Friday, December 2, 2011

ओन्स्किऔस्नेस्स रैसेद!

Seismic Insights; Cosmic Understandings; Meta- and Uber- well communicated.

Heard just this evening for the first time ever your interpretation of Gordon Light Foot's Song for a Winter's Eve and I am trembling with emotion - this is as unique and brilliant a rendering of a cover as anything I have ever heard and you not only capture all of what the original was, and a little more - you send one's mind reeling through an entirely different prism of experience, joy, and delight. Warmest regards, and best wishes always for your art and musical sensitivities; and your deep, deep, and profoundly insightful view of the human condition.

I segue from Summertime (Porgy & Bess) into my own rendering of this tune, but I've never explored to such infinite depths of emotional soul-filled, soul-bleeding humanity as this. I've learnt a great lesson.

Be well, be blessed, you are beloved, my dear, dear friend, and faithful followers.

http://youtu.be/f660fEGaaJw

सिस्मिक इन्सिघ्ट्स; कॉस्मिक understandings

Seismic Insights; Cosmic Understandings; Meta- and Uber- well communicated.

Heard just this evening for the first time ever your interpretation of Gordon Light Foot's Song for a Winter's Eve and I am trembling with emotion - this is as unique and brilliant a rendering of a cover as anything I have ever heard and you not only capture all of what the original was, and a little more - you send one's mind reeling through an entirely different prism of experience, joy, and delight. Warmest regards, and best wishes always for your art and musical sensitivities; and your deep, deep, and profoundly insightful view of the human condition.

I segue from Summertime (Porgy & Bess) into my own rendering of this tune, but I've never explored to such infinite depths of emotional soul-filled, soul-bleeding humanity as this. I've learnt a great lesson.

Be well, be blessed, you are beloved, my dear, dear friend, and faithful followers.

http://youtu.be/f660fEGaaJw

Thursday, December 1, 2011

are the three of us going to come back with bruises from mutual frustration and headbanging?

What I love about facebook are those snippets of conversation between mutual friends who have a LOT of history together, who love each other, and care enough to speak only the truth, with no fear of reprisal or judgment, or of losing the friendship.

With friends such as these, you can survive a family that deserts you at a VERY young and tender and impressionable age (provided these friends have already signed on, and you have made that life-long committment to love, honor, cherish and obey each other; that you will ALWAYS have the other's back.

More treausred than all the gold in Fort Knox.

Max and Megs - I sure hope you know and understand full well how blessed you are for the knowing of and loyalty to each other!

God Bless You Both, and may His Peace be upon your souls forever and ever, AMEN.


---------------------
=====================

MAX: Wow, you found someone who makes you give in?? DAMN

MEGS: Yeah its not the first time either. Hes as stubborn as a mule.

MAX: Nah, you're the mule, he's the rock.

MEGS: Lol a rock that i constantly beat my head against.

MAX: None of that! Haven't we been over this? Or are the three of us going to come back with bruises from mutual frustration and headbanging?

MEGS: Lol it is possible. I've heard that im really good at frustrating people.

MAX: You,?? Frustrating?? Nah!!!

MEGS: Thats what I'm told but I don't believe it. LOL.


Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Triggering Worldwide Consciousness क्ष्पन्सिओन




Scientific Proof that Galactic Energies Have
Triggered Worldwide Consciousness Expansion
ScienceSaturday, February 5th, 2011


New energy from the galactic center is raising consciousness, which is triggering an upgrade to our DNA.

On Coast to Coast AM, scientist David Sereda provided evidence that our Solar System entered a new field of cosmic energy that set off a chain of events including the vibration of the entire planet, the largest storm ever recorded on Saturn, and an early sunrise in Greenland (related to a wobble of the Earth and magnetic pole movement). The sequence of events began the day after the combined Winter Solstice and total lunar eclipse on December 21, 2010 – exactly two years to the day before the end of the Mayan calendar.

On Dec 22, 2010, one day after the Winter Solstice/total lunar eclipse, earthquake sensors all over the planet all went off at the same time with full signal strength. According to Sereda, this was not an earthquake – the entire planet vibrated.

On Dec 23, 2010 NASA reported that the largest storm ever recorded on Saturn erupted and is still going on today. Saturn is usually a very smooth object to look at. But, the storm on Saturn is massive. (Note that the storm may have also begun on Dec 22, but wasn’t reported until the next day.)

The Sun normally rises over Greenland’s most westerly town, Ilulissat, on January 13, ending a month-and-a-half of winter darkness. For the first time in history, sunlight crept above the horizon two days early on January 11, 2011 [1.11.11] at 1pm. The media attributed the cause of the early sunrise to the melting of Greenland’s ice. According to Sereda, that is laughable. Even Time Magazine said no. Many, many miles of ice would have have melted for this theory to be correct.

There was also a report that compass readings in Ilulissat were off by 3-4 degrees on 1/11/11, but returned to normal three days later. A compass is measuring the magnetic field – not the physical earth. However, the back and forth reading of the compass along with early sunrise indicates that the Earth actually wobbled. It must have wobbled at least a degree to have the sunrise occur two days early, according to Sereda.

Einstein said the field is the sole governing agency of matter. Fields of energy dictate the behavior of everything – from subatomic particles to massive planets. When you see a sudden change in an energy system, it will cause a sudden change to an ecosystem. With the giant storm on Saturn and the changes occurring on Earth, there is no doubt that something significant has happened from an energy or field perspective. Sereda concluded: “When you go into these new energy fields, changes are very sudden. you get these sudden vibrations. And, there it was. Everybody missed it.”

Other indications that the entire solar system is undergoing change are the melting poles on Mars, massive storms on Jupiter, and temperatures rising on many of the planets. All of these changes on the planets indicates that the entire solar system has entered a new field of energy.

Sereda also pointed out that the human body has an electromagnetic field that can be affected by activity on the sun, as well as energies coming from the galactic center, as the Earth moves through it. Fields of energy have either chaos or harmonic information inside of it. According ot Sereda, if these energy fields that are coming in from the galactic center contain harmonic information, then there is absolutely no doubt that you can scientifically prove that it is causing a consciousness shift on this planet and will continue to do so through 2012.

One of the theories of 2012 is that we are going to receive this new energy that will cause a shift in consciousness and it will affect everything on the planet – including the planet itself. Bruce Lipton has said that consciousness tells energy to tell the DNA what to do. Your genes are not your blueprint. Consciousness is your blueprint. Therefore, it is likely that along with a shift in consciousness, our DNA will be upgraded.

A worldwide consciousness expansion is happening now and will continue through 2012, which is now confirmed by science and the events that are currently unfolding around the world.

David Wilcock, among others, has been lecturing for several years now about energy coming in from the galactic center that will trigger higher consciousness and a DNA upgrade. You can learn a whole lot more by watching his outstanding film, “2012 Event Horizon”:

http://youtu.be/cEyqT2_ricA

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia.

Andrej Grubacic on Yugoslavia
Don’t Mourn, Balkanize
by PAUL BUHLE


By Andrej Grubacic, Introduction by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Oakland: PM Books, 269pp, $20.

This is a splendid time for the North American reader to meet the extraordinary Andrej Grubacic. After something of a letdown following the Seattle 1999 events– including what many of us perceived as an ideology-driven sectarian turn–anarchists are back in the news with the Occupations. No, not the anarchism of Bakunin or even Bookchin, but anarchism in a new key as well as a new generation, more practical and more open.

Grubacic, the natural citizen of an exterminated republic (Yugoslavia) happens to be the grandson of one of Tito’s key aides and a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement that sought unsuccessfully to break the lock of the Russians and Americans over world affairs. Faced first with the break-up of Yugoslavia, then the radiation-spewing population-bombings of NATO setting the model for future “humanitarian intervention,” he found his intellectual footing in what I would call anarcho-syndicalism. He also found himself out of a job, and made his way to SUNY Binghamton, aided by Noam Chomsky and then Immanuel Wallerstein. Since then, he has emerged as a theorist and activist in several quarters, all of them vital. If he was not in the front line with Occupation, he was in the second line of innovative thinkers; with Staughton Lynd, meanwhile, he posed (in thebook Wobblies and Zapatistas) ways for the return of an IWW-style politics of labor and community that could logically be called Syndicalism (although Wobblies almost never did).

Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! reflects one or two of his predilections less well-known than his espousal of anarchist organizational notions (mostly in Z-Net) and his running commentaries in various places on the emergence and significance of Occupations. It would be a mistake to see one subject as distant from another. He is looking for a wholesale reconstruction of politics along voluntary, collectivist lines, across all the usual borders; and behind a tough analysis, he is looking for what we now Old New Leftists used to call the beloved community, ways of linking human beings in urgent need of solidarity, making possible the solution of problems faced on the planet.

There is a backstory that does not quite emerge in these pages but deserves a mention. Slovenians and their partners (or rivals), Croats, were once vital forces in the American working class Left, and their cooperative movements, through ethnic halls and fraternal associations, outlasted most of the rest of the blue collar Left across a scattering of states. Until recent times, tamburitza bands played to good-sized audiences (driving in from the suburbs, most likely) in Croatian Halls that had back rooms with libraries and portraits of Karl Marx. Slovenian votes, it was said, provided the margin of victory for Richard Trumka in the United Mine Workers, and projected his rise at the moment when the AFL’s corrupt, thuggish leaders had lost their sway. Scarcely aware of this ethnic history of labor struggle and cooperative efforts, Grubacic is a descendent in many ways.

First of all, for any post-Yugoslavian radical, there is the need for refurbished collaboration among Croats, Slovenians, Serbs and others who once lived in a state together, not without resentments but without fratricide. In Grubacic’s critique, the CIA and State Department played upon centuries of distrust, adding hundreds of millions of dollars of fuel to the flames, then sweeping down relentlessly, pitting one nationality against another.

