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May 14th, 2008
Powerful new storm heads toward cyclone-devastated Myanmar
Chinese troops rush to plug dam near quake-hit city
Rescue teams who punched into the quake's stricken epicentre reported whole towns all but wiped off the map, spurring frantic efforts to bring emergency relief to the survivors.
Planes and military helicopters air-dropped supplies, 100 troops parachuted into a county that had been cut off, and rescuers in cities and towns across Sichuan province fought to pull the living and the dead from the debris.
But the overwhelming message that came back from this southwestern province was that only now is a picture slowly beginning to form of the epic scale of Monday's 7.9-magnitude quake.
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Bush warns of Iraq disaster
By MIKE ALLEN | 5/13/08
Mike Allen interviews President George W. Bush.
President Bush warned in an interview Tuesday that the Democratic presidential candidates' plans to withdraw abruptly from Iraq could "eventually lead to another attack on the United States" and would "embolden" terrorists.
In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president's first for an online audience — Bush said his doomsday scenario for a premature withdrawal “of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States."
"The United States pulling out of Iraq or pulling out of the Middle East or not maintaining a forward presence would send all kinds of signals throughout the Middle East," he said in the Roosevelt Room. "And it would shake everybody's nerves, and it would embolden the very same people that we're trying to defeat.
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By Attaturk Wednesday May 14, 2008
Gouge deeper a-hole
Here's the particularly hideous section as Lt. General Michael DeLong bemoans the Democrats victory in the 2006 elections:An ongoing exploration of the documents related to the Pentagon's "message force multipliers" program has unearthed a clip of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggesting that America, having voted the Democrats back into Congressional power, could benefit from suffering another terrorist attack, and doing so in the presence of the very same military analysts who went on to provide commentary and analysis of the Iraq War.
DELONG: Politically, what are the challenges because you're not going to have a lot of sympathetic ears up there.
RUMSFELD: That's what I was just going to say. This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack.
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Well, well, well. As Donald Rumsfeld once said, “…there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know” and coming from one as clearly clueless as he, today’s post is dedicated to his spirit of bewildering cluelessness.
I venture to guess that the majority of what is in this post never aired in primetime or made its way to the print media (ok, perhaps a snippet on the bottom of page 42 way below the fold). Today we delve into war crimes, nukes, lies and information the Corporate Media (CM) won’t tell you. Let’s start with some questions.
The oily truth about America’s foreign policy
Learning Not to be a Warmongering Nation
First Published 2008-05-14
There is evidence that the heightened price of energy is a direct consequence of the destabilizing wars and geopolitical insecurity in the region. These include not only the raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the threat of a looming war against Iran, says Ismael Hossein-zadeh.
Despite all the recent talk of soaring prices at the pump, political and economic pundits rarely mention the impact of war and political instability in the Middle East on the skyrocketing price of oil. There is strong evidence, however, that the heightened price of energy is a direct consequence of the destabilizing wars and geopolitical insecurity in the region.
***
There is clear evidence that the leading neoconservative figures have been long-time political activists who have worked through think tanks set up to serve either as the armaments lobby, or the pro-Israel lobby, or both—going back to the 1990s, 1980s and, in some cases, 1970s. These corporate-backed militaristic think tanks include the American Enterprise Institute, Project for the New American Century, Center for Security Policy, Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, National Institute for Public Policy, and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
There is also evidence that the major components of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, including the war on Iraq, were designed long before George W. Bush arrived in the White House—largely at the drawing boards of these think thanks, often in collaboration directly, or indirectly, with the Pentagon, the arms lobby, and pro-Israel lobby--MORE--
Customer: "Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now."
Pet-shop owner: "No, no he's not dead, he's -- he's resting! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian blue, isn't it, aye? Beautiful plumage!"
-- From "Monty Python's Flying Circus"
Hillary Clinton, pining for the Rose Garden. (By Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
The Ex-candidate: S he steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane's wing'
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Published: May 14, 2008
Every anniversary of Israel's birth is another scar on the soul of every Palestinian. Six decades have elapsed since Israel's reign of terror when 700,000 Palestinians were forced or intimidated into fleeing their homes little knowing they would never be allowed to return.
