Category: the fear trade
Julian Assange recently addressed the Oxford Union (UK) via videolink from the Ecuadorian Embassy, see earlier interpretOr post, and the accompanying audio (of his speech) via YouTube is currently muted. So, for the record, here is a synopsis of what was actually said (source: Oxford Union)
Julian Assange begins his address by saying that in 2007-08 he was looking at what was happening in Iran. He says that a lot of people did good work, especially Thomas Fingar in:Trying to correct the movement towards war with Iran based on lies.He says one of the worst modern deceptions of the western world happened only in 2003 where we went to war with Iraq based on lies where over 100, 000 people were killed and millions of Iraqi refugees displaced as a result.In 2008 WikiLeaks published Iraq's classified rules of engagement for the US army. In those rules there was a section that permitted a border skirmish to start up that allowed US troops to go into Iran under a variety of circumstances. Because of the leak Iran held a press conference saying that in no way are the US allowed into their territory. After this a second rules of engagement was published omitting the border skirmish. Between 20% and 50% of all wars have started as a result of these border skirmishes. 45 hostile military bases surrounds Iran's borders, because of this there is a constant fear of being invaded making for a very tense atmosphere in the country.He makes the point that WikiLeaks is not against intelligence agencies but mentions that corruption within intelligence agencies is born out of secrecy.Intelligence analysts mustn't be held responsible to the public through cultural bias but must be responsible to historical record.He mentions the WikiLeaks movie saying that it's a mass propaganda attack against the WikiLeaks organisation, also it fans the flames for war on Iran as is demonstrated in the opening scene of the film that is read out by Assange who has the script. The movie shows Iran as having an active nuclear program when intelligence reports have revealed in high confidence that this is not the case.Filmed on Wednesday 23rd January 2013
(London: HRW/Amnesty) – Iran’s judiciary should quash death sentences against five members of Iran’s Ahwazi Arab minority and immediately cancel their execution, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said today. The sentences were handed down by a revolutionary court and upheld by the country’s Supreme Court on January 9, 2013.
The five men – Mohammad Ali Amouri, Sayed Jaber Alboshoka and his brother Sayed Mokhtar Alboshoka, Hashem Sha’bani Amouri, and Hadi Rashidi (or Rashedi) – are all activists in Iran’s Arab-majority Khuzestan province, in southwest Iran. A branch of the Revolutionary Court sentenced them to death on terrorism-related charges following an unfair trial in July 2012. On January 18, authorities informed families gathered outside Karoun Prison in the south-western city of Ahvaz that the five men had been transferred out of the prison. Their whereabouts are unknown…click here for more on this story @ HRW
more interpretOr pieces on Iran:
‘rOmney betrays Iran protesters —really’ (world war 4 report 23/10/12)January 24th, 2013 | by Chris Woods and Alice K Ross | Published in All Stories, Covert Drone War, Top Stories |
A UN investigation into the legality and casualties of drone strikes has been formally launched, with a leading human rights lawyer revealing the team that will carry out the inquiry.
The announcement came as the latest reported US drone strike in Yemen was said to have mistakenly killed two children.
Ben Emmerson QC, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, told a London press conference that he will lead a group of international specialists who will examine CIA and Pentagon covert drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The team will also look at drone strikes by US and UK forces in Afghanistan, and by Israel in the Occupied Territories. In total some 25 strikes are expected to be examined in detail. The senior British barrister will work alongside international criminal lawyers, a senior Pakistani judge and one of the UK’s leading forensic pathologists, as well as experts from Pakistan and Yemen. Also joining the team is a serving judge-advocate with the US military ‘who is assisting the inquiry in his personal capacity.’ Emmerson told reporters: ’Those states using this technology and those on whose territory it is used are under an international law obligation to establish effective independent and impartial investigations into any drone attack in which it is plausibly alleged that civilian casualties were sustained.’ But in the absence of such investigations by the US and others, the UN would carry out investigations ‘in the final resort’, he said. Based at City University, London, the Bureau works in collaboration with other groups to get its investigations published and distributed. To date, TBIJ have worked with BBC File On Four, BBC Panorama, BBC Newsnight, Channel 4 Dispatches, Channel 4 News, al Jazeera English, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, Le Monde and numerous others.