Yugoslavia, he emphasizes, was always a dream of the Balkans, never quite a reality despite the victory over Fascism and the Tito decades to follow. The fragility of the model, a kind of market state-socialism with a bureaucratic class ruling over others, was bound to come apart, although without the global market stress and CIA operations, it would have lasted longer and perhaps evolved into something better. The dark side of the Balkans, a kind of escape valve for the Western European imagination with rugged landscapes, pirates or the Robin Hood type (or the opposite, today’s drug-dealers and sex-traders), was the veritable opposite of Victorian England or pre-Hitler Germany. The darkness was as much cause or hope as despair, and like victims of the other kinds of colonialism, a lifting of the pre-modern shackles seemed the key task of socialists, then communists. No leftwingers in Europe, at least, faced bigger problems of ethnic rivalries and old grudges.

Grubacic offers hope for a voluntary, cooperative future for something we might (or might not) call Yugoslavia, and this is a hope for all the rest of humankind. He does so with a precision of detail that no review can capture, but with a kindliness, an openness to possibility and a resistance of dogma, that anarcho-syndicalism or anarchism of a new kind looks as promising on the page as in the Occupation. Quite an accomplishment.

Paul Buhle is a retired senior lecturer of history and American civilization at Brown University, a Distinguished Lecturer at the Organization of American Historians and American Studies Association, the founder of Radical America magazine, and the founder and former director of New York University’s Oral History of the American Left archive. He is also the recipient of the 2010 Will Eisner Award for The Art of Harvey Kurtzman. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Andrej Grubacic on Yugoslavia Don’t Mourn, Balkanize by PAUL BUHLE

WEEKEND EDITION NOVEMBER 25-27, 2011


Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia.
By Andrej Grubacic, Introduction by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

Oakland: PM Books, 269pp, $20.


This is a splendid time for the North American reader to meet the extraordinary Andrej Grubacic. After something of a letdown following the Seattle 1999 events– including what many of us perceived as an ideology-driven sectarian turn–anarchists are back in the news with the Occupations. No, not the anarchism of Bakunin or even Bookchin, but anarchism in a new key as well as a new generation, more practical and more open.

Grubacic, the natural citizen of an exterminated republic (Yugoslavia) happens to be the grandson of one of Tito’s key aides and a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement that sought unsuccessfully to break the lock of the Russians and Americans over world affairs. Faced first with the break-up of Yugoslavia, then the radiation-spewing population-bombings of NATO setting the model for future “humanitarian intervention,” he found his intellectual footing in what I would call anarcho-syndicalism. He also found himself out of a job, and made his way to SUNY Binghamton, aided by Noam Chomsky and then Immanuel Wallerstein. Since then, he has emerged as a theorist and activist in several quarters, all of them vital. If he was not in the front line with Occupation, he was in the second line of innovative thinkers; with Staughton Lynd, meanwhile, he posed (in thebook Wobblies and Zapatistas) ways for the return of an IWW-style politics of labor and community that could logically be called Syndicalism (although Wobblies almost never did).

Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! reflects one or two of his predilections less well-known than his espousal of anarchist organizational notions (mostly in Z-Net) and his running commentaries in various places on the emergence and significance of Occupations. It would be a mistake to see one subject as distant from another. He is looking for a wholesale reconstruction of politics along voluntary, collectivist lines, across all the usual borders; and behind a tough analysis, he is looking for what we now Old New Leftists used to call the beloved community, ways of linking human beings in urgent need of solidarity, making possible the solution of problems faced on the planet.

There is a backstory that does not quite emerge in these pages but deserves a mention. Slovenians and their partners (or rivals), Croats, were once vital forces in the American working class Left, and their cooperative movements, through ethnic halls and fraternal associations, outlasted most of the rest of the blue collar Left across a scattering of states. Until recent times, tamburitza bands played to good-sized audiences (driving in from the suburbs, most likely) in Croatian Halls that had back rooms with libraries and portraits of Karl Marx. Slovenian votes, it was said, provided the margin of victory for Richard Trumka in the United Mine Workers, and projected his rise at the moment when the AFL’s corrupt, thuggish leaders had lost their sway. Scarcely aware of this ethnic history of labor struggle and cooperative efforts, Grubacic is a descendent in many ways.

First of all, for any post-Yugoslavian radical, there is the need for refurbished collaboration among Croats, Slovenians, Serbs and others who once lived in a state together, not without resentments but without fratricide. In Grubacic’s critique, the CIA and State Department played upon centuries of distrust, adding hundreds of millions of dollars of fuel to the flames, then sweeping down relentlessly, pitting one nationality against another.

Yugoslavia, he emphasizes, was always a dream of the Balkans, never quite a reality despite the victory over Fascism and the Tito decades to follow. The fragility of the model, a kind of market state-socialism with a bureaucratic class ruling over others, was bound to come apart, although without the global market stress and CIA operations, it would have lasted longer and perhaps evolved into something better. The dark side of the Balkans, a kind of escape valve for the Western European imagination with rugged landscapes, pirates or the Robin Hood type (or the opposite, today’s drug-dealers and sex-traders), was the veritable opposite of Victorian England or pre-Hitler Germany. The darkness was as much cause or hope as despair, and like victims of the other kinds of colonialism, a lifting of the pre-modern shackles seemed the key task of socialists, then communists. No leftwingers in Europe, at least, faced bigger problems of ethnic rivalries and old grudges.

Grubacic offers hope for a voluntary, cooperative future for something we might (or might not) call Yugoslavia, and this is a hope for all the rest of humankind. He does so with a precision of detail that no review can capture, but with a kindliness, an openness to possibility and a resistance of dogma, that anarcho-syndicalism or anarchism of a new kind looks as promising on the page as in the Occupation. Quite an accomplishment.

Paul Buhle is a retired senior lecturer of history and American civilization at Brown University, a Distinguished Lecturer at the Organization of American Historians and American Studies Association, the founder of Radical America magazine, and the founder and former director of New York University’s Oral History of the American Left archive. He is also the recipient of the 2010 Will Eisner Award for The Art of Harvey Kurtzman. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Robin Hoods of Victimhood I -Witnesses of the Mumbai Attacks by FARZANA VERSEY



“The spectators laughed. And my lawyer, rolling up one of his sleeves, said with finality, ‘Here we have a perfect reflection of this entire trial: everything is true and nothing is true!’”

– Albert Camus, from ‘The Outsider’


Just suppose 26/11 had not happened. Unthinkable. Even as nightmare, it is an addendum of India, the footnote we seek to become a part of history in the making. Such history seeks no veracity, but has a voracious appetite for stories where good conquers evil and no one knows either quite well. It can subsist on lies for “everything is true and nothing is true”. Perceptions overpower falsehoods.

From casual tourists to world leaders, the 26/11 route is part of the itinerary. Voluntary agencies have not been prominently involved. The work has been taken over by diverse citizens’ groups. Hubris meets hype.

Does it matter that recent reports have mentioned that certain western countries, most prominently Denmark, have plans to pump in funds to create discord? That the government is probing into the finances of ten NGOs that have received millions of rupees “to stage protests and resort to other agitational programmes against government policies, thus creating unrest”? Is this not cause for alarm, especially given the fact that David Headley, it transpires, could well have been a double agent working for the United States as well as Pakistan?

It is no surprise that those who came out in the streets on November 26, 2008 are the same ones who are part of the people’s movement against corruption. Today’s insider guilt by association is a reflection of the guilt by dissociation from then.

“Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.”

– Henri Bergson

One of the reconstructed hotels has a red grand piano in its lobby. It looks like an installation made up of all the blood. A 13-year-old girl who has an iron rod fixed in her leg says she will kill all such terrorists. Remembrance pretends to be the great leveler closing the divide between disparate groups; fake egalitarianism walks a tightrope as pursed lips and hanky-covered noses touch the hearts of the little people.

Cracked glass of the windows has been secured between two rectangles of fortified glass. It is now less reminder and more attraction, seen through the golden haze of beer mugs at Café Leopold. Three years after the attacks, everyone remains a witness to the persecution. I saw, I heard, I touched, I felt, I know – the politics of eyewitness accounts is as fragile as those shards, memories engraved in renovated carvings. It is a personal ‘I’ witness monogrammed monologue.

They await the larger-than-life four-foot clay and bronze bust of the cop who was killed. Sub-inspector Tukaram Omble spotted Ajmal Kasab, the lone survivor of the gang that carried out the attacks, playing dead in a car and confronted him only to take the bullets. His colleagues captured Kasab. In 2008, Omble was a sidelined figure who was soon replaced by kitschy toy cops along the sea-face promenade. It was a hollow sense of security, much like inflatable dolls. Sub- inspectors are not particularly important in the Mumbai psyche. As glorified statues, though, they will be garlanded. The other ‘victims’ who suffered through televised images will grant this man the honour he would never have received had he helped riot victims or doused fires in slums. It is their magnanimity superimposed on his martyrdom.

The superimposition is part of a larger projectile where two power centres play out their games. It is the moneyed class versus the establishment. “What about our security?” they ask. It is a perfectly-timed question. The rich taxpayers think they need to be protected; only they can beckon the government functionaries who we are supposed to see as public servants. They forget that they have elected the convenient candidates, the ones who will be good for business. That is what Kasab, too, was apparently told by his minders when he left his village in Faridkot to join the Lashkar-e-Taiyba: India is rich, they have goodies; you are poor, the son of a fellow who sells street food. If you want a better life, then destroy the best that India has to offer.



Mumbai has been killed often, but no one wants to go there as my piece in CounterPunch then revealed. So, why is there no closure in this case? We have the man in prison with the verdict of a death sentence. “Hang him!” is the cry of the herd. This is merely collective catharsis; no one cares. Not even Pakistan. This will end the matter, but just as the United States has to look for new wolves after they ‘got’ Osama, India has to keep this issue alive. There are tactical reasons.

