Mary J. Ruwart, Ph.D. is a former pharmaceutical research scientist and Assistant Professor of Surgery. She has worked extensively with the disadvantaged in low-income housing and was a contender for the 1992 Libertarian Party Vice-Presidential nomination. Her scientific, political, and community activities have been profiled in several prestigious biographical works, including American Men and Women of Sciences, World’s Who’s Who of Women, International Leaders in Achievement, and Community Leaders of America (57:22):

Stefan Molyneux runs Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web. His books, podcasts, and videos are available free on the web. Mr. Molyneux accepts donations with the utmost gratitude.

The options on the table before the Obama Administration War Cabinet all involved escalating the occupation by as many as 80,000 troops. The president wants other options as he continues dithering.

President Barack Obama is not satisfied to execute on any of the options his national security team have brought to the table, “pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government”, the Associated Press (AP) reports tonight from a senior administration official. The Afghan government has shown itself to be nothing more or less than a brutal mafia. The druglords and warlords are now the taxmen—rightfully scrutinized for being immoral, but actually just acting as a government.

The news comes as Karl Eikenberry, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, “sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise”, The Washington Post reported earlier from senior officials.

At today’s meeting with the War Council, Mr. Obama entertained—what was referred to throughout the day as—”the four options”, which WaPo reported would cost around $1bn per thousand troops. Christi Parsons and Julian Barnes reported them at the Los Angeles Times as:

1. At least 40,000 additional troops, the ‘medium-risk’ option from General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of the U.S.-led occupation—the ‘low-risk’ option being an escalation of 80,000 troops;
2. 34,000 additional troops, including 23,000 for combat and support, 7,000 for the occupiers’ command base and 4,000 trainers, officials confirmed over the weekend;
3. 20,000 additional troops, the ‘high-risk’ option from Gen. McChrystal—”known by military planners as ‘the hybrid’,” WaPo reports, “to shore up security in 10 to 12 major population areas”; and
4. around 12,000 additional troops, supported by Senator John Kerry (D-MA), more geared toward counterterrorism operations, maintaining the same troop level for counterinsurgency.

Mr. Obama was “leaning toward” escalating the occupation by 34,000 and announcing it after his trip to Asia in a week, Jonathan Landay reported at McClatchy over the weekend.

“The sense that he was being rushed and railroaded has stiffened Obama’s resolve to seek information and options beyond military planning, officials said, though a substantial troop increase is still likely,” the AP reports tonight, adding: “The options presented to Obama by his War Council will now be amended.”

Since Mr. Obama began his presidential run in early 2007, he referred to the occupation of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity”. Leading political scientists, notably Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, see no reason for such an assessment.

Counterterrorism operations have been dubbed by human rights groups and military officials as “death from above”, as strikes have killed 49 civilians for every terrorist leader assassinated. It’s uncontroversial such civilian casualties are counter-intuitive to “winning the hearts of minds of the population”, as Gen McChrystal reported to the president was crucial to avoid “mission failure”.

The argument for shifting to a counterterrorism mission is the concern over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the possibility of Afghanistan or Pakistan becoming a ’safe haven’ or ‘base of operations’ for ‘terrorists to conduct operations against the U.S. and the fulfillment of juvenile revenge fantasies over 9/11.

Seymour Hersh wrote of the politics toward understanding the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal at The New Yorker over the weekend, of which Little Alex partially analyzed. He discussed the battle between the military and the White House over the Afghanistan occupation and his article with Rachel Maddow this evening (7:18):

Here at Wonderland, we’re not giving the president as much credit as Mr. Hersh. (In his defense, Mr. Hersh was probably not aware that the reports actually stated there was no indication Mr. Obama would cease to escalate the occupation, as Ms. Maddow mistook.) Our message to the president remains the same: Stop dithering and bring the troops home, now!

To execute a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its allies would need to commit at least another 100,000 troops to begin building an Afghan Security Force of 400,000. This assessment was made by us before military officials confirmed the number, 600,000, as the amount of counterinsurgent forces needed to begin stablizing Afghanistan.

“Nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try,” George Will wrote at WaPo over two months ago. “Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.”.

On Veterans Day, we’re reminded of the deaths of U.S. soldiers during war, but the casualties of war remain, recklessly, forgotten.

“On MSNBC, and the other cable hawkers of government propaganda this morning, veterans were absent, despite the constant invocation of Veterans Day,” Lew Rockwell, Jr., president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, commented. “All the photos and discussion were of active-duty troops in the various U.S. occupations. None of the kids with missing limbs or brain parts were shown, the actual veterans, nor that single-payer Hell, the V.A. medical system and its inmates. It was all lies about the glory of war, by a caw-cawing bunch of chickenhawks.”

