, 797K; tome of jewelcrafting, 1,350.

In May of 2012, the price of virtual gold was approximately $30/100,000 or $0.0003/gold. As this article was completed — and bearing in mind that these prices may be erroneous, stale, or merely indications of interest — one site showed Diablo 3 gold being offered by four third party sellers at an average price of $1.09/20M, or $0.0000000545/gold: one ten-thousandth its market price one year earlier.In the RMAH, virtual gold was priced at $0.39/1M.

Remembering that game economies are private and players are voluntary members, there’s no explicit mandate to ensure rigid inflation control as one often sees (however rarely pursued) in public economies. That said, knowing that gaming experiences can be upended by economic missteps, there is a clear business interest for gaming firms in keeping virtual currencies and the greater economies as a whole stable.

Frequently, hyperinflationary episodes have ended by substituting a currency outside the political and central banking control of a nation for the sovereign currency. During the early 1990s, during Serbia’s hyperinflation,

[t]he authorities could not print enough cash to keep up. On Jan 6th, 1994, the dinar officially collapsed. The government declared the German mark legal tender … [which] end[ed] the hyperinflation.
Two obvious solutions for managers of virtual economies include more vigilant bot restrictions and close — indeed, real-time — monitoring of faucet output, sink absorption, prices, and user behaviors. More critically, though, whether structured as auctions or exchanges, markets must be allowed to operate freely, without caps, floors, or other artificialities. Unrestricted (real) cash auctions would for the most part preempt and obviate black markets.

One also surmises, considering the level of planning that goes into designing and maintaining virtual gaming environments, that some measure of statistical monitoring and/or econometric modeling must have been applied to Diablo 3’s game world. The Austrian School has long warned of the arrogance and naïveté intrinsic to applying rigid, quantitative measures to the deductive study of human actions. Indeed; if a small, straightforward economy generating detailed, timely economic data for its managers can careen so completely aslant in a matter of months, should anyone be surprised when the performance of central banks consistently breeds results which are either ineffective or destabilizing?

By no means does this analysis intend to equate the actions of virtual gaming firms with the policies of governments or central banks, or to malign their indisputably talented managers, designers, and programmers. While their actions may ultimately generate similar outcomes, central planners seek and wield power whereas the actions of commercial gaming interests are undertaken to compete with other online entertainment providers by delicately balancing opportunities for newer players with the need to continually challenge experienced players.

By all accounts Diablo 3 is a great game; one hopes that with this episode passed, it will reacquire its former glory. But while decision-makers at online gaming firms can and should be forgiven for not anticipating the perilous and unpredictable torsions of rapidly expanding money supplies, the events of the last week provide a stark reminder of the power and inescapability of the laws of economics.

ref]]> <![CDATA[An Interview With Julian Assange]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-An-Interview-With-Julian-Assange Wed, 22 May 2013 04:15:13 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-An-Interview-With-Julian-Assange An Interview With Julian Assange



[Image: assange_press_rtr_img_0.jpg]



A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the steps leading up to the building, and others wait in the lobby directly in front of the embassy door. An officer stands on the corner of a side street facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. Another officer peers out the window of a neighboring building a few feet from Assange’s bedroom at the back of the embassy. Police sit round-the-clock in a communications van topped with an array of antennas that presumably captures all electronic forms of communication from Assange’s ground-floor suite.
 
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), or Scotland Yard, said the estimated cost of surrounding the Ecuadorean Embassy from June 19, 2012, when Assange entered the building, until Jan. 31, 2013, is the equivalent of $4.5 million.

Britain has rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”

“The status quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the US-led campaign against him as we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face and was wearing a traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened WikiLeaks and me personally, threatened us before the whole world, demanded that we destroy everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new information from US government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other words, the total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did not self-destruct in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.”

“But they have failed,” he went on. “They set the rules about what a win was. They lost in every battle they defined. Their loss is total. We’ve won the big stuff. The loss of face is hard to overstate. The Pentagon reissued its threats on September 28 last year. This time we laughed. Threats inflate quickly. Now the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department intend to show the world what vindictive losers they are through the persecution of Bradley Manning, myself and the organization more generally.”

Assange, Manning and WikiLeaks, by making public in 2010 half a million internal documents from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of US helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, effectively exposed the empire’s hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence and its use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation. WikiLeaks shone a spotlight into the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this it has become empire’s prey. Those around the globe with the computer skills to search out the secrets of empire are now those whom empire fears most. If we lose this battle, if these rebels are defeated, it means the dark night of corporate totalitarianism. If we win, if the corporate state is unmasked, it can be destroyed.

US government officials quoted in Australian diplomatic cables obtained by The Saturday Age described the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks as “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” The scope of the operation has also been gleaned from statements made during Manning’s pretrial hearing. The US Department of Justice will apparently pay the contractor ManTech of Fairfax, Virginia, more than $2 million this year alone for a computer system that, from the tender, appears designed to handle the prosecution documents. The government line item refers only to “WikiLeaks Software and Hardware Maintenance.”

The lead government prosecutor in the Manning case, Maj. Ashden Fein, has told the court that the FBI file that deals with the leak of government documents through WikiLeaks has “42,135 pages or 3,475 documents.” This does not include a huge volume of material accumulated by a grand jury investigation. Manning, Fein has said, represents only 8,741 pages or 636 different documents in that classified FBI file.

There are no divisions among government departments or the two major political parties over what should be Assange’s fate. “I think we should be clear here. WikiLeaks and people that disseminate information to people like this are criminals, first and foremost,” then-press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking for the Obama administration, said during a 2010 press briefing.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and then-Senator Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, said in a joint letter to the US attorney general calling for Assange’s prosecution: “If Mr. Assange and his possible accomplices cannot be charged under the Espionage Act (or any other applicable statute), please know that we stand ready and willing to support your efforts to ‘close those gaps’ in the law, as you also mentioned…”

Republican Candice S. Miller, a US representative from Michigan, said in the House: “It is time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is—a terrorist organization, whose continued operation threatens our security. Shut it down. Shut it down. It is time to shut down this terrorist, this terrorist Web site, WikiLeaks. Shut it down, Attorney General [Eric] Holder.”

At least a dozen American governmental agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the Army’s Criminal Investigative Department, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Diplomatic Security Service, are assigned to the WikiLeaks case, while the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are assigned to track down WikiLeaks’ supposed breaches of security. The global assault—which saw Australia threaten to revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the “war on terror” into a wider war on civil liberties. It has become a hunt not for actual terrorists but a hunt for all those with the ability to expose the mounting crimes of the power elite.

The dragnet has swept up any person or organization that fits the profile of those with the technical skills and inclination to burrow into the archives of power and disseminate it to the public. It no longer matters if they have committed a crime. The group Anonymous, which has mounted cyberattacks on government agencies at the local and federal levels, saw Barrett Brown—a journalist associated with Anonymous and who specializes in military and intelligence contractors—arrested along with Jeremy Hammond, a political activist alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with 5.5 million e-mails between the security firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) and its clients. Brown and Hammond were apparently seized because of allegations made by an informant named Hector Xavier Monsegur—known as Sabu—who appears to have attempted to entrap WikiLeaks while under FBI supervision.

To entrap and spy on activists, Washington has used an array of informants, including Adrian Lamo, who sold Bradley Manning out to the US government.

WikiLeaks collaborators or supporters are routinely stopped—often at international airports—and attempts are made to recruit them as informants. Jérémie Zimmerman, Smári McCarthy, Jacob Appelbaum, David House and one of Assange’s lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, all have been approached or interrogated. The tactics are often heavy-handed. McCarthy, an Icelander and WikiLeaks activist, was detained and extensively questioned when he entered the United States. Soon afterward, three men who identified themselves as being from the FBI approached McCarthy in Washington. The men attempted to recruit him as an informant and gave him instructions on how to spy on WikiLeaks.

On Aug. 24, 2011, six FBI agents and two prosecutors landed in Iceland on a private jet. The team told the Icelandic government that it had discovered a plan by Anonymous to hack into Icelandic government computers. But it was soon clear the team had come with a very different agenda. The Americans spent the next few days, in flagrant violation of Icelandic sovereignty, interrogating Sigurdur Thordarson, a young WikiLeaks activist, in various Reykjavik hotel rooms. Thordarson, after the US team was discovered by the Icelandic Ministry of the Interior and expelled from the country, was taken to Washington, DC, for four days of further interrogation. Thordarson appears to have decided to cooperate with the FBI. It was reported in the Icelandic press that he went to Denmark in 2012 and sold the FBI stolen WikiLeaks computer hard drives for about $5,000.

There have been secret search orders for information from Internet service providers, including Twitter, Google and Sonic, as well as seizure of information about Assange and WikiLeaks from the company Dynadot, a domain name registrar and web host.

Assange’s suitcase and computer were stolen on a flight from Sweden to Germany on September 27, 2010. His bankcards were blocked. WikiLeaks’s Moneybookers primary donation account was shut down after being placed on a blacklist in Australia and a “watch list” in the United States. Financial service companies including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, Western Union and American Express, following denunciations of WikiLeaks by the US government, blacklisted the organization. Last month the Supreme Court of Iceland found the blacklisting to be unlawful and ordered it lifted in Iceland by May 8. There have been frequent massive denial-of-service attacks on WikiLeak’s infrastructure.

And there is a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Assange, including mischaracterizations of the sexual misconduct case brought against him by Swedish police. Assange has not formally been charged with a crime. The two women involved have not accused him of rape.

Bradley Manning’s heroism extends to his steadfast refusal, despite what appears to be tremendous pressure, to implicate Assange in espionage. If Manning alleges that Assange had instructed him on how to ferret out classified documents, the United States might try to charge Assange with espionage.

Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy after exhausting his fight to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden. He and his lawyers say that an extradition to Sweden would mean an extradition to the United States If Sweden refused to comply with US demands for Assange, kidnapping, or “extraordinary rendition,” would remain an option for Washington.

Kidnapping was given legal cover by a 1989 memorandum issued by the Justice Department stating that “the FBI may use its statutory authority to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if the FBI’s actions contravene customary international law” and that an “arrest that is inconsistent with international or foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment.” This is a stunning example of the security and surveillance state’s Orwellian doublespeak. The persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks and the practice of extraordinary rendition embody the shredding of the Fourth Amendment, which was designed to protect us from unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

Two Swedes and a Briton were seized by the United States last August somewhere in Africa—it is assumed to have been in Somalia—and held in one of our black sites. They suddenly reappeared—with the Briton stripped of his citizenship—in a Brooklyn courtroom in December facing terrorism charges. Sweden, rather than object to the extradition of its two citizens, dropped the Swedish charges against the prisoners to permit the rendition to occur. The prisoners, The Washington Post reported, were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury two months after being taken.

The persistence of WikiLeaks, despite the onslaught, has been remarkable. In 2012 it released some of the 5.5 million documents sent from or to the private security firm Stratfor. The documents, known as “the Global Intelligence Files,” included an e-mail dated January 26, 2011, from Fred Burton, a Stratfor vice president, who wrote: “Text Not for Pub. We [the US government] have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.”

WikiLeaks’s most recent foray into full disclosure includes the Kissinger files, or the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy. The files, which have built into them a remarkable search engine, provide access to 1.7 million diplomatic communications, once confidential but now in the public record, that were sent between 1973 and 1976. Henry Kissinger, secretary of state from September 1973 to January 1977, authored many of the 205,901 cables that deal with his activities.

In the files it appears that the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi may have been hired by the Swedish group Saab-Scania to help sell its Viggen fighter jet to India while his mother, Indira Gandhi, was prime minister.

In 1975 Kissinger during a conversation with the US ambassador to Turkey and two Turkish and Cypriot diplomats assured his hosts that he could work around an official arms embargo then in effect. He is quoted in the documents as saying: “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”

The documents, along with detailing collaborations with the military dictatorships in Spain and Greece, show that Washington created a torture exemption to allow the military government in Brazil to receive US aid.

The documents were obtained from the National Archives and Record Administration and took a year to be prepared in an accessible digital format. “It is essentially what Aaron Swartz was doing, making available documents that until now were hard to access or only obtainable through an intermediary,” Assange said in the interview.

Swartz was the Internet activist arrested in January 2011 for downloading more than 5 million academic articles from JSTOR, an online clearinghouse for scholarly journals. Swartz was charged by federal prosecutors with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The charges carried the threat of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison. Swartz committed suicide last January 11.

Assange, 41, works through most of the night and sleeps into the late afternoon. Even though he uses an ultraviolet light device, he was pale, not surprising for someone who has not been out in sunlight for nearly a year. He rarely gives interviews. A treadmill was tilted up against a wall of his quarters; he said he sets it up and tries to run three to five miles on it every day. He has visits from a personal trainer, with whom he practices calisthenics and boxing. He is lanky at 6 feet 2 inches tall and exudes a raw, nervous energy. He leaps, sometimes disconcertingly, from topic to topic, idea to idea, his words rushing to keep up with his cascading thoughts. He works with a small staff and has a steady stream of visitors, including celebrities such as Lady Gaga. When the Ecuadorean Ambassador Ana Alban Mora and Bianca Jagger showed up late one afternoon, Assange pulled down glasses and poured everyone whiskey from a stock of liquor he keeps in a cabinet. His visitors chatted at a small round table, seated in leatherette chairs. Jagger wanted to know how to protect her website from hackers. Assange told her to “make a lot of backup copies.”

It is from this room that Assange and his supporters have mounted an election campaign for a seat in Australia’s upper house of Parliament. Public surveys from the state of Victoria, where Assange is a candidate, indicate he has a good chance of winning.

Assange communicates with his global network of associates and supporters up to seventeen hours a day through numerous cellphones and a collection of laptop computers. He encrypts his communications and religiously shreds anything put down on paper. The frequent movements of the police cordon outside his window make sleep difficult. And he misses his son, whom he raised as a single father. He may also have a daughter, but he does not speak publicly about his children, refusing to disclose their ages or where they live. His family, he said, has received death threats. He has not seen his children since his legal troubles started. The emotional cost is as heavy as the physical one.

Assange said he sees WikiLeaks’s primary role as giving a voice to the victims of US wars and proxy wars by using leaked documents to tell their stories. The release of the Afghan and Iraq War Logs, he said, disclosed the extent of civilian death and suffering, and the plethora of lies told by the Pentagon and the state to conceal the human toll. The logs, Assange said, also unmasked the bankruptcy of the traditional press and its obsequious service as war propagandists.

“There were 90,000 records in the Afghan War Logs,” Assange said. “We had to look at different angles in the material to add up the number of civilians who have been killed. We studied the records. We ranked events different ways. I wondered if we could find out the largest number of civilians killed in a single event. It turned out that this occurred during Operation Medusa, led by Canadian forces in September 2006. The US-backed local government was quite corrupt. The Taliban was, in effect, the political opposition and had a lot of support. The locals rose up against the government. Most of the young men in the area, from a political perspective, were Taliban. There was a government crackdown that encountered strong resistance. ISAF [the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force] carried out a big sweep. It went house to house. Then an American soldier was killed. They called in an AC-130 gunship. This is a C-130 cargo plane refitted with cannons on the side. It circled overhead and rained down shells. The War Logs say 181 ‘enemy’ were killed. The logs also say there were no wounded or captured. It was a significant massacre. This event, the day when the largest number of people were killed in Afghanistan, has never been properly investigated by the old media.”

Operation Medusa, which occurred twenty miles west of Kandahar, took the lives of four Canadian soldiers and involved some 2,000 NATO and Afghan troops. It was one of the largest military operations by the ISAF in the Kandahar region.

Assange searched for accounts of reporters who were on the scene. What he discovered appalled him. He watched an embedded Canadian reporter, Graeme Smith of the Toronto Globe and Mail, use these words on a Canadian military website to describe his experiences during Operation Medusa:

Quote:In September 2006 I had one of the most intense experiences of my life. I was on the front lines of something called Operation Medusa. It was a big Canadian offensive against the Taliban who were massed outside of Kandahar City. The Taliban were digging trenches and intimidating locals, and the Canadians decided to sweep in there in big numbers and force them out. And I was travelling with a platoon that called themselves the “Nomads”. These were guys who had been sent all over, you know, sort of, a 50,000 square kilometer box out to the very edges of Kandahar City, and so they were moving around all the time; they were never sleeping in the same place twice and they’d even made up these little patches for their uniforms that said “Nomads” on them. The Nomads took me in and they sort of made me one of them. I spent what was originally supposed to be just a two or three day embed with them, stretched out into two weeks. I didn’t have a change of underwear. I didn’t have a change of shirt. I remember showering in my clothes, washing first the clothes on my body, then stripping the clothes off and washing my body, and that was just using a bucket as a shower. It was an intense experience. I slept in my flak jacket a lot of nights. We were under fire together, you know, we had RPGs whistling in. One time I was standing around behind a troop carrier and we were just sort of relaxing—we were in a down moment—and I think some guys had coffee out and were standing around and I heard a loud clap beside my right ear. It was like someone had sort of snuck up behind me and sort of played a prank by clapping beside my ear. I turned around to say hey that’s not really funny, that’s kind of loud, and all of the soldiers were lying on the ground because they know what to do when an incoming sniper round comes in, and I didn’t because [laughs] it was my first time under fire. So I threw myself to the ground as well. They had sort of made me one of them and so they gave me a little “Nomads” patch that I attached to my flak jacket and you know as a journalist you try to avoid drinking the Kool-Aid, but I did feel a sense of belonging with those guys.


“The physical demeanor of this man, the way he describes life in the great outdoors, led me to understand that here was someone who had never boxed, been mountain climbing, played rugby, been involved in any of these classically masculine activities,” Assange said. “Now, for the first time, he feels like a man. He has gone to battle. It was one of many examples of the failure by the embedded reporters to report the truth. They were part of the team.”

Assange is correct. The press of a nation at war, in every conflict I covered, is an enthusiastic part of the machine, cheerleaders for slaughter and tireless mythmakers for war and the military. The few renegades within the press who refuse to wave the flag and slavishly lionize the troops, who will not endow them with a host of virtues including heroism, patriotism and courage, find themselves pariahs in newsrooms and viciously attacked—like Assange and Manning—by the state.

As a reporter at The New York Times, I was among those expected to prod sources inside the organs of power to provide information, including top-secret information. The Pentagon Papers, released to the Times in 1971, and the Times’s Pulitzer-winning 2005 exposure of the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens by the National Security Council used “top secret” documents—a classification more restricted than the lower-level “secret” designation of the documents released by WikiLeaks. But as the traditional press atrophies with dizzying speed—effectively emasculated by Barack Obama’s use of the Espionage Act half a dozen times since 2009 to target whistleblowers like Thomas Drake—it is left to the renegades, people like Assange and Manning, to break down walls and inform the public.

The cables that WikiLeaks released, as disturbing as they were, invariably put a pro-unit or pro-US spin on events. The reality in war is usually much worse. Those counted as dead enemy combatants are often civilians. Military units write their own after-action reports and therefore attempt to justify or hide their behavior. Despite the heated rhetoric of the state, no one has provided evidence that anything released by WikiLeaks cost lives. Then–Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a 2010 letter to Senator Carl Levin conceded this point. He wrote Levin: “The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security. However, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure.”

The New York Times, The Guardian, El País, Le Monde and Der Spiegel giddily printed redacted copies of some of the WikiLeaks files and then promptly threw Assange and Manning to the sharks. It was not only morally repugnant, but also stunningly shortsighted. Do these news organizations believe that if the state shuts down organizations such as WikiLeaks and imprisons Manning and Assange, traditional news outlets will be left alone? Can’t they connect the dots between the prosecutions of government whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of communications and the persecution of Manning and Assange? Don’t they worry that when the state finishes with Manning, Assange and WikiLeaks, these atrophied news outlets will be next? Haven’t they realized that this is a war by a global corporate elite not against an organization or an individual but against the freedom of the press and democracy?