Most were destined to live out their lives in refugee camps, stateless and reliant upon charitable donations. The few who managed to return clutching precious keys and deeds were usually devastated to discover their home had been demolished or their village erased giving fuel to the Zionist slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land".
This 60th commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba or "Catastrophe" is particularly poignant because not only are the Palestinians physically split between the West Bank and Gaza, they are also divided ideologically and politically.
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Related
Obama says he'll reshape US foreign policy. But can he?
| May 14, 2008 |
| Obama vs. The Lobby No matter how much he grovels, it's never enough |
| by Justin Raimondo |
Poor Obama. No matter how much he tries to placate the Israel lobby, they just won't take yes for an answer. The Lobby has been after him for months, trying to dig up "evidence" that someone with the middle name of "Hussein" is necessarily an enemy of Israel. The best they could come up with so far were the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's jeremiads, which didn't have much of an effect at the polls, as the North Carolina and Indiana primary results – and subsequent national polls – attest. Yet Obama still keeps trying to appease the Lobby. He's purged staff members who so much as looked cross-eyed at the Israelis, such as one poor adviser who meekly suggested that talking to Hamas might not be such a bad idea. He was out faster than you can say Mearsheimer and Walt. Speaking of which: the Obama-oids have gone out of their way to distance themselves – i.e., "reject and denounce" – those two hate-criminals, even though, as Philip Weiss trenchantly avers, a book by Obama's point man on the Middle East says pretty much the same thing. In response to all this, Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative, dryly remarked: "At this point one wonders whether the people who deny the dramatic influence of the Israel lobby on American politics feel a little bit silly." |
In the third part of our series on Gaza, Rory McCarthy talks to Ahmad Abu Me'tiq, who lost his wife and four of his children in an Israeli air strike
- guardian.co.uk,
- Wednesday May 14 2008
Ready, set... cliché!
McCarthy writes:
As is frequently the case in this most grueling of conflicts the cause of the explosion that killed the wife and four children of Ahmad Abu Me'tiq is disputed.
It is certainly curious. Israel kills Palestinian civilians, but then it will deny culpability... this was the case of the family killed on the beach, Muhammed Dura, the bombing of the shelter in Qana, etc., etc. There is a long list of such hollow denials, yet for McCarthy it is an issue of a "dispute". Gaza is under siege, the population is being starved, Israeli aircraft attack every day... but McCarthy deems that he has to play along with this grotesque charade. The only thing that is missing are his ritual clucking sounds.
One can well imagine McCarthy asking Ahmad abu Me'tiq what he thought about the culpability for the killing of his family. "But you know Ahmad, the Israelis deny responsibility"!…
McCarthy, like so many journalists and commentators, also refers to the Israeli colonial project as a "conflict"; it is another of those knee jerk cliché terms. The use of the word "conflict" when referring to the Israeli grand larceny of Palestinian land and ethnic cleansing is like referring to the rape of a woman as mere "sexual relations".
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Ahmad abu Me'tiq. His wife and four of his children were killed in an explosion at the door to his home in Beit Hanoun, Gaza.. Photograph: Martin Godwin
Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza's Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma'a Abu Me'tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night.
It may be the best hospital in Gaza but even the poorest families, like the Abu Me'tiqs, must provide extra food themselves. Asma'a's father, Ahmad, returns from downstairs with a cheap electric hot-plate, which he bought on credit from a shopkeeper he knows. He plugs it into the wall to heat a pot of thin homemade soup for his 13-year-old daughter, but there is either no electricity or the hot-plate didn't work. "What bad luck," he says quietly to himself.
Then he reaches over to his daughter, who is coughing and struggling to breathe from the deep wound in her chest. She hasn't touched her food since she was rushed to hospital 10 days earlier: the day an explosion in the street outside demolished the metal front door of their house as the family were eating breakfast, impaling her and her younger sister, Shaima, seven, with shrapnel and killing outright four other brothers and sisters and her mother too.