Kashmir is a stale tale, and it is a porous border; the army is on the job. The conflict with Pakistan is like a long–playing record, with both sides getting royalties from the tremendous sales. Gujarat is too much of an internal saga. Ever since the innocence of Muslims who have been arrested for bomb blasts became news and it was not merely the ideology of the rightwing parties that could be blamed, but the failure of the intelligence agencies, it has become increasingly difficult to make the outside hand seem like a palpable reality. Mumbai, a city of immigrants, serves as a perfect example. Mumbai can mimic New York, it can have as many Ground Zeros as it wants. What it lacks in land, it makes up for in imaginary space.

“By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.”

– Yukio Mishima

A self-serving society basks in the evanescence of self-destructiveness. Terror is archived, each file suffixed with the word.

Pakistan has given India a reason to live a Goth monstrosity as much as it gave us death. Why did Pakistan that lost all its three wars against India manage to keep a people hostage in their home territory? The vampire has been encrusted as icicles in cold consciences. Ajmal Kasab goes against the prototype terrorist we expect, and that is what fills the vacuum of paranoia. The city that did not sleep is now awake to every drumbeat. The sounds ricochet like bullets. We can now say, look, this guy could have been anyone, so everyone is suspect. This makes us all feel threatened.

No self-respecting society would wish to engage in friendly banter with an enemy that has caused it so much grief. Why does India persist in the dialogues, the trade initiatives, the exchange of cultural ambassadors, who incidentally follow a strict pecking order with only the big names involved, the dissenting patriots, the stooges of recusancy?

The peace motive is suspect. In fact, it is ‘insider trading’ where here too the corporate sector is involved. The man on death row is not just a number, but also a figure: Rs. 50 crore spent thus far to keep him alive. He is our ticket to barter minted myth. The anger that had manifested itself with such calculated fervour was mythical too. The only hammer to come out is during art auctions. Painted landscapes of a blood-soaked yesterday. Such memories are just strawberry daiquiris.

Farzana Versey is a Mumbai-based writer. She lives and breathes the city and can be reached at http://farzana-versey.blogspot.com/

Global Dignity by MISSY BEATTIE

Rebellion From Within

Last week I attended a presentation by Robert Ford, the first United States Ambassador to Syria in five years. Just two months ago, Ford was recalled from Syria because of safety concerns. More than 3500 people, including children, have been killed there.

Charming and warm, Ford delivered a riveting talk. He’s a storyteller, providing historical information interspersed with details about diabolical dictators who delight in pulling fingernails from enemies. When he described his responsibilities and offered his opinions, Ford also mesmerized the audience by weaving in adventure narratives, some of which were Harrison Ford-action-movie suspenseful. And just as entertaining. A relative, perhaps?

As Ford talked about the people who live in the Middle East, he distilled the problems to a single word: “dignity.” Essentially, people just want to be treated with dignity.

Yet, it cannot be found on any line item of US foreign policy.

I think of the assignation of titles for military actions: “Shock and Awe.” How the hell can this be translated as “dignity” to the people our troops are devastating when we level their homes, their hospitals, their schools, and their lives?

When Ambassador Ford spoke about the threat of Iran and mentioned sanctions, I thought of Iraq. And the words of former Secretary of State Madeline Albright during a television interview when asked if she thought the death of half a million Iraqi children [from sanctions in Iraq] was a price worth paying. Albright replied: “This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”

What about the deaths of 500,000 children is dignified?

Ambassador Ford addressed the uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa, launched when Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian and college graduate, self-immolated after police confiscated the fruit and vegetables he sold without a permit. Bouazizi’s act of protest against a corrupt government started a chain reaction now known as Arab Spring. In Egypt, demonstrators are amassing despite a brutal military crackdown and violence leading to daily murders of those who will not back away.

Ford emphasized that this internal rebellion is the preferred means for change to spread democracy.

Stunning, isn’t it?

Because we are witness to rebellion from within, the Occupation Movement (OWS), right now, here at home, in our own supposedly “democratic” society. With each violation perpetuated by pepper-spraying, riot-geared police officers, the protestors’ determination strengthens.

Still, OWS’s future is being debated. Cynics predict its demise while others insist that today’s unacceptable conditions have awakened people to engage and remain involved.

A new report released by the US Census Bureau says that 100 million Americans (one in three), now, are living in poverty or near it.

For greater impact, protestors must target the nemesis that brought the country to economic collapse—the bailed-out bankers who committed criminal acts with impunity along with the non-financial corporations that suck productivity and dignity from the 99 percent. It is not bridges that should be blocked or the halls of Congress but Wall Street where the uber privileged continue to provide platinum salaries, diamond bonuses, and golden parachutes for their executives, the 1 percent who operate our politicians and render our voices mute.

Recently, Michael Moore spent four hours in a meeting with activists from OWS in NYC. This movement needs no input from the Moores of the world who add tangents to the demands. Stick with breaking up the banks and no more bailouts for financial institutions. In other words, focus on Wall Street, for now. By cutting the flow of money to DC and the oligarchs, a new system of government can be achieved. The rest, like improved Medicare for all and ending war, will follow.

As I listened to Ford, I thought about occupy sites all over the country, raided and shut down only to regroup and surge, inspiring more and more people to join in a demand for economic equality and justice. As we, the 99 percent, stipulate this within our own country, we also must also work to ensure a foreign policy that exacts the same for our brothers and sisters throughout the world.

Missy Beattie lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Email: missybeat@gmail.com

How the Occupy Movement Came to El Salvador by ALEXANDRA EARLY

Uninvited Guests on Thanksgiving

SAN SALVADOR.

At the U.S. embassy here on Thursday (Nov. 24), Ambassador Carmen Aponte held a gala Thanksgiving dinner for a select group of local and North American guests. Outside the castle-like embassy compound, there were some uninvited visitors as well.

Nearly 100 Salvadorans and U.S citizens gathered to display our solidarity with the global Occupy/Indignados movement in the first Central American OWS-inspired protest. The demonstrators included university students, environmental activists, and “gringos” (like myself) who work with human rights and community development organizations based here in the capital.

Like most Occupation crowds in the United States, this one was politically diverse. Young members of the Communist Party waved Cuban and Venezuelan flags, while dread-locked musicians played the drums, and other participants held up homemade signs urging passing cars in one of the richest neighborhoods in El Salvador to honk for social justice.

But we were all united around a common concern, namely the impact of corporate globalization on working people here and in North America.

As the news media from El Salvador and throughout the region gathered round, various protesters explained how the corporate-influence policies of the Obama Administration were–in the name “economic development”–actually hurting the 99% in El Salvador.

“Free trade” between the two countries has not only destroyed local agriculture and production, victimized workers and the poor and increased immigration to the U.S., but also elevated corporate interests over national sovereignty. In 2009, for example, the Canadian mining company known as Pacific Rim utilized the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to take legal action, before a World Bank tribunal, against the Salvadoran government for denying mining permits to Pacific Rim, as demanded by local environmental activists. Because the newly elected FMLN administration took a stand on the side of its own people and the environment, it now risks having to pay $77 million dollars in “damages” to Pacific Rim.

Alfredo Carias, of the Salvadoran environmental organization called La Unidad Ecologica Salvadorena (UNES), spoke about the broader environmental crimes of the U.S. government and the global 1%. As Wall Street Occupiers entered their second month of protest in New York and other cities in October El Salvador was hit by some of the worst flooding in its history. Tropical Depression 12 E dumped ten days of unrelenting rain on El Salvador, causing 34 deaths, forcing 50,000 people to flee their homes, and leaving an estimated $850 million worth of damage to infrastructure and agriculture in its wake.



Organizations like UNES attribute the unprecedented intensity of this storm to climate change. But Ambassador Aponte was among the first to caution the public about blaming human behavior for this “natural disaster.” The U.S. may be one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases and a leading foe of meaningful international action to slow global warming the Ambassador urged “What is the point of placing blame? With what we have, we have to confront this reality.”

Confronting Reality Together, A Different Way

For me, the most important part of the first OWS-inspired protest in Central America was the collaboration it created between Salvadoran social movement activists and their foreign allies in helping to spread the idea of a cross-border movement of the 99%.

In October, I had the chance to visit several Occupy encampments, while touring the Midwest with other representatives of my organization, U.S. El Salvador Sister Cities. Along with two Salvadoran community organizers, we visited a General Assembly meeting at OccupyMadison, a rally organized by labor unions and community groups at OccupyChicago, and a lively march at OccupyCincinnati. One of my Salvadoran compañeros, Agustin, who has been a community leader and popular education teacher since the Salvadoran civil war, was initially unimpressed. He joked that what we were seeing was not the movement of the 99% but “the movement of 99 people and their tents.”

But as we traveled from town to town, I was filled with a pride in my country that I have never experienced before. I thought to myself that, finally, I have something, from back home, to brag about in El Salvador among the veterans of social justice struggles there. However, when I returned to El Salvador I was surprised that the majority of the people in my sister organization, The Association for the Development of El Salvador (CRIPDES) hadn’t heard anything about the Occupy/Indignados movement.

Very little coverage of OWS was seeping through the cracks of the corporate dominated Salvadoran media. Besides, most people had more immediate concerns. Government and community organizations were scrambling for donations to help rebuild roads and homes in the wake of the flooding; they also needed to prepare for the food shortage ahead due to the resulting reduced harvest of corn and beans in the countryside. This year’s storm only exacerbated the problems Salvadorans face every day: gang violence, unemployment, poverty and woefully under-funded social services.