Assange mentions the WikiLeaks movie saying that it's a mass propaganda attack against the WikiLeaks organisation, also it fans the flames for war on Iran as is demonstrated in the opening scene of the film that is read out by Assange who has the script. The movie shows Iran as having an active nuclear program when intelligence reports have revealed in high confidence that this is not the case.
Filmed on Wednesday 23rd January 2013
“I’m not anti-Arab. I’m not anti-Israeli either. I really feel rather strongly about the Palestinian refugees. Sorry to get serious and political, but there’s an old American saying: ‘you can’t make an omlette without breaking eggs.’ Why is it always other people’s eggs they have to break? So my stand on the Middle East situation is very ambivalent, I’m afraid. I feel more for the people whose eggs are broken.”
Marty Feldman, circa ’73.
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves,”
Aaron Swartz
Since the George W. Bush administration’s first use of targeted assassinations via drone strikes, aimed at Al Qaeda and associated forces, in 2002, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reports at least 178 innocent children (up to age 17) have died directly as a result of U.S. drone policy.
A Pakistani mental health professional shared his worries about the long-term ramifications of such psychological trauma on children:
The biggest concern I have as a [mental health professional] is that when the children grow up, the kinds of images they will have with them, it is going to have a lot of consequences. You can imagine the impact it has on personality development. People who have experienced such things, they don’t trust people; they have anger, desire for revenge . . . So when you have these young boys and girls growing up with these impressions, it causes permanent scarring and damage.source: Effects of U.S. Drone Strikes on Children in Targeted Areas, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, (2012).
Justice Steven Rares:
Even though I have not found that the combination was as wide as Mr Slipper alleged in his points of claim, the evidence established that there was a combination involving Mr Ashby, Ms Doane and Mr Brough of that kind. Mr Ashby acted in combination with Ms Doane and Mr Brough when commencing the proceedings in order to advance the interests of the LNP and Mr Brough. Mr Ashby and Ms Doane set out to use the proceedings as part of their means to enhance or promote their prospects of advancement or preferment by the LNP, including by using Mr Brough to assist them in doing so. And the evidence also established that the proceedings were an abuse of the process of the Court for the reasons I have given. Accordingly, I am satisfied that the exceptional situation that enlivens the Court’s power to dismiss (or stay) proceedings as an abuse has been proved to the heavy standard required: Williams 174 CLR at 529.
Ashby v Commonwealth of Australia (No 4) [2012] FCA 1411: p75
Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, has raised the issue of the human casualties of US drones, in the wake of the tragic and senseless events in Connecticut…
“If the victims of Mr Obama’s drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms which suggest that they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats”, “since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.”
Monbiot’s piece was published in yesterday’s Guardian and a fully referenced version of this article can be found at monbiot.com
…plus, feel free to check out earlier interpretOr pieces on drones..
| doodlebugs tO drones: terror from the sky |
| WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD | |
| FRIDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2012 14:39 | |
| On Thursday, Bradley Manning, one of the foremost prisoners of conscience in the world today, testified in open court — the first time his voice has been heard since he was arrested, confined and subjected to psychological torture by the U.S. government.