Obama vs. The Israel Lobby: No matter how much he grovels, it's never enough
The presidential hopeful opposed the Iraq war and spoke sense about Iran, but expect business as usual on the Middle East
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- The Guardian,
- Wednesday May 14 2008
Now that Barack Obama is almost certain to be the Democratic party's nominee, in spite of last night's expected Clinton victory in West Virginia, those who want to believe he may change America's foreign policy should turn to his pre-campaign biography. I don't mean the recent and obviously self-serving Audacity of Hope, but Dreams From My Father, which he wrote in his early 30s.
In four tight pages, before the main section about the dilemmas of being a person of mixed race in America, Obama recounts his 1960s childhood in Jakarta with an Indonesian stepfather and a white mother. Working in the US embassy, she found herself alongside "caricatures of the ugly American, prone to making jokes about Indonesians until they found out she was married to one".
Obama recalls how she picked up "things she couldn't learn in the published news reports": the role the CIA had just played in toppling the popular nationalist leader, Sukarno; the fact that half a million alleged communist sympathisers were murdered; the way the massacres were suppressed both by the regime and terrified survivors. Obama was only six, but his mother later told him of her shock that "history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets".
Online Journal Contributing Writer
May 14, 2008
WMR -- In Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's world of an "Israelized" America, the terms SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) and BDO (Behavior Detection Officer) are the new acronyms of Stasi-like control of the American citizenry by a government that treats anyone as a suspicious person in the same manner that Israel mistreats its own Arab citizens and Palestinians.
Sunday, this editor and his colleague faced the Chertoffian menace at Washington's Reagan National Airport while heading to the gate to board a flight to Houston.
It is now clear from a review of the events that unfolded that I was pre-selected for an intensive search and battery of questions even before arriving in line for the security screening. A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener was overheard saying, "the guy with the beard." Since I was the only person in line who also had a beard, it was evident that a red flag had earlier been raised.
What followed, was worse than anything I had previously encountered while leaving Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, itself a revolting display of ingratitude to citizens of the country that bankrolls Israel, or the Israeli-run screening process at Amsterdam's Schipol.
Airport.
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Opposing a Jewish State in 1938, 1946 & 1952 and Labeling Future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin a Fascist in 1948.
After the death of the first president of Israel in 1952, the Israeli government offered the post of second president to Einstein. He declined the offer.
Albert Einstein, on April 17, 1938, in a speech at the Commodore Hotel in New York City, said:
“I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical consideration, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain — especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, …..
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Posted by morris108 on May 11, 2008
I decided to leave a comment on the haaretz article.
Saying a lawyer needed to propose a law to stop warmongering, racist and the far right pushing the country into absurdities.
And that the article whispered of a post zionist mature country, as do other articles on the net.
I don’t expect it to be published so I have typed it here.
Anyway I was surprised that the comments guidelines forbid the use of the words ethnic cleansing.
Why Bush must recognise the Nakba
May 13th, 2008
Close to 1 million people turned up for a Hizballah rally in 2006
Could there be a more perfect image of the catastrophic self-inflicted rout suffered by U.S. Middle East policy under President George W. Bush? This week, the President will party with Israel’s leaders celebrating their country’s 60th anniversary — and champion a phony peace process whose explicity aim is to produce an agreement to go on the shelf — with Bush curiously choosing the moment to honor the legend of the mass infanticide and suicide of the Jewish Jihadists at Masada. Meanwhile, across the border in Lebanon, Hizballah are riding high on the tectonic shifts in the Middle East’s political substructure, making clear that the “new Middle East” memorably (if grotesquely) inaugurated by Condi Rice in Beirut in 2006 is nothing like that imagined or pursued by the Bush Administration. On the contrary, the Bush Administration has managed to weaken its friends and allies and empower its enemies to an almost unprecedented degree.