However, many of us “gringos” employed by human rights and community development organizations, continued to talk with awe and admiration about the Occupy movement. We mused aloud about how to bring OWS to El Salvador and stage our own protest, but we were accustomed to playing the safer, more typical role of gringos solidarios—ie accompanying the Salvadoran social movement not pushing initiatives or projects. We decided we would stage our own gringo protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador. However, as we informed our Salvadoran friends about our plans, the younger, more Internet savvy ones wanted to participate. Working initially with a few local environmental activists, we began to recalibrate the OWS message, focusing on the way corporate greed and capitalism is negatively affecting El Salvador as well.

The Pissed Off and Indignant

We also had to come up with new name, since the word “occupy” has negative connotations in a nation first occupied by Spain and then dominated by the U.S. ever since. We decided to call ourselves Los 99% Encachimbados and Indignados de El Salvador, the Pissed Off and Indignant 99% of El Salvador. Our Salvadoran collaborators were, of course, very pleased with our choice of protest target, because they have long seen the U.S. Embassy as a symbol of capitalism and “yanqui imperialism”.

As we began recruiting at forums, press conferences, meetings and a raucus concert of Calle 13, the reggaeton group which has gained wide popularity for protest anthems like Latinoamerica, we tried to convey the excitement and importance of the Occupy movement in the U.S.Some Salvadoran activists shared our enthusiasm, readily agreeing that resistance to corporate globalization would be greatly strengthened if more citizens of the U.S. joined the fight in the “belly of the beast.” But others responded to our fliers and invitations with the attitude that Occupiers were just pampered gringos all worked up about unemployment and budget cuts in the U.S., when far worse corruption and joblessness have been El Salvador’s fate for years.

So we focused on the international roots of the movement, its origins in the “Arab Spring” and the take-over of plazas in Spain and other countries faced with similar austerity measures. We also emphasized that our Indignados and Occupy Movement would bring more attention to the longstanding demands of the Salvadoran left for an end to a system of corruption, impunity and tax fraud that benefits the wealthy and powerful.

On the night before our Thanksgiving Action, a cafe newly opened by two long-time leftist activists hosted a sign making party and discussion of this global Occupy Movement. About 30 people showed up and went to work producing placards in Spanish and English with slogans like “We occupy to liberate our planet” and “1% Thanks for not Giving!” One artist in the group drew a portrait of the martyred Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, with the word Indignado, Indignant, emblazoned on his chest. We joined together to watch Telesur coverage of the November 16th national day of action in the U.S.; a journalist from Spain talked about occupation activity in his country; a Salvadoran asked what we saw for the movement’s future.

We stepped out into the warm night air after the event brimming with excitement, hope and a few lingering anxieties about the next day’s action. But even in that moment, it felt like we had already achieved something important. We had stepped away from the previous model of solidarity in which we supported the Salvadoran struggle for social justice with political advocacy in the U.S. and financial support for education and leadership programs in El Salvador but we never really linked the struggle here to our own back home.

In the past, we didn’t see our movement and our challenges in the U.S. as worthy of sharing with Salvadorans who had fought, sacrificed everything and lost loved ones to try to create a just and peaceful El Salvador. Now, we were sharing experiences and strategies not as experienced Salvadoran luchadores and gringo novices with heavy consciences, but as equals striving together for change. Even if there were only a handful of us at the embassy on Thanksgiving, we would, like the trickle of protestors that grew into a flood around the U.S., be adding our voices to the cry of the 99%.

Alexandra Early works for U.S. El Salvador Sister Cities. She is a former organizer for the National Union of Healthcare Workers and a graduate of Wesleyan University, where she studied Latin American studies. Ms. Early can be reached at earlyave@gmail.com.

The Bahrain Arms Deal by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI

Another Oops Moment

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

– Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man


The question is why the United States was even thinking of selling arms to Bahrain. The answer can be found in the fact that the United States is the number one arms supplier in the world and to maintain its status it cannot be judgmental about the conduct of its customers. If standards of conduct were the operable criteria, the United States’ customer base would be reduced if not eliminated. As it is, sales of arms simply jeopardize the lives of some who live in the customers’ countries as well as those with which they may come into armed conflict, conflicts that might not take place were the adversaries not armed by the United States and other weapons supplying countries.

On March 19, 2011protestors took over Pearl Square in Manama, Bahrain. Two days before the take over and acting under orders from King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the army had used live ammunition to crack down on the Shiite dissidents who were demanding changes in how the country was governed. Unlike Egypt or Tunisia, where the revolts against the establishment were quick and successful, in Bahrain the monarchy brutally put down the revolt, assisted by its neighbor, Saudi Arabia. (As reported in the Los Angeles Times, on March 15 “hundreds of troops from Saudi Arabia and police officers from the nearby United Arab Emirates . . . entered Bahrain at the request of the ruling family. . . .”) Thanks to his own quick, if brutal response, and the assistance of Saudi Arabia, King Hamad continues to rule.

In Egypt and Libya and more recently Syria, the Obama administration said the conduct of their respective leaders had resulted in the loss of their right to rule. In Bahrain, home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, the Obama administration urged the Kahlifa family and the demonstrators to negotiate their differences. The fact that Bahrain is the headquarters for the U.S. 5th Fleet was probably not the reason for the different approach.

Although King Hamad successfully put down the revolt he was sufficiently concerned about reports of brutality by government forces that four moths after the events took place he appointed a commission to investigate. The commission was headed by Professor Cherif Bassiounim a professor of international criminal law and a former member of U.N. human rights panels. The report was released on November 23, 2011. According to the Associated Press, in the press conference at which the results of the commission’s findings were announced, Mr. Bassiouni said when the revolt began, the government undertook midnight raids to create fear and engaged in purges from workplaces and universities. A number of Shiite mosques were destroyed. Those jailed were blindfolded, whipped, kicked, given electric shocks and threatened with rape to extract confessions. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights said more than 40 deaths of protestors occurred.

Although it is likely that someone in the United States government was aware of the appointment of the commission, it did not wait to find out what the commission would discover. Instead, on September 14 the Pentagon told Congress it intended to sell more than 44 armored Humvees and 300 TOW missiles to Bahrain. Some outside the administration who had followed events in Bahrain were alarmed.

Shortly after the notice was sent out Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote the Secretary of State and observed what she might have observed without his prompting. He wrote that: “Proceeding with the announced arms sale to Bahrain without modification under the current circumstances weakens U.S. credibility at a critical time of political transition in the Middle East.” In what might be described as an “oops” moment, the administration said it was delaying the arms sale until the Bassiouni commission report was released and it had had a chance to review the report. Some might wonder why it took a letter from a Senator to get the State Department to delay its actions. The answer can be found in more than the zeal of the United States to stay in first place in the arms sale business. It can be found in a government audit that was released on November 19, 2011, The audit found “inadequate monitoring of American weapons sales to Persian Gulf countries with questionable human rights records or recent clashes with protesters.” According to the Washington Post, the GAO’s report expressed concern about “how the U.S. government ensures the proper use of military equipment” sold to, among other countries, Bahrain. It observed that “[s]uch vetting is especially critical given Bahrain’s use of its security forces to quell public demonstrations.”

Commenting on the GAO report, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, said: “We need to ensure that the equipment is not being diverted to third parties, and that those groups and units who are the intended recipients are not implicated in human rights violations.” Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen got it right. The disturbing thing is that the State Department didn’t.

Christopher Brauchli is an attorney living in Boulder, Colorado. He can be e-mailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu.

The Stealth Halal Jihadist Turkey by WAJAHAT ALI

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Muslim Trojan Horse


American Muslim communities celebrating Thanksgiving with a traditional Turkey feast represents an encouraging sign of integration with American values and rituals.

But, of course, we Muslims fooled you.

Yet again.

You should have known that our baked, brined, and deep-fried masala turkeys were simply veiling our nefarious, anti-American plots to replace McDonald’s arches with minarets and convert the White House to the United Colors of Benetton House.

Pam Geller, Our Anti-Muslim Paul Revere

However, not all patriotic Americans were gullible and naïve! Nay, some America-holic crusaders, like bloggers Pam Geller and her fearless co-horts, called out our “stealth jihadist turkey plot!” Like modern-day Paul Reveres, they blogged, tweeted and mass mailed our ingenious plot “to submit unassuming Americans to Islam by feeding them halal Turkey” this holiday season. (Halal meat is slaughtered according to Islamic custom, similar to Jewish Kosher laws.)

Our nation’s Cassandra, Pam Geller – the preeminent anti-Muslim blogger and conspiracy theorist aficionado – believes President Obama is a Muslim, illegitimate son of Malcolm X who once went to Pakistan for drugs and jihad.

She also uncovered Arabic is not just a language, but actually a spearhead for anti-Americanism. Thanks to her, we discovered radical Islam has infiltrated our government, which is secretly being run by Islamic supremacists. She also accused Muslims of engaging in stealth cultural jihad by wearing their headscarves at Disneyland.

Truth be told, we’ve already converted Goofy. Donald Duck was always our Manchurian candidate. Mickey was the first to turn Benedict Arnold. As for Porky Pig, he better watch out; we’re coming for him next…with our scimitars.

Damn you, Pamela Geller, your anti-Muslim, detective nose is too evolved and sophisticated in sniffing out our dastardly plots!

I guess the feathered, red wattled bird is out of the proverbial bag. There’s no reason to hide the secret any longer.

It’s true. The turkey is our new Trojan Horse.

After spending decades learning to cook and enjoy the famously-dry turkey, we Muslims decided to use the bird to launch our turkey jihad after successfully conquering it in our respective kitchens. We’ve evolved from creeping sharia into states to creeping cholesterol and obesity into American diets. After taking over all the street meat vendors in New York, the Islamization of the turkey bird was inevitable.

Turkey: The Greatest Weapon of Mass Distraction

The Turkey is our greatest weapon of distraction. Even more so than hummus, biryani, shwarmas,kebobs, naans, and Lupe Fiasco.

