Responsibility and War Guilt
Responsibility and War Guilt
– an interview with Noam Chomsky
This is a good interview. However, as I criticized Sy Hersh in a previous post for not outright calling Bush and Cheney liars, I do the same here with Noam Chomsky. Chomsky implies that Bush and Cheney believe the lies they are telling us. I don’t believe this for a second – Bush/Cheney know they are lying. They may believe that they are lying for a “noble cause” but they know they are lying. Making untrue public statements as Bush and Cheney have done to bring the U.S. to war is, in my opinion, a high crime and misdemeanor – an impeachable offense. This should be emphasized at every opportunity.
Chomsky’s description of power with regard to the population in modern society is very good. Chomsky complains that the individual lacks representation. However, simply turning a government into a pure democracy is not a cure. A representative democracy where an individual’s rights are protected by a Constitution still is a preferred government. And even with the tight hold on power of the U.S. elite, one has to ultimately blame the people. The U.S. population has been negligent in their duties by continuing to reward the malfeasance of their elected representatives.

Posted by: Rick | Nov 11 2007 8:49 utc | 4

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad from Baghdad on the “concerned citizens” (thugs) the U.S. is now employing: Meet Abu Abed: the US’s new ally against al-Qaida

A senior Sunni sheikh, whose tribe is joining the new alliance with the Americans against al-Qaida, told me in Beirut that it was a simple equation for him. “It’s just a way to get arms, and to be a legalised security force to be able to stand against Shia militias and to prevent the Iraqi army and police from entering their areas,” he said.
“The Americans lost hope with an Iraqi government that is both sectarian and dominated by militias, so they are paying for locals to fight al-Qaida. It will create a series of warlords.
“It’s like someone who brought cats to fight rats, found himself with too many cats and brought dogs to fight the cats. Now they need elephants.”
…
The suspect’s brother, still in his pyjamas, pleaded, and women in nightgowns stood in the street wailing and begging the gunmen to release him.
The gunmen pointed their guns at the people and pushed them back. A young fighter carrying an old British sub-machine gun fired a burst into the air.
Abu Abed walked into the scuffle. The detained man was not the target. Someone had overheard him saying Abu Abed’s men were “worse than al-Qaida” after Bakr’s men raided the house.
Furious at the insult, Abu Abed aimed his gun at the brother. “Al-Qaida is better than us, huh? Did you forget when the bodies were piled in the streets?”
Some neighbours intervened, and the man was released. His brother grabbed him by the arm and pushed him inside.
Abu Abed, shaking his head and waving his gun, walked back to his car, murmuring “Al-Qaida, better than us…”
…
After we had settled again in his office, Abu Abed told me of his grand dreams. “Ameriya is just the beginning. After we finish with al-Qaida here, we will turn toward our main enemy, the Shia militias. I will liberate Jihad [a Sunni area next to Ameriya taken over by the Mahdi army] then Saidiya and the whole of west Baghdad.”
…
Back at Abu Abed’s HQ, the men were put into cells. Men in US-supplied blue uniforms were being jailed by men in US-supplied green uniforms.
An American officer, Captain Cosper, visited Abu Abed that night. He sat in the office trying to make sense of what was going on. “They [the Concerned Citizens] are not allowed to detain people or conduct raids,” he told me.
In a nearby room, two blindfolded men were being questioned by Abu Abed’s men.
…

Posted by: b | Nov 11 2007 10:17 utc | 6

Iraqi fighters ‘grilled for evidence on Iran’

US military officials are putting huge pressure on interrogators who question Iraqi insurgents to find incriminating evidence pointing to Iran, it was claimed last night.
Micah Brose, a privately contracted interrogator working for American forces in Iraq, near the Iranian border, told The Observer that information on Iran is ‘gold’.
…
He denied ever being asked to fabricate evidence, adding: ‘We’re not asked to manufacture information, we’re asked to find it. But if a detainee wants to tell me what I want to hear so he can get out of jail… you know what I’m saying.’