An event of some newsworthiness, you might think. Manning has admitted leaking documents that detailed American war crimes in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He has been held incommunicado for more than 900 days by the Obama administration. Reports of his treatment at the hands of his captors have sparked outrage, protests and concern around the world. He was now going to speak openly in a pre-trial hearing on a motion to dismiss his case because of that treatment. Surely such a moment of high courtroom drama would draw heavy media coverage, if only for its sensationalistic aspects. But if you relied on the nation’s pre-eminent journal of news reportage, the New York Times, you could have easily missed notice of the event altogether, much less learned any details of what transpired in the courtroom. The (New YorK) Times sent no reporter to the hearing, but contented itself with a brief bit of wire copy from AP, tucked away on Page 3, to note the occasion...CLICK HERE FOR THIS PIECE IN FULL @ CHRIS FLOYD… Chris Floyd is an American writer based in the UK, and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. His blog, “Empire Burlesque,” can be found at www.chris-floyd.com. |
By Eliot Spitzer | Posted Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, at 10:52 AM ET @ Slate
“…The shoddy ethics of Murdoch’s British news operation has been exposed. There is now a huge question mark that hangs over his American news empire. Will his American interests be investigated in the same fashion? At this point, it’s beyond the proper thing to do. It is necessary…”
Members of the Iraq War Inquiry Group:
- Paul Barratt, former Deputy Secretary, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; former Secretary, Department of Defence
- Rod Barton, former Director of Intelligence (Science and Technology), Defence Intelligence Organisation; former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq.
- Dr Alison Broinowski, former diplomat; Visiting Fellow, Department of Asian Studies, ANU; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wollongong
- Adjunct Professor Richard Broinowski, Media and Communications, University of Sydney; former diplomat.
- Michelle Fahy, editor and writer
- Andrew Farran, International Lawyer; Business Consultant. Formerly with Departments of External Affairs and Defence, and Law Faculty Monash University
- General (ret’d) Peter Gration, former Chief of the Australian Defence Force
- Dr Jenny Grounds, President, Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia)
- Professor John Langmore, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne; former MP for Fraser; former director of UN Division of Social Policy and Development, and representative of the ILO to the UN
- Edward Santow, CEO, Public Interest Advocacy Centre
- Lt Gen (ret’d) John Sanderson, former Chief of the Australian Army, and former Governor of WA.
- Professor Gerry Simpson, Professor of International Law, University of Melbourne
- Professor Richard Tanter, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Melbourne; Senior Research Associate, Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability
- Professor Ramesh Thakur, Professor of International Relations, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Adjunct Professor, Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law, Griffith University; former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General
- Dr Sue Wareham, Vice-President, Medical Association for Prevention of War
- Garry Woodard, former ambassador; Senior Fellow, Dept of Politics, University of Melbourne
- Tim Wright, Australian director, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Tony Abbott needs a timely reminder of his craven form re demonising the defenceless. As he and his moronic inferno of negative shadows attack the character of Australia’s first woman PM, Julia Gillard, and continue to peddle their mantra of “stop the boats”, fear and bile, let’s cast our minds back to October 2007…
…Abbott’s moral bankruptcy was displayed by his actions as Federal Health minister during the ghastly Howard era:
The Sydney Morning Herald, Age, ABC and other Oz media reported that in October 2007, whilst Federal Health Minister…
Abbott accuses asbestos fighter of political stunt:
THE Federal Government last night picked a fight with a national hero, after the Health Minister, Tony Abbott, attacked the dying leader of the campaign to win justice for the victims of asbestos poisoning.Mr Abbott accused Bernie Banton, who three years ago received an Order of Australia for his efforts to get compensation from James Hardie, of being involved in a political stunt.
Mr Banton and members of the Construction Union protested outside Mr Abbott’s electorate office in Manly yesterday, because the minister has yet to approve a drug, Alimta, which can prolong the lives of mesothelioma sufferers, for the pharmaceutical benefits scheme.
Mr Banton, who is wheelchair-bound and dying of the disease, got off his sick bed to make the journey across Sydney yesterday but Mr Abbott left before the protesters arrived. Last night the minister told Channel Nine: “Look, it was a stunt, let’s be upfront about this. I know Bernie is very sick but just because a person is sick doesn’t mean that he is necessarily pure of heart in all things.”
But last night Mr Banton returned fire at the minister. “What a flea,” he told the Herald. “What a gutless human being. He wasn’t game enough to front up and face the very people his Government is denying treatment to.”