In-action U.S. casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan total over 90,000, on record. “That includes a tire-screeching 75,134 dead, wounded-in-action, and medically evacuated due to illness, disease, or injury in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and 14,323 and counting in Afghanistan, or Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF),” Kelley B. Vlahos reports at AntiWar.com, adding:

Larry Scott, who runs VAWatchdog.org, an invaluable daily monitor of ongoing issues affecting the 23.4 million living U.S veterans, said the 90,591 figure relating to OIF/OEF casualties is valid—and ultimately overwhelming. “People just forget, they don’t realize there is an ongoing cost of war. Whether you agree with the war or not is not the issue. We have to be ready to pay the price.”

Documents from the government and non-governmental organizations have found that 170,000 veterans of the Vietnam Counterinsurgency have committed suicide, Dahr Jamail reported at AntiWar Radio today. The Veterans Health Administration confirmed in an email dated 15 December 2007: 6,552 veterans commit suicide every year—126 every week, 18 every day. Any suicide survivor can attest to the fact that the casualties of every suicide are exponential to the statistic itself.

The RAND Corportation, according to the Online Journal in April 2008, stated around 300,000 troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering major depression or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—better known as shell shock—and nearly 370,000 received traumatic brain injuries.

Any native of a nation-state invaded by the U.S. Armed Forces can attest to the fact that for every U.S. casualty is a potential nationwide population of human beings and property and natural resources damaged or destroyed.

Mr. Obama won the 2008 presidential election with 52.9% of the vote. That was a year ago. Today, a CNN poll reports 56% of those polled oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan and 58% oppose the occupation as a whole.

Mr. President, politics has a price. Life does not. Morality exceeds value. Integrity makes you a man. Defying power with integrity makes you a leader.

End the occupation of Afghanistan. Yes, you can.

The threat of military force, according to international law, in an act of war. The Venezuelan president is posturing, but the U.S. has mobilized forces and resources in Colombia—to which President Chávez claims to be reacting. Eva Golinger, a journalist and lawyer heavily focused on Venezuela, says the October 30th U.S-Colombia agreement “basically converting Colombia into one giant U.S. military base in South America” (4:49):

The Obama Administration and the Colombian government signed an agreement allowing for the U.S. to expand access to military bases in a “private, low-key ceremony” that infuriated Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, the Associated Press reported less than two weeks ago.

They reported Mr. Chávez’s concern is that the ten-year counterinsurgency deal “would make Colombia a base for asserting U.S. power in South America”. The deal, U.S. officials say, will not increase U.S. presence of armed forces and—nearly twice that amount of—corporations contracted by the U.S. government.

Mr. Chávez has said “that U.S. access to the Colombian bases poses a direct threat to his oil-exporting country”, al Jazeera reports.

Violence on the Venezuela-Colombia border has escalated over the last months, as has demonization from the U.S. since Venezuela began to make efforts toward abandoning the acceptance of U.S. dollars for its oil.

The Daily Telegraph reported of this violence as Mr. Chávez recently voiced a preparation for war after recent violence:

Four men on motorcycles shot and killed two Venezuelan National Guard troops at a checkpoint near the border in Venezuela’s western Tachira state last week, prompting Chávez’s government to temporarily close some border crossings.

And last month, Venezuelan authorities arrested at least 10 people in Tachira alleging involvement in paramilitary groups. The bullet-ridden bodies of 11 men, nine of them Colombians, were also found last month in Tachira after being abducted from a soccer field

The violence prompted Venezuela to send 15,000 soldiers to the border with Colombia on Thursday. Officials said the build-up was necessary to increase security along the border.

“Let’s not waste a day on our main aim: to prepare for war and to help the people prepare for war, because it is everyone’s responsibility,” Mr. Chávez told military officers during his weekly television and radio program.

“Students, revolutionaries, workers, women: all are ready to defend this sacred homeland called Venezuela,” he continued, adding: “The best way to avoid war is preparing for it.”

Last week, Humberto Márquez, reporting at Inter Press Service, wrote of Colombian paramilitary factions in Western Venezuela “aggravating”  diplomacy:

The sense of alarm has even reached their big neighbour, Brazil, where Marco Aurelio García, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s foreign policy adviser, said “It would be a good thing for Venezuela and Colombia to agree on a system of joint surveillance of their common border, and I would not exclude a non-aggression pact,” for which Brazil could provide assistance through “technical means,” such as surveillance aircraft….