Someone told Ignatius to launch this call for negotiations with Iran.
The Spy Who Wants Israel to Talk

Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, titled his memoirs “Man in the Shadows.” But now that he’s out in the sunlight, the 72-year-old retired spy chief has some surprisingly contrarian things to say about Iran and Syria. The gist of his message is that rather than constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric of confrontation, the United States and Israel should be looking for ways to establish a creative dialogue with these adversaries.
…
“I believe that Israel is indestructible,” he insists. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may boast that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, but Iran’s ability to consummate this threat is “minimal,” he says. “Israel has a whole arsenal of capabilities to make sure the Iranians don’t achieve their result.” Even if the Iranians did obtain a nuclear weapon, says Halevy, “they are deterrable,” because for the mullahs, survival and perpetuation of the regime is a holy obligation.
“We must be much more sophisticated and nuanced in our policies toward Iran,” Halevy contends. He argues for a combination of increased economic pressure and a diplomatic opening that attempts to speak to Iran’s “national aspirations” and its shared interests with America and the West — and even Israel.
…

Posted by: b | Nov 11 2007 13:22 utc | 8

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University
In the Mideast, America Casts an Imperial Shadow

[S]ince 2000, no one in a position of power in Washington seems to have bothered to read any history. Believing that the demise of the Soviet Union meant an end to checks and balances at home and to limits abroad, and seduced by the blandishments of shallow-minded theorists who believe that the rules that applied to all previous great powers do not apply to the United States, the current administration has plunged into not one but two land wars in Asia.
…
Thus armed with the conviction that theirs were the noblest of purposes and buoyed by the popular support that a president always receives after an attack (particularly one as dastardly as 9/11), President Bush and his advisers ignored 200 years of Middle Eastern history and invaded Iraq, supposedly to spread democracy to the entire region.
…
After the first shock of the invasion wore off, what people in Iraq and all over the Middle East remembered was two centuries of Western powers attempting to bring their countries under imperial control through military force. They recalled decades of Western petroleum companies controlling their oil. And unsurprisingly, the United States quickly became as unpopular as the European colonial powers had ever been.
…
People in the Middle East are angry at the United States not because of our values, many of which they share: democracy, free enterprise, even many of our cultural values such as love of family and respect for religion. They are angry at us, essentially, because our forces are doing things in their back yard that we would never tolerate from foreign troops in our own region.
We are the greatest power in world history. But that will make not a whit of difference to the outcome in Iraq. We will not — we cannot — force the Iraqis to do what we want, any more than the British could toward the end of their own attempt to rule Iraq, although they managed to hold on for much longer than our doomed occupation will.
Our political leaders must recognize that force does not solve the problem of terrorism. The real terrorists — those blowing up civilians in marketplaces and office towers, as opposed to Iraqis resisting U.S. occupation — can be dealt with only by means far more subtle than military might.
…

Posted by: b | Nov 11 2007 19:50 utc | 10

jj: Now we understand Rice’s insistence that Musharraf “take off his uniform by November 15th”, even though the laws he wanted put in place to allow him to retain a semblance of power were delayed by leftist Paki lawmakers. They want Bhutto in.
No word on what’s in it for Khalilzad.
“While at RAND, Khalilzad had a brief stint consulting for Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which at the time was conducting a risk analysis for Unocal, now part of ConocoPhillips, for a proposed 1,400 km (890 mile), $2-billion, 622 m³/s (22,000 ft³/s) Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. He is one of the original members of Project for the New American Century (PNAC).”
Maybe he’s trying for one of those deferred salary and stock options deals with ConocoPhillips, similar to what Dick Cheney used with Halliburton to amass his $500M fortune.
It’s clear the clock is ticking on the US overthrow of Pakistan in time to quash the Iran:Pakistan pipeline deal, and substitute the Unocal flavor with US tax monies, bringing a little Turkmen royalty money to the Karzai coffers, since Bush’s pledge of $10B to rebuild Afghanistan turns out to be another pot to piss away taxes in.
You’ll recall the president of Turkmenistan mysteriously “died of natural causes in his sleep” just a year after a Brit mercenary group floated a tender to capture or kill him to the highest bidder, and now the US controls the Turkmen oil and gas.
Here’s a little bit of wayback machine on Bhutto: http://www.saag.org/papers6/paper508.html
“In 1994, the Government of Benazir Bhutto decided to create the Taliban to restore law and order in Afghanistan to facilitate the construction of the oil and gas pipeline project of UNOCAL, the US company, and the overland movement of cotton from Turkmenistan to the textile mills of Pakistan, which were facing difficulties due to the failure of the cotton crop in Pakistan for three years in succession.”
Ahh, so, desu neh!
No word yet on a war audit before Congress approves Bush’s $200B “emergency graft”.

