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June 8, 2009
Links June 8 09

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Posted by b on June 8, 2009 at 06:15 UTC | Permalink
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Key Figures in Global Battle Against Illegal Arms Trade Lost in Air France Crash

Source: The Sunday Herald via Common Dreams
ARGENTINA: Argentine campaigner Pablo Dreyfus and Swiss colleague Ronald Dreyer battled South American arms and drug trafficking
by Andrew McLeod
AMID THE media frenzy and speculation over the disappearance of Air France’s ill-fated Flight 447, the loss of two of the world’s most prominent figures in the war on the illegal arms trade and international drug trafficking has been virtually overlooked.
Pablo Dreyfus
Pablo Dreyfus, a 39-year-old Argentine who was travelling with his wife Ana Carolina Rodrigues aboard the doomed flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, had worked tirelessly with the Brazilian authorities to stem the flow of arms and ammunition that for years has fuelled the bloody turf wars waged by drug gangs in Rio’s sprawling favelas.
Also travelling with Dreyfus on the doomed flight was his friend and colleague Ronald Dreyer, a Swiss diplomat and co-ordinator of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence who had worked with UN missions in El Salvador, Mozambique, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Angola. Both men were consultants at the Small Arms Survey, an independent think tank based at Geneva’s Graduate Institute of International Studies. The Survey said on its website that Dryer had helped mobilise the support of more than 100 countries to the cause of disarmament and development.

According to the International Action Network on Small Arms Control (IANSA), Dreyfus’s work was instrumental in the introduction of landmark small arms legislation in Brazil in 2003. Under this legislation, an online link was created between army and police databases listing production, imports and exports of arms and ammunition in Brazil.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 8 2009 7:14 utc | 1

The Veolia boycott has worked. They were building light rail in Jerusalem connecting settlers.
Haaretz June 8
Veolia has lost its contract to exploit the Stockholm metro and was not awarded a large contract in Bordeaux. A Dutch bank and the biggest Swedish pension fund have severed relations with them. Galway (water distribution) threw them out, and the city of Sandwell (GB) eliminated them from the market (garbage collection, this time.) They have ‘lost’ (est.) 7 billion.. The links give some info.
Le Monde, in fr
electronic intifada

Posted by: Tangerine | Jun 8 2009 10:20 utc | 2

Obama’s Cairo speech made a deep impression.

Posted by: Qlipoth | Jun 8 2009 10:55 utc | 3

Sorry, bad link:
http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=1244117185038

Posted by: Qlipoth | Jun 8 2009 10:56 utc | 4

@Tangerine – thanks, good news indeed.
@Olipoth – The Der Standard piece translated:
After Obama’s Cairo speech a Saudi camel rancher named one of his best camels “Obama” …

Posted by: b | Jun 8 2009 11:00 utc | 5

U.S. Weighs Intercepting North Korean Shipments NYT – Intercepting ships = act of war
Apparently that’s what North Korea has claimed. NYT: “North Korea has repeatedly said it would regard any intercepting ships as an act of war”. But probably a better description for such interception is “Casus belli”, a justification for war.
Some definitions:
act of war: Anything that causes loss or damage as a result of hostilities or conflict. Such risks are excluded from all insurance policies (except life assurances). In marine and aviation insurance only, any extra premium may be paid to include war risks.
Act Of War: any act occurring in the course of declared war; armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or armed conflict between military forces of any origin. 18 U.S.C.
act of war: an act of aggression by a country against another with which it is nominally at peace.//
This gets even more complicated. Legally the US and North Korea are still in a state of war. The US has not sought peace with North Korea since the end of hostilities 57 years ago and has maintained troops on a war footing in Korea.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Jun 8 2009 13:52 utc | 6

chomsky: Turning Point?

The Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas meetings in May, followed by Obama’s speech in Cairo, have been widely interpreted as a turning point in US Middle East policy, leading to consternation in some quarters, exuberance in others. Fairly typical is Middle East analyst Dan Fromkin of the Washington Post, who sees “signs Obama will promote a new regional peace initiative for the Middle East, much like the one championed by Jordan’s King Abdullah… [and also] the first distinct signs that Obama is willing to play hardball with Israel.” (WP, May 29). A closer look, however, suggests considerable caution.
…
Obama’s June 4 Cairo address to the Muslim world kept pretty much to his well-honed “blank slate” style – saying very little of substance, but in a personable manner that allows listeners to write on the slate what they want to hear. CNN captured its spirit in headlining a report “Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.” Obama had announced the goals of his address in an interview with NYT columnistThomas Friedman (June 3): “`We have a joke around the White House,’ the president said. ‘We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East’.” The White House commitment is most welcome, but it is useful to see how it translates into practice.
…
Washington’s new initiative for Middle East peace, so it is hoped, will integrate Israel among the “moderate” Arab states as a bulwark for US domination of the vital energy-producing regions. It fits well into Obama’s broader programs for Afghanistan and Pakistan, where military operations are escalating and huge “embassies” are being constructed on the model of the city-within-a-city in Baghdad, clearly signaling Obama’s intentions (Saeed Shah and Warren Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers, May 27).
The “re-conceptualization” is evidently satisfactory to US high tech industry, which continues to enhance its intimate relations with Israel. One striking illustration as a gigantic installation that Intel is constructing in Israel to implement a revolutionary reduction in size of chips, expecting to set a new industry standard and to supply much of the world with parts from its Kiryat Gat facility. Relations between US and Israeli military industry remain particularly close. Israel continues to provide the US with a strategically located overseas military base for prepositioning weapons and other functions. Intelligence cooperation goes back half a century.
These are among the unparalleled services that Israel provides for US militarism and global dominance. They afford Israel a certain leeway to defy Washington’s orders – though it is skating on thin ice if it tries to push its luck too far, as history has repeatedly shown. So far the jingoist extremism of the current government has been constrained by more sober elements: for example, the shelving of the proposals to require a loyalty oath and to prevent citizens from commemorating the Nakba – the disaster for Palestinians in 1948. But if Israel goes too far, there might indeed erupt a confrontation of the kind that many commentators perceive today, so far, with little basis.

Posted by: b real | Jun 8 2009 13:58 utc | 7

WASHINGTON (CNN) — When then-President-elect Barack Obama first asked Hillary Clinton to be his top diplomat, she turned him down and recommended others for the job, the secretary of state said in an interview broadcast Sunday.
But lucky for us, she changed her mind.
“Ultimately, it came down to my feeling that, number one, when your president asks you to do something for your country, you really need a good reason not to do it. Number two, if I had won and I had asked him to please help me serve our country, I would have hoped he would say yes. And finally, I looked around our world and I thought, you know, we are in just so many deep holes that everybody had better grab a shovel and start digging out.”
Actually, we should STOP DIGGING. It’s the first law of holes.
She knew then that she’s no diplomat. But in spite of that, the US has her as its chief (non)diplomat, still digging.
The official motto of the U.S. Department of State is “Diplomacy in Action”
Mission: The mission of the Department, working closely with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is to “advance freedom for the benefit of the
American people and the international community by helping to build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world composed of well-governed states
that respond to the needs of their people, reduce widespread poverty, and act responsibly within the international system.”
Some recent Clinton non-diplomatic remarks:
Hillary Clinton refused yesterday to rule out a pre-emptive Israeli military strike on Iran ‘The Way That We Did’ Iraq.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told ABC’s “This Week” the nation could be placed back on a blacklist if there’s evidence the country has supported international terrorism.
Still digging.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Jun 8 2009 14:34 utc | 8

In the 1953 truce, which ended the war and is still in effect, this is what it says about shipping. I think it is pretty clear:
Article 15. This Armistice Agreement shall apply to all opposing naval forces, which naval forces shall respect the water contiguous to the Demilitarized Zone and to the land area of Korea under the military control of the opposing side, and shall not engage in blockade of any kind of Korea.
For full document: http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/korea/kwarmagr072753.html

Posted by: ensley | Jun 8 2009 15:20 utc | 9

This is very important. And Scary.
Douglas Frantz: Israel’s Judy Miller?
Also:
Ahmadijads’s little helpers

Posted by: Anthony | Jun 8 2009 16:02 utc | 10

U.S. to Weigh Returning North Korea to Terror List
The USA’s terror list will have no credibility unless they put themselves at the top and Israel second.

Posted by: Charles | Jun 8 2009 19:43 utc | 11

Hey, thanks for that alternate link on the Financial Times article. I never realized Google.de would let me read the full article (in English) without providing them with an address to feed the spambot. That said, the article didn’t give much hope to Germany in spite of its fiscal discipline. What good does it do to play it conservatively and by the rules when someone else’s antics can foul the market for everyone? Makes me think of the good old boys at Enron and their “rolling blackouts” back in 2000-2001. Why did they do it? Because they could…

Posted by: Jim T. | Jun 9 2009 2:41 utc | 12

Charles #11–Your first link is not working.

Posted by: jawbone | Jun 9 2009 4:55 utc | 13

@Jim T – I never realized Google.de would let me read the full article (in English) without providing them with an address to feed the spambot.
It works as well with Google.com.
In fact you can read all the Financial Times ‘subscriber only’ articles in full if you copy their headline and do a Google search with the headline (might want to put it in quotes). Usually the first link Google will present as search result will let you read the FT piece in full.
Explanation: The FT checks the ‘referrer’ part of a incoming HTTP request and if that referrer says “I come via google” free access is granted.

Posted by: b | Jun 9 2009 7:07 utc | 14

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