For nearly half a century, Colombia has been caught up in a civil war that frequently spills over its borders. Guerrilla movements in remote rural areas took up arms in 1964, and far-right paramilitary death squads with ties to the drug trade have been active since the 1980s.

Since 2000, Colombia—the main source of drugs to the U.S. market—has received heavy U.S. military aid as well as advisers and contractors, to fight drug trafficking and the insurgent groups, through Plan Colombia.

Former Colombian president Ernesto Samper (1994-1998) warned that there was a “pre-war situation” with Venezuela because of President Álvaro Uribe’s poor handling of the new military agreement with Washington….

Lula’s adviser García said the Brazilian government “does not see the accord as appropriate. We cannot keep Colombia from reaching its own decisions, but what are needed are guarantees that no imbalance will be generated in the region.”…

Since July, Chávez ordered restrictions of trade and other economic activities with Colombia, and the border bridges over the Táchira river, joining the Colombian city of Cúcuta and the Venezuelan towns of San Antonio and Ureña have been the scenario of frequent protests by truckers, local merchants, shop workers and people who depend on petty contraband for a living.

Last weekend, paramilitary supporters handed out leaflets urging businesses in Ureña and San Antonio to close their doors in protest against the restrictions on cross-border traffic imposed by authorities in Venezuela. The leaflets also included death threats against some people in the area. Ten of the pamphleteers were arrested by the Venezuelan National Guard.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe “reacted angrily” to the mobilization of Venezuelan troops and the rhetoric of Mr. Chávez, calling on the U.N. to investigate, the Daily Telegraph reports. A statement from the Foreign Ministry of Venezuela responded his reaction was “immoral” and “showed the hypocrisy of the Colombian oligarchy”.

Some facts via Reuters:

• Venezuela and Colombia share a 1,375-mile (2,200-km) border and a volatile history. After both were freed from the Spanish by Venezuelan liberator Simon Bolivar in the 19th century, the two countries were the center of a short-lived nation known as Gran Colombia that also included Ecuador and Panama.
• Colombia’s four-decade-old guerrilla conflict has for years spilled over the Venezuelan border, where kidnappings, contraband and drug trafficking are common. Mr. Chávez’s ideological closeness to Colombian FARC Marxist rebels has led Washington and Bogota to accuse him of supporting the guerrillas. Mr. Chávez denies providing arms or logistical support to the rebels.
• When Mr. Chavez recalled his diplomats from Colombia in July, it was the third such measure since 2005 when tensions ran high over the arrest in Caracas of a FARC guerrilla leader in a Colombian-led police operation.
• The two countries raised the specter of war in March 2008 after a Colombian bombing raid on a guerrilla camp in Ecuador brought troop movements from Quito and Caracas. Mr. Chavez cut diplomatic relations with Bogota and threatened to stop cross-border trade.

Manuel Rosales, primary opposition presidential candidate to Mr. Chávez in 2006, is in Venezuelan custody for allegedly offering a $25 million bounty to 2,500 paramilitary operants to kill Mr. Chávez, al Jazeera reported—adding that, however, “he himself would not give the money directly”.

Begs the questions: (a) True or false?; (b) If true, who are Mr. Rosales benefactors?

Stephen Webster at The Raw Story adds:

During the summer of 2009, Venezuela bought billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated fighter jets and tanks from its military ally Russia.

Venezuela’s closest allies, Ecuador and Bolivia, back that stance.

“As long as there are uniformed foreigners in a South American country, it’s difficult for us to think there can be peace,” Bolivian President Evo Morales reportedly said in August.

A conventional war between Venezuela and Colombia would, as Mr. Chávez said in his address, “extend throughout the whole continent”.

Such a troop mobilization from Venezuela with its president’s rhetoric and continued defiance against the U.S. and dollar hegemony coincide with the unprecedented circumstances of a tail-spinning U.S. dollar and the over-extension of U.S military might with liabilities far exceeding its assets.

Military conflict between the two countries would become a proxy war between: the ‘West’-aided Colombia; and a Russia, the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries—or ‘OPEC‘—and possibly China-aided Venezuela. The West would crumble, making such a World War III hypothetical, improbable.

Whatever the reason stated by the Obama Administration for its latest agreement with Colombia, it’s self-defeating. Unless, of course, that is the reason.