The fatty bird’s high levels of tryptophan act like a paralyzing agent, causing intense drowsiness and lethargy when Americans overeat on Thanksgiving Day. The ensuing food coma paves the way for The Muslim Agenda to stealthily accomplish its ambitious goal of radically transforming America into a radical Caliphate guided by Sharia law.

Pam Geller, the 21st century’s Velma, uncovers The Great Halal Turkey Conspiracy:

“Across this great country, on Thanksgiving tables nationwide, infidel Americans are unwittingly going to be serving halal turkeys to their families this Thursday. Turkeys that are halal certified… [this] is just the opposite of what Thanksgiving represents: freedom and inclusiveness, neither of which are allowed for under that same Islamic law.”

Blast her foresight and remarkable sleuthing skills!

In this land of religious freedom, tolerance and pluralism, it is utterly unacceptable – downright un-American, I say – to allow a diversity of slaughtering options for mass consumers! And allowing Turkeys to be slaughtered according to a religious custom similar to Jewish Kosher laws? Shudder the thought!

Indeed, it is more patriotic to consume a steroid-pumped, undernourished, traumatized turkey hurled onto a mechanical conveyor belt – along with thousands of its gobbling brethren – awaiting its rapture under the guillotine of economic efficiency and other profit-maximizing instruments of death.

That, my friends, is truly the American way!

Muslims, We’re Like the Green Bay Packers

But, even American superheroes like Pamela Geller can’t stop our momentum. Muslims are like the current Green Bay Packers of fifth-column, culinary stealth jihadists– we’re on a hot streak!

First, we infiltrated America by creating a hot, Lebanese American beauty pageant named Rima Fakih who won Miss USA and stole the tiara from the infidels. Then, we installed a biracial man with Kenyan roots in the Oval Office, who happens to be a practicing Christian that celebrates Easter, accepts Christ as his savior, and has yet to step foot in a mosque during his three years as President. Moreover, he drinks alcohol and publicly eats bacon. Indeed, the hallmark traits of a Muslim President.

Most recently, we have invaded mainstream American television sets with our very own reality TV show, TLC’s All American Muslim. Move over Kim, Paris and Snookie, Arab-American Muslim Shadia is creeping to take over your botox and photoshopped US Weekly covers. According to Pamela Geller’s Justice League of Islamophobes, TLC’s real intention in creating the show is to force“submission to Islam through the hijab.” (Our clandestine plots foiled yet again!)

Halal Turkey Victory: The Icing on the Cake

But this latest victory is the icing on the cake, or I should say, the honey on the kanafeh. Ha!

Who was our mighty warrior leading us to victory, you ask? Our Alexander? Our Achilles? Our Obama? Our Aaron Rogers? The Trojan horse of our stealth victory was none other than the Thanksgiving turkey.

In fact, we’ve been so successful at integrating, we’ve inspired the mega corporation Butterball to become our preeminent stealth jihadist and unleash stealth halal turkeys on unsuspecting Americans and citizens abroad.

After all, what’s more anti-American than introducing a uniquely American bird, Turkey, to new global consumer markets thereby promoting American products, advertising brand names, and stimulating the national economy?

That’s downright Communistic!

But, even this is too much for Geller, who is asking for Butterball to be held accountable for allegedly serving Americans unlabeled halal meat. She has created the “Boycott Butterball Turkey” Facebook page.

Even fellow American Muslims are upset! All this time they could’ve purchased turkey at affordable prices from their local supermarkets instead of shelling out extra money for halal-certified birds from their community butchers! How come no one told the rest of them about Butterball’s ingenious stealth halal turkey jihadist plan?

(We have to keep them in the dark. We can’t afford to activate all of our of culinary stealth jihadists at once. Most of them have to live as if they are actually moderate, peaceful, loyal, normal Americans going about their day to day lives dealing with real problems and concerns that are shared by their neighbors, friends and co-workers. Lateral thinking.)

The Muslim Agenda Fortune Cookie

If you’re lucky, you’ll find The Protocols of the Elders of Mecca (or, “The Muslim Agenda”) stuffed in your Butterball turkey this holiday season. It outlines the plans for our next American cultural takeovers. If you look closely, deep inside your Butterball turkeys, there will be leaked cell phone photos of a circumcised Easter Bunny praying towards Mecca right before he hands out Kosher eggs and crescent-shaped chocolates to kids from his Easter basket, which we imported from China.

Apparently he’s also developed an insatiable sexual urge for white female rabbits and has started his own “Hare’s Harem.” Rumor has it he’s been fasting during Ramadan and partying like it was Mardi Gras during Lent.

And, wait until you see what we have in store for Christmas! Red-nosed camels and a Santa Claus named Abu Qhlaws: a hairy, overweight Moroccan man with a bushy beard giving chicken tagine to school kids in the malls.

There’s a rumor that American Muslim families will be giving snickers and tandoori chicken pieces for Halloween. Trick or Treat?

We’ve successfully brainwashed the Tooth Fairy as well. She now wears a burqa and was forced to marry Imam Rumpelstiltskin (Come on, that wasn’t a shocker, right?). Instead of replacing children’s teeth with coins, she now places small Qurans published in Saudi Arabia under their bedroom pillows. She also sprinkles fairy dust on the children, consisting of turmeric and zaatar.

The battle of the absurd, paranoid, and demented is thankfully yearlong and not contained to seasonal limitations.

This Thanksgiving, however, please do enjoy your Turkey, whether it be kosher, halal, vegan, vegetarian, American or even foreign.

To appease Pamela Geller and company, just please make sure your dead, cooked bird is tasty, America-holic and not a radical, stealth agent of jihad. Just to be safe, stab the bird a few times Pulp Fiction-style with the baster.

Because, after all, you can never really know and you can never really be too sure.

Wajahat Ali is a playwright, attorney, journalist and humorist. He blogs at Goatmilk and is the author of the award-winning Domestic Crusaders. He is a contributor to He will be basting his halal turkey in America-holic juices this Thanksgiving.

Originally published in Loonwatch.

Turkey and the Syrian ‘Abyss’ by RAMZY BAROUD

‘Zero-Problems’ Foreign Policy No More


When Recep Tayyip Erdogan became Turkey’s prime minister in 2003, he seemed to be certain of the new direction his country would take. It would maintain cordial ties with Turkey’s old friends, Israel included, but also reach out to its Arab and Muslim neighbors, Syria in particular. The friendly relations between Ankara and Damascus soon morphed from rhetorical emphasis on cultural ties into trade deals and economic exchanges worth billions of dollars. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s vision of a ‘zero-problems’ foreign policy seemed like a truly achievable feat, even in a region marred by conflict, foreign occupations and ‘great game’ rivalry.

The Israeli raid on the Turkish aid ship, Mavi Marmara, in international waters on May 31, 2010, was not enough to erode this vision. The official Turkish response to Israel’s violent attack – which killed nine Turkish citizens – was one of great anger, but it hardly resembled what Turkey saw as state-sponsored Israeli piracy in the Mediterranean.

However, the Syrian uprising in March, the harsh government crackdown on dissent, and the growing militarization of the opposition – all leading the country down the road to full-fledged civil war – has forced Turkey to abandon its ‘zero-problems’ foreign policy. While Turkey had clearly grown impatient with the bloody crackdowns on widespread protests demanding freedom and political reforms, its growingly confrontational attitude towards Damascus was not entirely altruistic either. Considering the exceptionality of the situation throughout the Arab World, Turkey has had to make some difficult choices.

Turkey’s initially guarded support of NATO’s military intervention against Libya was a litmus test. It proved that Turkey’s membership in the organization, and its regional standing was more important than any foreign policy visions.

“The same stunning irony was clear in Turkey’s relations with (murdered President Muammar) Qadhafi’s Libya. Once these regimes faltered…zero problems was likely to look like a bad bet,” wrote Steven A Cook in the Atlantic, on November 18.

The other ‘stunning irony’ is, of course, Turkey’s hostile attitude towards Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, once considered by Erdogan to be a personal friend. In fact, the leading role currently played by Ankara to isolate and punish al-Assad would seem like the official “denouement of the Erdogan/Davutoglu investment in Bashar al-Assad,” and thus the “end of what has been billed as Turkey’s transformative diplomacy,” according to Cook.

Despite pressure on Ankara to hasten its isolation of Syria, and subtle insinuations that the Turkish leadership is moving too slow on that front, the language alone tells of near complete foreign policy conversion. In a statement on November 15, Prime Minister Erdogan suggested that al-Assad cannot be trusted. “No one any longer expects (the Syrian President) to meet the expectations of the people and of the international community…Our wish is that the Assad regime, which is now on a knife edge, does not enter this road of no return, which leads to the edge of the abyss” (Global Spin blog, TIME online, November 16).

The apocalyptic language can be justified on the basis of an almost inevitable civil war in Syria, and the instability that such a war could create for an already unstable southern Turkish border. More, with regional and international players already vying for the opportunity to exploit Syria’s internal woes, Turkey’s own internal problems could soon be exploited for the benefit of outside forces. Thus, the new Turkish foreign policy appears to be centered on ensuring a position of leadership for Ankara in any future scenario faced by Syria. It’s a remarkable shift – from a moralistic approach to politics to a crude realpolitik outlook, which may require sacrificing others for the benefit of oneself.

Political realism is often riddled with ironies. While Turkey once threatened to go to war unless Syria expelled PKK’s Ocalan, it “is now supporting a man, Riad al Assad, whose ‘Free Syrian Army’ is doing exactly the same across the Syrian border,” according Ankara-based writer Jeremy Salt. Furthermore, “in confronting Syria…Turkey has put itself at odds with Syria’s ally, Iran, whose cooperation it needs in dealing with the PKK” (The Palestine Chronicle, November 18).