Posted by: Peris Troika | Nov 12 2007 6:51 utc | 12

The U.S. hired Sunni “Concerned Citizens”. Turns out, as was obvious, that this will backfire …
Spring in Iraq will be very “interesting time”. JAM will be back on the streets and the “concerned citizens” will have been weaponized and organized by the U.S. but then run free too.
Hurdles Stall Plan For Iraqi Recruits

The U.S. effort to organize nearly 70,000 local fighters to solidify security gains in Iraq is facing severe political and logistical challenges as U.S.-led forces struggle to manage the recruits and the central government resists incorporating them into the Iraqi police and army, according to senior military officials.
…
Eighty-two percent of the volunteers are Sunni and 18 percent are Shiite, he said. About 37,000 are being paid about $300 a month through contracts funded by the U.S.-led military coalition.
…
“When they started out, they appeared pretty legitimate, I think,” Bifulco said. “There is collaboration now going on, at least on a small level,” between al-Qaeda in Iraq and the volunteers.
Jadou, of the brigade, agreed that some of members work with al-Qaeda in Iraq. “All of the factions, even al-Qaeda, have intelligence elements over here, who will see how the brigade is going to work, and whether it would be for the benefit of the Sunnis,” he said.

Posted by: b | Nov 12 2007 9:42 utc | 14

Looking at Pakistan, we are told that Musharraf kicked out the supreme court because it would challange his bid for presidency. But there are other persons too who would benefit from this step. No wonder Bhutto never took the side of that court …
Trail of corruption and kickback charges still in wings for opposition leader

Hopes for a third term for Benazir Bhutto, twice kicked out of government for corruption and incompetence, have been thrown into turmoil by the emergency rule. But her ambitions ultimately still depend on whether the amnesty on her corruption charges, granted to her last month by the national reconciliation ordinance, will be upheld in the new supreme court.
…
The controversy surrounding Bhutto’s financial affairs has been compounded by reports showing she and her family have worldwide assets worth about 90bn Pakistan rupees ($1.5bn). Despite voluminous evidence, some from the British government, the Bhuttos deny all the charges.
The charges:
…

Posted by: b | Nov 12 2007 11:05 utc | 16

The US likes its foreign dictators to look good, look Ma, no hands! And Popular Support! They seem to think that a handsome lady in a white head covering (care of the best plastic surgeon in NY, whole face and big part of the body, all young photos of her have been destroyed and repressed) will temper oppo’ to Mush, or just be ‘democratic’ somehow. A bit of something for everyone. Another corrupt stooge on the stage.
The trial in Geneva awaits the decision of the Pakistani Supreme court. Trial won’t take place, the magistrates here are pissed off. Tax payers furious, no more pandering to the superpowers, let them take care of their own sh*t! And so on.

Posted by: Tangerine | Nov 12 2007 17:55 utc | 18

Frank Rich in todays NYTimes. Best take I’ve read on the fallout from the Mukasey nomination and its implications:

Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”
To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.
[….]In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.
That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.
Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).
Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.

Schumer and Feinstein should rot in hell for this disgusting milestone capitulation. I can think of no other such capitulation, amongst the so many, that quite compares in its shameless brevity. That for whatever excuse, they would enable it ((torture)) to become the marquee official policy of the U.S.A. flashing ***TORTURE***WE LOVE TORTURE*** to the world like gaudy Los-Vegas casino signage. There is after all, no debate left as to what torture is and whether we do it and if we will continue to do it – it is now official. About all I have left is to be like the proverbial Vegas gambling addict who wakes up broke in a sticky floored cheap motel with the cops crashing through the door – that we’ve truly and finally hit rock bottom this time. Or at least, lets hope so.