And yet Assange is surprisingly hopeful—at least for the short and medium term. He believes that the system cannot protect itself completely from those who chip away at its digital walls.

“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” he said. “It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”

“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he said. “The education of young people takes place on the Internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the Internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the Internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”

The long term, however, may not be as sanguine. Assange recently completed a book with three co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” The Internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to cement into place a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.” It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, they argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we blunt state secrecy. “The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”

The United States, according to one of Assange’s lawyers, Michael Ratner, appears poised to seize Assange the moment he steps out of the embassy. Washington does not want to become a party in two competing extradition requests to Britain. But Washington, with a sealed grand jury indictment prepared against Assange, can take him once the Swedish imbroglio is resolved, or can take him should Britain make a decision not to extradite. Neil MacBride, who has been mentioned as a potential head of the FBI, is US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, which led the grand jury investigation, and he appears to have completed his work.

Assange said, “The grand jury was very active in late 2011, pulling in witnesses, forcing them to testify, pulling in documents. It’s been much less active during 2012 and 2013. The DOJ appears ready to proceed with the prosecution proper immediately following the Manning trial.”

Assange spoke repeatedly about Manning, with evident concern. He sees in the young Army private a reflection of his own situation, as well as the draconian consequences of refusing to cooperate with the security and surveillance state.

Manning’s twelve-week military trial is scheduled to begin in June. The prosecution is calling 141 witnesses, including an anonymous Navy SEAL who was part of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Assange called the Navy SEAL the “star diva” of the state’s “twelve-week Broadway musical.” Manning is as bereft of establishment support as Assange.

“The old media attempted to remove his alleged heroic qualities,” Assange said of Manning. “An act of heroism requires that you make a conscious act. It is not an unreasoned expression of madness or sexual frustration. It requires making a choice—a choice that others can follow. If you do something solely because you are a mad homosexual there is no choice. No one can choose to be a mad homosexual. So they stripped him, or attempted to strip him, of all his refinements.”

“His alleged actions are a rare event,” Assange went on. “And why does a rare event happen? What do we know about him? What do we know about Bradley Manning? We know that he won three science fairs. We know the guy is bright. We know that he was interested in politics early on. We know he’s very articulate and outspoken. We know he didn’t like lies.… We know he was skilled at his job of being an intelligence analyst. If the media was looking for an explanation they could point to this combination of his abilities and motivations. They could point to his talents and virtues. They should not point to him being gay, or from a broken home, except perhaps in passing. Ten percent of the US military is gay. Well over 50 percent are from broken homes. Take those two factors together. That gets you down to, say, 5 percent—5 percent on the outside. There are 5 million people with active security clearances, so now you’re down to 250,000 people. You still have to get from 250,000 to one. You can only explain Bradley Manning by his virtues. Virtues others can learn from.”

I walked for a long time down Sloane Street after leaving the embassy. The red double-decker buses and the automobiles inched along the thoroughfare. I passed boutiques with window displays devoted to Prada, Giorgio Armani and Gucci. I was jostled by shoppers with bags stuffed full of high-end purchases. They, these consumers, seemed blissfully unaware of the tragedy unfolding a few blocks away. “In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences,” Albert Camus wrote in The Plague. “A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.”

I stopped in front of the four white columns that led into the brick-turreted Cadogan Hotel. The hotel is where Oscar Wilde was arrested in Room 118 on April 6, 1895, before being charged with “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons.” John Betjeman imagined the shock of that arrest, which ruined Wilde’s life, in his poem “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel.” Here’s a fragment:

Quote:A thump, and a murmur of voices—
(“Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

“Mr. Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”


The world has been turned upside down. The pestilence of corporate totalitarianism is spreading rapidly over the earth. The criminals have seized power. It is not, in the end, simply Assange or Manning they want. It is all who dare to defy the official narrative, to expose the big lie of the global corporate state. The persecution of Assange and Manning is the harbinger of what is to come, the rise of a bitter world where criminals in Brooks Brothers suits and gangsters in beribboned military uniforms—propped up by a vast internal and external security apparatus, a compliant press and a morally bankrupt political elite—monitor and crush those who dissent. Writers, artists, actors, journalists, scientists, intellectuals and workers will be forced to obey or thrown into bondage. I fear for Julian Assange. I fear for Bradley Manning. I fear for us all.



May 8, 2013
Chris Hedges
The Nation]]> An Interview With Julian Assange



[Image: assange_press_rtr_img_0.jpg]



A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the steps leading up to the building, and others wait in the lobby directly in front of the embassy door. An officer stands on the corner of a side street facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. Another officer peers out the window of a neighboring building a few feet from Assange’s bedroom at the back of the embassy. Police sit round-the-clock in a communications van topped with an array of antennas that presumably captures all electronic forms of communication from Assange’s ground-floor suite.
 
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), or Scotland Yard, said the estimated cost of surrounding the Ecuadorean Embassy from June 19, 2012, when Assange entered the building, until Jan. 31, 2013, is the equivalent of $4.5 million.

Britain has rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”

“The status quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the US-led campaign against him as we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face and was wearing a traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened WikiLeaks and me personally, threatened us before the whole world, demanded that we destroy everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new information from US government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other words, the total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did not self-destruct in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.”

“But they have failed,” he went on. “They set the rules about what a win was. They lost in every battle they defined. Their loss is total. We’ve won the big stuff. The loss of face is hard to overstate. The Pentagon reissued its threats on September 28 last year. This time we laughed. Threats inflate quickly. Now the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department intend to show the world what vindictive losers they are through the persecution of Bradley Manning, myself and the organization more generally.”

Assange, Manning and WikiLeaks, by making public in 2010 half a million internal documents from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of US helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, effectively exposed the empire’s hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence and its use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation. WikiLeaks shone a spotlight into the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this it has become empire’s prey. Those around the globe with the computer skills to search out the secrets of empire are now those whom empire fears most. If we lose this battle, if these rebels are defeated, it means the dark night of corporate totalitarianism. If we win, if the corporate state is unmasked, it can be destroyed.

US government officials quoted in Australian diplomatic cables obtained by The Saturday Age described the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks as “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” The scope of the operation has also been gleaned from statements made during Manning’s pretrial hearing. The US Department of Justice will apparently pay the contractor ManTech of Fairfax, Virginia, more than $2 million this year alone for a computer system that, from the tender, appears designed to handle the prosecution documents. The government line item refers only to “WikiLeaks Software and Hardware Maintenance.”

The lead government prosecutor in the Manning case, Maj. Ashden Fein, has told the court that the FBI file that deals with the leak of government documents through WikiLeaks has “42,135 pages or 3,475 documents.” This does not include a huge volume of material accumulated by a grand jury investigation. Manning, Fein has said, represents only 8,741 pages or 636 different documents in that classified FBI file.

There are no divisions among government departments or the two major political parties over what should be Assange’s fate. “I think we should be clear here. WikiLeaks and people that disseminate information to people like this are criminals, first and foremost,” then-press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking for the Obama administration, said during a 2010 press briefing.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and then-Senator Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, said in a joint letter to the US attorney general calling for Assange’s prosecution: “If Mr. Assange and his possible accomplices cannot be charged under the Espionage Act (or any other applicable statute), please know that we stand ready and willing to support your efforts to ‘close those gaps’ in the law, as you also mentioned…”

Republican Candice S. Miller, a US representative from Michigan, said in the House: “It is time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is—a terrorist organization, whose continued operation threatens our security. Shut it down. Shut it down. It is time to shut down this terrorist, this terrorist Web site, WikiLeaks. Shut it down, Attorney General [Eric] Holder.”

At least a dozen American governmental agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the Army’s Criminal Investigative Department, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Diplomatic Security Service, are assigned to the WikiLeaks case, while the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are assigned to track down WikiLeaks’ supposed breaches of security. The global assault—which saw Australia threaten to revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the “war on terror” into a wider war on civil liberties. It has become a hunt not for actual terrorists but a hunt for all those with the ability to expose the mounting crimes of the power elite.

The dragnet has swept up any person or organization that fits the profile of those with the technical skills and inclination to burrow into the archives of power and disseminate it to the public. It no longer matters if they have committed a crime. The group Anonymous, which has mounted cyberattacks on government agencies at the local and federal levels, saw Barrett Brown—a journalist associated with Anonymous and who specializes in military and intelligence contractors—arrested along with Jeremy Hammond, a political activist alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with 5.5 million e-mails between the security firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) and its clients. Brown and Hammond were apparently seized because of allegations made by an informant named Hector Xavier Monsegur—known as Sabu—who appears to have attempted to entrap WikiLeaks while under FBI supervision.

To entrap and spy on activists, Washington has used an array of informants, including Adrian Lamo, who sold Bradley Manning out to the US government.

WikiLeaks collaborators or supporters are routinely stopped—often at international airports—and attempts are made to recruit them as informants. Jérémie Zimmerman, Smári McCarthy, Jacob Appelbaum, David House and one of Assange’s lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, all have been approached or interrogated. The tactics are often heavy-handed. McCarthy, an Icelander and WikiLeaks activist, was detained and extensively questioned when he entered the United States. Soon afterward, three men who identified themselves as being from the FBI approached McCarthy in Washington. The men attempted to recruit him as an informant and gave him instructions on how to spy on WikiLeaks.

On Aug. 24, 2011, six FBI agents and two prosecutors landed in Iceland on a private jet. The team told the Icelandic government that it had discovered a plan by Anonymous to hack into Icelandic government computers. But it was soon clear the team had come with a very different agenda. The Americans spent the next few days, in flagrant violation of Icelandic sovereignty, interrogating Sigurdur Thordarson, a young WikiLeaks activist, in various Reykjavik hotel rooms. Thordarson, after the US team was discovered by the Icelandic Ministry of the Interior and expelled from the country, was taken to Washington, DC, for four days of further interrogation. Thordarson appears to have decided to cooperate with the FBI. It was reported in the Icelandic press that he went to Denmark in 2012 and sold the FBI stolen WikiLeaks computer hard drives for about $5,000.

There have been secret search orders for information from Internet service providers, including Twitter, Google and Sonic, as well as seizure of information about Assange and WikiLeaks from the company Dynadot, a domain name registrar and web host.

Assange’s suitcase and computer were stolen on a flight from Sweden to Germany on September 27, 2010. His bankcards were blocked. WikiLeaks’s Moneybookers primary donation account was shut down after being placed on a blacklist in Australia and a “watch list” in the United States. Financial service companies including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, Western Union and American Express, following denunciations of WikiLeaks by the US government, blacklisted the organization. Last month the Supreme Court of Iceland found the blacklisting to be unlawful and ordered it lifted in Iceland by May 8. There have been frequent massive denial-of-service attacks on WikiLeak’s infrastructure.

And there is a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Assange, including mischaracterizations of the sexual misconduct case brought against him by Swedish police. Assange has not formally been charged with a crime. The two women involved have not accused him of rape.

Bradley Manning’s heroism extends to his steadfast refusal, despite what appears to be tremendous pressure, to implicate Assange in espionage. If Manning alleges that Assange had instructed him on how to ferret out classified documents, the United States might try to charge Assange with espionage.

Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy after exhausting his fight to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom to Sweden. He and his lawyers say that an extradition to Sweden would mean an extradition to the United States If Sweden refused to comply with US demands for Assange, kidnapping, or “extraordinary rendition,” would remain an option for Washington.

Kidnapping was given legal cover by a 1989 memorandum issued by the Justice Department stating that “the FBI may use its statutory authority to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if the FBI’s actions contravene customary international law” and that an “arrest that is inconsistent with international or foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment.” This is a stunning example of the security and surveillance state’s Orwellian doublespeak. The persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks and the practice of extraordinary rendition embody the shredding of the Fourth Amendment, which was designed to protect us from unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

Two Swedes and a Briton were seized by the United States last August somewhere in Africa—it is assumed to have been in Somalia—and held in one of our black sites. They suddenly reappeared—with the Briton stripped of his citizenship—in a Brooklyn courtroom in December facing terrorism charges. Sweden, rather than object to the extradition of its two citizens, dropped the Swedish charges against the prisoners to permit the rendition to occur. The prisoners, The Washington Post reported, were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury two months after being taken.

The persistence of WikiLeaks, despite the onslaught, has been remarkable. In 2012 it released some of the 5.5 million documents sent from or to the private security firm Stratfor. The documents, known as “the Global Intelligence Files,” included an e-mail dated January 26, 2011, from Fred Burton, a Stratfor vice president, who wrote: “Text Not for Pub. We [the US government] have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.”

WikiLeaks’s most recent foray into full disclosure includes the Kissinger files, or the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy. The files, which have built into them a remarkable search engine, provide access to 1.7 million diplomatic communications, once confidential but now in the public record, that were sent between 1973 and 1976. Henry Kissinger, secretary of state from September 1973 to January 1977, authored many of the 205,901 cables that deal with his activities.

In the files it appears that the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi may have been hired by the Swedish group Saab-Scania to help sell its Viggen fighter jet to India while his mother, Indira Gandhi, was prime minister.

In 1975 Kissinger during a conversation with the US ambassador to Turkey and two Turkish and Cypriot diplomats assured his hosts that he could work around an official arms embargo then in effect. He is quoted in the documents as saying: “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.”

The documents, along with detailing collaborations with the military dictatorships in Spain and Greece, show that Washington created a torture exemption to allow the military government in Brazil to receive US aid.

The documents were obtained from the National Archives and Record Administration and took a year to be prepared in an accessible digital format. “It is essentially what Aaron Swartz was doing, making available documents that until now were hard to access or only obtainable through an intermediary,” Assange said in the interview.

Swartz was the Internet activist arrested in January 2011 for downloading more than 5 million academic articles from JSTOR, an online clearinghouse for scholarly journals. Swartz was charged by federal prosecutors with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The charges carried the threat of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison. Swartz committed suicide last January 11.

Assange, 41, works through most of the night and sleeps into the late afternoon. Even though he uses an ultraviolet light device, he was pale, not surprising for someone who has not been out in sunlight for nearly a year. He rarely gives interviews. A treadmill was tilted up against a wall of his quarters; he said he sets it up and tries to run three to five miles on it every day. He has visits from a personal trainer, with whom he practices calisthenics and boxing. He is lanky at 6 feet 2 inches tall and exudes a raw, nervous energy. He leaps, sometimes disconcertingly, from topic to topic, idea to idea, his words rushing to keep up with his cascading thoughts. He works with a small staff and has a steady stream of visitors, including celebrities such as Lady Gaga. When the Ecuadorean Ambassador Ana Alban Mora and Bianca Jagger showed up late one afternoon, Assange pulled down glasses and poured everyone whiskey from a stock of liquor he keeps in a cabinet. His visitors chatted at a small round table, seated in leatherette chairs. Jagger wanted to know how to protect her website from hackers. Assange told her to “make a lot of backup copies.”

It is from this room that Assange and his supporters have mounted an election campaign for a seat in Australia’s upper house of Parliament. Public surveys from the state of Victoria, where Assange is a candidate, indicate he has a good chance of winning.

Assange communicates with his global network of associates and supporters up to seventeen hours a day through numerous cellphones and a collection of laptop computers. He encrypts his communications and religiously shreds anything put down on paper. The frequent movements of the police cordon outside his window make sleep difficult. And he misses his son, whom he raised as a single father. He may also have a daughter, but he does not speak publicly about his children, refusing to disclose their ages or where they live. His family, he said, has received death threats. He has not seen his children since his legal troubles started. The emotional cost is as heavy as the physical one.

Assange said he sees WikiLeaks’s primary role as giving a voice to the victims of US wars and proxy wars by using leaked documents to tell their stories. The release of the Afghan and Iraq War Logs, he said, disclosed the extent of civilian death and suffering, and the plethora of lies told by the Pentagon and the state to conceal the human toll. The logs, Assange said, also unmasked the bankruptcy of the traditional press and its obsequious service as war propagandists.

“There were 90,000 records in the Afghan War Logs,” Assange said. “We had to look at different angles in the material to add up the number of civilians who have been killed. We studied the records. We ranked events different ways. I wondered if we could find out the largest number of civilians killed in a single event. It turned out that this occurred during Operation Medusa, led by Canadian forces in September 2006. The US-backed local government was quite corrupt. The Taliban was, in effect, the political opposition and had a lot of support. The locals rose up against the government. Most of the young men in the area, from a political perspective, were Taliban. There was a government crackdown that encountered strong resistance. ISAF [the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force] carried out a big sweep. It went house to house. Then an American soldier was killed. They called in an AC-130 gunship. This is a C-130 cargo plane refitted with cannons on the side. It circled overhead and rained down shells. The War Logs say 181 ‘enemy’ were killed. The logs also say there were no wounded or captured. It was a significant massacre. This event, the day when the largest number of people were killed in Afghanistan, has never been properly investigated by the old media.”

Operation Medusa, which occurred twenty miles west of Kandahar, took the lives of four Canadian soldiers and involved some 2,000 NATO and Afghan troops. It was one of the largest military operations by the ISAF in the Kandahar region.

Assange searched for accounts of reporters who were on the scene. What he discovered appalled him. He watched an embedded Canadian reporter, Graeme Smith of the Toronto Globe and Mail, use these words on a Canadian military website to describe his experiences during Operation Medusa:

Quote:In September 2006 I had one of the most intense experiences of my life. I was on the front lines of something called Operation Medusa. It was a big Canadian offensive against the Taliban who were massed outside of Kandahar City. The Taliban were digging trenches and intimidating locals, and the Canadians decided to sweep in there in big numbers and force them out. And I was travelling with a platoon that called themselves the “Nomads”. These were guys who had been sent all over, you know, sort of, a 50,000 square kilometer box out to the very edges of Kandahar City, and so they were moving around all the time; they were never sleeping in the same place twice and they’d even made up these little patches for their uniforms that said “Nomads” on them. The Nomads took me in and they sort of made me one of them. I spent what was originally supposed to be just a two or three day embed with them, stretched out into two weeks. I didn’t have a change of underwear. I didn’t have a change of shirt. I remember showering in my clothes, washing first the clothes on my body, then stripping the clothes off and washing my body, and that was just using a bucket as a shower. It was an intense experience. I slept in my flak jacket a lot of nights. We were under fire together, you know, we had RPGs whistling in. One time I was standing around behind a troop carrier and we were just sort of relaxing—we were in a down moment—and I think some guys had coffee out and were standing around and I heard a loud clap beside my right ear. It was like someone had sort of snuck up behind me and sort of played a prank by clapping beside my ear. I turned around to say hey that’s not really funny, that’s kind of loud, and all of the soldiers were lying on the ground because they know what to do when an incoming sniper round comes in, and I didn’t because [laughs] it was my first time under fire. So I threw myself to the ground as well. They had sort of made me one of them and so they gave me a little “Nomads” patch that I attached to my flak jacket and you know as a journalist you try to avoid drinking the Kool-Aid, but I did feel a sense of belonging with those guys.


“The physical demeanor of this man, the way he describes life in the great outdoors, led me to understand that here was someone who had never boxed, been mountain climbing, played rugby, been involved in any of these classically masculine activities,” Assange said. “Now, for the first time, he feels like a man. He has gone to battle. It was one of many examples of the failure by the embedded reporters to report the truth. They were part of the team.”

Assange is correct. The press of a nation at war, in every conflict I covered, is an enthusiastic part of the machine, cheerleaders for slaughter and tireless mythmakers for war and the military. The few renegades within the press who refuse to wave the flag and slavishly lionize the troops, who will not endow them with a host of virtues including heroism, patriotism and courage, find themselves pariahs in newsrooms and viciously attacked—like Assange and Manning—by the state.