By claiming a position of leadership in the ongoing effort to topple the Syrian government, Turkey hopes to stave off unwanted repercussions from the Syria fallout – and thus control the outcome of that adventure. This explains why Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, has played the host of the Syrian National Council, and why the Free Syrian Army, which has launched several deadly attacks on Syrian security installations, is finding a safe haven in Turkish territories.

Politically, Turkey is also taking a lead role. Its foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, after a meeting with French foreign minister Alain Juppe, called for more international pressure against Damascus. “If they don’t listen we have to increase pressure to stop bloodshed in Syria,” he said. “But this pressure should not be unilateral pressure, all the relevant countries should act together” (The Financial Times, November 18).

What Davutoglu means by ‘act together’, and which countries are ‘relevant’ is open to speculation.

As for acting, Mohammad Riad Shaqfa, the leader of Syria’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, offered his own roadmap at a news conference in Istanbul. “If the international community procrastinates then more is required from Turkey as a neighbor to be more serious than other countries to handle this regime,” Shaqfa said. “If other interventions are required, such as air protection, because of the regime’s intransigence, then the people will accept Turkish intervention” (Turkey’s Hurriyet, November 17).

A detailed plan of that envisaged intervention was published in Turkey’s Sabah newspaper on the day of Shaqfa’s comments. According to Sabah, an intervention plan was put forth by ‘oppositional forces’. Its details include a limited no-fly-zone that progressively widened to include major Syrian provinces and a blockade of the city of Aleppo in the north (Sabah, November 17).

Considering the escalating violence in Syria, and the palpable lack of good intentions by all ‘relevant countries,’ Syria is teetering close to the abyss of prolonged civil war, divisions and unprecedented bloodletting.

“As negotiator and facilitator between the Syrian government and the internal opposition, Turkey has a role to play,” wrote Jeremy Salt, “but provoking Syria along the border, lecturing Bashar al-Assad as if he were a refractory provincial governor during Ottoman rule and giving support to people who are killing Syrian citizens is not the way ahead.”

Ramzy Baroud is editor of PalestineChronicle.com. He is the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle and “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London).

The “Decent Left” and the Libya Intervention by DAVID N. GIBBS

A Reply to Michael Bérubé


Even as NATO celebrates its victory over the Gaddafi dictatorship, there is growing unease about the operation. The Libyan intervention was supposed to be a model of legality, but ended up exceeding the terms set forth in Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized a no fly zone but not regime change. US involvement violated the War Powers Resolution. The intervention was presented as a truly international operation, but ended up being directed by Britain and France, the two main powers from the heyday of colonialism, thus adding to the unsavory appearance of the whole enterprise. The intervention was supposed to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, but ended up enabling one in Sirte, where there have been numerous executions of pro-Gaddafi loyalists. It was supposed to dissuade other tyrants from oppressing their own people, but in reality had no such effect.[1] Political repression in Syria actually increased after the intervention. The intervention has generated significant dangers to global security: The character of Western policy toward the Libyan despot – by first persuading Gaddafi to give up his nuclear weapons development program and then overthrowing him – has discouraged other countries from abandoning their own nuclear weapons programs. The intervention thus constitutes a setback for international efforts to curb nuclear proliferation. In addition, vast stocks of anti-aircraft missiles have been looted from Gaddafi’s warehouses in the course of the intervention; these have likely filtered into the world-wide arms market. And even the most hardened observers must be chilled at the fate of Gaddafi himself, who was apparently sodomized before he was killed. This was certainly not the “clean” overthrow it was supposed to be.

In this context, supporters of the intervention seek to shift discussion away from the embarrassing facts and lash out against those who disagree with their views. Michael Bérubé has created a stir recently with his article “Libya and the Left,” [please add link] soon to appear in print in The Point Magazine. This article defends the intervention, while it attacks writers who oppose it, with a special emphasis on attacking left-wing opponents of the intervention. Both Juan Cole and Brad DeLong recommend this article on their blog sites, while the onlineedition of The Economist also praises it.

Bérubé condemns what he terms the “addled left” and their “popular shibboleths about the war,” which includes the supposedly widespread view that “Gaddafi was a progressive in domestic or foreign policy” who was “justified in sending out the military to crush the protesters.” There is a strong insinuation throughout the article that most opponents of the NATO intervention were friends of the Gaddafi dictatorship. On his own blog, Cole agrees with Bérubé and extols the merits of his analysis which, according to Cole, exposes the left’s “Woolly thinking, outrageous lies, moon-eyed Gaddafi-worship,” among other sins.

And Bérubé criticizes those who question NATO’s motives for intervening. He is particularly incensed by allegations that Libya’s oil reserves – which are the ninth largest in the world – might have influenced the decision to intervene. Allegations that the NATO states might have acted on self interest are examples of mere “tropes that have been forged over the past four decades of antiwar activism,” and can thus be dismissed.

The article concludes by arguing for a “rigorously internationalist left” one that will support “the freedom of speech, the freedom to worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear,” and will do these things even where it “puts one in the position of supporting US policies.” There is a distinct tone of innuendo here — that the existing left is for the most part not internationalist, that it opposes freedom of speech and the like – but no evidence whatsoever.

True, Bérubé inserts intermittent statements that acknowledge a more complex picture and admit that the intervention can be opposed for legitimate reasons. But such qualifications appear brief and pro forma. For the most part, the article is a sweeping indictment against virtually all opponents of the intervention, mostly through insinuated slurs.

“Libya and the Left” will no doubt be cited by many who will nevertheless miss the point that the article is rambling, petty, and self-contradictory; that the most weighty “evidence” cited by Bérubé consists of extended quotes from Cole (who appears to have formed a mutual admiration society with Bérubé); that it cites few facts, and those it does cite are often cited tendentiously; that it focuses more on attacking the moral character of the anti-interventionist movement than on their substantive claims; and that overall, it presents a textbook case of a profoundly illogical ad hominem argument.

Let us now turn to the reality of the situation with regard to the Gaddafi dictatorship: In fact, there has been a problem of Western collaboration with the dictatorship. However, the problem was not one of leftist collaboration, which was relatively minor. The real sources of collaboration were the very same Western leaders who recently crushed Gaddafi — who had been Gaddafi supporters only a few months before. This history of collaboration provides vital context for understanding NATO’s recent intervention.

Here are the facts: Around 2003, Gaddafi essentially offered to abandon his radical policies, including his support for terrorism and his nuclear weapons development program, on the condition that the Western powers would end their adversarial stance and lift economic sanctions, which had been in place since the 1980s. He also offered to cooperate in the War on Terror. The US and European powers accepted this deal, and Gaddafi became a de facto ally. Internally, Gaddafi’s oppression of his people continued uninterrupted, but this was not a problem since Western officials were unconcerned about human rights.

It is important to emphasize that the Western collaboration with Gaddafi during this period was very close indeed. Several states sought to sell weapons to Gaddafi. The French in particular were trying to sell him fighter planes as late as January 2011, only two months before they began to bomb him. Ironically enough, the fighter plane the French sought to sell was the Rafale, which was later used as the main weapon of war against Gaddafi, once French policy changed. We should not be shocked by France’s cynical shifting of loyalties in this case, since France has had a long history of cynical arms dealing (with extensive sales to Libya in the 1970s).

Leaders of several NATO states in addition to France established close relations with Gaddafi, and his previous history of terrorism was forgotten. Western companies poured money into Libyan oil fields, while British MI-6 agents formed close relationships with Libyan security personnel. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the post-2003 dealings with Gaddafi concerned the practice of extraordinary rendition: We now know that the Central Intelligence Agency sent terrorist suspects to Libya, where they were tortured by Gaddafi’s thugs.

This sickening involvement with Libyan torture practices makes Dennis Kucinich’s pro-Gaddafi dalliances seem trivial in comparison.

And there was further collaboration: Nongovernmental institutions accepted Gaddafi money, with few qualms. The London School of Economics received a large contribution from the Gaddafi family, which aimed at improving their image in Britain. From the US, the Monitor Group consultancy arranged for prominent Americans such as Richard Perle to meet the Libyan dictator.

Thus, Western elites were perfectly comfortable with Gaddafi’s oppressive rule, including his use of torture. These states only broke with Gaddafi when his hold on power tottered, in response to the Arab Spring, and he ceased to be useful. He was no longer viewed as a reliable protector of Western access to Libya’s oil resources.

This shift from being pro-Gaddafi to anti-Gaddafi was undertaken with such suddenness and crass opportunism that the shift must be viewed as another iteration in the sordid history of realpolitik. And contrary to Bérubé’s claims, this collaboration was not undertaken primarily by the antiwar left. It was done by many of the same Western leaders who today are claiming the moral high ground in having overthrown the tyrant — who was considered a close ally only a few months before.

“The Left and Gaddafi” serves mainly to whitewash the history of official collaboration with the Gaddafi dictatorship, and it thus contributes to historical amnesia and foreign policy ignorance. Supporters of intervention may indulge Bérubé’s fantasy that leftists were the main supporters of Gaddafi, but this is a fantasy all the same.

The article also stands as a testament to the debasing of public discussion, whereby serious issues are trivialized through ad hominem attacks. Bérubé presents himself as part of the “decent left,” but he uses the same techniques as David Horowitz and the McCarthyite right.

David N. Gibbs is professor of history at the University of Arizona, who has published extensively on international relations, political economy, and US foreign policy. His latest book is First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).


Notes.
[1] See B. J. Bjornson, “Libya and the Left,” November 7, 2011, http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2011/11/libya-and-the-left.html

AF-PAK Sitrep by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

The Good, the Bizarre and the Ugly


It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”

To those readers who disagree with my opening line, I urge you to study Anthony Cordersman’s most recent situation report on the AF-PAK War, THE AFGHANISTAN- PAKISTAN WAR AT THE END OF 2011: Strategic Failure? Talk Without Hope? Tactical Success? Spend Not Build (And Then Stop Spending)? It was issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on November 15. Reading the report is heavy slogging but I urge readers to download and examine it — at the very least, take a few minutes to read the executive summary.