Posted by: anna missed | Nov 13 2007 7:39 utc | 20

Interesting that this is just coming out now.
He had all-American cover: born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, Army buddies with whom he played baseball.
George Koval also had a secret. During World War II, he was a top Soviet spy, code named Delmar and trained by Stalin’s ruthless bureau of military intelligence.
Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century.
On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.
The announcement hailed Dr. Koval as “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to infiltrate the project’s secret plants, saying his work “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”
Since then, historians, scientists, federal officials and old friends have raced to tell Dr. Koval’s story — the athlete, the guy everyone liked, the genius at technical studies. American intelligence agencies have known of his betrayal at least since the early 1950s, when investigators interviewed his fellow scientists and swore them to secrecy.
The spy’s success hinged on an unusual family history of migration from Russia to Iowa and back. That gave him a strong commitment to Communism, a relaxed familiarity with American mores and no foreign accent.
…
George Koval was born in 1913 to Abraham and Ethel Koval in Sioux City, Iowa, which had a large Jewish community and a half-dozen synagogues. In 1932, during the Great Depression, his family emigrated to Birobidzhan, a Siberian city that Stalin promoted as a secular Jewish homeland.
Could Putin have honored him as part of his battle against xUS assault on Iran – saying, in effect by inference, that Jews have betrayed US Nat’l Security before & the right-wing Jews agitating for war w/Iran are doing so again? Or as I being too paranoid/sensitive?

Posted by: jj | Nov 13 2007 9:06 utc | 22

Hugo Chavez got into a bit of unseemly name calling at the recent international conference in Chile by calling Aznar a fascist. Here’s a bit of background on why he might be a bit jumpy these days. In particular

In addition … Carabobo State Governor Luis
Felipe Acosta Carlez, one of the heroes in helping to break the opposition-inspired food shortages in their economic sabotage of 2002-2003, has been bought off by NED funds in Washington and is expected to resign as governor after making a deal with [the] rancid oligarchy in Valencia.
The Washington-spawned plan is also bent on blocking major routes to cut off distribution of food supplies in order to bring the population to its knees and with the hope they will demand Chavez’ resignation.
…
The plan also includes the use of Colombian paramilitary cells in Venezuela to arbitrarily kill innocent civilians and create chaos which they have been doing for the past month vis-à-vis the bourgeois student protests.
This plan also involves another [act of] economic sabotage – the closing of factories to lock out workers – just as they did in the national managers’ strike in 2002-2003.

Needless to say, I have no proof that any of this is true, but I do feel certain that it won’t be presented for discussion on the U.S. evening TV news programs.

One other point en passant: it’s no surprise, but is perverse,
that such nobly named institutions as The National Endowment for Democracy or the NEFA Foudation (Nine/Eleven Finding Answers) and many others of the same ilk, whose main similarity would seem to be the nobility of their names and the baseness of their (conjectural) occult sponsors, seem to work in direct contradiction to their nominal mission.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 13 2007 15:45 utc | 24

Iraq Gives up on US and Turns to China to Provide Electricity

…Iraqi authorities are clearly aware that transferring the assignment to non-US companies will quite displease their masters in Washington.
Still, they decided to do so because the entire experience of the American occupation demonstrates to them the extreme inefficiency of not just the US military machine – the huge dinosaur of a superpower unable to deal with comparatively poorly armed insurgents – but also of the US’s economic management. And this might have much more direct implications in the long run for the American imperial presence than a military defeat.

Posted by: Bea | Nov 13 2007 18:25 utc | 26

Another take on the costs of the Iraq war and what they could have bought instead:
The Gavel

Posted by: Bea | Nov 13 2007 19:17 utc | 28

Wow. To hammer home the impact of Bea’s #27 and #28 comes this…
For only the sixth time in seven years, . In keeping with the tradition of his previous vetoes, this was a $606billion bill for public health and education projects.
Here are some of the increasingly cartoonish highlights from the most recent veto story…

President Bush, escalating his budget battle with Congress, on Tuesday vetoed a spending measure for health and education programs prized by congressional Democrats.
He also signed a big increase in the Pentagon’s non-war budget although the White House complained it contained “some unnecessary spending.”
The president’s action was announced on Air Force One as Bush flew to New Albany, Ind., on the Ohio River across from Louisville, Ky., for a speech criticizing the Democratic-led Congress on its budget priorities.
The White House said the $606 billion education and health was loaded with 2,000 earmarks — lawmaker-sponsored projects that critics call pork-barrel spending — which Bush wants stripped from the bill.
“Some of its wasteful projects include a prison museum, a sailing school taught aboard a catamaran and a Portugese-as-a-second-language program,” the president said. “Congress owes the taxpayers much better than this effort.”

Got to stop there for just one second. I’m not any fonder of pork, as the three or four of you who actually read my posts already know… but… just re-read paragraph 2 and 5 again. Pentagon waste = Good. Cultural waste = Bad. Got it? Killing = Good. Culture = Bad. There’s no other way to interpret this response. Okay, let’s continue.