As a reporter at The New York Times, I was among those expected to prod sources inside the organs of power to provide information, including top-secret information. The Pentagon Papers, released to the Times in 1971, and the Times’s Pulitzer-winning 2005 exposure of the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens by the National Security Council used “top secret” documents—a classification more restricted than the lower-level “secret” designation of the documents released by WikiLeaks. But as the traditional press atrophies with dizzying speed—effectively emasculated by Barack Obama’s use of the Espionage Act half a dozen times since 2009 to target whistleblowers like Thomas Drake—it is left to the renegades, people like Assange and Manning, to break down walls and inform the public.

The cables that WikiLeaks released, as disturbing as they were, invariably put a pro-unit or pro-US spin on events. The reality in war is usually much worse. Those counted as dead enemy combatants are often civilians. Military units write their own after-action reports and therefore attempt to justify or hide their behavior. Despite the heated rhetoric of the state, no one has provided evidence that anything released by WikiLeaks cost lives. Then–Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a 2010 letter to Senator Carl Levin conceded this point. He wrote Levin: “The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security. However, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure.”

The New York Times, The Guardian, El País, Le Monde and Der Spiegel giddily printed redacted copies of some of the WikiLeaks files and then promptly threw Assange and Manning to the sharks. It was not only morally repugnant, but also stunningly shortsighted. Do these news organizations believe that if the state shuts down organizations such as WikiLeaks and imprisons Manning and Assange, traditional news outlets will be left alone? Can’t they connect the dots between the prosecutions of government whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of communications and the persecution of Manning and Assange? Don’t they worry that when the state finishes with Manning, Assange and WikiLeaks, these atrophied news outlets will be next? Haven’t they realized that this is a war by a global corporate elite not against an organization or an individual but against the freedom of the press and democracy?

And yet Assange is surprisingly hopeful—at least for the short and medium term. He believes that the system cannot protect itself completely from those who chip away at its digital walls.

“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” he said. “It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”

“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he said. “The education of young people takes place on the Internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the Internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the Internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”

The long term, however, may not be as sanguine. Assange recently completed a book with three co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” The Internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to cement into place a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.” It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, they argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we blunt state secrecy. “The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”

The United States, according to one of Assange’s lawyers, Michael Ratner, appears poised to seize Assange the moment he steps out of the embassy. Washington does not want to become a party in two competing extradition requests to Britain. But Washington, with a sealed grand jury indictment prepared against Assange, can take him once the Swedish imbroglio is resolved, or can take him should Britain make a decision not to extradite. Neil MacBride, who has been mentioned as a potential head of the FBI, is US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, which led the grand jury investigation, and he appears to have completed his work.

Assange said, “The grand jury was very active in late 2011, pulling in witnesses, forcing them to testify, pulling in documents. It’s been much less active during 2012 and 2013. The DOJ appears ready to proceed with the prosecution proper immediately following the Manning trial.”

Assange spoke repeatedly about Manning, with evident concern. He sees in the young Army private a reflection of his own situation, as well as the draconian consequences of refusing to cooperate with the security and surveillance state.

Manning’s twelve-week military trial is scheduled to begin in June. The prosecution is calling 141 witnesses, including an anonymous Navy SEAL who was part of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Assange called the Navy SEAL the “star diva” of the state’s “twelve-week Broadway musical.” Manning is as bereft of establishment support as Assange.

“The old media attempted to remove his alleged heroic qualities,” Assange said of Manning. “An act of heroism requires that you make a conscious act. It is not an unreasoned expression of madness or sexual frustration. It requires making a choice—a choice that others can follow. If you do something solely because you are a mad homosexual there is no choice. No one can choose to be a mad homosexual. So they stripped him, or attempted to strip him, of all his refinements.”

“His alleged actions are a rare event,” Assange went on. “And why does a rare event happen? What do we know about him? What do we know about Bradley Manning? We know that he won three science fairs. We know the guy is bright. We know that he was interested in politics early on. We know he’s very articulate and outspoken. We know he didn’t like lies.… We know he was skilled at his job of being an intelligence analyst. If the media was looking for an explanation they could point to this combination of his abilities and motivations. They could point to his talents and virtues. They should not point to him being gay, or from a broken home, except perhaps in passing. Ten percent of the US military is gay. Well over 50 percent are from broken homes. Take those two factors together. That gets you down to, say, 5 percent—5 percent on the outside. There are 5 million people with active security clearances, so now you’re down to 250,000 people. You still have to get from 250,000 to one. You can only explain Bradley Manning by his virtues. Virtues others can learn from.”

I walked for a long time down Sloane Street after leaving the embassy. The red double-decker buses and the automobiles inched along the thoroughfare. I passed boutiques with window displays devoted to Prada, Giorgio Armani and Gucci. I was jostled by shoppers with bags stuffed full of high-end purchases. They, these consumers, seemed blissfully unaware of the tragedy unfolding a few blocks away. “In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences,” Albert Camus wrote in The Plague. “A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.”

I stopped in front of the four white columns that led into the brick-turreted Cadogan Hotel. The hotel is where Oscar Wilde was arrested in Room 118 on April 6, 1895, before being charged with “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons.” John Betjeman imagined the shock of that arrest, which ruined Wilde’s life, in his poem “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel.” Here’s a fragment:

Quote:A thump, and a murmur of voices—
(“Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

“Mr. Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”


The world has been turned upside down. The pestilence of corporate totalitarianism is spreading rapidly over the earth. The criminals have seized power. It is not, in the end, simply Assange or Manning they want. It is all who dare to defy the official narrative, to expose the big lie of the global corporate state. The persecution of Assange and Manning is the harbinger of what is to come, the rise of a bitter world where criminals in Brooks Brothers suits and gangsters in beribboned military uniforms—propped up by a vast internal and external security apparatus, a compliant press and a morally bankrupt political elite—monitor and crush those who dissent. Writers, artists, actors, journalists, scientists, intellectuals and workers will be forced to obey or thrown into bondage. I fear for Julian Assange. I fear for Bradley Manning. I fear for us all.



May 8, 2013
Chris Hedges
The Nation]]> <![CDATA[Judge Rips Obama’s Right-Wing Plan B Stance]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Judge-Rips-Obama%E2%80%99s-Right-Wing-Plan-B-Stance Wed, 22 May 2013 03:55:01 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Judge-Rips-Obama%E2%80%99s-Right-Wing-Plan-B-Stance Judge rips Obama’s right-wing Plan B stance



[Image: obama_korman-620x412.jpg]



"You're disadvantaging young people, African-Americans, the poor... that's the policy of the Obama administration?"

“It turns out that the same policies that President Bush followed were followed by President Obama,” said District Court Judge Edward Korman on Tuesday morning, in a charged and dramatic two-hour hearing in which the Obama administration defended its arbitrary policy to limit contraceptive access.

Korman was explaining why, when previously ruling on access to Plan B emergency contraception, he had initially waited for the administration to act on its own and make the drug widely available based on scientific evidence, rather than on politics. “The process had been corrupted by political influence. I remanded because I thought with a new president” things would be different, Korman said. But in 2011, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius overruled, with the president’s explicit blessing, the FDA’s recommendation to lift all age restrictions, which Korman ruled in March was a decision made in “bad faith” because of the politics around sex and contraception. He ordered the administration to lift all restrictions. Instead, it accepted a manufacturer’s petition to make Plan B available over the counter only with photo ID showing the purchaser was at least 15, and the Department of Justice is appealing.

This morning, Korman repeatedly slammed his hand down on the table for emphasis, interrupting the government counsel’s every other sentence with assertions like, “You’re just playing games here,” “You’re making an intellectually dishonest argument,” “You’re basically lying,” “This whole thing is a charade,” “I’m entitled to say this is a lot of nonsense, am I not?” and “Contrary to the baloney you were giving me …” He also accused the administration of hypocrisy for opposing voter ID laws but being engaged in the “suppression of the rights of women” with the ID requirement for the drug.

Frank Amanat, arguing on behalf of the administration, said that the court had overreached by ordering a particular policy rather than remanding to the agency for further review. But he could not say, in response to repeated demands from Korman, that the result would be any different if it were returned to the agency. Nor did he specify any harm that would come from making the drug more available.

“The irony is that I would be allowing what the FDA wanted. This has got to be one of the most unusual administrative law cases I have ever seen,” Korman said, adding, “I would have thought that on the day I handed down my decision, they would be drinking champagne at the FDA.”

Korman said the administration had engaged in a “choreography”: “First the president makes a speech to Planned Parenthood and throws them a kiss. The next day you grant an application from 2012″ to make it available with ID for 15 and up, in an attempt to “sugarcoat” the appeal of Korman’s order to lift all restrictions. (The decision was actually announced a couple of days after the Planned Parenthood speech.)

The government didn’t argue the merits of requiring a photo ID or that the drug only be sold in locations with an on-site pharmacy, but Korman made clear why he found that to be an inadequate compromise: “You’re using these 11- and 12-year-olds to place an undue burden on women’s ability to access emergency contraception. If it’s an impediment to voting, it’s an impediment to get the drug.”

He cited Brennan Center statistics — which he said Eric Holder had also cited in a speech before the NAACP — showing that 25 percent of African-Americans of voting age don’t have a photo ID, and also dismissed the government’s suggestion that 15-year-olds, who usually aren’t eligible for a driver’s license, could use a birth certificate, since that’s not a photo ID. ”You’re disadvantaging young people, African-Americans, the poor — that’s the policy of the Obama administration?” (He didn’t mention it, but immigrants would also face additional barriers.)

Amanat said the Supreme Court has previously found that requiring an ID is a permissible impediment for the purchase of a product, and that the plaintiffs in the citizen’s petition hadn’t said that the issue of ID had harmed them. The government has said it put the age cutoff at 15, because Teva had asked them to in their petition. But Korman said that in previously unreleased correspondence between the FDA and Teva, the government had specifically instructed the company to reapply in that fashion after rejecting its first attempt to lift all age restrictions. When he tried to read aloud from one of those documents, a tense standoff resulted, in which Teva’s representative cut in and insisted that the correspondence was confidential. But Korman did get as far as, “We are amending our application to address the Secretary’s stated concern …” In other words, the new restrictions were apparently initiated by the Obama administration as a compromise move.

Also at issue was the affordability of the drug, which can cost up to $50. Or, as Korman put it, waving toward the representative from Teva Pharmaceuticals, “Those price gougers over there.” The citizen’s petition filed by reproductive rights advocates had asked for all forms of the drug, including generics, to be available over-the-counter, and not just Teva’s Plan B One Step, which Korman had granted. If Teva loses its exclusivity for the single-dose and over-the-counter version, which the FDA just extended for three more years, competition will presumably lower the price. The government has said that Teva is entitled to its exclusivity for three more years because it had to pay for extra usage studies and to more broadly encourage drug innovation.

Amanat argued that making a hormonal drug like Plan B over-the-counter was unprecedented, and that the public interest was served “when the government acts deliberately and incrementally.” Korman cut in sarcastically, “Tell me about the public interest. Is there a public interest in unplanned pregnancies? Some of which end in abortions?”

Korman, a Reagan appointee, said he would rule on the administration’s request for a stay by Thursday evening. He is expected to deny it but defer on the stay’s enforcement to the 2nd Circuit, where the case goes next.



May 7, 2013
Irin Carmon
Salon.com]]> Judge rips Obama’s right-wing Plan B stance



[Image: obama_korman-620x412.jpg]



"You're disadvantaging young people, African-Americans, the poor... that's the policy of the Obama administration?"

“It turns out that the same policies that President Bush followed were followed by President Obama,” said District Court Judge Edward Korman on Tuesday morning, in a charged and dramatic two-hour hearing in which the Obama administration defended its arbitrary policy to limit contraceptive access.

Korman was explaining why, when previously ruling on access to Plan B emergency contraception, he had initially waited for the administration to act on its own and make the drug widely available based on scientific evidence, rather than on politics. “The process had been corrupted by political influence. I remanded because I thought with a new president” things would be different, Korman said. But in 2011, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius overruled, with the president’s explicit blessing, the FDA’s recommendation to lift all age restrictions, which Korman ruled in March was a decision made in “bad faith” because of the politics around sex and contraception. He ordered the administration to lift all restrictions. Instead, it accepted a manufacturer’s petition to make Plan B available over the counter only with photo ID showing the purchaser was at least 15, and the Department of Justice is appealing.

This morning, Korman repeatedly slammed his hand down on the table for emphasis, interrupting the government counsel’s every other sentence with assertions like, “You’re just playing games here,” “You’re making an intellectually dishonest argument,” “You’re basically lying,” “This whole thing is a charade,” “I’m entitled to say this is a lot of nonsense, am I not?” and “Contrary to the baloney you were giving me …” He also accused the administration of hypocrisy for opposing voter ID laws but being engaged in the “suppression of the rights of women” with the ID requirement for the drug.

Frank Amanat, arguing on behalf of the administration, said that the court had overreached by ordering a particular policy rather than remanding to the agency for further review. But he could not say, in response to repeated demands from Korman, that the result would be any different if it were returned to the agency. Nor did he specify any harm that would come from making the drug more available.

“The irony is that I would be allowing what the FDA wanted. This has got to be one of the most unusual administrative law cases I have ever seen,” Korman said, adding, “I would have thought that on the day I handed down my decision, they would be drinking champagne at the FDA.”

Korman said the administration had engaged in a “choreography”: “First the president makes a speech to Planned Parenthood and throws them a kiss. The next day you grant an application from 2012″ to make it available with ID for 15 and up, in an attempt to “sugarcoat” the appeal of Korman’s order to lift all restrictions. (The decision was actually announced a couple of days after the Planned Parenthood speech.)

The government didn’t argue the merits of requiring a photo ID or that the drug only be sold in locations with an on-site pharmacy, but Korman made clear why he found that to be an inadequate compromise: “You’re using these 11- and 12-year-olds to place an undue burden on women’s ability to access emergency contraception. If it’s an impediment to voting, it’s an impediment to get the drug.”

He cited Brennan Center statistics — which he said Eric Holder had also cited in a speech before the NAACP — showing that 25 percent of African-Americans of voting age don’t have a photo ID, and also dismissed the government’s suggestion that 15-year-olds, who usually aren’t eligible for a driver’s license, could use a birth certificate, since that’s not a photo ID. ”You’re disadvantaging young people, African-Americans, the poor — that’s the policy of the Obama administration?” (He didn’t mention it, but immigrants would also face additional barriers.)

Amanat said the Supreme Court has previously found that requiring an ID is a permissible impediment for the purchase of a product, and that the plaintiffs in the citizen’s petition hadn’t said that the issue of ID had harmed them. The government has said it put the age cutoff at 15, because Teva had asked them to in their petition. But Korman said that in previously unreleased correspondence between the FDA and Teva, the government had specifically instructed the company to reapply in that fashion after rejecting its first attempt to lift all age restrictions. When he tried to read aloud from one of those documents, a tense standoff resulted, in which Teva’s representative cut in and insisted that the correspondence was confidential. But Korman did get as far as, “We are amending our application to address the Secretary’s stated concern …” In other words, the new restrictions were apparently initiated by the Obama administration as a compromise move.

Also at issue was the affordability of the drug, which can cost up to $50. Or, as Korman put it, waving toward the representative from Teva Pharmaceuticals, “Those price gougers over there.” The citizen’s petition filed by reproductive rights advocates had asked for all forms of the drug, including generics, to be available over-the-counter, and not just Teva’s Plan B One Step, which Korman had granted. If Teva loses its exclusivity for the single-dose and over-the-counter version, which the FDA just extended for three more years, competition will presumably lower the price. The government has said that Teva is entitled to its exclusivity for three more years because it had to pay for extra usage studies and to more broadly encourage drug innovation.

Amanat argued that making a hormonal drug like Plan B over-the-counter was unprecedented, and that the public interest was served “when the government acts deliberately and incrementally.” Korman cut in sarcastically, “Tell me about the public interest. Is there a public interest in unplanned pregnancies? Some of which end in abortions?”

Korman, a Reagan appointee, said he would rule on the administration’s request for a stay by Thursday evening. He is expected to deny it but defer on the stay’s enforcement to the 2nd Circuit, where the case goes next.



May 7, 2013
Irin Carmon
Salon.com]]> <![CDATA[Calif. Farm Workers Fired for Leaving Fields During Wildfire]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Calif-Farm-Workers-Fired-for-Leaving-Fields-During-Wildfire Wed, 22 May 2013 03:47:22 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Calif-Farm-Workers-Fired-for-Leaving-Fields-During-Wildfire Calif. Farm Workers Fired for Leaving Fields During Wildfire



More than a dozen farm workers in Southern California were out of a job after walking out of the fields last week, forced indoors because of heavy smoke from a massive wildfire burning nearby.

“Oh, yeah, the smoke was very bad. That’s no doubt about that,” said Lauro Barrajas, of the United Farm Workers.

As the blaze, dubbed the Springs Fire, continued to grow in Camarillo May 2, farm workers 11 miles south in Oxnard said they started to feel the effects of the smoke in the strawberry fields.

The ashes were falling on top of us, one of them explained, adding “it was hard to breathe.”

Air quality in the region was at dangerously poor levels and 15 workers at Crisalida Farms decided they could not handle it any longer. They left, even though their foreman warned them they would not have a job when they returned.

When they went back to the fields May 3, the farm fired them.

Barrajas, who is a representative of the UFW, said the workers contacted him for help, even though they were not members of the union.

Union representatives met with the farm’s upper management and applied a union rule.

“No worker shall work under conditions where they feel his life or health is in danger,” Barrajas said.

In a statement to Telemundo, the farm representative said the workers left without permission while orders still needed to be filled. The company offered to pay them for the hours they’d worked.

Later, the company settled with the union and offered to rehire all 15 workers. But only one worker returned.

The others took jobs on other farms.

One worker said while it hurts to lose work, one's health is more important.



May 7, 2013
John Cadiz Klemack & Yvonne Beltzer
NBC]]> Calif. Farm Workers Fired for Leaving Fields During Wildfire



More than a dozen farm workers in Southern California were out of a job after walking out of the fields last week, forced indoors because of heavy smoke from a massive wildfire burning nearby.

“Oh, yeah, the smoke was very bad. That’s no doubt about that,” said Lauro Barrajas, of the United Farm Workers.

As the blaze, dubbed the Springs Fire, continued to grow in Camarillo May 2, farm workers 11 miles south in Oxnard said they started to feel the effects of the smoke in the strawberry fields.

The ashes were falling on top of us, one of them explained, adding “it was hard to breathe.”

Air quality in the region was at dangerously poor levels and 15 workers at Crisalida Farms decided they could not handle it any longer. They left, even though their foreman warned them they would not have a job when they returned.

When they went back to the fields May 3, the farm fired them.

Barrajas, who is a representative of the UFW, said the workers contacted him for help, even though they were not members of the union.

Union representatives met with the farm’s upper management and applied a union rule.

“No worker shall work under conditions where they feel his life or health is in danger,” Barrajas said.

In a statement to Telemundo, the farm representative said the workers left without permission while orders still needed to be filled. The company offered to pay them for the hours they’d worked.

Later, the company settled with the union and offered to rehire all 15 workers. But only one worker returned.

The others took jobs on other farms.

One worker said while it hurts to lose work, one's health is more important.