Now compare Cordesman’s systematic, detailed, and workmanlike analysis to the bizarre obscurantism peddled one week later, on 22 November, co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon (Brookings Institution) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (American Enterprise Institute) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled Defining Victory in Afghanistan.
O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz posit the bizarre thesis that the admittedly less than successful outcome against the FARC guerrillas in Columbia is a favorable model for justifying continuing business as usual in Afghanistan. Viewed through the refractions of their Columbian lens, O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz conclude, “Our current exit strategy of reducing American troops to 68,000 by the end of next summer and transferring full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014 is working. In a war where the U.S. has demonstrated remarkable strategic patience, we need to stay patient and resolute.”

Are O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz living on the same planet as Cordesman or do they live in some kind of parallel universe?
I submit it is latter. Here’s why -

Einstein showed how reasoning by analogy can be a very creative way of thinking, but it is also very dangerous, because bad analogies, if not rigorously tested against reality, can capture the imagination and cause one to see what one wants to see. This problem has been particularly evident in the case of understanding the highly evolved complex tribal cultures of Afghanistan, as Jonathan Steele shows in his just released book, Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground (Counterpoint, Berkeley, October 2011). Steele explains how one of the enduring features of America’s 30 year adventure in Afghanistan is a policy-making decision cycle, [ i.e., what military reformers refer to as the collective Observation - Orientation - Decision Action (OODA) Loop], grounded in an outlook [i.e., Orientation] that is shaped by false assumptions and mythical beliefs. The distorted Orientation causes decision makers and policy wonks to filter information in a way that causes them see what they want to see. When this happens, as I explained here, decisions and actions become progressively disconnected from reality and decision-makers become overloaded by confusion and disorder — a process we in the Pentagon used to call incestuous amplification.

The only innoculation against incestuous amplification is to destroy the “model” shaping the orientation with a blunt dose of cold reality, like the Cordesman Report — yet as O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz have so convincingly demonstrated, the minds of some people are beyond saving. A problem, of course, is that more people will read silly fantasies peddled in the Wall Street Journal than heavy tomes produced by serious analysts.

Cordesman’s report is also important for another reason. Notwithstanding the last ditch fantasies of O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz, an atmosphere of gloom is descending on Versailles, and the inevitable hunt for scapegoats to blame for the looming failure is in the offing. While Cordesman is unlikely to be a part of any finger pointing game, analyses like his (and others like Steele’s) will add fuel to the fire heating up the emerging political debate over “who lost Iraq and AFPAK?” We can expect that debate to go from the bizarre (like the O’Hanlon/Wolfowitz thesis) to the really ugly, given the unscrupulous know-nothing scorched-earth atmosphere currently so much in evidence in our contemporary politics.

Polls suggest withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan are more in tune with the majority wishes of the American public, which after ten years of costly futile war is understandably tired and is turning inward because of economic troubles at home. Yet polls also suggest the military is now the most “respected” institution of government–far more so than it was in the early 1970s; this is true despite (1) the fact that DoD is now the only federal agency that cannot pass at least part of the annual audit required explicitly by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 and implicitly by the Constitution and (2) that after ten years, its wars are sputtering aimlessly into an morass.

On the other hand, the military — really the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex or MICC — is also far more politicized and influential in domestic politics than it was in the 1970s; its PR machine, abetted by ubiquitous advertisements by defense contractors in the printed and electronic media, is also far more sophisticated today than it was 40 years ago, and militarism has insinuated itself far more deeply into our popular culture. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere, Eisenhower’s nightmare is upon us.

To wit: the recent debate over deficit reduction effectively took serious reductions in defense spending off the table. In fact, even though the Super Committee on deficit reduction just collapsed as many predicted it would, Pentagon officials have refused to even make contingency plans to cope with defense cutbacks caused by a sequester, and have decided instead to push back on Congress, in effect passing the pain onto social programs and Social Security and Medicare. Evidence is mounting that defense spending and “no tax increases” are now eclipsing Social Security and Medicare as third rails in American politics.

My adice, dear reader, is to get ready for another Vietnam-like “stab in the back” argument like that of the late 1970s when the generals blamed their strategic/grand-strategic defeat in Vietnam on politicians at home. That drumbeat in the 1970s, abetted by phony claims that budget cuts after Vietnam created a “hollow military,” when in fact the hollowness was a self-inflicted wound [1]⁠1, together with fantastical promises that new technologies would revolutionize the nature of war, plus the spreading of contracts to more and more congressional districts, fueled a political atmosphere that unleashed the huge and wasteful spending spree of the 1980s.

This time, a re-run of the stab-in-the-back argument is also likely to be abetted by an unstated racist undertone of being ‘stabbed by a black socialist president,’ (a totally phony charge) fueled discretely behind the scenes by the MICC. This kind of inuendo will very likely to gain traction, particularly among the Limbaugh/Beck crowd on the hard right, but more generally among angry blue collar white men who have seen their standard of living stagnate or decline and their social status diminish.

Obama and the Democrats will be targeted for the bulk of blame, although in the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama certainly bears a major part of the responsibility for Afghanistan, given his reckless decision to escalate the ground and air war in 2009. But the problems cited in Cordesman’s report did not build up in just three years, and its information helps us understand why blaming Obama and Democrats for ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’ is a phony charge — there is plenty of blame to go around. Nevertheless, it is a almost certain this charge will be a campaign plank of the Republicans in 2012.

Combine the likely intensification of the MICC’s ‘stab-in-the-back politics with the growing popular rage against austerity economics in the US and Europe, the increasing prospect of a double dip global recession or even a debt-driven deflation, and 2012 is shaping up to be a very dangerous year for the United States — particularly if Israel tries to take advantage of this mess by attacking Iran in the middle of an election year.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He be reached atchuck_spinney@mac.com


Notes
1 As I explained in my 1980 report, Defense Facts of Life (see Part I of Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch, Westview Press 1985) the so-called “hollow military” was a self inflicted wound caused by explicit internal decisions to cutback on readiness inorder to pay for modernization with increasingly costly and complex weapons. My report proved this point by showing how the Air Force’s tactical fighter force suffered from the same readiness problems as the rest of the military, even though the budget for the tactical fighter mission area increased dramatically in inflation adjusted terms after 1975.

Germany’s “Failed” Bond Auction by MIKE WHITNEY

Pushing the Eurozone to the Brink

“We are caught, it seems, in one of those self-reinforcing loops that almost always presage a collapse.”

– Michael Pettis, China Financial Markets


Germany’s “failed” bund auction on Wednesday was a real gamechanger. It means that Europe’s biggest and most powerful economy will not escape the contagion that’s swept across the south. Germany’s borrowing costs will rise and it’s finances will be put under a microscope. But that’s just the half of it. What’s roiling the markets is that investors are now pricing in the probability of a eurozone breakup. That’s what all the commotion is about; the nightmare scenario is beginning to unfold.

Here are the facts: Of the €6 billion in 10-year bonds that were offered at Wednesday’s auction, only €3.6 billion were purchased leaving the Bundesbank with the remaining €2.4 billion, which is 39 percent of the total allotment, the highest ratio on record.

The auction was, in the words of one trader “a complete disaster” mainly because it showed that Germany is not the safe haven that many thought it was. German debt has become a “risk asset” overnight just like that of Greece or Italy. (although to lesser degree) Investors are fleeing Europe altogether and moving their money into Gilts and US Treasuries. Take a look at this from the Wall Street Journal:

“Euro-zone leaders say they are determined to save the single currency. But the smart money is voting with its feet. First, short-term U.S. dollar-funding markets effectively closed, then the senior unsecured-bond markets shut down, then the interbank market. Now, corporate customers appear to be withdrawing their deposits from some countries’ banks. With an estimated €1.7 trillion ($2.29 trillion) of funding to roll over in the next three years, the stresses in the euro-zone banking system look doomed to get worse….

If eurozone leaders are serious about saving the euro, they must find ways to persuade the smart money to stay.” (“Europe’s Smart Money Votes With Its Feet”, Wall Street Journal)

So, the eurozone is experiencing a bankrun, only, so far, much of the money has merely shifted from the weaker countries to the stronger. Now that’s beginning to change. But don’t be deceived, the problem isn’t Germany’s debt-to-GDP ratio or its prospects for future growth. The problem is that it’s linked to other teetering sovereigns in a single currency suicide pact, and there’s no way to get out unscathed. Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian:

“Global investors headed for the eurozone exit on Thursday after leaders of the area’s three biggest economies squashed residual market hopes for a huge intervention by the European Central Bank (ECB) to solve the sovereign debt crisis….

Angela Merkel again ruled out any expanded role for the ECB and stamped down proposals for single, eurozone-wide “eurobonds” to share the risk of sovereign debt. The ECB, she said, was only responsible for monetary policy….

Merkel … agreed only that early agreement to boost the EU’s bailout fund, the European financial stability facility, could help resolve the immediate crisis…She reiterated the view she expressed to the Bundestag a day earlier that eurobonds or the collectivisation of sovereign risk were neither “necessary nor appropriate” and could function only at a later stage of fiscal union.” (“Fear sweeps markets as Germany rules out ECB intervention”, Guardian)

Merkel’s rejection of eurobonds and fiscal transfers is a death warrant for the eurozone. She also refuses to allow the ECB to act as lender of last resort which would stem the flight out of government bonds. Here’s what a senior trader at a US bank told the Financial Times:

“We are now seeing funds and clients wanting to get out of anything that is denominated in euros and that includes Bunds because they don’t know what will happen to monetary union.”