It was sixth bill vetoed by Bush. Congress has overridden his veto only once, on a politically popular water projects measure.
Bush hammered Democrats for what he called a tax-and-spend philosophy:
“The Congress now sitting in Washington holds this philosophy,” Bush told an audience of business and community leaders. “The majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far it’s acting like a teenager with a new credit card.

Sorry. I need to break again. Teenagers with credit cards usually buy frivolous fun things. Remember, Frivolous = Bad. Destruction = Good. Got it…? Pentagon waste is A-Okay. Remember. Let’s continue…

“This year alone, the leadership in Congress has proposed to spend $22 billion more than my budget [emphasis on the inappropriate possessive pronoun mine] provides,” the president said. “Now, some of them claim that’s not really much of a difference. The scary part is, they seem to mean it.”

Remember what he’s been increasingly asking for in defense spending since before 2003 and try not to let that statement break your brain.

More than any other spending bill, the education and health measure defines the differences between Bush and majority Democrats. The House fell three votes short of winning a veto-proof margin as it sent the measure to Bush.
Rep. David Obey, the Democratic chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, pounced immediately on Bush’s veto.
“This is a bipartisan bill supported by over 50 Republicans,” Obey said. “There has been virtually no criticism of its contents. It is clear the only reason the president vetoed this bill is pure politics.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Bush “again vetoed a bipartisan and fiscally responsible bill that addresses the priorities of the American people: education for our children, assistance in paying skyrocketing energy costs, veterans’ health care, and other urgent health research on cancer and other serious medical problems. At the same time, President Bush and his congressional allies demand hundreds of billions of dollars for the war in Iraq — none of it paid for.”

Got to stop. Pelosi’s statement here is absolutely correct and precisely the crux of what I am trying to get across. Having said that, Nancy Pelosi can die in a fire. She has blocked the pursuit of impeachment hearings against both Bush and VP Cheney for the ostensible reason that it would reflect poorly on her priorities to her constituency. At least Bush in this instance is not being hypocritical– he truly is an asshat and doesn’t care how it comes across to anyone. People sometimes do the right thing for the wrong reason… Pelosi goes as far as saying the right thing here for the wrong reason.
Screw Pelosi.

Since winning re-election, Bush has sought to cut the labor, health and education measure below the prior year level. But lawmakers have rejected the cuts. The budget that Bush presented in February sought almost $4 billion in cuts to this year’s bill.
Democrats responded by adding $10 billion to Bush’s request for the 2008 bill. Democrats say spending increases for domestic programs are small compared with Bush’s pending war request totaling almost $200 billion.
The measure provides:
_a 20 percent increase over Bush’s request for job training programs.
_$1.4 billion more than Bush’s request for health research at the National Institutes of Health, a 5 percent increase.
_$2.4 billion for heating subsidies for the poor, $480 million more than Bush requested.
_$665 million for grants to community action agencies; Bush sought to kill the program outright.
_$63.6 billion for the Education Department, a 5 percent increase over 2007 spending and 8 percent more than Bush sought.
_a $225 million increase for community health centers.
The $471 billion defense budget gives the Pentagon a 9 percent, $40 billion budget increase. The measure only funds core department operations, omitting Bush’s $196 billion request for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, except for an almost $12 billion infusion for new troop vehicles that are resistant to roadside bombs.
Much of the increase in the defense bill is devoted to procuring new and expensive weapons systems, including $6.3 billion for the next-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, $2.8 billion for the Navy’s DD(X) destroyer and $3.1 billion for the new Virginia-class attack submarine.
Huge procurement costs are driving the Pentagon budget ever upward. Once war costs are added in, the total defense budget will be significantly higher than during the typical Cold War year, even after adjusting for inflation.

I have nothing more to say that isn’t simply going around in the same circle… and I did it the last time Bush vetoed a bill. And the time before. It’s beyond transparent… it is cartoonishly monomaniacal… how much they love to hurt people and how much they despise alleviating that hurt.