Scott Horton, anarchist host of AntiWar Radio, spoke to the Young Americans for Liberty chapter at the University of New Hampshire on why libertarians should be antiwar, the history of oligarchs lying the U.S. into wars, the becoming of the Empire, blowback, how Osama bin Laden baited the U.S. into Afghanistan to end the Empire as the U.S. did to the Soviets, and irrational American exceptionalism—introducing Thomas Woods – 6 November 09 – (27:36):

Peter Schiff, an intellectual economist, brutalizes a know-nothing dingbat with no substance to bring to the table. Schiff: 1; Dingbat: 0

Part One (7:10):

Part Two (7:10):

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“Al Jazeera has obtained exclusive footage showing the Taliban in Afghanistan displaying what appears to be U.S. weapons. The fighters say they seized the arms cache from two U.S. outposts in eastern Nuristan province. Days after the alleged assault, the U.S. military pulled out its troops from the area,” Jonah Hull reports (1:50):

We’re to believe U.S. Armed Forces are fleeing, frantically—disregarding arms and ammunition?

We’re to believe the best-trained military in the world left arms behind—where militant factions, which could disrupt the world order, could just pick them up—by accident? Or after some long-calculated cost:benefit analysis? An analysis taking up as much time to pack up the arms for transport?

The consent for the extension of the occupation is being manufactured on the basis that you’re stupid enough to believe all of these coincidences.

Logic, people.

Carrie ‘Opposite Marriage’ Prejean: (a) ‘wrote’ a book; (b) for which Sean Hannity ‘wrote’ a foreword; and (c) “I was all by myself”? Form your own conclusions—and please send them to TMZ. I won’t reply to responses—like I don’t to anti-Semites and chickenhawks.

Nowhere near the, regularly heavily, substantial LAW post, but lolololololol (7:36):

My count, including “alone”: 5

</immature, counter-productive waste of time>

And, you’re right, Ms. Prejean—Christians aren’t perfect, they (you) are stupid for your superstition. Talking snakes, rebirthing whales and zombie messiahs are the beliefs of whack-jobs.

KBR, Inc.—a recently former subsidiary of Halliburton and profiteer of the Iraq War, which is the largest non-union construction company in the U.S.—faces a class-action lawsuit claiming burning waste exposed 100,000 Iraqis and foreign troops to cancer-causing toxins, Daniel Tencer reports at The Raw Story.

by Daniel Tencer

9 Nov 09 | Raw Story

Defense contractor KBR may have exposed as many as 100,000 people, including U.S. troops, to cancer-causing toxins by burning waste in open-air pits in Iraq, says a series of class-action lawsuits filed against the company.

At least 22 separate lawsuits claiming KBR poisoned American soldiers in Iraq have been combined into a single massive lawsuit that says KBR, which until not long ago was a subsidiary of Halliburton, sought to save money by disposing of toxic waste and incinerating numerous potentially harmful substances in open-air “burn pits.”

According to one of the lawsuits (PDF), filed in a federal court in Nashville, KBR burned “tires, lithium batteries … biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals, and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles.”

And they did so within plain sight of U.S. troops operating in Iraq, the lawsuit states. “In some instances, the burn pit smoke was so bad that it interfered with the military mission,” the Nashville lawsuit states. “For example, the military located at Camp Bucca, a detention facility, had difficulty guarding the facility as a result of the smoke.”

The plaintiffs note that the military “did not prevent” KBR from disposing of the waste “in a safe manner that would not have harmed plaintiffs. The military wanted the defendants to solve the burn pit problems.”

The lawsuit “claims at least 100,000 people were endangered by the contractors’ ‘utter indifference to and conscious disregard’ of troops’ welfare,” notes the Courthouse News Service.

At a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee on Friday, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said that KBR continues to use burn pits at the U.S.’s largest base in Iraq.

“The Army and the contractor in charge of this waste disposal—Kellogg, Brown, and Root—made frequent and unnecessary use of these burn pits and exposed thousands of U.S. troops to toxic smoke,” Dorgan said. “Burn pits are still used at the Balad Airbase in Iraq, which is the largest U.S. base in that country.”

A 2008 report by the Pentagon asserted that “adverse health risks are unlikely” from the burn pits, but that assertion was challenged by retired Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis, a biomedical sciences officer who took some of the air samples used in the report.

“Although I have no hard data, I believe that the burn pits may be responsible for long-term health problems in many individuals,” the Air Force Times quoted Curtis as saying. “I think we are going to look at a lot of sick people.”

The lawsuit “claims at least 100,000 people were endangered by the contractors’ ‘utter indifference to and conscious disregard’ of troops’ welfare,” notes the Courthouse News Service.

At a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee on Friday, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said that KBR continues to use burn pits at the U.S.’s largest base in Iraq.

“The Army and the contractor in charge of this waste disposal—Kellogg, Brown, and Root—made frequent and unnecessary use of these burn pits and exposed thousands of U.S. troops to toxic smoke,” Dorgan said. “Burn pits are still used at the Balad Airbase in Iraq, which is the largest U.S. base in that country.”