May 7, 2013
John Cadiz Klemack & Yvonne Beltzer
NBC]]> <![CDATA[The Terrorist “Radicalization” of the Tsarnaev Brothers]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-The-Terrorist-%E2%80%9CRadicalization%E2%80%9D-of-the-Tsarnaev-Brothers Wed, 22 May 2013 03:36:50 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-The-Terrorist-%E2%80%9CRadicalization%E2%80%9D-of-the-Tsarnaev-Brothers The Terrorist “Radicalization” of the Tsarnaev Brothers



“An Eye for an Eye”

Where, how, when, why and by whom were the Tsarnaev brothers “radicalized”? These are the questions mainstream journalism poses and strives to answer. But one antonym of “radical”—“superficial”—describes this line of approach.

Leave aside the fact that “radicalization” is a vague, unhelpful concept without any definite political or moral content, and that many of us have been radicalized about various matters in appropriate, positive ways. In the 1960s, a sort of “radicalization” was a function of political awareness and decency. (What was “radical” then—opposition to the Vietnam War, support for Black Power, women’s liberation, gay rights—is hardly controversial today.) This use of language insults (leftist, Marxist, anti-imperialist) radicals such as myself and posits implicitly a collaborationist “moderation” as the desired norm. But the main problem with this approach is that it obfuscates the real issue: how did the brothers come to believe that it was okay to kill random civilians?


You Shouldn’t Kill, But…

For most people it’s difficult to fathom. What’s more fundamental to the social contract underlying human society than the rule, “You shall not kill”? The principle is enshrined in all law codes and religious traditions. Still, these same traditions allow, even sometimes mandate, exceptions.

The same Laws of Moses that state “You shall not kill” require the execution of adulterers (Deuteronomy 22:22) and any man “who lies with” other men (Leviticus 20:13). Worse, the same god who sets down the law orders his Chosen People to wipe out whole peoples. He obliges the Hebrew leader Joshua to execute the “curse of destruction” on the city of Jericho: “man and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21). The Lord of Hosts orders King Saul to punish the Amalakites for deeds of their ancestors: “Now, go and crush Amalek: put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3).

One could go on and on with such citations, but I do not mean to solely target the Judeo-Christian tradition (or the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, since these three Abrahamic faiths all draw upon Old Testament myths and values). Pagans’ moral codes similarly banned killing but with various exceptions. The Vikings had firm laws against homicide within their own communities. But when off on raids on the coasts of Britain, Ireland or France they had no qualms about slaughtering at random. Going a-viking was to take a break from the normal morals practiced around the fjords.

Normal domestic morality can contrast with the morality applied towards outsiders. This was nicely illustrated in 1944 when 13% of people polled in the U.S. declared that U.S. troops should “kill all Japanese.” On just one night in March 1945 U.S. forces killed 100,000 men, women and children in Tokyo through conventional bombing. This was the calculated intention; Gen. Curtis LeMay boasted of his desire to “scorch and boil and bake to death” countless Japanese. (LeMay went on to become the vice-presidential candidate on a ticket headed by segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace.) The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 200,000 more. Those ordering the strikes could justify in their own minds this deliberate infliction of terror. Truman felt no qualms about dropping nukes on babies. Why not?

Because they attacked us. So don’t they deserve to be bombed?

Surely there were other factors at play, not least of which was racism, which helps to explain the massive civilian death toll in the Korean, Vietnam, Afghan and Iraq wars as well. It’s easier to slaughter people if you think them less human than you. My point is just that the notion of collective guilt justified, and continues to justify, random butchery.

This willingness to conflate civilians and military, the guilty and the innocent, by virtue of nationality, and to kill “man and women, young and old,” is a feature of terrorist mentality. We are accustomed to associating it with “militant Islamists,” “Muslim extremists.” Some people associate it with Islam in general, although one searches the Qur’an in vain for tales of divinely ordered genocide such as those that occur in the Bible. But how many innocent civilians have been killed by Muslim terrorist attacks in the last century, and how many by U.S. bombs and U.S.-backed death squads?


Why Did the Tsarnaevs Come to Think It Was Right to Kill?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told his interrogators that he and his brother were spurred to set off bombs in Boston on Marathon Monday by the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That this should be the catalyst is unsurprising. A 2003 UN-commissioned study found that the “War on Terror” was in fact increasing terrorism. Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and head of the International Crisis Group, noted the same thing in 2004: “The unhappy truth is that the net result of the war on terror, so far at least, has been more war and more terror.” A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies stated that the Iraq war had “made the overall terrorism problem worse.”

Some become “terrorists” (or, in some cases, decide to take up arms against U.S. occupiers and invaders, whom Washington and the Pentagon might regard as terrorists—or “illegal combatants”—although we should feel free to question such designations) because a loved one perished in a drone attack or was tortured during interrogation. They are motivated by personal vengeance and honor. Others see fellow Muslims somewhere victimized by the U.S. and hear the call to jihad in some far-off country. Others opt to vent their fury by blowing up random people in what they see as the belly of the beast.

Let’s imagine that the Tsarnaev brothers were indeed outraged by the things that offend many normal people. Let’s imagine that both came to see the war in Iraq, raging from 2003 (when the boys were 9 and 16) to 2011 (when they were 16 and 24) for what it really was: a war based on lies, producing over 100,000 civilian deaths. A horrendous war crime with enduring horrific repercussions for which no one has ever been tried or held to account.

No doubt they saw the disgusting photos of the humiliation and torture of Muslim prisoners in Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad made public in 2004. They could have made an impression on eleven and eighteen year old boys. Perhaps they learned that such treatment of Muslim prisoners, most of them charged with nothing and entirely innocent, was typical in Bagram in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo as well. One can imagine some feelings of indignation.

Maybe they saw the cockpit gunsight footage of the Apache helicopter attack over Baghdad in 2007, released by WikiLeaks in 2010, showing pilots and ground crew cavalierly discussing the killing of a dozen innocent Iraqi men including two Reuters employees. “Come on, let us shoot!” shouts someone requesting permission to fire as a van pulls up. The shooting resumes, injuring two children who were being driven to school. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one pilot says.

Maybe they were outraged, like regular decent folks, at the gunners’ bloodlust (maybe bolstered by the false belief that they were avenging the 9/11 victims). That outrage itself would have been entirely appropriate, would it have not?


Who is an Innocent Civilian?

Of course one should distinguish between those responsible for all these crimes and the people of this country, like you and me. That’s indeed our premise in asking: how did these young men ever come to think otherwise?

But the distinction between the culpable regime and the innocent “American people” becomes muddied when you read polls showing that as recently as March 42% of the people in the U.S. believe the Iraq War was “not a mistake,” while (only) 53% believe otherwise. That forty-two percent of the U.S. adult population is roughly one hundred million people. Their opinions shouldn’t damn them; they are in any case largely shaped by the mass media, the pulpit and their own ignorance. But the fact that there is so much popular support at any particular time for U.S. atrocities among the people of this country (and sometimes it is overwhelming!) must make many around the world question the presumption of our collective innocence.

Why, they surely ask, do the Americans enjoying the “freedom” to participate in elections, always elect these people who attack, invade and bomb us? Why do they not drive them from power when they do? Why do they instead re-elect them, and never prosecute any leaders for war crimes? If their government is really “theirs”—freely chosen and supported—are they not our enemies as much as their leaders?

(By the way: is it not also an outrage that these polls in the aftermath of wars, including those in Vietnam and Iraq, always give the respondent the two options “mistake?” or “not a mistake”? Those responsible for war are thus assumed to have had good intentions. There is no way to respond: “I believe it was a calculated crime.” This tells the world something about U.S. capacity for self-criticism.)

The distinction between regime and people also blurs when you read that 65% of U.S. residents polled support the drone strikes producing more terror in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Or even when you go to Fenway Park in Boston, just wanting to enjoy the baseball, and are forced to listen to the requisite tributes to “our heroes” supposedly “defending our freedoms,” and note the enthusiastic crowd response to any mention of “our men and women in uniform.” Must it not sound to many like applause for the slaughter of innocents?

And mustn’t the sight of crowds of flag-wavers chanting USA! USA! USA!, aggressively affirming their pride in “their” country (uniting implicitly with the 1% who actually control this country) send chills down any conscious person’s spine? This after all sounds very much like this.

One might compassionately think, “Well, these people are ignorant, brainwashed.” Or one might think, these people are just evil. If you are a Muslim, part of a community under constant surveillance and suspicion, you might see every unprovoked U.S. killing of Muslims abroad as an attack on yourself. Is not mindless U.S. patriotism and knee-jerk support for each new war also a threat to yourself? How then to respond?

The U.S. responded to an attack on itself by some Muslims twelve years ago by attacking numerous Muslims with no connection to the attack. The ongoing slaughter in Afghanistan has nothing to do with al-Qaeda and 9/11 but is rather an effort to contain the resurgent Taliban (who are not and never were the same as al-Qaeda) and aligned forces fighting to topple the U.S.-imposed, highly corrupt, unpopular Karzai regime. In this effort, as in Iraq, U.S. forces are killing civilians with impunity.

The moral question thus arises: If George W. Bush could slaughter Iraqi civilians in the name of fighting Muslim extremism, and if Barack Obama can bomb innocents in several Muslim countries virtually at will, why can’t Muslims kill U.S. civilians in the name of fighting back? Isn’t it a matter of “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” as it says in the Bible (Exodus 21:24; see also the Qur’an 2:178)? At some point the older brother seems to have concluded precisely thus.

One should mention that there’s actually a difference between the tribal mentality “us vs. them” and the “eye for an eye” principle. The latter was apparently intended to curb the practice of indiscriminate and disproportionate revenge. Rather than killing everyone in the neighboring village for the death of one of your own at the hands of one of theirs, you just kill one and call it even. (I won’t digress on the irony involved in the fact that contemporary Israeli leaders, in effect rejecting Exodus 21:24, boast of their deliberately “disproportionate responses” to any attack on themselves. It is an effort to terrify all foes.)

In the history of religion one sees a further evolution from this “eye for an eye” principle to the (arguably higher) principle of forgiveness. Thus we find in the Buddhist Dhammapada:

Quote:“How will hate leave him if a man forever thinks,

‘He abused me, he hit me, he defeated me, he robbed me’?

Will hate ever touch him if he does not think,

‘He abused me, he hit me, he defeated me, he robbed me’?

There is only one eternal law:

Hate never destroys hate: only love does.”


And of course Jesus is supposed to have said (Matthew 5:38):

Quote:“You have heard how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer no resistance to the wicked. On the contrary, if someone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well…”


In the theology of St. Paul, the “New Law” of Christian forgiveness supersedes the “Old Law” of retribution of Mosaic law.

But such refined thoughts have rarely impacted the behavior of modern states. Indeed the rule has been: “Isn’t it ok to make them feel our pain—by killing their children, so rich in hope and promise, shattering their peace of mind as they go about their lives, actively or just tacitly supporting their government that has provoked us?” That’s how Gen. Curtis LeMay felt, surely, in waging his war without mercy. I think this is how the Tsarnaevs also came to feel.


Some Comparisons

On April 15, the brothers’ bombs killed two young women and a little boy, occasioning a national outpouring of grief and countless tributes to the imagined bravery of we Bostonians and the heroism of local police.

On that same day in Baghdad, according to Iraq Body Count, 30 civilians were killed by car bombs and IEDs for reasons directly connected to the U.S. invasion and occupation. In all 62 were killed in Iraq by bombs or gunfire for such reasons, just another typical day in that wrecked country.

On the same day, nine Afghan civilians were killed in the ongoing civil war sparked by the invasion and occupation. A roadside bomb killed seven. Four were killed by an IED the next day. A week before U.S. airstrikes had killed 17 civilians including 12 children in Kunar province; the public clamor forced President Karzai to order U.S. special forces out of the province.

According to NATO, 475 civilians were killed in the Afghan conflict from January to March of this year. In Iraq, 561 civilians were killed in bombings or shootings in April alone. Such is the magnitude of suffering inflicted by U.S. imperialism on just these two countries within the Muslim world. Meanwhile Libya is worse off then ever after getting “liberated” by U.S.-NATO bombing; Mali suffers from the fallout of the Libya intervention; Syria and Iran remain in the U.S. crosshairs; and in Yemen resentment smolders at the drone strikes (up to 54 in April alone).

Some Muslim clerics—one must stress, a tiny minority—look at this big picture and say, “Islam is under attack from the U.S. It is our religious obligation to defend our brothers and sisters. Since we cannot defeat this enemy through conventional ways, we must use terror to make them realize there is a price for their own terror.” It is precisely the sentiment conveyed by an unknown Hebrew poet two and a half millennia ago, in venting his rage against the Babylonians who’d conquered and dispersed his people:

Quote:Daughter of Babel, doomed to destruction,

A blessing on anyone

Who treats you as you treated us,

A blessing on anyone who seizes your babies

And shatters them against a rock!


Spine-chilling you say? Yet it is, for Jews and Christians, Holy Writ: the ending of Psalm 137:8-9. And you will find no end of Jewish and Christian cleric-bloggers who jump to its defense. “One of the unsurpassed biblical hymns of all time,” says one. “Nowhere does it say that God approves of the Psalmist’s request,” writes another, “ or that he fulfilled it. Just because it is recorded that the Psalmist wrote the imprecation, doesn’t mean it was approved by God.” Another writes: “Now the psalmist says that soon someone will destroy Babylon. He was right!” Others write that the poet is simply expressing satisfaction that prophecy will be fulfilled.


An Eye for an Eye, Including Your Baby’s

But there’s really no question that this justifies mass-murder, or at least surely did, for some people, for a period of time. It is more than “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” It’s “the eye or the tooth of any of your people including the innocent child” or rather an expression of the notion that there are no “innocents” in this great conflict between the People of God and their enemies. There is no great leap between this (sick) mentality and that of the occasional Islamic imam who depicts everyone in this country as an appropriate target.

But did the Tsarnaevs need some sort of religious-political mentor (the mysterious Misha, William Plotnikov, Mansur Nidal, Awlaki) to make the leap from mere outrage to the righteous shattering of babies against the rock? Or was the moral model already at hand, there in the wars based on lies, in the Abu Ghraib photos, the Blackwater Baghdad murders of Sept. 2007, the Baghdad collateral murder video?

“It’s their fault for bringing their kids,” said the pilot in the leaked video, proud to have picked off eight Iraqis. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, proud to have killed three Bostonians, might say with precisely the same degree of moral legitimacy, “It’s their fault for attacking Muslim kids!”

To fail to understand this is to invite the endless exchange of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. One senses this was what Osama bin Laden wanted when he planned or approved the 9/11 attacks. He reasoned that the U.S. would launch a general crusade, including attacks on targets with nothing to do with al-Qaeda (like Iraq) thereby uniting more Muslims in hostility to itself. Prompting more terrorism, it would respond with more, begetting more in response, and so on, polarizing the world, drawing an ever firmer line between the west and a revived Islam with visions of a new global Caliphate. Could he have imagined that two irreligious Avar-Chechen boys from Kirgizia, growing up in the U.S., would ever climb aboard the jihadi-terrorist bandwagon?

He probably wouldn’t have been surprised, supposing that the course of events itself would “radicalize” those hitherto apathetic. An online al-Qaeda publication reportedly urges supporters in western countries to stay at home and take action in their own countries. The current leaders probably think that exploits like the Marathon bombing will sharpen the sense of “us vs. them,” produce anti-Muslim backlashes, leading to more violence within clearer battle lines, paving the way to ultimate victory. The vision, while insane and impossible, acquires more resonance with each new report of a Muslim civilian death at U.S. hands.


Radicalized Here or There? What Difference Does It Make?

Gandhi is supposed to have said “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” The even more primitive “us vs. them” mentality has long since blinded most of the political class and the mainstream media.

In the face of the Boston tragedy, all they can ask is, “Were the boys radicalized abroad? Or did it happen here?” Rephrased: Was their decision to express their outrage at the Iraq and Afghan wars through terrorism something implanted in their minds by Muslims met abroad, in dangerous mosques in Dagestan or Chechnya? Or did it stem from their own failure to assimilate into U.S. society, and a hatred towards this country rooted in their own hereditary religion? Either way the issue becomes merely us versus “radical Islam”—leaving the wars unmentioned, as though they played only a marginal role in the boys’ “radicalization.”

The blind are leading the blind. George W. Bush’s instinct the day of 9/11 was to attack Iraq! and to declare an indefinite “War on Terror” against anyone who could be smeared with the charge of supporting “terrorists” or pursuing WMD programs. Never mind that these are very different phenomena in themselves, or that the U.S. supports terrorists on occasion and also maintains half the world’s nuclear arsenal. While insisting publicly that the U.S. was not against Islam (gosh, he wondered, why would anyone think that?) Bush used ignorant anti-Muslim sentiment to garner support for his war on Iraq, depicting that war as one of response to 9/11.

“You’re for us or against us,” he bellowed, obviously and shamelessly invoking Jesus’ statement “Anyone who is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30), to divide the world in two. Obama has not stepped back from that crude Manicheanism. He criticized the Iraq War as a “strategic blunder” but has never questioned the morality of using the “us versus them” mentality to garner support for that criminal act. Instead he has praised Iraq War vets as “heroes” and pointedly declined to direct the Justice Department to pursue any charges against officials responsible for a criminal war.

He has always embraced the invasion of Afghanistan, sharply escalating it while terrorizing the people of neighboring Pakistan presumed collectively responsible for aiding the Taliban(s) that now flourish in both countries. He contemplates attacks on targets in Syria, Iran, perhaps Mali, that pose no more threat to you or me than Saddam’s imagined WMDs.

Much of humankind sees all this. It is not blinded. It looks on in unease if not horror at the scale and impunity of U.S. violence. If it becomes radicalized (in a positive life-affirming way), it is not by religion or a passion for holy war, but by natural human revulsion at the antics of a wounded Cyclops—the one-eyed monster that is twenty-first century U.S. imperialism.



May 7, 2013
Gary Leupp
CounterPunch]]> The Terrorist “Radicalization” of the Tsarnaev Brothers



“An Eye for an Eye”

Where, how, when, why and by whom were the Tsarnaev brothers “radicalized”? These are the questions mainstream journalism poses and strives to answer. But one antonym of “radical”—“superficial”—describes this line of approach.

Leave aside the fact that “radicalization” is a vague, unhelpful concept without any definite political or moral content, and that many of us have been radicalized about various matters in appropriate, positive ways. In the 1960s, a sort of “radicalization” was a function of political awareness and decency. (What was “radical” then—opposition to the Vietnam War, support for Black Power, women’s liberation, gay rights—is hardly controversial today.) This use of language insults (leftist, Marxist, anti-imperialist) radicals such as myself and posits implicitly a collaborationist “moderation” as the desired norm. But the main problem with this approach is that it obfuscates the real issue: how did the brothers come to believe that it was okay to kill random civilians?


You Shouldn’t Kill, But…

For most people it’s difficult to fathom. What’s more fundamental to the social contract underlying human society than the rule, “You shall not kill”? The principle is enshrined in all law codes and religious traditions. Still, these same traditions allow, even sometimes mandate, exceptions.

The same Laws of Moses that state “You shall not kill” require the execution of adulterers (Deuteronomy 22:22) and any man “who lies with” other men (Leviticus 20:13). Worse, the same god who sets down the law orders his Chosen People to wipe out whole peoples. He obliges the Hebrew leader Joshua to execute the “curse of destruction” on the city of Jericho: “man and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21). The Lord of Hosts orders King Saul to punish the Amalakites for deeds of their ancestors: “Now, go and crush Amalek: put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3).

One could go on and on with such citations, but I do not mean to solely target the Judeo-Christian tradition (or the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, since these three Abrahamic faiths all draw upon Old Testament myths and values). Pagans’ moral codes similarly banned killing but with various exceptions. The Vikings had firm laws against homicide within their own communities. But when off on raids on the coasts of Britain, Ireland or France they had no qualms about slaughtering at random. Going a-viking was to take a break from the normal morals practiced around the fjords.