Andrew West, SMH, October 31, 2007
A health minister who attacks a terminally ill man becomes shadow leader and a stain on Oz politics. A nasty, moral coward called Tony Abbott.
“We had to fight even for the right of dying cancer victims to get a speedy trial. I recall sitting in the WA Supreme Court in an interlocutory hearing for the test cases involving Wittenoom miners Mr Peter Heys and Mr Tim Barrow. CSR was represented by Ms Julie Bishop (then Julie Gillon). (She) was rhetorically asking the court why workers should be entitled to jump court queues just because they were dying.”
Australian Doctor magazine, 2007
Tuesday 20th November 2012
Transcript – 2GB Alan Jones Show
Friday 26th October 2012
Transcript – 2GB Alan Jones Show
Friday 13th July 2012
Wednesday 30th May 2012
Transcript – 2GB Alan Jones Show
Thursday 10th May 2012
Meanwhile, in the world beyond dodgy victorian-wanker air pollution, the United Nations announced Friday November 23rd 2012:
“Across the region… the number of Syrian refugees in surrounding countries now stands at 442,256, an increase of more than 213,000 since the beginning of September,” UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards told reporters in Geneva
| Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York (UNITED NATIONS) |
PRESS CONFERENCE BY UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON HUMAN RIGHTS
IN OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY
“The whole issue of Palestinian self determination is at risk here,” saidRichard Falk, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian occupied territories since 1967. “The longer the process is delayed, the less realistic it is to believe that these settlers and the large settler population can be removed in such a way as to create a Palestinian State.”
Mr. Falk briefed correspondents after presenting his annual report to the General Assembly’s Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural), in which he encouraged a boycott of United States industry giants Caterpillar Inc., Hewlett Packard and Motorola, Israeli cosmetic firm Ahava, Cemex of Mexico, Veolia Environment of France, G4S of the United Kingdom and Volvo Group of Sweden, among others, and for civil society to join that effort (See Press Release GA/SCH/4048).
He said the focus on the business community was partly an expression of frustration over the failure to persuade Israel to comply with its fundamental legal obligations and the ineffectiveness of the United Nations efforts to condemn expansion of the settlements, which had grown 5.3 per cent on average annually in the past decade, and now covered more than 40 per cent of the West Bank.
In the last year alone, 15,000new settlers had taken root in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while Israeli officials had moved to legalize some 100 outposts previously considered unlawful under Israeli law, he said, and added that settler violence against the local Palestinian population in those areas was growing.
“This is an attempt to reach out beyond the intergovernmental and international institutional system,” Mr. Falk said, stressing that illegal settlements were “a core concern of those that seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict” through the two-State solution.
Asked if creation of an independent Palestinian State was still viable, he said that notion was in severe jeopardy and that it was much harder to envision how a sustainable peace could be achieved through the proposed two-State solution.
Such a solution was crucial for ensuring Palestinian rights and reducing regional tensions and violence.”
“Being in isolation to me felt like I was on an island all alone…dying a slow death from the inside out…”
Letter from Kyle B. (pseudonym), from California to Human Rights Watch, 2012.
Human Rights Watch and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) have just released ‘Growing Up Locked Down’, a 141 page report examining the plight of children in solitary confinement in US prisons. Based on research in both US jails and prisons in five states – Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania – and correspondence with young people in 14 others, this report is freely and publicly available here @ HRW.org:
“The isolation of solitary confinement causes anguish, provokes serious mental and physical health problems, and works against rehabilitation for teenagers…”
Here in Australia, independent public broadcaster the ABC, has recently reported on child detention in the state of Victoria – an excerpt from Josie Taylor’s 31 Oct 2012 story, ‘Aboriginal teen kept in solitary confinement’ follows:
Victorian lawyers and the Child Safety Commissioner have raised serious concerns about a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy who was held in solitary confinement at one of the state's adult jails.The teen spent nearly four months in solitary confinement at the Charlotte maximum security unit inside Port Phillip Prison while under the protection of the Department of Human Services (DHS). Legal experts now want to know how many other juveniles are inside adult jails...