The collapse and humiliation of the U.S.-backed Lebanese government after it had foolishly threatened to curb Hizballah’s ability to fight Israel was simply the latest example of a failed U.S. policy of cajoling allies into confrontations with politically popular radical movements that the U.S. and its allies simply can’t win. And picking fights that you can’t win is not exactly adaptive behavior. Indeed, as I noted earlier this week, recovering alcoholics in America are taught the adage that repeating the same behavior and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity — but by measure of what we’ve seen in Gaza, Basra, Sadr City, that’s one lesson that appears to have eluded this particular administration. The Lebanese showdown was initiated by Washington’s closest allies threatening to close down Hizballah’s internal communication network, and it’s hard not to suspect that such a provocative move could only have been taken with Washington’s encouragement. And to put it unkindly, paper tigers should not play with matches.
The result was predictable, because in terms of popular support, organization, and arms in the field, the militias backing the U.S.-backed government are no match for Hizballah, which quickly seized control of Beirut, and also of other key locations. But Hizballah made abundantly clear that it had no intention of taking over the country, it was simply underlining its intention to maintain its capacity to fight Israel — and to resist any attempt to trim that capacity, regardless of whether such trimming is required by UN Security Council resolutions. That’s why it took control over key Druze-controlled towns in the Chouf — because they’re strategically valuable in any confrontation with the Israelis.
Tue, 13 May 2008 22:39:34
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has revealed that Washington plans to engage in a number of 'exclusive' activities against Iran.
"We're being very aggressive in going after the networks in Iraq, and the individuals who are interfering or supplying weapons from Iran," said Gates Tuesday.
"We have a number of other activities under way. We take it very seriously. But at this point our activities are focused pretty exclusively inside Iraq,'' he added.
He accused the Islamic Republic of arming Iraqi insurgents and claimed it had 'awakened them (the Iraqis) to the reality of the magnitude of Iranian meddling in Iraq.'
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Cops with rifles to hit streets this summer
Added: May 13, 2008
Indiana police state
He kicks the guy lying face down and cuffed!
School Recruiting Could Violate Int'l Protocol
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 13 (IPS) - Pressed by the demands of the "global war on terrorism", the United States is violating an international protocol that forbids the recruitment of children under the age of 18 for military service, according to a new report released Tuesday by a major civil rights group that charged that recruitment practices target children as young as 11 years old.
The 46-page report, "Soldiers of Misfortune", which was prepared by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for submission to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, also found that the U.S. military disproportionately targets poor and minority public school students.Military recruiters, according to the report, use "exaggerated promises of financial rewards for enlistment, [which] undermines the voluntariness of their enlistment." In some cases documented by the report, recruiters used coercion, deception, and even sexual abuse in order to gain recruits. Perpetrators of such practices are only very rarely punished, the report found.
"The United States military's procedures for recruiting students plainly violate internationally accepted standards and fail to protect youth from abusive and aggressive recruitment tactics," said Jennifer Turner of the ACLU Human Rights Project.
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US: Nearly 400 immigrant workers arrested in slaughterhouse raid
By Bill Van Auken
14 May 2008
In one of the largest ever government dragnets against immigrant workers, federal agents swooped down upon a meatpacking plant in northeastern Iowa Monday, rounding up nearly 400 workers.
Heavily armed squads of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, backed by state and local police, stormed Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville, Iowa, the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world, while two government helicopters hovered overhead.
In all, 16 local, state and federal agencies were involved in the raids, which had been prepared for months.
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The survivors' stories leave no doubt: Guantánamo makes us all less safe
May 12, 2008, 9:32 AM
John Yoo: In His Own Words
Go inside John H. Richardson's transcript of his interviews with John Yoo, author of "The Torture Memo."
By John H. Richardson
John Yoo is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California-Berkeley. He is also the main author of what has come to be known as "The Torture Memo," the long-sealed internal White House document that defined precisely which aggressive techniques could be legally employed by CIA interrogators against suspected terrorists.
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Certainly there was this whole industry of people outside the Congress, all these Clinton-haters, who were making a career out of attacking Clinton, but I thought it was a legitimate subject for investigation. The president and his advisors were trying to cover up financial misconduct or sexual harassment. I think Congress is allowed to ask about that. For example, I think Congress is fully allowed to ask about interrogation procedures. That's one of their roles. They should have oversight. It can be crippling, obviously, to the executive if Congress goes forward guns blazing in its oversight powers, but I don't think there's anything unconstitutional about it. Certainly for Hatch it wasn't vindictive. I can't speak for everyone who worked in the Senate. Hatch thought there were things that could be wrong here.