Posted by: Monolycus | Nov 13 2007 20:21 utc | 30

what monolycus sd

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 13 2007 21:11 utc | 32

what Annie said
Just by way of suggestion why don’t we replace jew with zionist in these debates. The plain fact is many people who are jewish do not support the Israel cruel construct and many people who are not jewish do. However all supporters appear to subscribe to some aspect of zionist philosophy.
yet even here at MoA the debate gets diverted by the carefully constructed but facile anti Israel = anti Jewish argument.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 13 2007 22:02 utc | 34

almost missed this one from monday’s kurdish regional govt press releases
Kurdistan Signs Five More Petroleum Contracts

Following the unanimous decisions of the Regional Oil and Gas Council of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) at its second and third meetings, Dr Ashti Hawrami, the KRG Minister for Natural Resources, today announced that the five production sharing contracts (PSCs) previously approved by the Council have been signed by the KRG with TNK-BP affiliate Norbest Limited, with a Korean consortium headed by Korean state-owned oil company KNOC, with Hillwood International Energy company HKN Energy, and with subsidiaries of UK-listed Sterling Energy LLC and Denver-based Aspect Energy LLC.
“These five PSCs are yet another clear expression of confidence in the strength and stability of the Kurdistan Region,” said Dr Hawrami, “and they produce very comprehensive returns for the people of Iraq.”
The Council had approved these contracts at its earlier meetings, with today’s announcement following formal signing ceremonies in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region, on Saturday, November 10th and Monday, November 12th.
…
After the signing ceremony today, Dr Hawrami said: “In Kurdistan, we are setting an example: this is the first post-Saddam framework for oil investment in Iraq which follows the democratic, federal, and free market principles mandated by the Iraq Constitution. It is the first and the only constitutionally based legal framework to attract investments to Iraq, which is designed for Iraq-wide revenue sharing, an essential element of future stability in Iraq that the Constitution also rightly mandates.” “The KRG’s ambition now is for a similar constitutional framework to be adopted in the rest of Iraq. Without such a framework, investors cannot have confidence in contracts issued by authorities in other parts of Iraq,” he added

Posted by: b real | Nov 14 2007 4:34 utc | 36

US, Israel refuse to cooperate with inquest into Syria strike

UN nuclear watchdog has no evidence Syria had nuclear facility
The International Atomic Energy Agency – the United Nations nuclear watchdog – has not been able to conduct an investigation into the events surrounding the Sept. 6 Israeli bombing of a Syrian military installation because neither the Bush administration nor Israel are cooperating.
A diplomatic source close to the Vienna based IAEA told Raw Story that both the United States and Israel have been approached by the organization requesting supporting evidence of a nuclear reactor which media sources have cited, based on anonymous sources in both governments, as the reason for the Israeli strike.
The source also explained that the satellite footage, which the IAEA obtained through commercial channels for lack of any “credible evidence,” does not show a nuclear reactor in the early construction phase.

Posted by: annie | Nov 14 2007 16:22 utc | 38

‘over a 100 a week’ according to the video. reminded me of the movie i watched last night.
‘the lives of others’
Dreyman arranges with West Germany’s weekly magazine Der Spiegel to anonymously publish an article on suicide rates in the GDR. While the GDR publishes detailed statistics on many things, it has not published any information on suicide rates since the 1970s, presumably because they are embarrassingly high.

Posted by: annie | Nov 14 2007 16:46 utc | 40

Interesting speech on some Bush Jr. innovations in how NOT to prosecute corporate crime. Completely new topics to me were the new DOJ approaches of
• non prosecution agreements
• deferred prosecution agreement
• prosecution of closet or defunct entities
very clever how the deferred or closeted prosecution not only can, but has, kept ALL health insurers from ever being subject to mandatory exclusion from government contracts when they defraud Medicare. Nice!
20 Things You Should Know About Corporate Crime
an excerpt:

Number 12
Corporations love non prosecution agreements even more.
One Friday evening last July, I was sitting my office in the National Press Building. And into my e-mail box came a press release from the Justice Department.
The press release announced that Boeing will pay a $50 million criminal penalty and $615 million in civil penalties to resolve federal claims relating to the company’s hiring of the former Air Force acquisitions chief Darleen A. Druyun, by its then CFO, Michael Sears – and stealing sensitive procurement information.
So, the company pays a criminal penalty. And I figure, okay if they paid a criminal penalty, they must have pled guilty.
No, they did not plead guilty.
Okay, they must have been charged with a crime and had the prosecution deferred.
No, they were not charged with a crime and did not have the prosecution deferred.
About a week later, after pounding the Justice Department for an answer as to what happened to Boeing, they sent over something called a non prosecution agreement.
That is where the Justice Department says – we’re going to fine you criminally, but hey, we don’t want to cost you any government business, so sign this agreement. It says we won’t prosecute you if you pay the fine and change your ways.
Corporate criminals love non prosecution agreements. No criminal charge. No criminal record. No guilty plea. Just pay the fine and leave.