More recent reports, including a social worker’s estimate, say up to six children are being kept in solitary confinement in a maximum-security adult prison in Victoria, (Oz), …on an island all alone?
"Australia has 40% of the world's uranium, all of it on indigenous land. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just been to India to sell uranium to a government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and whose enemy, Pakistan, is also a non-signatory. The threat of nuclear war between them is constant. Uranium is an essential ingredient of nuclear weapons. Gillard's deal in Delhi formally ends the Australian Labor Party's long-standing policy of denying uranium to countries that reject the NPT's obligation "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament"
…click here for this piece in full @ JohnPilger.com…
Journalist John Pilger describes the augmented Anglo-American government and media campaign against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as Assange is granted political asylum by Ecuador and remains in that country’s London embassy.
click here for his piece in full @ JohnPilger.com
Here @ the interpretOr, we seem to recall that Assange and wikileaks won the 2011 Walkley award (Oz) for “Most outstanding contribution to journalism”…
and here’s background excerpt from JohnPilger.com:
“…Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated freelance ‘agency’ in Italy…and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.He became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain’s highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America’s poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968…”
another jfreos pic…
an interpretOr had a bad dream recently and it went a bit like this...
…Aymen…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr…
“Look here, Rhoades. After I speak, you’re going to hear from Secretary Ann Coulter. That’s a good thing. I think it’s important to get the views of moderates – the likes of she and Rupert Murd…moderate views around the new, the new cabinet table vista.”
uhhh…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr.
“My himmediate changes in federal welfare-to-work rules…they will…they will end a culture of deeependency and restore a culture of good hard work…Foxcon is a beacon on the sacred pathway…’ndeedy…His blueprint, no less.”
uhhh…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr.
“Rhoades…Anne, geee, Missus Pruzudunt Anne…she…Anne is my sacred torch-bearer, my torch-bearer…my bearer on the journey…from the roadmap…quite sincerely, fellow Ameri… At the end of the day…what I took from Bain was more than mere money…more than how ta turn a buck…I acquired a vision…a sacred vision that led me here across the hard rugged terrain, of the ravine…that…ruggedly constitutes the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…
uhhh…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr.
“I am here now. We shall move forwards..move forward on a united front…The business model of the prison is more to me than mere abstract notion…a fantasy…it is nothing short of…of a miracle…the fruit of His toil…’nd Foxcon is sweet poetry…in motion…’nda doublin’ Guantanamo pronto…Cheney poised ‘n preenin on Iran..Bibi’s a fan-doodly on side. Phase Four in motion…we’re kickun asss, Rhoades.
uhhh…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr.
“Haaharrr…heads – you lose…tails, I win.”
uhhh…muster pruzudunt…President Romney, surrr. yes surrrr…
Al Jazeera’s Andrew Thomas reports from Sydney on the plight of 70 North Koreans who have fled their troubled country for Australia, where they’ve found that the country’s restrictions – that no one with dual citizenship may apply for an Australian passport – means they might soon be forced to leave to face an uncertain future in South Korea where the sustainability of their safety is a matter of concern…
1980.……..”President elect, Ronnnaldddd…Reagannnn!”?!!!? (?!!!?..what the…not Carter…..oh, bollocks…not good at all…)
1984…”Presi—dent Ronnnaldddd…Reagannnnnnnn!” (?!!!? again…what the fxxx…he’s a mad, bad B-movie fascist)
1988…”Presidunnnt elect…Georororge Bush!!!” (...the man is an ex CIA oil-nazi…son of “Hitler’s banker”..Prescott Bu…nohhhhhhhh)
2000…Presidunnnt elect…Georororge Doubleyoooooo Bush!!!” (this dangerous moron…Gore…what the friggin’…? We are all doomed…the planet is dead…)
2004…Presidunnnt…Georororge Doubleyoooooo Bush!!!” (duhhhhhhhhh…I…just…give…up…!)