Clinton certainly didn't make it easy. Same as the Bush administration. Knowing what you know now about what they had done, if they had been much more open and forthcoming coming out of the gate, it would have been better for everybody.
But I will say this: I wasn't in favor of impeachment. I don't think what Clinton did rose to the level of what impeachment is really for. I think if people in Congress wanted to impeach President Bush they could, not because he committed a crime but because they think he's a bad president.
That was the phrase ["high crimes and misdemeanors"] that came from Britain, and the British used to, under that phrase, remove people just because they screwed up a war.
There are great examples. Allegedly these were the same standards of impeachments when they impeached a minister because the British suffered a setback in the war with the Dutch. It wasn't a crime, but you were a bad leader. But it has to be something of significance to the state. Clinton, what he did didn't seem to rise to that level.
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Published: Tuesday, May 13, 2008
VANCOUVER - A police psychologist blasted Taser International at the public inquiry probing the controversial use of Tasers, claiming Tuesday that Canadian police have been "brainwashed" by the manufacturer to justify "ridiculously inappropriate" use of the electronic weapon.
Mike Webster accused the company that makes Tasers of instructing police in Canada that when they encounter a person suffering from a "mythical" condition that Taser calls "excited delirium," police have few options other than jolting the person with the controversial electrical weapon, which delivers a five-second shock that incapacitates a person.
"When you think the only tool you have is a hammer, then the whole world begins looking like a nail," Webster told the inquiry in Vancouver.
Excited delirium is not a recognized medical diagnosis, he said, but is a "dubious disorder" used by Taser International in its training of police in Canada and the U.S.
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Rhode Island CHANGE Confronts Richard N. Haass
Richard N. Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, delivered a speech entitled "Why Does the World Hate Us?", to a large audience at Brown University on April 29, 2008. Nathan Florence of the Rhode Island Chapter of WeAreChange.org (RIChange.org)was there to meet him and attempt to have some of the Council's past statements and current positions clarified by its acting President. Here is what happened.
14 May 2008
DON'T ask for what you never had,' is the underlying message made by supporters of Israel when they claim Palestine was never a state to begin with.
The contention is, of course, easily refutable. Following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th Century, colonial powers plotted to divide the spoils. When Britain and France signed the secretive Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, which divided the spheres of influence in west Asia, there were hardly any 'nation-states' in the region which would fit contemporary definitions of the term.
All borders were colonial concoctions that served the interests of the powerful countries seeking strategic control, political influence and raw material. Most of Africa and much of Asia were victims of the colonial scrambles, which disfigured their geo-political and subsequently socio-economic compositions.
But Palestinians, like many other people, did see themselves as a unique group linked historically to a specific geographic entity. All That Remains by Professor Walid Khalidi is one leading volume which documents a thriving pre-Israel history of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Such history is often overlooked, if not entirely dismissed. Some choose to believe that no other civilization ever existed in Palestine, neither prior to nor between the assumed destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE until the founding of Israel in 1948. But what about irrefutable facts? For example, the Israeli Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post when it was founded in 1932. Why Palestine and not Israel? Whose existence, as a definable political entity, preceded the other? The answer is obvious.
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Jump in food prices biggest in 18 years
Is inflation or deflation the biggest threat to the global economy?
The Last Bite
The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash
As safe as houses? How harsh realities are dispelling the home market myths
Caroline Flint blunder lets slip Government's house price pessimism
A Cornucopia for Rich Farmers
From the credit crunch to the spectre of global crisis
JPMorgan Chase CEO: Recession Just Beginning
Federal Reserve Freakout
Bankruptcies in America
Waiting for Armageddon
Mar 27th 2008 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
The recent rise in corporate bankruptcies in America may well be a sign of much worse to come
If the debt markets are to be believed, companies could be in at least as much trouble as they were in the previous two downturns, in the early 1990s and at the start of this decade, after the dotcom bubble burst. A leading indicator is the spread between yields on speculative “junk” bonds and American Treasury bonds. A year ago, the spread was only about 280 basis points; the long-term average is around 500 points. This month the spread exceeded 800 points for the first time since March 2003, reaching 862 on March 17th.