See? Germany may be an industrial powerhouse and have it’s house in order (economically), but that’s not going to matter if the capital flight continues. It will face the same excruciating reckoning as the others.

So, what’s the solution?

In truth, there are only two options; either move towards total political and fiscal integration (A United States of Europe) or scrap the euro-project altogether and dissolve the union. If policymakers continue to procrastinate (“the politics of dither”), then the market will impose its own solution which will involve a cascade of bank and corporate defaults, soaring unemployment, agonising deflation and a decade of severe depression.

So, is there any chance of a positive outcome to the EU debt crisis? Here’s how economist James Galbraith answered that question:

James Galbraith: “No, I don’t think so. To get there you would have to have a complete reversal of the ideas that presently govern Europe. You would have to have a much greater sense of solidarity, a greater willingness to put European funds into the periphery in a serious and sustained way, and you’d have to have a plan for their growth and development. None of those are presently in the offing.” (Daily Ticker)

EU leaders haven’t changed their minds about anything. In fact, they’ve rejected every idea that might have helped, which is why the eurozone will not pull out of its death spiral.

For the video of Galbraith see link:

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/europe-crisis-may-end-violent-blow-galbraith-161311592.html



MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

The Troubling Case of Saif Gadhafi by FRANKLIN LAMB

ICC Prosecutor’s Career Move Switches Horses and Legal Theories in Libya

A CounterPunch Exclusive

Zintan, Libya

Despite the claims of the National Transitional Council of Libya (NTC) that Saif al Islam Gadhafi, the apprehended subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant that ordered his transport to The Hague, is in a secure hidden location near Zintan, Libya, a town approximately 85 miles southwest of Tripoli, this is not the case.

Neither are the assurances by Steven Anderson, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) who on 11/23/11 announced that Saif al-Islam’s injuries had been “taken care of,” nor his profuse assurances that Saif is in good health. In point of fact, following the ICRC assurances, the Ukrainian-born Doctor Andrei Murakhovsky who lives in Zintan reported that “Saif’s wound is covered with gangrenous tissue and necrotic tissue.” He added that “This wound is not in good condition and requires amputation. His index finger has been ripped off at the level of the middle phalange (finger bone), the bones are all shattered. It’s the same thing with the thumb of that hand.” Dr. Murakhovsky told the Reuters news service.

The morning of 11/24/11, Libyan NTC Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib still insisted that “Saif al-Islam is receiving the best possible treatment, but for now he is not in the hands of the provisional central government and we don’t know where he is.”

Regarding Saif al Islam’s “secure and hidden location”, most people in the village of Zintan know where he is being held, as does this observer who visited a motley group of B-western movie types who are currently guarding and “protecting” Saif.

Although armed with a Power of Attorney from one of Saif’s family members to visit him, the group refused my request to visit Saif with the excuse that they had to consult their commander who was not expected to return for a few days since he was now the new NTC Libyan Defense Minister.

On the question of Saif’s health, there is increasing concern also because his guards claim they cannot take him to Zintan’s only hospital because someone would likely kill him in order to collect on the substantial rumored Qatar/NATO offered cash reward for whoever assassinates him thus presumably helping “the new Libya” and its allies avoid a messy trial.

Meanwhile, after what he claims in a change of heart, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, now professes that Libya, not The Hague, is the best place after all for Saif al Islam and his trial. Since its establishment by the United Nations in 2002, the ICC has had just one Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. To the reported expressed relief of many international defense lawyers, several ICC staff and ICC judges, plus legal commentators familiar with his prosecutorial work, the ICC will have his successor chosen next month in New York. This coming weekend in New York, the legal defense organization, Avocats Sans Frontiers (ASF, ie Lawyers Without Borders) will meet in order to try to agree on a successor to propose to the 18 ICC Judges who will decide.

Prosecutor Ocampo’s visit this week to Libya caused some raised eyebrows among the groups noted above when he suddenly announced that the ICC would not invoke its UN Security Council-granted power and proceed with Case # ICC 01/11. This case was opened at the ICC on March 3, 2011, having been assigned to the ICC by the UN Security Council following the preceding month’s uprising in Benghazi, Libya.

Speculation among some in The Hague, in Libya and from ASF lawyers is that knowing that he would not be re-elected for another term as ICC Prosecutor, due to among other reasons he has not won one case during his 9 year term, has repeatedly incurred the wrath of ICC judges for bringing cases which they ruled lacked sufficient evidence and his penchant for self-aggrandizing publicity and making inaccurate claims about cases and defendants that border on judicial misconduct, Ocampo decided to switch horses.

One egregious example of his making false representations is the current ICC case involving Saif al-Islam Gadhafi in which Ocampo made several inaccurate headline-grabbing statements over the past several weeks claiming to be negotiating “indirectly” with Saif al Islam to give himself up to the ICC. Saif has emphatically denied Ocampo’s grandstanding claims and presumably, were Ocampo to attempt to personally prosecute his case Saif’s legal team would immediately file a motion to replace Ocampo for cause, as provided by ICC rules.

Given these problems, Ocampo, according to someone who accompanied him during his visit this week to Libya, decided to accept a lucrative offer from the NTC to advise the oil-rich country on setting up a legal system to try Saif al Islam and others.

The assurances by Moreno-Ocampo, NATO officials and American UN Ambassador Susan Rice that Libya is currently fully capable of currently handling trials of former regime loyalists are nonsense. Rice exhibited ignorance and surprise here last weekend when she claimed not to know that Libya had the death penalty and would apply the death penalty in the ICC case if given the chance. The Libyan public’s apparent preference is for the death penalty by hanging in the two Libya ICC cases. This was the case with Rwanda, which is one reason the Ruanda Tribunal did not allow the government of Rwanda to conduct certain trials even though that government assured the UN it would not actually carry out a death penalty sentence. Libya has offered no such assurances to the ICC against the use of the death penalty nor has it submitted a legal challenge to ICC jurisdiction over the Saif al Islam or Abdullah Sanussi cases, as the Rome Statute requires.

Despite switching jobs, Ocampo has not lost interest in prosecuting the Saif al Islam case which he views as his best chance of finally winning at least an ICC related case, but not at The Hague where there is the possibility that Saif could be convicted, given Court rules of procedure and ICC legal staff resources that would actually assist an accused in presenting his defense before the court. Ocampo is said to be betting on gaining a victory in Saif’s high profile case by working with the NATO-created NTC government in Libya and running the prosecution as a behind the scenes “consultant” and helping Libya’s NTC keep the UN and ICC at bay while allowing the NTC to try both Saif’s case and that of Abdullah Sanussi if and when the latter is proven to have been captured. Ocampo is said to relish the job of becoming the “Father of Libya’s new legal system.” Ocampo is now explaining that it was never his role “to tell Libyan officials how to hold a fair trial and the standard of the ICC is that it has to be a judicial process that is not organized to shield the suspect and I respect that it’s important for the cases to be tried in Libya.” He then added, “There are so many different traditions, it is difficult to say what is fair.”

No sooner had the surprising news and Ocampo’s sudden vagueness about what constitutes a fair trial begun to ricochet around the Internet than this observer received an email from an international criminal lawyer whose office is two blocks from the Carl Moultrie Courthouse in Washington, DC. The American lawyer was appalled: “Paying Ocampo as a consultant for the new Libyan government on criminal trial procedures is a ridiculous thought/idea. He has no idea of fair trial rights and has not achieved a conviction in his nearly 9 years at the ICC.”

Nor were the ICC judges thrilled at the perceived betrayal. The ICC quickly fired off a reminder to Ocampo, to the new Libyan government and the media that it is the ICC judges, and not the ICC Prosecutor, who will decide whether a case will be held in The Hague or if the country where the alleged crimes occurred and only they will decide if Libya has the ability to conduct a fair trial. The ICC is signaling that the Ocampo-generated international headlines to the contrary notwithstanding, the issue of trial venue in Libya has not settled in ICC case # 01/11.

Prosecutor Ocampo knows well that once the ICC decides to open an investigation of a case, national courts may not investigate that case and are relieved from their obligation to do so. In addition, since the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Libyan defendants, all states – including Libya – are obliged to cooperate fully with the Court. 

Following the public dressing down from The Hague, Ocampo has now retreated a bit and told CNN on 11/23/11 that: “ The only condition is the new Libyan government has to present their position to the International Criminal Court judges and the judges will decide if the case can be prosecuted in Libya. Libya will present evidence to ICC judges that the country can hold the trial, and the judges will decide if they are satisfied,” Ocampo explained.

The ICC, if it takes up the question as expected, should rule in the developing Saif al Islam case, precisely as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found in ruling against that country’s request for trial jurisdiction, although like Libya today, Rwanda claimed to have “modern functioning court system.” The reason is that an initial review of Libya’s criminal judicial system and discussion with Libyan criminal defense lawyers as well as with international criminal defense lawyers with years of experience in international tribunals’ practice, shows that it is very clear that persons accused of serious crimes in Libya currently do not have even the most minimal judicial rights that are required by international norms. Today Libya defendants do not enjoy adequate legal representation, financial support for indigent accused, travel and investigation support for defense teams, security for defense teams. Libya’s central and local governments place impediments curtailing defense teams in the discharge of their functions.

An admittedly cursory inquiry in Libya among lawyers here also reveal nonexistent or inadequate accommodation and transport arrangements for witness, as well as a lack of arrangements for protection of witnesses before, during and after testifying in court. In addition, the NTC is engaging in a pattern of threatening potential witnesses preparing to testify against NATO in another case. Similarly the NTC is failing to provide safe and secure travel for Libyan witnesses living abroad, including in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, Niger, and Egypt. Interviews with Libyan lawyers and officials as well as visits to detention facilities in Libya reveal that conditions are not in compliance with international standards and that there is widespread torture of prisoners in Libya and threats against the families of prisoners.

Franklin Lamb is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com