2012…Presidunnnt elect…
breaking news @ the Refugee Action Coalition:
The move by the Gillard government to excise the Australian mainland from the migration zone is “an absurd throwback to the draconian policies of the Howard government.” “The blind application of the so-called ‘no advantage’ policy has led the government to implement yet another element of failed Liberal Party policy. Excising the mainland is a nonsense. Thousands of asylum seekers are arriving at excised places. The Minister can excise all the territory he likes, but the question is, ‘What is he going to do with the thousands of asylum seekers arriving at excised places who are languishing in Australian detention centres and on Nauru?’ ”said Ian Rintoul, spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition. “The government is desperate to be seen to be doing something, but excising the mainland is worse than nothing. The government’s off-shore processing arrangements are already in tatters…”
click here for more on this story @ the Refugee Action Coalition
Human Rights Watch (see our interpretOr link roll) adds that the Australian and Indonesian governments should urgently take effective measures to protect migrant children at high risk of abuse while in Indonesia en route to Australia.
“Threats, imprisonment, torture and even murder are used to curtail free speech, particularly that of regime critics and activists. This is particularly common in the most authoritarian countries such as China or Iran. The murder of journalists and political activists in authoritarian states remains frequent and the arrest and beating of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei changed the country’s political landscape by showing that no one, however famous or influential, was beyond the state’s reach….” click through here to piece in full @ the Index on Censorship (UK)
“There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize — I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to — segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence…”
Martin Luther King, Jnr.
“Social Justice and the Emerging New Age” address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University, (18 December 1963)
‘…during his time as head honcho of Bain Capital, there were no women partners in the firm. Today, only 4 of 49 partners are women. The candidate did mention that women need special accommodations “if” they work.
And just as the poorly chosen words rolled out of Romney’s mouth, social media users latched on to the phrase. #Bindersfullofwomen trended on Twitter while an industrious user created an@Romneys_Binder account; it currently boasts more than 14,000 followers. “Binders full of women” was the “third-fastest rising search on Google during the televised debate,” according to the Daily Beast.’
Submitted by Bill Weinberg @ ww4 report on Tue, 10/23/2012 – 00:2
We aren’t being ironic in the slightest. The only irony is that Mitt Romney posed as the protector of the Iranian protesters when by doing exactly that he actually utterly betrayed them—placing them at greater risk of repression and generally weakening their position within Iran. Here’s what he said, according to the New York Times transcript:
And then the president began what I've called an apology tour of going to — to various nations in the Middle East and — and criticizing America. I think they looked at that and saw weakness. Then when there were dissidents in the streets of Tehran, the Green Revolution, holding signs saying, is America with us, the president was silent. I think they noticed that as well. And I think that when the president said he was going to create daylight between ourselves and Israel that — that they noticed that as well.
Now this is a bigger betrayal of Iran’s protesters than anything Obama could ever do. Portraying them as looking to the US for sponsorship or protection, and linking them to US imperial interests in the Middle East, and even, implicitly, to Israel! Nothing could make Ahmadinejad happier than this verbiage, which plays right into his cynical strategy of tarring the protesters as dupes or pawns of the United States. Obama, in contrast, did the Iranian opposition a great service when he cut off money to the Iran Democracy Fund, over the outraged protests of the neocons.