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Foreclosure rate skyrockets in April
April saw a 65% increase in foreclosures from the same month a year ago.The numbers pretty much speak for themselves, with 243,353 receiving notices in April. This is a vast increase from April 2007, when "only" 147,708 homes received the same notice. This was also a 4% increase from March. The numbers are based on a report from RealtyTrac Inc.
Homeowners in California and Florida are among the hardest hit. The two states had 9 metropolitan areas that ranked in the top ten areas of the country in terms of foreclosures..
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Camille Paglia - Wikipedia
May. 14, 2008
She won't go easy
Hillary will likely fight to the bitter end -- but she should be grateful the media gave her a free pass. Plus: A Soap Opera legend, a disappearing Stevie and the Cream still rises
By Camille Paglia
***
Surely, given Hillary's claim of expertise on the basis of her service as first lady, every major or ambiguous episode in her husband's two presidencies should have been systematically reexamined by the media. I for one have renewed questions about the 1993 suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, Hillary's former law partner and longtime friend, whose files were purged by Hillary's staff before they could be examined for evidence. One must always be skeptical about Web rumors, but my interest was piqued last year by claims that Foster was shattered by the role he had played three months earlier in the outrageous order for federal agents to attack David Koresh's ranch at Waco, Texas, producing a conflagration that led to 76 deaths, including 21 children. Why has the Waco fiasco been forgotten? It triggered the worst case of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, the 1995 revenge bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
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By Alice Rothchild
May 14, 2008
This spring we are obsessed with anniversaries: the fifth year since the invasion of Iraq, the 40th since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and, of course, the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence. Each such marker shapes our understanding of history, framing how a story is to be told and how it is to be remembered. I am struck by one conspicuous anniversary that is not making many headlines.
On tour recently in the U.S., Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli organization Zochrot, explained that "zochrot" is the Hebrew word for "remembering," intentionally used in its feminine form to imply that this organization is not about the standard history of schoolbooks but about a memory grounded in compassion. Zochrot focuses on educating Israelis about the other side of the 1948 War of Liberation, the dispossession and expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians living in what was to become Israel. Through careful documentation of the locations of more than 450 destroyed Palestinian villages, by interviewing and photographing Palestinians living in Israel and surrounding refugee camps, Zochrot creates a living human memory that encompasses the other side of history.
Mr. Bronstein has been touring with Mohammad Jaradat, a Palestinian activist, negotiator at the Madrid peace talks and co-founder of Badil, Arabic for "alternative," a foundation that researches and advocates for Palestinian residency and refugee rights. He is part of a vigorous Palestinian movement for civil society that is largely unknown in the U.S.
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The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online. The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity initiative." That includes an electronic test range, where federally-funded hackers can test out the latest electronic attacks. "You used to need an army to wage a war," a recent Air Force commercial notes. "Now, all you need is an Internet connection."
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Lexington
May 8th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Illustration by Kevin Kallaugher
NO OTHER country puts as much emphasis on “freedom” as the United States. Patrick Henry demanded “liberty or death”. The national anthem calls America “the land of the free”. Great reformers from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King have urged America to live up to its ideal of “freedom”. When a group of French Americanophiles wanted to flatter the United States, they sent the Statue of Liberty.
And no other country boasts as much about its mission to give freedom to the rest of the world. Woodrow Wilson thought that he had a God-given duty to bring liberty to mankind. George Bush regards his foreign policy as a crusade for freedom—“the right and hope of all humanity”.
But how good is America at living up to its own ideals? A new study by Freedom House tries to answer this question. The fact that Freedom House has devoted so much attention to the United States is significant in its own right. Founded in 1941 by a group of Americans who were worried about the advance of fascism, Freedom House is now the world's leading watchdog of liberty. The fact that “Today's American: How Free?” is such a thorough piece of work makes it doubly significant
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