Rawk!
On!
Further Calvinist Proof of Divine Election (not that it was in doubt).

Posted by: citizen | Nov 14 2007 18:54 utc | 42

yuk – have I been completely wrong on this issue? U.S. Intelligence: Iran Possesses Trillions Of Potentially Dangerous Atoms

Barely two months after U.N. inspectors in Iran failed to find evidence of an active nuclear weapons program, the Department of Homeland Security uncovered new information Monday proving the Middle Eastern nation has obtained literally trillions of atoms—the same particles sometimes used to make atomic bombs—for unknown purposes.
…

Posted by: b | Nov 14 2007 19:55 utc | 44

Just in case the bad sign of 07 continues into 08 and Hillary Clinton is one of the two empire candidates for prez of amerika, I suggest all MoA-ites permitted to vote in amerika read The Making of Hillary Clinton by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR which should even inoculate a dem machine hack against the lesser evilism which appears to permeate the consciousness of any thinkers left in the dem party.
Much of it has been said before, but not in this concise and undiluted a dose. This quiet and understated article can de-Hillary any sentient being.
One of the most revealing passages:

Hillary was on Mondale’s staff for the summer of ’71, investigating worker abuses in the sugarcane plantations of southern Florida, as close to slavery as anywhere in the U.S.A. Life’s ironies: Hillary raised not a cheep of protest when one of the prime plantation families, the Fanjuls, called in their chips (laid down in the form of big campaign contributions to Clinton) and insisted that Clinton tell Vice President Gore to abandon his calls for the Everglades to be restored, thus taking water Fanjul was appropriating for his operation.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 15 2007 3:14 utc | 46

Spencer Ackerman on The Problem With Militias – now that the U.S. Anbar Awakening project has created almost 70,000 new “concerned local citizens” (Sunni warlord militias):

Everywhere you go in Iraq, there’s victory. The commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, told reporters last Wednesday that he had wiped al-Qaeda in Iraq out of the city. Stability in Iraq is “within sight, but not yet within touch,” he said. And while categorical statements about progress have come back to haunt U.S. officials, commanders are evincing more certainty about the possibilities of success than they would ever have dared prior to Gen. David Petraeus’ September testimony. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has gone even further, proclaiming “victory against terrorist groups and militias.” It’s pretty bewildering, even for those who’ve seen some recent reasons for cautious optimism.
[….]
But what’s truly in the Sunni interest — at least as many Sunnis understand it — is to again rule the country. Perceiving the United States’ receptivity to Sunnis who declare themselves against AQI, whose number has always been miniscule compared to the indigenous Sunni insurgency, the Sunnis have built a massive constellation of militias in the past few months with U.S. support. Known as “Concerned Local Citizens” — “militia” being a taboo term — the U.S. military totals the number of militiamen at a staggering 67,000. About 37,300 of them are under a contract with the U.S. and receive a stipend of $300 per month.
[….]
Perhaps it’s not too late for Maliki to embrace the CLCs. But consider the implications if he doesn’t. Following best counterinsurgency practices, the decision to support the rise — the armed rise — of the Sunnis against AQI made sense for the U.S. But the U.S. hasn’t ever just had the destruction of AQI, a marginal if vicious group that didn’t exist before the invasion, as its primary objective in Iraq: If it is, the troops should begin withdrawing immediately, mission (basically) accomplished. U.S. objectives for Iraq, broadly, concern the country’s transformation into a stable staging ground for American power in the Middle East — or at least, at this late hour, to keep Iraq from imploding. Absent actual reconciliation, which Stanton believes will be “generational” in coming, this year’s strategy had the short-term effect of reducing violence to 2006 levels, and the probable long-term effect of hastening Iraq’s disintegration. Even by the standards of Iraq’s numerous predictable disasters, this one is glaring and obvious. We might as well call it victory.