Bill Weinberg is an award-winning 25-year veteran journalist in the fields of human rights, indigenous peoples, ecology and war. He is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso Books, 2000) and War on the Land: Ecology and Politics in Central America (Zed Books, 1991). As a correspondent and contributing editor for Native Americas, Cornell University’s quarterly journal of hemispheric indigenous issues, he won three awards from the Native American Journalists Association for his reportage from Nicaragua to Arizona. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, The Village Voice, NACLA Report on the Americas, Middle East Policy, Al Jazeera, Yes! Magazine, Indian Country Today, The Ecologist
Iran and the bOmb: more wag the dog? (the interpretOr: Nov. 2011)
November 28, 2011
October 18, 2012 9:00 AM ET
Mitt Romney clearly wants to run away from the Bush legacy of unnecessary war, budget-busting tax cuts for the rich and economic collapse. When a town-hall debate questioner finally forced the GOP nominee to directly compare himself to Dubya earlier this week, Romney insisted: “President Bush and I are different people.” But place the two men’s biographies side by side, and the similarities that emerge are not just striking, they’re uncanny…
click here for piece in full @ Rolling Stone (US)
…and here @ the interpretOr, we view Romney as a disingenuous, oleaginous and highly dangerous Reagan/Bush Mk II figure of fear and loathing, with a bulging Swiss bank account, private jet and bizarre Tupperware fetish…
Go on then Fones, put it to the test then, if you’re so damn sure! Go on, you potato of a man. Wretched, viscious…potato…bastard.
Ohhh, what vile scum duth I hear before me? Just crawl back to your microbiotical vegetable garden and yer…and yer friggin’ mung beans, you, you…
So to what, exactly, do you attribute global warming, ehh? You overpaid, foul-mouthed bigot, you…
Foul mouthed, foul mouthed?? I’ll let you jolly well know, that by MY calculations, human beings produce a mere, trifling 0.000001% of carbon dioxide – ya know – ceee ohhh tooo – in the earth’s atmosphere. 0.000001 percentile points…
Yeahh, right. And I’m a banana.
That you may be. Climate change…climate change is caused by the seasons. The SEASONS, man. Autumn, summer…err, errr…
Have you totally lost it, Fones?
Winter. Winter and autumn. Look, don’t you know WHO I AM. I’m Fones, NORB FONES!!!!
( for more Norb Fones: Norb Fones: mOnster of talkback… “well, hello Tony” )
I remember as a young kid asking my lovely English grandma – “granny, what was the most scary thing about the war?”
…and she answered immediately and unequivocably – “the Doodlebugs, darling…the Doodlebugs.”
– “oh, what are those?”
“V2 rockets, love. I was back in London with your mum and aunties and grandpa was still at sea. Mister Hitler fired them over the Channel and they’d come down when they ran out of fuel…they’d explode and were very powerful. Absolutely dreadful.”
– “very, very bad, then?”
“Well, yes, you’d hear noise in the sky…and then if it became suddenly silent….that meant the rocket had run out of fuel…the silence was very, very frightening.”
– “oh.”
This reaction came from a modest, strong and resilient woman who had survived an unexploded bomb descending through her sitting room, raised four kids and endured the pain of separation – her husband, my grandpa, on Arctic patrol, dodging U-boats, as best he could.
I was reflecting on this recently when I came across the following….
A new joint report, Living Under Drones (2012), is by Stanford University’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, and New York University School of Law’s Global Justice Clinic. The 165-page study looks at key aspects of the CIA’s drone programme – its legal basis, how strikes are reported, their strategic implications – and how civilians are affected:
Men, women and children are subjected to almost constant trauma – including fear of attack, severe anxiety, powerlessness, insomnia and high levels of stress – says a nine month investigation into CIA drone strikes in Pakistan by two top US university law schools. More than 130 ‘victims, witnesses and experts’ were interviewed in Pakistan for the study.
The new study heavily challenges US government claims that few civilians have died in CIA drone strikes, saying that there is ‘significant evidence’ to the contrary. As the report notes in its executive summary: ‘In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false.’
Alternet’s Nancy L. Cohen:
“One winter day, far along into her pregnancy with her second child, 21-year-old Peggy Hayes received a phone call from Willard Mitt Romney. He wanted to talk to her, he said. Could he come over?