Normal domestic morality can contrast with the morality applied towards outsiders. This was nicely illustrated in 1944 when 13% of people polled in the U.S. declared that U.S. troops should “kill all Japanese.” On just one night in March 1945 U.S. forces killed 100,000 men, women and children in Tokyo through conventional bombing. This was the calculated intention; Gen. Curtis LeMay boasted of his desire to “scorch and boil and bake to death” countless Japanese. (LeMay went on to become the vice-presidential candidate on a ticket headed by segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace.) The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 200,000 more. Those ordering the strikes could justify in their own minds this deliberate infliction of terror. Truman felt no qualms about dropping nukes on babies. Why not?

Because they attacked us. So don’t they deserve to be bombed?

Surely there were other factors at play, not least of which was racism, which helps to explain the massive civilian death toll in the Korean, Vietnam, Afghan and Iraq wars as well. It’s easier to slaughter people if you think them less human than you. My point is just that the notion of collective guilt justified, and continues to justify, random butchery.

This willingness to conflate civilians and military, the guilty and the innocent, by virtue of nationality, and to kill “man and women, young and old,” is a feature of terrorist mentality. We are accustomed to associating it with “militant Islamists,” “Muslim extremists.” Some people associate it with Islam in general, although one searches the Qur’an in vain for tales of divinely ordered genocide such as those that occur in the Bible. But how many innocent civilians have been killed by Muslim terrorist attacks in the last century, and how many by U.S. bombs and U.S.-backed death squads?


Why Did the Tsarnaevs Come to Think It Was Right to Kill?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told his interrogators that he and his brother were spurred to set off bombs in Boston on Marathon Monday by the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That this should be the catalyst is unsurprising. A 2003 UN-commissioned study found that the “War on Terror” was in fact increasing terrorism. Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and head of the International Crisis Group, noted the same thing in 2004: “The unhappy truth is that the net result of the war on terror, so far at least, has been more war and more terror.” A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies stated that the Iraq war had “made the overall terrorism problem worse.”

Some become “terrorists” (or, in some cases, decide to take up arms against U.S. occupiers and invaders, whom Washington and the Pentagon might regard as terrorists—or “illegal combatants”—although we should feel free to question such designations) because a loved one perished in a drone attack or was tortured during interrogation. They are motivated by personal vengeance and honor. Others see fellow Muslims somewhere victimized by the U.S. and hear the call to jihad in some far-off country. Others opt to vent their fury by blowing up random people in what they see as the belly of the beast.

Let’s imagine that the Tsarnaev brothers were indeed outraged by the things that offend many normal people. Let’s imagine that both came to see the war in Iraq, raging from 2003 (when the boys were 9 and 16) to 2011 (when they were 16 and 24) for what it really was: a war based on lies, producing over 100,000 civilian deaths. A horrendous war crime with enduring horrific repercussions for which no one has ever been tried or held to account.

No doubt they saw the disgusting photos of the humiliation and torture of Muslim prisoners in Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad made public in 2004. They could have made an impression on eleven and eighteen year old boys. Perhaps they learned that such treatment of Muslim prisoners, most of them charged with nothing and entirely innocent, was typical in Bagram in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo as well. One can imagine some feelings of indignation.

Maybe they saw the cockpit gunsight footage of the Apache helicopter attack over Baghdad in 2007, released by WikiLeaks in 2010, showing pilots and ground crew cavalierly discussing the killing of a dozen innocent Iraqi men including two Reuters employees. “Come on, let us shoot!” shouts someone requesting permission to fire as a van pulls up. The shooting resumes, injuring two children who were being driven to school. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one pilot says.

Maybe they were outraged, like regular decent folks, at the gunners’ bloodlust (maybe bolstered by the false belief that they were avenging the 9/11 victims). That outrage itself would have been entirely appropriate, would it have not?


Who is an Innocent Civilian?

Of course one should distinguish between those responsible for all these crimes and the people of this country, like you and me. That’s indeed our premise in asking: how did these young men ever come to think otherwise?

But the distinction between the culpable regime and the innocent “American people” becomes muddied when you read polls showing that as recently as March 42% of the people in the U.S. believe the Iraq War was “not a mistake,” while (only) 53% believe otherwise. That forty-two percent of the U.S. adult population is roughly one hundred million people. Their opinions shouldn’t damn them; they are in any case largely shaped by the mass media, the pulpit and their own ignorance. But the fact that there is so much popular support at any particular time for U.S. atrocities among the people of this country (and sometimes it is overwhelming!) must make many around the world question the presumption of our collective innocence.

Why, they surely ask, do the Americans enjoying the “freedom” to participate in elections, always elect these people who attack, invade and bomb us? Why do they not drive them from power when they do? Why do they instead re-elect them, and never prosecute any leaders for war crimes? If their government is really “theirs”—freely chosen and supported—are they not our enemies as much as their leaders?

(By the way: is it not also an outrage that these polls in the aftermath of wars, including those in Vietnam and Iraq, always give the respondent the two options “mistake?” or “not a mistake”? Those responsible for war are thus assumed to have had good intentions. There is no way to respond: “I believe it was a calculated crime.” This tells the world something about U.S. capacity for self-criticism.)

The distinction between regime and people also blurs when you read that 65% of U.S. residents polled support the drone strikes producing more terror in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Or even when you go to Fenway Park in Boston, just wanting to enjoy the baseball, and are forced to listen to the requisite tributes to “our heroes” supposedly “defending our freedoms,” and note the enthusiastic crowd response to any mention of “our men and women in uniform.” Must it not sound to many like applause for the slaughter of innocents?

And mustn’t the sight of crowds of flag-wavers chanting USA! USA! USA!, aggressively affirming their pride in “their” country (uniting implicitly with the 1% who actually control this country) send chills down any conscious person’s spine? This after all sounds very much like this.

One might compassionately think, “Well, these people are ignorant, brainwashed.” Or one might think, these people are just evil. If you are a Muslim, part of a community under constant surveillance and suspicion, you might see every unprovoked U.S. killing of Muslims abroad as an attack on yourself. Is not mindless U.S. patriotism and knee-jerk support for each new war also a threat to yourself? How then to respond?

The U.S. responded to an attack on itself by some Muslims twelve years ago by attacking numerous Muslims with no connection to the attack. The ongoing slaughter in Afghanistan has nothing to do with al-Qaeda and 9/11 but is rather an effort to contain the resurgent Taliban (who are not and never were the same as al-Qaeda) and aligned forces fighting to topple the U.S.-imposed, highly corrupt, unpopular Karzai regime. In this effort, as in Iraq, U.S. forces are killing civilians with impunity.

The moral question thus arises: If George W. Bush could slaughter Iraqi civilians in the name of fighting Muslim extremism, and if Barack Obama can bomb innocents in several Muslim countries virtually at will, why can’t Muslims kill U.S. civilians in the name of fighting back? Isn’t it a matter of “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” as it says in the Bible (Exodus 21:24; see also the Qur’an 2:178)? At some point the older brother seems to have concluded precisely thus.

One should mention that there’s actually a difference between the tribal mentality “us vs. them” and the “eye for an eye” principle. The latter was apparently intended to curb the practice of indiscriminate and disproportionate revenge. Rather than killing everyone in the neighboring village for the death of one of your own at the hands of one of theirs, you just kill one and call it even. (I won’t digress on the irony involved in the fact that contemporary Israeli leaders, in effect rejecting Exodus 21:24, boast of their deliberately “disproportionate responses” to any attack on themselves. It is an effort to terrify all foes.)

In the history of religion one sees a further evolution from this “eye for an eye” principle to the (arguably higher) principle of forgiveness. Thus we find in the Buddhist Dhammapada:

Quote:“How will hate leave him if a man forever thinks,

‘He abused me, he hit me, he defeated me, he robbed me’?

Will hate ever touch him if he does not think,

‘He abused me, he hit me, he defeated me, he robbed me’?

There is only one eternal law:

Hate never destroys hate: only love does.”


And of course Jesus is supposed to have said (Matthew 5:38):

Quote:“You have heard how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer no resistance to the wicked. On the contrary, if someone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well…”


In the theology of St. Paul, the “New Law” of Christian forgiveness supersedes the “Old Law” of retribution of Mosaic law.

But such refined thoughts have rarely impacted the behavior of modern states. Indeed the rule has been: “Isn’t it ok to make them feel our pain—by killing their children, so rich in hope and promise, shattering their peace of mind as they go about their lives, actively or just tacitly supporting their government that has provoked us?” That’s how Gen. Curtis LeMay felt, surely, in waging his war without mercy. I think this is how the Tsarnaevs also came to feel.


Some Comparisons

On April 15, the brothers’ bombs killed two young women and a little boy, occasioning a national outpouring of grief and countless tributes to the imagined bravery of we Bostonians and the heroism of local police.

On that same day in Baghdad, according to Iraq Body Count, 30 civilians were killed by car bombs and IEDs for reasons directly connected to the U.S. invasion and occupation. In all 62 were killed in Iraq by bombs or gunfire for such reasons, just another typical day in that wrecked country.

On the same day, nine Afghan civilians were killed in the ongoing civil war sparked by the invasion and occupation. A roadside bomb killed seven. Four were killed by an IED the next day. A week before U.S. airstrikes had killed 17 civilians including 12 children in Kunar province; the public clamor forced President Karzai to order U.S. special forces out of the province.

According to NATO, 475 civilians were killed in the Afghan conflict from January to March of this year. In Iraq, 561 civilians were killed in bombings or shootings in April alone. Such is the magnitude of suffering inflicted by U.S. imperialism on just these two countries within the Muslim world. Meanwhile Libya is worse off then ever after getting “liberated” by U.S.-NATO bombing; Mali suffers from the fallout of the Libya intervention; Syria and Iran remain in the U.S. crosshairs; and in Yemen resentment smolders at the drone strikes (up to 54 in April alone).

Some Muslim clerics—one must stress, a tiny minority—look at this big picture and say, “Islam is under attack from the U.S. It is our religious obligation to defend our brothers and sisters. Since we cannot defeat this enemy through conventional ways, we must use terror to make them realize there is a price for their own terror.” It is precisely the sentiment conveyed by an unknown Hebrew poet two and a half millennia ago, in venting his rage against the Babylonians who’d conquered and dispersed his people:

Quote:Daughter of Babel, doomed to destruction,

A blessing on anyone

Who treats you as you treated us,

A blessing on anyone who seizes your babies

And shatters them against a rock!


Spine-chilling you say? Yet it is, for Jews and Christians, Holy Writ: the ending of Psalm 137:8-9. And you will find no end of Jewish and Christian cleric-bloggers who jump to its defense. “One of the unsurpassed biblical hymns of all time,” says one. “Nowhere does it say that God approves of the Psalmist’s request,” writes another, “ or that he fulfilled it. Just because it is recorded that the Psalmist wrote the imprecation, doesn’t mean it was approved by God.” Another writes: “Now the psalmist says that soon someone will destroy Babylon. He was right!” Others write that the poet is simply expressing satisfaction that prophecy will be fulfilled.


An Eye for an Eye, Including Your Baby’s

But there’s really no question that this justifies mass-murder, or at least surely did, for some people, for a period of time. It is more than “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” It’s “the eye or the tooth of any of your people including the innocent child” or rather an expression of the notion that there are no “innocents” in this great conflict between the People of God and their enemies. There is no great leap between this (sick) mentality and that of the occasional Islamic imam who depicts everyone in this country as an appropriate target.

But did the Tsarnaevs need some sort of religious-political mentor (the mysterious Misha, William Plotnikov, Mansur Nidal, Awlaki) to make the leap from mere outrage to the righteous shattering of babies against the rock? Or was the moral model already at hand, there in the wars based on lies, in the Abu Ghraib photos, the Blackwater Baghdad murders of Sept. 2007, the Baghdad collateral murder video?

“It’s their fault for bringing their kids,” said the pilot in the leaked video, proud to have picked off eight Iraqis. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, proud to have killed three Bostonians, might say with precisely the same degree of moral legitimacy, “It’s their fault for attacking Muslim kids!”

To fail to understand this is to invite the endless exchange of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. One senses this was what Osama bin Laden wanted when he planned or approved the 9/11 attacks. He reasoned that the U.S. would launch a general crusade, including attacks on targets with nothing to do with al-Qaeda (like Iraq) thereby uniting more Muslims in hostility to itself. Prompting more terrorism, it would respond with more, begetting more in response, and so on, polarizing the world, drawing an ever firmer line between the west and a revived Islam with visions of a new global Caliphate. Could he have imagined that two irreligious Avar-Chechen boys from Kirgizia, growing up in the U.S., would ever climb aboard the jihadi-terrorist bandwagon?

He probably wouldn’t have been surprised, supposing that the course of events itself would “radicalize” those hitherto apathetic. An online al-Qaeda publication reportedly urges supporters in western countries to stay at home and take action in their own countries. The current leaders probably think that exploits like the Marathon bombing will sharpen the sense of “us vs. them,” produce anti-Muslim backlashes, leading to more violence within clearer battle lines, paving the way to ultimate victory. The vision, while insane and impossible, acquires more resonance with each new report of a Muslim civilian death at U.S. hands.


Radicalized Here or There? What Difference Does It Make?

Gandhi is supposed to have said “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” The even more primitive “us vs. them” mentality has long since blinded most of the political class and the mainstream media.

In the face of the Boston tragedy, all they can ask is, “Were the boys radicalized abroad? Or did it happen here?” Rephrased: Was their decision to express their outrage at the Iraq and Afghan wars through terrorism something implanted in their minds by Muslims met abroad, in dangerous mosques in Dagestan or Chechnya? Or did it stem from their own failure to assimilate into U.S. society, and a hatred towards this country rooted in their own hereditary religion? Either way the issue becomes merely us versus “radical Islam”—leaving the wars unmentioned, as though they played only a marginal role in the boys’ “radicalization.”

The blind are leading the blind. George W. Bush’s instinct the day of 9/11 was to attack Iraq! and to declare an indefinite “War on Terror” against anyone who could be smeared with the charge of supporting “terrorists” or pursuing WMD programs. Never mind that these are very different phenomena in themselves, or that the U.S. supports terrorists on occasion and also maintains half the world’s nuclear arsenal. While insisting publicly that the U.S. was not against Islam (gosh, he wondered, why would anyone think that?) Bush used ignorant anti-Muslim sentiment to garner support for his war on Iraq, depicting that war as one of response to 9/11.

“You’re for us or against us,” he bellowed, obviously and shamelessly invoking Jesus’ statement “Anyone who is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30), to divide the world in two. Obama has not stepped back from that crude Manicheanism. He criticized the Iraq War as a “strategic blunder” but has never questioned the morality of using the “us versus them” mentality to garner support for that criminal act. Instead he has praised Iraq War vets as “heroes” and pointedly declined to direct the Justice Department to pursue any charges against officials responsible for a criminal war.

He has always embraced the invasion of Afghanistan, sharply escalating it while terrorizing the people of neighboring Pakistan presumed collectively responsible for aiding the Taliban(s) that now flourish in both countries. He contemplates attacks on targets in Syria, Iran, perhaps Mali, that pose no more threat to you or me than Saddam’s imagined WMDs.

Much of humankind sees all this. It is not blinded. It looks on in unease if not horror at the scale and impunity of U.S. violence. If it becomes radicalized (in a positive life-affirming way), it is not by religion or a passion for holy war, but by natural human revulsion at the antics of a wounded Cyclops—the one-eyed monster that is twenty-first century U.S. imperialism.



May 7, 2013
Gary Leupp
CounterPunch]]> <![CDATA[An Open Letter From Assata]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-An-Open-Letter-From-Assata Wed, 22 May 2013 01:58:34 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-An-Open-Letter-From-Assata An Open Letter From Assata



[Image: tumblr_m9fx5sTgqE1qdx7dko1_500.jpg]



My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy towards people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984.

I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the U.S. government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one. In the 1960s, I participated in various struggles: the black liberation movement, the student rights movement, and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. I joined the Black Panther Party. By 1969 the Black Panther Party had become the number one organization targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Because the Black Panther Party demanded the total liberation of black people, J. Edgar Hoover called it “greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and vowed to destroy it and its leaders and activists.

In 1978, my case was one of many cases bought before the United Nations Organization in a petition filed by the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, exposing the existence of political prisoners in the United States, their political persecution, and the cruel and inhuman treatment they receive in US prisons. According to the report:

Quote:"‘The FBI and the New York Police Department in particular, charged and accused Assata Shakur of participating in attacks on law enforcement personnel and widely circulated such charges and accusations among police agencies and units. The FBI and the NYPD further charged her as being a leader of the Black Liberation Army which the government and its respective agencies described as an organization engaged in the shooting of police officers. This description of the Black Liberation Army and the accusation of Assata Shakur’s relationship to it was widely circulated by government agents among police agencies and units. As a result of these activities by the government, Ms. Shakur became a hunted person; posters in police precincts and banks described her as being involved in serious criminal activities; she was highlighted on the FBI’s most wanted list; and to police at all levels she became a ‘shoot-to-kill’ target.”


I was falsely accused in six different “criminal cases” and in all six of these cases I was eventually acquitted or the charges were dismissed. The fact that I was acquitted or that the charges were dismissed, did not mean that I received justice in the courts, that was certainly not the case. It only meant that the “evidence” presented against me was so flimsy and false that my innocence became evident. This political persecution was part and parcel of the government’s policy of eliminating political opponents by charging them with crimes and arresting them with no regard to the factual basis of such charges.

On May 2, 1973 I, along with Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, supposedly for a “faulty tail light.” Sundiata Acoli got out of the car to determine why we were stopped. Zayd and I remained in the car. State trooper Harper then came to the car, opened the door and began to question us. Because we were black, and riding in a car with Vermont license plates, he claimed he became “suspicious.” He then drew his gun, pointed it at us, and told us to put our hands up in the air, in front of us, where he could see them. I complied and in a split second, there was a sound that came from outside the car, there was a sudden movement, and I was shot once with my arms held up in the air, and then once again from the back. Zayd Malik Shakur was later killed, trooper Werner Foerster was killed, and even though trooper Harper admitted that he shot and killed Zayd Malik Shakur, under the New Jersey felony murder law, I was charged with killing both Zayd Malik Shakur, who was my closest friend and comrade, and charged in the death of trooper Forester. Never in my life have I felt such grief. Zayd had vowed to protect me, and to help me to get to a safe place, and it was clear that he had lost his life, trying to protect both me and Sundiata. Although he was also unarmed, and the gun that killed trooper Foerster was found under Zayd’s leg, Sundiata Acoli, who was captured later, was also charged with both deaths. Neither Sundiata Acoli nor I ever received a fair trial We were both convicted in the news media way before our trials. No news media was ever permitted to interview us, although the New Jersey police and the FBI fed stories to the press on a daily basis. In 1977, I was convicted by an all- white jury and sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison. In 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case, and who were also extremely fearful for my life.

The U.S. Senate’s 1976 Church Commission report on intelligence operations inside the USA, revealed that “The FBI has attempted covertly to influence the public’s perception of persons and organizations by disseminating derogatory information to the press, either anonymously or through “friendly” news contacts.” This same policy is evidently still very much in effect today.

On December 24, 1997, The New Jersey State called a press conference to announce that New Jersey State Police had written a letter to Pope John Paul II asking him to intervene on their behalf and to aid in having me extradited back to New Jersey prisons. The New Jersey State Police refused to make their letter public. Knowing that they had probably totally distort the facts, and attempted to get the Pope to do the devils work in the name of religion, I decided to write the Pope to inform him about the reality of’ “justice” for black people in the State of New Jersey and in the United States. (See attached Letter to the Pope).