Posted by: anna missed | Nov 15 2007 9:16 utc | 48

Very creepy: FEMA rap for kidz

Posted by: b | Nov 15 2007 14:00 utc | 50

The China Matters blog
is worth reading even when it doesn’t talk about Pakistan (;-)
In particular the top of the blog today leads us to understand (attention Malooga!) the role of that forgotten activist John Foster Dulles in the American civil rights movement.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 15 2007 14:32 utc | 52

the peacock rpt: NASA Creates Unit to Hasten Dawning of Nukes on Moon

The eventual deployment of nuclear reactors on the Moon blasted a baby step closer to reality today, with NASA embarking upon the creation of a new unit tasked with bringing such a nuclear capability to fruition. The Technology Demonstration Unit (TDU) for Fission Surface Power (FSP) on Nov. 14 began searching for potential contractors capable of helping the new entity to initially develop and test a “simulated nucelar heat source,” according to a presolicitation notice that The Peacock Report (TPR) located via a routine search of the FedBizOpps database. The TDU is “planned as a 5 or 6-year activity with concept definition and risk reduction that could lead to the start of a potential flight development program in the future,” the document says:

FSP systems provide a potential option to support future human exploration missions on the Moon and Mars. FSP is a current technology project under the Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) sponsored by the NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.

TPR broke the story early last year that the Bush Administration envisions building nuclear facilities and robotic spacecraft-manufacturing plants on the Moon as a critical step in eventually sending humans to Mars (see TPR, 03/23/2006; New Details of U.S. Moon-Base Project Reveal Nuclear Intentions).

(you’ll find the links in the original)

Posted by: b real | Nov 15 2007 20:23 utc | 54

Krugman is (rightfully) mad with Obama:
Played for a Sucker

Which brings us back to Mr. Obama. Why would he, in effect, play along with this new round of scare-mongering and devalue one of the great progressive victories of the Bush years?
I don’t believe Mr. Obama is a closet privatizer. He is, however, someone who keeps insisting that he can transcend the partisanship of our times — and in this case, that turned him into a sucker.
Mr. Obama wanted a way to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton — and for Mr. Obama, who has said that the reason “we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions” is that “politics has become so bitter and partisan,” joining in the attack on Senator Clinton’s Social Security position must have seemed like a golden opportunity to sound forceful yet bipartisan.
But Social Security isn’t a big problem that demands a solution; it’s a small problem, way down the list of major issues facing America, that has nonetheless become an obsession of Beltway insiders. And on Social Security, as on many other issues, what Washington means by bipartisanship is mainly that everyone should come together to give conservatives what they want.
We all wish that American politics weren’t so bitter and partisan. But if you try to find common ground where none exists — which is the case for many issues today — you end up being played for a fool. And that’s what has just happened to Mr. Obama.

Posted by: b | Nov 16 2007 7:37 utc | 56

Good news from the Senate, I just got this in an email from Chris Dodd’s site
As they say … Breaking News from the Senate.
Forgive me if some of this is in the weeds, I’ll try and make the parliamentary process as painless as possible.
1. Within the last hour, the Senate Judiciary Committee just reported out a FISA bill that DOES NOT include retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that helped the Bush Administration spy on Americans.
2. This means the Judiciary bill moves to the full Senate WITHOUT the dangerous language included.
3. Retroactive immunity will, however, surely be introduced as an amendment to the FISA bill.
4. If needed Senator Dodd will filibuster any amendment seeking to add retroactive immunity to the underlying bill. By filibustering, he will force the opposition to find 60 votes to pass the provision.
It will be a lot more difficult for those who would enable the erosion of our Constitution to find the 60 votes necessary to stop immunity on its own than it would be for us to find the 40 needed to sustain a filibuster of the bill as a whole if it included immunity.
Today is a great victory for all of us — and another example of Chris Dodd’s leadership.
If it wasn’t for our efforts, together, retroactive immunity would be well on its way to sailing through the Senate … largely unnoticed.
The fight continues, for sure, but this was a big victory today.

Posted by: dan of steele | Nov 16 2007 8:18 utc | 58

Thanks to DOS @ 58 for elucidating the subtleties of legislative maneuvering on immunity for the Telcom miscreants.
At the risk of seeming always to proffer apologia for rightists, I recommend this recent survey (from a declaredly conservative perspective) of a familiar Krugman meme. What I find interesting (after discarding the decorative patina of anti-socialist rhetoric) is that Krugman’s basic thesis is accepted, and the problem is discussed in an essentially rational manner.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 16 2007 10:08 utc | 60

Cui prodest ?

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 16 2007 13:08 utc | 62