Hayes, the divorced, unmarried mother of a 3-year-old daughter, was struggling as a nurse’s aide in a working-class suburb of Boston. She had little in common with the successful Bain executive, but the request wasn’t as odd as it might seem. Hayes was a Mormon. Romney was her bishop. Romney walked into her small apartment, made small talk and then commanded her to give her baby up for adoption after it was born. He was her bishop, and as she knew, Mormonism disapproved of single motherhood. Hayes said no.
“Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,” Romney said, according to Hayes in an interview with Boston Globe journalists Michael Kranish and Scott Helman .
Romney denied he made that threat, although he did not dispute the incident.
click here for more on this story…
This interpretOr would like to add that broadsheet Boston Globe not given to flights of fancy or sensationalism…a Romney presidency would be a catastrophe for humanity…it would be like Dubbya on steroids…another sheer bloody nightmare…WAKE UP, AMERICA…
An interpretOr heard Wayne Swan say this on RN (Oz) a few weeks back….
“Changes start long before they
become statistics”
Coming from the Oz Treasurer, quite a refreshing contrast to the voodoo-economic bull and conformist, fear-twaddle peddled by the Opposition and the Sheridan, Christopher Cheeseman chorus in the ghastly Caucasian…
Concerned about US Republican “cranks and crazies”, Swan’s seemingly not too taken with the book of Mor(m)on either…Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz may be more his thing… come to think of it, he’s shown a bit of oomph on Gina-greedy-guts and not-so-‘fair’-dinkum Andy too…wonder if he’ll join some of us in our efforts to send Sheridan, Howard, Blair et al to Guantanamo, via the ICC in the Hague? Now, that really would be a change.
more here @ the book of Mor(m)on: a histOry
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 19. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948, was the result of the experience of the Second World War. With the end of that war, and the creation of the United Nations, the international community vowed never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again. World leaders decided to complement the UN Charter with a road map to guarantee the rights of every individual everywhere. The document they considered, and which would later become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was taken up at the first session of the General Assembly in 1946.
on religiOn…
“I conceive some scattered notions about a superior power to be of a singular use for the common people, as furnishing excellent materials to keep children quiet when they grow peevish, and providing topics of amusement in a tedious winter-night.”
Jonathan Swift, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, (1708).
The Nation / By JoAnn Wypijewski
Every once in a while, a situation arises that so completely captures the spirit of the time—in this case, the horror moving like an amoeba under the surface of our pleasant days, our absurd distractions, our seemingly serious politics—that ordinary assumptions, ordinary arguments and their limited conclusions serve only to obliterate honesty, and so any hope of grappling with the real. Such is the case of Julian Assange now.
“With Assange, the political context is the totalizing immorality of the national security state on a global scale.”
click here to the piece in whole @ alternet….
The interpretOr adds that the New York Times, Boston Globe and other US broadsheets reporting that the offensive video that has been the catalyst of this weeks anti-American riots across the Middle East was “promoted by a shadowy assortment of right-wing Christians in the United States” and linked to book burning Florida pastor, Terry Jones.
Wag the Dog?
An app that uses the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s covert war data , to alert people to the far reaches of the US government’s secret wars, has been blocked from Apple’s app store.
Drones+, the creation of NYU student Josh Begley, was meant to be a simple way of notifying users whenever US drones struck somewhere in the world. But Apple decided this was not acceptable for its customers. After rejecting the app on the grounds of its design and functionality, the US tech giant finally took exception to its content.
The interpretOr would like to add that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has great credibility, and works in collaboration with other news groups to get its investigations published and distributed. To date, BIJ have worked with BBC File On Four, BBC Panorama, BBC Newsnight, Channel4 Dispatches, Channel4 News, The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Le Monde and numerous others.
In correspondence seen by the Bureau, the US tech giant told Begley that apps that ‘present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected.’ The company added:
‘We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable.’
Apple’s decision did not come as a surprise to Begley. ‘I think their position is often just they don’t want to let anything through that could be seen by anyone at any particular table that could be seen as controversial,’ he said.
the interpretOr 