In January of 1998, during the pope’s visit to Cuba, I agreed to do an interview with NBC journalist Ralph Penza around my letter to the Pope, about my experiences in New Jersey court system, and about the changes I saw in the United States and it’s treatment of Black people in the last 25 years. I agreed to do this interview because I saw this secret letter to the Pope as a vicious, vulgar, publicity maneuver on the part of the New Jersey State Police, and as a cynical attempt to manipulate Pope John Paul II. I have lived in Cuba for many years, and was completely out of touch with the sensationalist, dishonest, nature of the establishment media today. It is worse today than it was 30 years ago. After years of being victimized by the “establishment” media it was naive of me to hope that I might finally get the opportunity to tell “my side of the story.” Instead of an interview with me, what took place was a “staged media event” in three parts, full of distortions, inaccuracies and outright lies. NBC purposely misrepresented the facts. Not only did NBC spend thousands of dollars promoting this “exclusive interview series” on NBC, they also spent a great deal of money advertising this “exclusive interview” on black radio stations and also placed notices in local newspapers.

Like most poor and oppressed people in the United States, I do not have a voice. Black people, poor people in the U.S. have no real freedom of speech, no real freedom of expression and very little freedom of the press. The black press and the progressive media has historically played an essential role in the struggle for social justice. We need to continue and to expand that tradition. We need to create media outlets that help to educate our people and our children, and not annihilate their minds. I am only one woman. I own no TV stations, or Radio Stations or Newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on, and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask, those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media, those of you who believe in truth freedom, To publish this statement and to let people know what is happening. We have no voice, so you must be the voice of the voiceless.

Free all Political Prisoners, I send you Love and Revolutionary Greetings From Cuba, One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) That has ever existed on the Face of this Planet.



May 3, 2013
Assata Shakur
Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle]]> An Open Letter From Assata



[Image: tumblr_m9fx5sTgqE1qdx7dko1_500.jpg]



My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy towards people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984.

I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the U.S. government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one. In the 1960s, I participated in various struggles: the black liberation movement, the student rights movement, and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. I joined the Black Panther Party. By 1969 the Black Panther Party had become the number one organization targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Because the Black Panther Party demanded the total liberation of black people, J. Edgar Hoover called it “greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and vowed to destroy it and its leaders and activists.

In 1978, my case was one of many cases bought before the United Nations Organization in a petition filed by the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, exposing the existence of political prisoners in the United States, their political persecution, and the cruel and inhuman treatment they receive in US prisons. According to the report:

Quote:"‘The FBI and the New York Police Department in particular, charged and accused Assata Shakur of participating in attacks on law enforcement personnel and widely circulated such charges and accusations among police agencies and units. The FBI and the NYPD further charged her as being a leader of the Black Liberation Army which the government and its respective agencies described as an organization engaged in the shooting of police officers. This description of the Black Liberation Army and the accusation of Assata Shakur’s relationship to it was widely circulated by government agents among police agencies and units. As a result of these activities by the government, Ms. Shakur became a hunted person; posters in police precincts and banks described her as being involved in serious criminal activities; she was highlighted on the FBI’s most wanted list; and to police at all levels she became a ‘shoot-to-kill’ target.”


I was falsely accused in six different “criminal cases” and in all six of these cases I was eventually acquitted or the charges were dismissed. The fact that I was acquitted or that the charges were dismissed, did not mean that I received justice in the courts, that was certainly not the case. It only meant that the “evidence” presented against me was so flimsy and false that my innocence became evident. This political persecution was part and parcel of the government’s policy of eliminating political opponents by charging them with crimes and arresting them with no regard to the factual basis of such charges.

On May 2, 1973 I, along with Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, supposedly for a “faulty tail light.” Sundiata Acoli got out of the car to determine why we were stopped. Zayd and I remained in the car. State trooper Harper then came to the car, opened the door and began to question us. Because we were black, and riding in a car with Vermont license plates, he claimed he became “suspicious.” He then drew his gun, pointed it at us, and told us to put our hands up in the air, in front of us, where he could see them. I complied and in a split second, there was a sound that came from outside the car, there was a sudden movement, and I was shot once with my arms held up in the air, and then once again from the back. Zayd Malik Shakur was later killed, trooper Werner Foerster was killed, and even though trooper Harper admitted that he shot and killed Zayd Malik Shakur, under the New Jersey felony murder law, I was charged with killing both Zayd Malik Shakur, who was my closest friend and comrade, and charged in the death of trooper Forester. Never in my life have I felt such grief. Zayd had vowed to protect me, and to help me to get to a safe place, and it was clear that he had lost his life, trying to protect both me and Sundiata. Although he was also unarmed, and the gun that killed trooper Foerster was found under Zayd’s leg, Sundiata Acoli, who was captured later, was also charged with both deaths. Neither Sundiata Acoli nor I ever received a fair trial We were both convicted in the news media way before our trials. No news media was ever permitted to interview us, although the New Jersey police and the FBI fed stories to the press on a daily basis. In 1977, I was convicted by an all- white jury and sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison. In 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case, and who were also extremely fearful for my life.

The U.S. Senate’s 1976 Church Commission report on intelligence operations inside the USA, revealed that “The FBI has attempted covertly to influence the public’s perception of persons and organizations by disseminating derogatory information to the press, either anonymously or through “friendly” news contacts.” This same policy is evidently still very much in effect today.

On December 24, 1997, The New Jersey State called a press conference to announce that New Jersey State Police had written a letter to Pope John Paul II asking him to intervene on their behalf and to aid in having me extradited back to New Jersey prisons. The New Jersey State Police refused to make their letter public. Knowing that they had probably totally distort the facts, and attempted to get the Pope to do the devils work in the name of religion, I decided to write the Pope to inform him about the reality of’ “justice” for black people in the State of New Jersey and in the United States. (See attached Letter to the Pope).

In January of 1998, during the pope’s visit to Cuba, I agreed to do an interview with NBC journalist Ralph Penza around my letter to the Pope, about my experiences in New Jersey court system, and about the changes I saw in the United States and it’s treatment of Black people in the last 25 years. I agreed to do this interview because I saw this secret letter to the Pope as a vicious, vulgar, publicity maneuver on the part of the New Jersey State Police, and as a cynical attempt to manipulate Pope John Paul II. I have lived in Cuba for many years, and was completely out of touch with the sensationalist, dishonest, nature of the establishment media today. It is worse today than it was 30 years ago. After years of being victimized by the “establishment” media it was naive of me to hope that I might finally get the opportunity to tell “my side of the story.” Instead of an interview with me, what took place was a “staged media event” in three parts, full of distortions, inaccuracies and outright lies. NBC purposely misrepresented the facts. Not only did NBC spend thousands of dollars promoting this “exclusive interview series” on NBC, they also spent a great deal of money advertising this “exclusive interview” on black radio stations and also placed notices in local newspapers.

Like most poor and oppressed people in the United States, I do not have a voice. Black people, poor people in the U.S. have no real freedom of speech, no real freedom of expression and very little freedom of the press. The black press and the progressive media has historically played an essential role in the struggle for social justice. We need to continue and to expand that tradition. We need to create media outlets that help to educate our people and our children, and not annihilate their minds. I am only one woman. I own no TV stations, or Radio Stations or Newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on, and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask, those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media, those of you who believe in truth freedom, To publish this statement and to let people know what is happening. We have no voice, so you must be the voice of the voiceless.

Free all Political Prisoners, I send you Love and Revolutionary Greetings From Cuba, One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) That has ever existed on the Face of this Planet.



May 3, 2013
Assata Shakur
Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle]]> <![CDATA[Watch Out, George Osborne: Smith, Marx and Even the IMF Are After You]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Watch-Out-George-Osborne-Smith-Marx-and-Even-the-IMF-Are-After-You Wed, 22 May 2013 01:49:58 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Watch-Out-George-Osborne-Smith-Marx-and-Even-the-IMF-Are-After-You Watch out, George Osborne: Smith, Marx and even the IMF are after you



[Image: spanish-python--008.jpg]



When even the IMF's free market ideologues recoil from the UK chancellor's austerity politics, democracy itself is at stake

George Osborne and his Treasury officials are gearing up for a fight. They've promised to make life difficult for the other side for the next two weeks. The unlikely opponents are the team of economists visiting from the IMF for a regular policy review.

Why has this routine meeting, which would hardly be noticed outside professional circles, become a confrontation? Because the IMF has recently dropped its support for the chancellor's austerity policy and repeatedly urged him to rethink it. It even said he was "playing with fire" in refusing to change course.

This is an astonishing development. For in the past three decades the IMF has been the standard-bearer for austerity. Back in 1997 it even forced South Korea – with an existing budget surplus and one of the smallest public debts in the world (as a proportion of GDP) – to cut government spending. Only when the policy turned what was already the biggest recession in the country's history into a catastrophe, with more than 100 firms going bankrupt every day for five months, did it do an embarrassing U-turn and allow a budget deficit to develop.

Given this history, being told by the IMF to go easy on austerity is like being told by the Spanish Inquisition to be more tolerant of heretics. The chancellor and his team should be worried.

If even the IMF doesn't approve, why is the UK government persisting with a policy that is clearly not working? Or, for that matter, why is the same policy pushed through across Europe? A certain dead economist would have said it is because the government is "in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor". Dead right.

Current policies in the UK and other European countries are really about making poor people pay for the mistakes of the rich. Millions of poor people have lost their jobs and the support they received through welfare, but how many of those top bankers who caused the crisis have suffered – except for a cancelled knighthood here and a partially returned pension pot there? If anyone has suffered in the financial industry, it is its poorer members – junior analysts who lost their jobs and tellers who are working longer hours for shrinking real wages.

In case you were wondering, it wasn't Karl Marx who wrote the words that I quoted above. He would have never put it so crudely. His version, delivered with typical panache, was that the "executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". No, those damning words came from Adam Smith, the supposed patron saint of free-market economics.

To Smith and Marx, the class bias of the state was plain to see. They lived at a time when only the rich had votes (if there were elections at all) and so there were few checks on the extent to which they could dictate government policy.

With the subsequent broadening of suffrage, ultimately to every adult, the class nature of the state has been significantly diluted. The welfare state, regulations on monopoly, consumer protection, and protection of worker rights are all things that have been established only because of this political change. Democracy, despite its limitations, is in the end the only way to ensure that policies do not simply benefit the privileged few.

This is, of course, exactly why free-market economists and others who are on the side of the rich have been so negative about democracy. In the old days, free-market economists strongly opposed universal suffrage on the grounds that it would destroy capitalism: poor people would elect politicians who would appropriate the means of the rich and give handouts to the poor, they argued, completely destroying incentives for wealth creation.

Once universal suffrage was introduced, they could not openly oppose democracy. So they started criticising "politics" in general. Politicians, it was argued, would adopt policies that maximised their chances of re-election but damaged the economy – printing money, handing out favours to powerful monopolies, and increasing social welfare spending for the poor. Politicians needed to be prevented from making important policy decisions, the argument went.

On this advice, since the 1980s, many countries have ring-fenced the most important policy areas to keep politicians out. Independent central banks (such as the European Central Bank), independent regulatory agencies (such as Ofcom and Ofgem) and strict rules on government spending and deficits (such as the "balanced budget" rule) have been introduced.

In particularly difficult economic times, it was even argued, we need to insulate economic policies from politics altogether. Latin American military dictatorships were justified in such terms. The recent imposition of "technocratic" governments, made up of economists and bankers who have not been "tainted" by politics, on Greece and Italy comes from the same intellectual stable.

What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy.

The conflict surrounding austerity policies in Europe is, then, not just about figures on budget, unemployment and growth rate. It is also about the meaning of democracy.

As José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, has recently recognised, the policy of austerity has "reached its limits" in terms of "political and social support". If European leaders, including the British chancellor, keep pushing these policies against those limits, people will inevitably start asking: what is the point of democracy, when policies serve only the interest of the tiny minority at the top? This is nothing less than crunch time for democracy in Europe.



May 8, 2013
Ha-Joon Chang
Guardian]]> Watch out, George Osborne: Smith, Marx and even the IMF are after you



[Image: spanish-python--008.jpg]



When even the IMF's free market ideologues recoil from the UK chancellor's austerity politics, democracy itself is at stake

George Osborne and his Treasury officials are gearing up for a fight. They've promised to make life difficult for the other side for the next two weeks. The unlikely opponents are the team of economists visiting from the IMF for a regular policy review.

Why has this routine meeting, which would hardly be noticed outside professional circles, become a confrontation? Because the IMF has recently dropped its support for the chancellor's austerity policy and repeatedly urged him to rethink it. It even said he was "playing with fire" in refusing to change course.

This is an astonishing development. For in the past three decades the IMF has been the standard-bearer for austerity. Back in 1997 it even forced South Korea – with an existing budget surplus and one of the smallest public debts in the world (as a proportion of GDP) – to cut government spending. Only when the policy turned what was already the biggest recession in the country's history into a catastrophe, with more than 100 firms going bankrupt every day for five months, did it do an embarrassing U-turn and allow a budget deficit to develop.

Given this history, being told by the IMF to go easy on austerity is like being told by the Spanish Inquisition to be more tolerant of heretics. The chancellor and his team should be worried.

If even the IMF doesn't approve, why is the UK government persisting with a policy that is clearly not working? Or, for that matter, why is the same policy pushed through across Europe? A certain dead economist would have said it is because the government is "in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor". Dead right.

Current policies in the UK and other European countries are really about making poor people pay for the mistakes of the rich. Millions of poor people have lost their jobs and the support they received through welfare, but how many of those top bankers who caused the crisis have suffered – except for a cancelled knighthood here and a partially returned pension pot there? If anyone has suffered in the financial industry, it is its poorer members – junior analysts who lost their jobs and tellers who are working longer hours for shrinking real wages.

In case you were wondering, it wasn't Karl Marx who wrote the words that I quoted above. He would have never put it so crudely. His version, delivered with typical panache, was that the "executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". No, those damning words came from Adam Smith, the supposed patron saint of free-market economics.

To Smith and Marx, the class bias of the state was plain to see. They lived at a time when only the rich had votes (if there were elections at all) and so there were few checks on the extent to which they could dictate government policy.

With the subsequent broadening of suffrage, ultimately to every adult, the class nature of the state has been significantly diluted. The welfare state, regulations on monopoly, consumer protection, and protection of worker rights are all things that have been established only because of this political change. Democracy, despite its limitations, is in the end the only way to ensure that policies do not simply benefit the privileged few.

This is, of course, exactly why free-market economists and others who are on the side of the rich have been so negative about democracy. In the old days, free-market economists strongly opposed universal suffrage on the grounds that it would destroy capitalism: poor people would elect politicians who would appropriate the means of the rich and give handouts to the poor, they argued, completely destroying incentives for wealth creation.

Once universal suffrage was introduced, they could not openly oppose democracy. So they started criticising "politics" in general. Politicians, it was argued, would adopt policies that maximised their chances of re-election but damaged the economy – printing money, handing out favours to powerful monopolies, and increasing social welfare spending for the poor. Politicians needed to be prevented from making important policy decisions, the argument went.

On this advice, since the 1980s, many countries have ring-fenced the most important policy areas to keep politicians out. Independent central banks (such as the European Central Bank), independent regulatory agencies (such as Ofcom and Ofgem) and strict rules on government spending and deficits (such as the "balanced budget" rule) have been introduced.

In particularly difficult economic times, it was even argued, we need to insulate economic policies from politics altogether. Latin American military dictatorships were justified in such terms. The recent imposition of "technocratic" governments, made up of economists and bankers who have not been "tainted" by politics, on Greece and Italy comes from the same intellectual stable.

What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy.

The conflict surrounding austerity policies in Europe is, then, not just about figures on budget, unemployment and growth rate. It is also about the meaning of democracy.

As José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, has recently recognised, the policy of austerity has "reached its limits" in terms of "political and social support". If European leaders, including the British chancellor, keep pushing these policies against those limits, people will inevitably start asking: what is the point of democracy, when policies serve only the interest of the tiny minority at the top? This is nothing less than crunch time for democracy in Europe.



May 8, 2013
Ha-Joon Chang
Guardian]]> <![CDATA[Stephen Hawking Joins Academic Boycott of Israel]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Stephen-Hawking-Joins-Academic-Boycott-of-Israel Wed, 22 May 2013 01:32:43 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Stephen-Hawking-Joins-Academic-Boycott-of-Israel Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel



[Image: Stephen-Hawking-008.jpg]



Physicist pulls out of conference hosted by president Shimon Peres in protest at treatment of Palestinians

Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres's 90th birthday.

Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking's approval described it as "his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there".

Hawking's decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.

In April the Teachers' Union of Ireland became the first lecturers' association in Europe to call for an academic boycott of Israel, and in the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first national academic group to do so.

In the four weeks since Hawking's participation in the Jerusalem event was announced, he has been bombarded with messages from Britain and abroad as part of an intense campaign by boycott supporters trying to persuade him to change his mind. In the end, Hawking told friends, he decided to follow the advice of Palestinian colleagues who unanimously agreed that he should not attend.

Hawking's decision met with abusive responses on Facebook, with many commentators focusing on his physical condition, and some accusing him of antisemitism.

By participating in the boycott, Hawking joins a small but growing list of British personalities who have turned down invitations to visit Israel, including Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Mike Leigh.

However, many artists, writers and academics have defied and even denounced the boycott, calling it ineffective and selective. Ian McEwan, who was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2011, responded to critics by saying: "If I only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out of bed...It's not great if everyone stops talking."

Noam Chomsky, a prominent supporter of the Palestinian cause, has said that he supports the "boycott and divestment of firms that are carrying out operations in the occupied territories" but that a general boycott of Israel is "a gift to Israeli hardliners and their American supporters".

Hawking has visited Israel four times in the past. Most recently, in 2006, he delivered public lectures at Israeli and Palestinian universities as the guest of the British embassy in Tel Aviv. At the time, he said he was "looking forward to coming out to Israel and the Palestinian territories and excited about meeting both Israeli and Palestinian scientists".

Since then, his attitude to Israel appears to have hardened. In 2009, Hawking denounced Israel's three-week attack on Gaza, telling Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera that Israel's response to rocket fire from Gaza was "plain out of proportion...The situation is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue."

Israel Maimon, chairman of the presidential conference said: "This decision is outrageous and wrong.

"The use of an academic boycott against Israel is outrageous and improper, particularly for those to whom the spirit of liberty is the basis of the human and academic mission. Israel is a democracy in which everyone can express their opinion, whatever it may be. A boycott decision is incompatible with open democratic discourse."

In 2011, the Israeli parliament passed a law making a boycott call by an individual or organisation a civil offence which can result in compensation liable to be paid regardless of actual damage caused. It defined a boycott as "deliberately avoiding economic, cultural or academic ties with another person or another factor only because of his ties with the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic damage".


• This article was amended on 8 May 2013. The original described Hawking as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He stepped down in 2009.



May 8, 2013
Harriet Sherwood & Matthew Kalman
Guardian]]> Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel



[Image: Stephen-Hawking-008.jpg]



Physicist pulls out of conference hosted by president Shimon Peres in protest at treatment of Palestinians

Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres's 90th birthday.

Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking's approval described it as "his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there".

Hawking's decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.

In April the Teachers' Union of Ireland became the first lecturers' association in Europe to call for an academic boycott of Israel, and in the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first national academic group to do so.

In the four weeks since Hawking's participation in the Jerusalem event was announced, he has been bombarded with messages from Britain and abroad as part of an intense campaign by boycott supporters trying to persuade him to change his mind. In the end, Hawking told friends, he decided to follow the advice of Palestinian colleagues who unanimously agreed that he should not attend.

Hawking's decision met with abusive responses on Facebook, with many commentators focusing on his physical condition, and some accusing him of antisemitism.

By participating in the boycott, Hawking joins a small but growing list of British personalities who have turned down invitations to visit Israel, including Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Mike Leigh.

However, many artists, writers and academics have defied and even denounced the boycott, calling it ineffective and selective. Ian McEwan, who was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2011, responded to critics by saying: "If I only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out of bed...It's not great if everyone stops talking."

Noam Chomsky, a prominent supporter of the Palestinian cause, has said that he supports the "boycott and divestment of firms that are carrying out operations in the occupied territories" but that a general boycott of Israel is "a gift to Israeli hardliners and their American supporters".

Hawking has visited Israel four times in the past. Most recently, in 2006, he delivered public lectures at Israeli and Palestinian universities as the guest of the British embassy in Tel Aviv. At the time, he said he was "looking forward to coming out to Israel and the Palestinian territories and excited about meeting both Israeli and Palestinian scientists".

Since then, his attitude to Israel appears to have hardened. In 2009, Hawking denounced Israel's three-week attack on Gaza, telling Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera that Israel's response to rocket fire from Gaza was "plain out of proportion...The situation is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue."

Israel Maimon, chairman of the presidential conference said: "This decision is outrageous and wrong.

"The use of an academic boycott against Israel is outrageous and improper, particularly for those to whom the spirit of liberty is the basis of the human and academic mission. Israel is a democracy in which everyone can express their opinion, whatever it may be. A boycott decision is incompatible with open democratic discourse."

In 2011, the Israeli parliament passed a law making a boycott call by an individual or organisation a civil offence which can result in compensation liable to be paid regardless of actual damage caused. It defined a boycott as "deliberately avoiding economic, cultural or academic ties with another person or another factor only because of his ties with the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic damage".


• This article was amended on 8 May 2013. The original described Hawking as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He stepped down in 2009.



May 8, 2013
Harriet Sherwood & Matthew Kalman
Guardian]]> <![CDATA[Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and Anti-Muslim Animus]]> http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Sam-Harris-the-New-Atheists-and-Anti-Muslim-Animus Wed, 22 May 2013 01:28:03 +0100 http://www.immortaltechnique.co.uk/Thread-Sam-Harris-the-New-Atheists-and-Anti-Muslim-Animus Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus



[Image: Sam-Harris-008.jpg]



A long overdue debate breaks out about whether rational atheism is being used as a cover for Islamophobia and US militarism

Two columns have been published in the past week harshly criticizing the so-called "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens: this one by Nathan Lean in Salon, and this one by Murtaza Hussain in Al Jazeera. The crux of those columns is that these advocates have increasingly embraced a toxic form of anti-Muslim bigotry masquerading as rational atheism. Yesterday, I posted a tweet to Hussain's article without comment except to highlight what I called a "very revealing quote" flagged by Hussain, one in which Harris opined that "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists."

Shortly after posting the tweet, I received an angry email from Harris, who claimed that Hussain's column was "garbage", and he eventually said the same thing about Lean's column in Salon. That then led to a somewhat lengthy email exchange with Harris in which I did not attempt to defend every claim in those columns from his attacks because I didn't make those claims: the authors of those columns can defend themselves perfectly well. If Harris had problems with what those columns claim, he should go take it up with them.

I do, however, absolutely agree with the general argument made in both columns that the New Atheists have flirted with and at times vigorously embraced irrational anti-Muslim animus. I repeatedly offered to post Harris' email to me and then tweet it so that anyone inclined to do so could read his response to those columns and make up their own minds. Once he requested that I do so, I posted our exchange here.

Harris himself then wrote about and posted our exchange on his blog, causing a couple dozen of his followers to send me emails. I also engaged in a discussion with a few Harris defenders on Facebook. What seemed to bother them most was the accusation in Hussain's column that there is "racism" in Harris' anti-Muslim advocacy. A few of Harris' defenders were rage-filled and incoherent, but the bulk of them were cogent and reasoned, so I concluded that a more developed substantive response to Harris was warranted.

Given that I had never written about Sam Harris, I found it odd that I had become the symbol of Harris-bashing for some of his faithful followers. Tweeting a link to an Al Jazeera column about Harris and saying I find one of his quotes revealing does not make me responsible for every claim in that column. I tweet literally thousands of columns and articles for people to read. I'm responsible for what I say, not for every sentence in every article to which I link on Twitter. The space constraints of Twitter have made this precept a basic convention of the medium: tweeting a link to a column or article or re-tweeting it does not mean you endorse all of it (or even any of it).

That said, what I did say in my emails with Harris - and what I unequivocally affirm again now - is not that Harris is a "racist", but rather that he and others like him spout and promote Islamophobia under the guise of rational atheism. I've long believed this to be true and am glad it is finally being dragged out into open debate. These specific atheism advocates have come to acquire significant influence, often for the good. But it is past time that the darker aspects of their worldview receive attention.

Whether Islamophobia is a form of "racism" is a semantic issue in which I'm not interested for purposes of this discussion. The vast majority of Muslims are non-white; as a result, when a white westerner becomes fixated on attacking their religion and advocating violence and aggression against them, as Harris has done, I understand why some people (such as Hussain) see racism at play: that, for reasons I recently articulated, is a rational view to me. But "racism" is not my claim here about Harris. Irrational anti-Muslim animus is.

Contrary to the assumptions under which some Harris defenders are laboring, the fact that someone is a scientist, an intellectual, and a convincing and valuable exponent of atheism by no means precludes irrational bigotry as a driving force in their worldview. In this case, Harris' own words, as demonstrated below, are his indictment.

Let's first quickly dispense with some obvious strawmen. Of course one can legitimately criticize Islam without being bigoted or racist. That's self-evident, and nobody is contesting it. And of course there are some Muslim individuals who do heinous things in the name of their religion - just like there are extremists in all religions who do awful and violent things in the name of that religion, yet receive far less attention than the bad acts of Muslims (here are some very recent examples). Yes, "honor killings" and the suppression of women by some Muslims are heinous, just as the collaboration of US and Ugandan Christians to enact laws to execute homosexuals is heinous, and just as the religious-driven, violent occupation of Palestine, attacks on gays, and suppression of women by some Israeli Jews in the name of Judaism is heinous. That some Muslims commit atrocities in the name of their religion (like some people of every religion do) is also too self-evident to merit debate, but it has nothing to do with the criticisms of Harris.

Nonetheless, Harris defenders such as the neoconservative David Frum want to pretend that criticisms of Harris consist of nothing more than the claim that, as Frum put it this week, "it's OK to be an atheist, so long as you omit Islam from your list of the religions to which you object." That's a wildly dishonest summary of the criticisms of Harris as well as people like Dawkins and Hitchens; absolutely nobody is arguing anything like that. Any atheist is going to be critical of the world's major religions, including Islam, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

The key point is that Harris does far, far more than voice criticisms of Islam as part of a general critique of religion. He has repeatedly made clear that he thinks Islam is uniquely threatening: "While the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization." He has insisted that there are unique dangers from Muslims possessing nuclear weapons, as opposed to nice western Christians (the only ones to ever use them) or those kind Israeli Jews: "It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence." In his 2005 "End of Faith", he claimed that "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."

This is not a critique of religion generally; it is a relentless effort to depict Islam as the supreme threat. Based on that view, Harris, while depicting the Iraq war as a humanitarian endeavor, has proclaimed that "we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam." He has also decreed that "this is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with millions more than have any direct affiliation with Al Qaeda." "We" - the civilized peoples of the west - are at war with "millions" of Muslims, he says. Indeed, he repeatedly posits a dichotomy between "civilized" people and Muslims: "All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth."

This isn't "quote-mining", the term evidently favored by Harris and his defenders to dismiss the use of his own words to make this case. To the contrary, I've long ago read the full context of what he has written and did so again yesterday. All the links are provided here - as they were in Hussain and Lean's columns - so everyone can see it for themselves. Yes, he criticizes Christianity, but he reserves the most intense attacks and superlative condemnations for Islam, as well as unique policy prescriptions of aggression, violence and rights abridgments aimed only at Muslims. As the atheist scholar John L Perkins wrote about Harris' 2005 anti-religion book: "Harris is particularly scathing about Islam."

When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted. That's true of Dawkins' proclamation that " often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today." It's true of Hitchens' various grotesque invocations of Islam to justify violence, including advocating cluster bombs because "if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too". And it's true of Harris' years-long argument that Islam poses unique threats beyond what Christianity, Judaism, and the other religions of the world pose.

Most important of all - to me - is the fact that Harris has used his views about Islam to justify a wide range of vile policies aimed primarily if not exclusively at Muslims, from torture ("there are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like 'water-boarding' may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary"); to steadfast support for Israel, which he considers morally superior to its Muslim adversaries ("In their analyses of US and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so...there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah"); to anti-Muslim profiling ("We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it"); to state violence ("On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that 'liberals are soft on terrorism.' It is, and they are").

Revealingly, Harris sided with the worst Muslim-hating elements in American society by opposing the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero, milking the Us v. Them militaristic framework to justify his position:

Quote:"The erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory — and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice."


Harris made the case against that innocuous community center by claiming - yet again - that Islam is a unique threat: "At this point in human history, Islam simply is different from other faiths."

In sum, he sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims. As this superb review of Harris' writings on Israel, the Middle East and US militarism put it, "any review of Sam Harris and his work is a review essentially of politics": because his atheism invariably serves - explicitly so - as the justifying ground for a wide array of policies that attack, kill and otherwise suppress Muslims. That's why his praise for European fascists as being the only ones saying "sensible" things about Islam is significant: not because it means he's a European fascist, but because it's unsurprising that the bile spewed at Muslims from that faction would be appealing to Harris because he shares those sentiments both in his rhetoric and his advocated policies, albeit with a more intellectualized expression.

Beyond all that, I find [i]extremely suspect the behavior of westerners like Harris (and Hitchens and Dawkins) who spend the bulk of their time condemning the sins of other, distant peoples rather than the bulk of their time working against the sins of their own country. That's particularly true of Americans, whose government has brought more violence, aggression, suffering, misery, and degradation to the world over the last decade than any other. Even if that weren't true - and it is - spending one's time as an American fixated on the sins of others is a morally dubious act, to put that generously, for reasons Noam Chomsky explained so perfectly:

Quote:"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it.

"So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."


I, too, have written before about the hordes of American commentators whose favorite past-time is to lounge around pointing fingers at other nations, other governments, other populations, other religions, while spending relatively little time on their own. The reason this is particularly suspect and shoddy behavior from American commentators is that there are enormous amounts of violence and extremism and suffering which their government has unleashed and continues to unleash on the world. Indeed, much of that US violence is grounded in if not expressly justified by religion, including the aggressive attack on Iraq and steadfast support for Israeli aggression (to say nothing of the role Judaism plays in the decades-long oppression by the Israelis of Palestinians and all sorts of attacks on neighboring Arab and Muslim countries). Given the legion human rights violations from their own government, I find that Americans and westerners who spend the bulk of their energy on the crimes of others are usually cynically exploiting human rights concerns in service of a much different agenda.

Tellingly, Harris wrote in 2004 that "we are now mired in a religious war in Iraq and elsewhere." But by this, he did not mean that the US and the west have waged an aggressive attack based at least in part on religious convictions. He meant that only Them - those Muslims over there, whose country we invaded and destroyed - were engaged in a vicious and primitive religious war. As usual, so obsessed is he with the supposed sins of Muslims that he is blinded to the far worse sins from his own government and himself: the attack on Iraq and its accompanying expressions of torture, slaughter, and the most horrific abuses imaginable.

Worse, even in its early stages, Harris casually dismissed the US attack on Iraq as a "red herring"; that war, he said, was simply one in which "civilized human beings [westerners] are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people." Western violence and aggression is noble, civilized, and elevated; Muslim violence (even when undertaken to defend against an invasion by the west) is primitive, vicious, brutal and savage. That is the blatant double standard of one who seeks not to uphold human rights but to exploit those concepts to demonize a targeted group.

Indeed, continually depicting Muslims as the supreme evil - even when compared to the west's worst monsters - is par for Harris' course, as when he inveighed:

Quote:Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies."


Just ponder that. To Harris, there are "tens of millions" of Muslims "far scarier" then the US political leader who aggressively invaded and destroyed a nation of 26 million people, constructed a worldwide regime of torture, oversaw a network of secret prisons beyond the reach of human rights groups, and generally imposed on the world his "Dark Side". That is the Harris worldview: obsessed with bad acts of foreign Muslims, almost entirely blind to - if not supportive of - the far worse acts of westerners like himself.

Or consider this disgusting passage:

Quote:"The outrage that Muslims feel over US and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns. Devout Muslims consider it a sacrilege for infidels to depose a Muslim tyrant and occupy Muslim lands — no matter how well intentioned the infidels or malevolent the tyrant. Because of what they believe about God and the afterlife and the divine provenance of the Koran, devout Muslims tend to reflexively side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior."


Right: can you believe those primitive, irrational Muslims get angry when their countries are invaded, bombed and occupied and have dictators imposed on them rather than exuding gratitude toward the superior civilized people who do all that - all because of their weird, inscrutable religion that makes them dislike things such as foreign invasions, bombing campaigns and externally-imposed tyrants? And did you know that only Muslims - but not rational westerners like Harris - "reflexively side" with their own kind? This, from the same person who hails the Iraq war as something that should produce gratitude from the invaded population toward the "civilized human beings" - people like him - who invaded and destroyed their country. Theodore Sayeed noted the glaring irony pervading the bulk of Harris's political writing:

Quote:"For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their 'reflexive solidarity' with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work."


Indeed. And the same is true of the US and the West generally. Harris' self-loving mentality amounts to this: those primitive Muslims are so tribal for reflexively siding with their own kind, while I constantly tout the superiority of my own side and justify what We do against Them. How anyone can read any of these passages and object to claims that Harris' worldview is grounded in deep anti-Muslim animus is staggering. He is at least as tribal, jingoistic, and provincial as those he condemns for those human failings, as he constantly hails the nobility of his side while demeaning those Others.

Perhaps the most repellent claim Harris made to me was that Islamophobia is fictitious and non-existent, "a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia". How anyone can observe post-9/11 political discourse in the west and believe this is truly mystifying. The meaning of "Islamophobia" is every bit as clear as "anti-semitism" or "racism" or "sexism" and all sorts of familiar, related concepts. It signifies (1) irrational condemnations of all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group; (2) a disproportionate fixation on that group for sins committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially one's own; and/or (3) sweeping claims about the members of that group unjustified by their actual individual acts and beliefs. I believe all of those definitions fit Harris quite well, as evinced by this absurd and noxious overgeneralization from Harris:

Quote:The only future devout Muslims can envisage — as Muslims — is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed."


That is utter garbage: and dangerous garbage at that. It is no more justifiable than saying that the only future which religious Jews - as Jews - can envision is one in which non-Jews live in complete slavery and subjugation: a claim often made by anti-semites based on highly selective passages from the Talmud. It is the same tactic that says Christians - as Christians - can only envisage the extreme subjugation of women and violence against non-believers based not only on the conduct of some Christians but on selective passages from the Bible. Few would have difficultly understanding why such claims about Jews and Christians are intellectually bankrupt and menacing.

Worse still, these claims from Harris about how Muslims think are simply factually false. An AFP report on a massive 2008 Gallup survey of the Muslim world simply destroyed most of Harris' ugly generalizations about the beliefs of Muslims:

Quote:"A huge survey of the world's Muslims released Tuesday challenges Western notions that equate Islam with radicalism and violence...It shows that the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemned the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 and other subsequent terrorist attacks, the authors of the study said in Washington...

"About 93 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews...

"Meanwhile, radical Muslims gave political, not religious, reasons for condoning the attacks, the poll showed...

"But the poll, which gives ordinary Muslims a voice in the global debate that they have been drawn into by 9/11, showed that most Muslims -- including radicals -- admire the West for its democracy, freedoms and technological prowess.

"What they do not want is to have Western ways forced on them, it said."


Indeed, even a Pentagon-commissioned study back in 2004 - hardly a bastion of PC liberalism - obliterated Harris' self-justifying stereotype that anti-American sentiment among Muslims is religious and tribal rather than political and rational. That study concluded that "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies": specifically "American direct intervention in the Muslim world" — through the US's "one sided support in favor of Israel"; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, "the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan".

As I noted before, a long-time British journalist friend of mine wrote to me shortly before I began writing at the Guardian to warn me of a particular strain plaguing the British liberal intellectual class; he wrote: "nothing delights British former lefties more than an opportunity to defend power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle." That - "defending power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle" - is precisely what describes the political work of Harris and friends. It fuels the sustained anti-Muslim demonization campaign of the west and justifies (often explicitly) the policies of violence, militarism, and suppression aimed at them. It's not as vulgar as the rantings of Pam Geller or as crude as the bloodthirsty theories of Alan Dershowitz, but it's coming from a similar place and advancing the same cause.

I welcome, and value, aggressive critiques of faith and religion, including from Sam Harris and some of these others New Atheists whose views I'm criticizing here. But many terms can be used to accurately describe the practice of depicting Islam and Muslims as the supreme threat to all that is good in the world. "Rational", "intellectual" and "well-intentioned" are most definitely not among them.


UPDATE

Sam Harris in 2005: "I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror."

Sam Harris in 2012: "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."

Sam Harris in 2005: "In our dealings with the Muslim world, we must acknowledge that Muslims have not found anything of substance to say against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart from the ubiquitous canard that they were really Jews." (Harris' own ugly canard would come as news to CAIR, the leading Muslim advocacy group, as well as most of the world's Muslims).

By themselves, those statements - fully in context - negate 90% of the comments from Harris defenders. If you're going to defend him, do remember to defend these.

One last point: I absolutely do not believe that Harris - or, for that matter, Hitchens - is representative of all or even most atheists in this regard. The vast majority of atheists I know find such sentiments repellent. They are representative only of themselves and those who share these views, not atheists generally.


UPDATE II

Several commenters and emailers object to the inclusion of Dawkins with Hitchens and (especially) Harris on this issue. Both the above-cited Salon and Al Jazeera columns (particularly the former) contain several quotes with links from Dawkins, including his recent decree that he "often" says that Islam is the "greatest force for evil today". Those statements seem clear and incriminating. Nonetheless, my focus here is on Harris, and I haven't conducted the type of comprehensive examination of Dawkins' writing as I have of Harris', so whether Dawkins belongs in this group to the same extent that Harris does is something that is worthy of further debate. One sentence was edited to reflect the debatability of Dawkins' inclusion.


UPDATE III [Thurs.]

As a follow-up to all of this, here are a few related items. First, here is Noam Chomsky in late 2011 - in the first two minutes of the video - explaining how Harris and Hitchens exploit atheism to justify US militarism and convert it into little more than another religion:






And here is Chomsky in 2008 elaborating further on Harris and company [quote and link fixed]:

Quote:"(I)f it is to be even minimally serious, the 'new atheism' should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship, so well exemplified by those who laud huge atrocities like the invasion of Iraq, or cannot comprehend why they might have some concern when their own state, with their support, carries out some of its minor peccadilloes, like killing probably tens of thousands of poor Africans by destroying their main source of pharmaceutical supplies on a whim -- arguably more morally depraved than intentional killing, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere.

"In brief, to be minimally serious the 'new atheism' should begin by looking in the mirror."


That is the hallmark of this New Atheist movement: exploiting rational atheism to support and glorify US state power and aggression; they have become a prime source for pseudo-intellectual justification of US government conduct.

Here's a 2008 interview with the great war journalist Chris Hedges on what he concluded after reviewing the work of "New Atheists" such as Harris and Hitchens: "I was appalled at how they essentially co-opted secular language to present the same kind of chauvinism, intolerance, and bigotry that we see in the Christian right." He adds:

Quote:"They're secular fundamentalists...I find that it's, like the Christian right, a fear based movement. It's a movement that is very much a reaction to 9/11. The kinds of things that they write about Muslims could be lifted from the most rabid sermon by a radical fundamentalist."


Having dealt somewhat extensively with Harris and many of his supporters this week, I can say that I haven't encountered such religious-type fervor and jingoistic and tribalistic self-love (My Side is superior to Theirs!!) in quite a long time.

Meanwhile, even Christopher Hitchens - Harris' comrade in US militarism - denounced Harris' statement that "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists." Wrote Hitchens in 2006 shortly after Harris wrote that: "When I read Sam Harris's irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: 'Not while I'm alive, they won't.'" I think Harris' "fascists" comment is far from his worst statement - it has the limited significance I outlined - but if Christopher Hitchens, of all people, is telling you that you're being "irresponsible" in your anti-Islam advocacy, that's a pretty strong sign that you've gone way too far.



April 3, 2012
Glenn Greenwald
Guardian]]> Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus



[Image: Sam-Harris-008.jpg]



A long overdue debate breaks out about whether rational atheism is being used as a cover for Islamophobia and US militarism

Two columns have been published in the past week harshly criticizing the so-called "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens: this one by Nathan Lean in Salon, and this one by Murtaza Hussain in Al Jazeera. The crux of those columns is that these advocates have increasingly embraced a toxic form of anti-Muslim bigotry masquerading as rational atheism. Yesterday, I posted a tweet to Hussain's article without comment except to highlight what I called a "very revealing quote" flagged by Hussain, one in which Harris opined that "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists."

Shortly after posting the tweet, I received an angry email from Harris, who claimed that Hussain's column was "garbage", and he eventually said the same thing about Lean's column in Salon. That then led to a somewhat lengthy email exchange with Harris in which I did not attempt to defend every claim in those columns from his attacks because I didn't make those claims: the authors of those columns can defend themselves perfectly well. If Harris had problems with what those columns claim, he should go take it up with them.

I do, however, absolutely agree with the general argument made in both columns that the New Atheists have flirted with and at times vigorously embraced irrational anti-Muslim animus. I repeatedly offered to post Harris' email to me and then tweet it so that anyone inclined to do so could read his response to those columns and make up their own minds. Once he requested that I do so, I posted our exchange here.

Harris himself then wrote about and posted our exchange on his blog, causing a couple dozen of his followers to send me emails. I also engaged in a discussion with a few Harris defenders on Facebook. What seemed to bother them most was the accusation in Hussain's column that there is "racism" in Harris' anti-Muslim advocacy. A few of Harris' defenders were rage-filled and incoherent, but the bulk of them were cogent and reasoned, so I concluded that a more developed substantive response to Harris was warranted.

Given that I had never written about Sam Harris, I found it odd that I had become the symbol of Harris-bashing for some of his faithful followers. Tweeting a link to an Al Jazeera column about Harris and saying I find one of his quotes revealing does not make me responsible for every claim in that column. I tweet literally thousands of columns and articles for people to read. I'm responsible for what I say, not for every sentence in every article to which I link on Twitter. The space constraints of Twitter have made this precept a basic convention of the medium: tweeting a link to a column or article or re-tweeting it does not mean you endorse all of it (or even any of it).

That said, what I did say in my emails with Harris - and what I unequivocally affirm again now - is not that Harris is a "racist", but rather that he and others like him spout and promote Islamophobia under the guise of rational atheism. I've long believed this to be true and am glad it is finally being dragged out into open debate. These specific atheism advocates have come to acquire significant influence, often for the good. But it is past time that the darker aspects of their worldview receive attention.

Whether Islamophobia is a form of "racism" is a semantic issue in which I'm not interested for purposes of this discussion. The vast majority of Muslims are non-white; as a result, when a white westerner becomes fixated on attacking their religion and advocating violence and aggression against them, as Harris has done, I understand why some people (such as Hussain) see racism at play: that, for reasons I recently articulated, is a rational view to me. But "racism" is not my claim here about Harris. Irrational anti-Muslim animus is.

Contrary to the assumptions under which some Harris defenders are laboring, the fact that someone is a scientist, an intellectual, and a convincing and valuable exponent of atheism by no means precludes irrational bigotry as a driving force in their worldview. In this case, Harris' own words, as demonstrated below, are his indictment.

Let's first quickly dispense with some obvious strawmen. Of course one can legitimately criticize Islam without being bigoted or racist. That's self-evident, and nobody is contesting it. And of course there are some Muslim individuals who do heinous things in the name of their religion - just like there are extremists in all religions who do awful and violent things in the name of that religion, yet receive far less attention than the bad acts of Muslims (here are some very recent examples). Yes, "honor killings" and the suppression of women by some Muslims are heinous, just as the collaboration of US and Ugandan Christians to enact laws to execute homosexuals is heinous, and just as the religious-driven, violent occupation of Palestine, attacks on gays, and suppression of women by some Israeli Jews in the name of Judaism is heinous. That some Muslims commit atrocities in the name of their religion (like some people of every religion do) is also too self-evident to merit debate, but it has nothing to do with the criticisms of Harris.

Nonetheless, Harris defenders such as the neoconservative David Frum want to pretend that criticisms of Harris consist of nothing more than the claim that, as Frum put it this week, "it's OK to be an atheist, so long as you omit Islam from your list of the religions to which you object." That's a wildly dishonest summary of the criticisms of Harris as well as people like Dawkins and Hitchens; absolutely nobody is arguing anything like that. Any atheist is going to be critical of the world's major religions, including Islam, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

The key point is that Harris does far, far more than voice criticisms of Islam as part of a general critique of religion. He has repeatedly made clear that he thinks Islam is uniquely threatening: "While the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization." He has insisted that there are unique dangers from Muslims possessing nuclear weapons, as opposed to nice western Christians (the only ones to ever use them) or those kind Israeli Jews: "It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence." In his 2005 "End of Faith", he claimed that "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."

This is not a critique of religion generally; it is a relentless effort to depict Islam as the supreme threat. Based on that view, Harris, while depicting the Iraq war as a humanitarian endeavor, has proclaimed that "we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam." He has also decreed that "this is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with millions more than have any direct affiliation with Al Qaeda." "We" - the civilized peoples of the west - are at war with "millions" of Muslims, he says. Indeed, he repeatedly posits a dichotomy between "civilized" people and Muslims: "All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth."

This isn't "quote-mining", the term evidently favored by Harris and his defenders to dismiss the use of his own words to make this case. To the contrary, I've long ago read the full context of what he has written and did so again yesterday. All the links are provided here - as they were in Hussain and Lean's columns - so everyone can see it for themselves. Yes, he criticizes Christianity, but he reserves the most intense attacks and superlative condemnations for Islam, as well as unique policy prescriptions of aggression, violence and rights abridgments aimed only at Muslims. As the atheist scholar John L Perkins wrote about Harris' 2005 anti-religion book: "Harris is particularly scathing about Islam."

When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted. That's true of Dawkins' proclamation that " often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today." It's true of Hitchens' various grotesque invocations of Islam to justify violence, including advocating cluster bombs because "if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too". And it's true of Harris' years-long argument that Islam poses unique threats beyond what Christianity, Judaism, and the other religions of the world pose.

Most important of all - to me - is the fact that Harris has used his views about Islam to justify a wide range of vile policies aimed primarily if not exclusively at Muslims, from torture ("there are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like 'water-boarding' may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary"); to steadfast support for Israel, which he considers morally superior to its Muslim adversaries ("In their analyses of US and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so...there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah"); to anti-Muslim profiling ("We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it"); to state violence ("On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that 'liberals are soft on terrorism.' It is, and they are").

Revealingly, Harris sided with the worst Muslim-hating elements in American society by opposing the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero, milking the Us v. Them militaristic framework to justify his position:

Quote:"The erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory — and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice."


Harris made the case against that innocuous community center by claiming - yet again - that Islam is a unique threat: "At this point in human history, Islam simply is different from other faiths."

In sum, he sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims. As this superb review of Harris' writings on Israel, the Middle East and US militarism put it, "any review of Sam Harris and his work is a review essentially of politics": because his atheism invariably serves - explicitly so - as the justifying ground for a wide array of policies that attack, kill and otherwise suppress Muslims. That's why his praise for European fascists as being the only ones saying "sensible" things about Islam is significant: not because it means he's a European fascist, but because it's unsurprising that the bile spewed at Muslims from that faction would be appealing to Harris because he shares those sentiments both in his rhetoric and his advocated policies, albeit with a more intellectualized expression.

Beyond all that, I find [i]extremely suspect the behavior of westerners like Harris (and Hitchens and Dawkins) who spend the bulk of their time condemning the sins of other, distant peoples rather than the bulk of their time working against the sins of their own country. That's particularly true of Americans, whose government has brought more violence, aggression, suffering, misery, and degradation to the world over the last decade than any other. Even if that weren't true - and it is - spending one's time as an American fixated on the sins of others is a morally dubious act, to put that generously, for reasons Noam Chomsky explained so perfectly:

Quote:"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it.

"So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."


I, too, have written before about the hordes of American commentators whose favorite past-time is to lounge around pointing fingers at other nations, other governments, other populations, other religions, while spending relatively little time on their own. The reason this is particularly suspect and shoddy behavior from American commentators is that there are enormous amounts of violence and extremism and suffering which their government has unleashed and continues to unleash on the world. Indeed, much of that US violence is grounded in if not expressly justified by religion, including the aggressive attack on Iraq and steadfast support for Israeli aggression (to say nothing of the role Judaism plays in the decades-long oppression by the Israelis of Palestinians and all sorts of attacks on neighboring Arab and Muslim countries). Given the legion human rights violations from their own government, I find that Americans and westerners who spend the bulk of their energy on the crimes of others are usually cynically exploiting human rights concerns in service of a much different agenda.

Tellingly, Harris wrote in 2004 that "we are now mired in a religious war in Iraq and elsewhere." But by this, he did not mean that the US and the west have waged an aggressive attack based at least in part on religious convictions. He meant that only Them - those Muslims over there, whose country we invaded and destroyed - were engaged in a vicious and primitive religious war. As usual, so obsessed is he with the supposed sins of Muslims that he is blinded to the far worse sins from his own government and himself: the attack on Iraq and its accompanying expressions of torture, slaughter, and the most horrific abuses imaginable.

Worse, even in its early stages, Harris casually dismissed the US attack on Iraq as a "red herring"; that war, he said, was simply one in which "civilized human beings [westerners] are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people." Western violence and aggression is noble, civilized, and elevated; Muslim violence (even when undertaken to defend against an invasion by the west) is primitive, vicious, brutal and savage. That is the blatant double standard of one who seeks not to uphold human rights but to exploit those concepts to demonize a targeted group.

Indeed, continually depicting Muslims as the supreme evil - even when compared to the west's worst monsters - is par for Harris' course, as when he inveighed:

Quote:Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies."


Just ponder that. To Harris, there are "tens of millions" of Muslims "far scarier" then the US political leader who aggressively invaded and destroyed a nation of 26 million people, constructed a worldwide regime of torture, oversaw a network of secret prisons beyond the reach of human rights groups, and generally imposed on the world his "Dark Side". That is the Harris worldview: obsessed with bad acts of foreign Muslims, almost entirely blind to - if not supportive of - the far worse acts of westerners like himself.

Or consider this disgusting passage:

Quote:"The outrage that Muslims feel over US and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns. Devout Muslims consider it a sacrilege for infidels to depose a Muslim tyrant and occupy Muslim lands — no matter how well intentioned the infidels or malevolent the tyrant. Because of what they believe about God and the afterlife and the divine provenance of the Koran, devout Muslims tend to reflexively side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior."


Right: can you believe those primitive, irrational Muslims get angry when their countries are invaded, bombed and occupied and have dictators imposed on them rather than exuding gratitude toward the superior civilized people who do all that - all because of their weird, inscrutable religion that makes them dislike things such as foreign invasions, bombing campaigns and externally-imposed tyrants? And did you know that only Muslims - but not rational westerners like Harris - "reflexively side" with their own kind? This, from the same person who hails the Iraq war as something that should produce gratitude from the invaded population toward the "civilized human beings" - people like him - who invaded and destroyed their country. Theodore Sayeed noted the glaring irony pervading the bulk of Harris's political writing:

Quote:"For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their 'reflexive solidarity' with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work."


Indeed. And the same is true of the US and the West generally. Harris' self-loving mentality amounts to this: those primitive Muslims are so tribal for reflexively siding with their own kind, while I constantly tout the superiority of my own side and justify what We do against Them. How anyone can read any of these passages and object to claims that Harris' worldview is grounded in deep anti-Muslim animus is staggering. He is at least as tribal, jingoistic, and provincial as those he condemns for those human failings, as he constantly hails the nobility of his side while demeaning those Others.

Perhaps the most repellent claim Harris made to me was that Islamophobia is fictitious and non-existent, "a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia". How anyone can observe post-9/11 political discourse in the west and believe this is truly mystifying. The meaning of "Islamophobia" is every bit as clear as "anti-semitism" or "racism" or "sexism" and all sorts of familiar, related concepts. It signifies (1) irrational condemnations of all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group; (2) a disproportionate fixation on that group for sins committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially one's own; and/or (3) sweeping claims about the members of that group unjustified by their actual individual acts and beliefs. I believe all of those definitions fit Harris quite well, as evinced by this absurd and noxious overgeneralization from Harris:

Quote:The only future devout Muslims can envisage — as Muslims — is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed."


That is utter garbage: and dangerous garbage at that. It is no more justifiable than saying that the only future which religious Jews - as Jews - can envision is one in which non-Jews live in complete slavery and subjugation: a claim often made by anti-semites based on highly selective passages from the Talmud. It is the same tactic that says Christians - as Christians - can only envisage the extreme subjugation of women and violence against non-believers based not only on the conduct of some Christians but on selective passages from the Bible. Few would have difficultly understanding why such claims about Jews and Christians are intellectually bankrupt and menacing.

Worse still, these claims from Harris about how Muslims think are simply factually false. An AFP report on a massive 2008 Gallup survey of the Muslim world simply destroyed most of Harris' ugly generalizations about the beliefs of Muslims:

Quote:"A huge survey of the world's Muslims released Tuesday challenges Western notions that equate Islam with radicalism and violence...It shows that the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemned the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 and other subsequent terrorist attacks, the authors of the study said in Washington...

"About 93 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews...

"Meanwhile, radical Muslims gave political, not religious, reasons for condoning the attacks, the poll showed...

"But the poll, which gives ordinary Muslims a voice in the global debate that they have been drawn into by 9/11, showed that most Muslims -- including radicals -- admire the West for its democracy, freedoms and technological prowess.

"What they do not want is to have Western ways forced on them, it said."


Indeed, even a Pentagon-commissioned study back in 2004 - hardly a bastion of PC liberalism - obliterated Harris' self-justifying stereotype that anti-American sentiment among Muslims is religious and tribal rather than political and rational. That study concluded that "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies": specifically "American direct intervention in the Muslim world" — through the US's "one sided support in favor of Israel"; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, "the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan".

As I noted before, a long-time British journalist friend of mine wrote to me shortly before I began writing at the Guardian to warn me of a particular strain plaguing the British liberal intellectual class; he wrote: "nothing delights British former lefties more than an opportunity to defend power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle." That - "defending power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle" - is precisely what describes the political work of Harris and friends. It fuels the sustained anti-Muslim demonization campaign of the west and justifies (often explicitly) the policies of violence, militarism, and suppression aimed at them. It's not as vulgar as the rantings of Pam Geller or as crude as the bloodthirsty theories of Alan Dershowitz, but it's coming from a similar place and advancing the same cause.

I welcome, and value, aggressive critiques of faith and religion, including from Sam Harris and some of these others New Atheists whose views I'm criticizing here. But many terms can be used to accurately describe the practice of depicting Islam and Muslims as the supreme threat to all that is good in the world. "Rational", "intellectual" and "well-intentioned" are most definitely not among them.


UPDATE

Sam Harris in 2005: "I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror."

Sam Harris in 2012: "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."

Sam Harris in 2005: "In our dealings with the Muslim world, we must acknowledge that Muslims have not found anything of substance to say against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart from the ubiquitous canard that they were really Jews." (Harris' own ugly canard would come as news to CAIR, the leading Muslim advocacy group, as well as most of the world's Muslims).

By themselves, those statements - fully in context - negate 90% of the comments from Harris defenders. If you're going to defend him, do remember to defend these.

One last point: I absolutely do not believe that Harris - or, for that matter, Hitchens - is representative of all or even most atheists in this regard. The vast majority of atheists I know find such sentiments repellent. They are representative only of themselves and those who share these views, not atheists generally.


UPDATE II

Several commenters and emailers object to the inclusion of Dawkins with Hitchens and (especially) Harris on this issue. Both the above-cited Salon and Al Jazeera columns (particularly the former) contain several quotes with links from Dawkins, including his recent decree that he "often" says that Islam is the "greatest force for evil today". Those statements seem clear and incriminating. Nonetheless, my focus here is on Harris, and I haven't conducted the type of comprehensive examination of Dawkins' writing as I have of Harris', so whether Dawkins belongs in this group to the same extent that Harris does is something that is worthy of further debate. One sentence was edited to reflect the debatability of Dawkins' inclusion.


UPDATE III [Thurs.]

As a follow-up to all of this, here are a few related items. First, here is Noam Chomsky in late 2011 - in the first two minutes of the video - explaining how Harris and Hitchens exploit atheism to justify US militarism and convert it into little more than another religion:






And here is Chomsky in 2008 elaborating further on Harris and company [quote and link fixed]:

Quote:"(I)f it is to be even minimally serious, the 'new atheism' should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship, so well exemplified by those who laud huge atrocities like the invasion of Iraq, or cannot comprehend why they might have some concern when their own state, with their support, carries out some of its minor peccadilloes, like killing probably tens of thousands of poor Africans by destroying their main source of pharmaceutical supplies on a whim -- arguably more morally depraved than intentional killing, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere.

"In brief, to be minimally serious the 'new atheism' should begin by looking in the mirror."


That is the hallmark of this New Atheist movement: exploiting rational atheism to support and glorify US state power and aggression; they have become a prime source for pseudo-intellectual justification of US government conduct.

Here's a 2008 interview with the great war journalist Chris Hedges on what he concluded after reviewing the work of "New Atheists" such as Harris and Hitchens: "I was appalled at how they essentially co-opted secular language to present the same kind of chauvinism, intolerance, and bigotry that we see in the Christian right." He adds:

Quote:"They're secular fundamentalists...I find that it's, like the Christian right, a fear based movement. It's a movement that is very much a reaction to 9/11. The kinds of things that they write about Muslims could be lifted from the most rabid sermon by a radical fundamentalist."


Having dealt somewhat extensively with Harris and many of his supporters this week, I can say that I haven't encountered such religious-type fervor and jingoistic and tribalistic self-love (My Side is superior to Theirs!!) in quite a long time.

Meanwhile, even Christopher Hitchens - Harris' comrade in US militarism - denounced Harris' statement that "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists." Wrote Hitchens in 2006 shortly after Harris wrote that: "When I read Sam Harris's irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: 'Not while I'm alive, they won't.'" I think Harris' "fascists" comment is far from his worst statement - it has the limited significance I outlined - but if Christopher Hitchens, of all people, is telling you that you're being "irresponsible" in your anti-Islam advocacy, that's a pretty strong sign that you've gone way too far.



April 3, 2012
Glenn Greenwald
Guardian]]>