A 2008 report by the Pentagon asserted that “adverse health risks are unlikely” from the burn pits, but that assertion was challenged by retired Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis, a biomedical sciences officer who took some of the air samples used in the report.

“Although I have no hard data, I believe that the burn pits may be responsible for long-term health problems in many individuals,” the Air Force Times quoted Curtis as saying. “I think we are going to look at a lot of sick people.”

Trends forecaster Gerald Celente discusses the Newspeak of State officials with Lew Rockwell, Jr.: “The wealth of the nation is going to the ‘too big to fail’s” (13:41):

Download the mp3 here.

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Vedad Krehic on ‘intellectual property’ at LewRockwell.com (LRC): How copyright has turned the record labels, software writers and film studios against their own customers.

by Vedad Krehic

9 Nov 09 | LRC

The consumer entertainment industry lobbyists lie. They lie over, and over, and over. They lie to the media, they lie to the politicians, they lie to you. The lies in question are rarely looked upon critically by the media or the politicians, only by grassroots opposition. The main lies involved are all variations on the same theme; copying equals theft. That is to say, if you copy a piece of data – be it a software program, a song, a movie, a book, that makes you a thief. You’re depriving the producer of that work of money which they supposedly have a right to.

I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t “educated” well enough in government schools, but no matter how I twist and turn my logic, I still fail to see how this even remotely makes sense. If I walk into a store and leave with a jacket for which I have not paid then I have deprived the store’s owner of his or her justly acquired, tangible property. They have one less jacket. They are directly harmed by my action.

If a friend, however, lends me a music CD and if I then make a copy, so that I can listen to the music without having to borrow the disc again in the future, nobody is harmed. It is possible that I could, for example, have made an agreement or contract with him when I borrowed the disc stating that I cannot copy it. If I were to do it anyway, I’d be in violation of a private agreement. If not, who is harmed by my act of duplication? I used my own tangible property (CD drive, computer, and hard drive or blank CD) to fashion a duplicate of the data on the CD. The original CD is still my friend’s property. I return it to him, and while he is no better or worse off than he was before, I am now better off. The imprint of the music on my tangible property makes that property marginally worth more to me, as I can enjoy its use to a greater extent than previously.

Was anyone harmed at any point here?

Yes—if you choose to believe the consumer entertainment industry. They claim there was a third party here that was being harmed. Can you see the third party? There was me, and there was my friend. There was my property and that of my friend. I don’t see the third party anywhere in that process. I suppose my friend could have been in a contract with the person or organization he purchased the CD from not to copy it, but I wouldn’t have been bound by that contract. Either way, I did nothing wrong.

So who is this mysterious third party? At which point does he appear, and how is he harmed?

The third party is the copyright holder. Wait, the what-holder? What’s a copyright holder? Where does he come into play?

Well, let me explain. You see, there’s this notion advocated by some—primarily media lobbyists, objectivists and government officials—of an intellectual property (I.P.). What is an intellectual property, you may ask? Well, the gist of it is that if you do anything that requires a bit of work with the big, roundish object mounted on top of your neck, you have a time-limited monopoly on that action if you’re the first person to do it.

Not understandable? Let me enlighten you, dear reader, with some examples.

Let’s say you are the first to invent a new type of screwdriver. According to the theory of I.P., if you register it with a patent office, for all intents and purposes you now own that idea. You own it for a limited amount of time (20 years), after which the ownership magically vanishes. How can you own the idea, you might ask? Well, according to I.P., that means that nobody else can legally manufacture the same type of screwdriver for the duration of the ownership. Or, to put it in clearer terms, nobody has a right to compete with you. You have a monopoly. The same applies for all other sub-categories of I.P., including copyright, trademarks, trade secrets, and so on; but this article is intended to focus mainly on copyright. For an extended discourse and refutation of the other ones, as well as a more in-depth take on copyright, I recommend to the reader Stephan Kinsella’s brilliant essay, “Against Intellectual Property” [.pdf]

Copyright follows the same logic as the screwdriver inventor. It posits that the act of making a “creative” work—such as writing a book, composing a song, painting a picture, taking a photo and so on—creates a different type of property on top of the tangible property that already exists in that item. Follow me, dear readers, if you can, through the logic. Let’s use a painting as an example. The painting consists of a canvas and some paint. That’s the tangible property. That’s what the painting’s owner owns. But, according to the theory of I.P., there is (assuming the painting hasn’t been placed into the public domain or had its copyright expire) another owner, as well. The painter, or whomever he might have signed over the copyright to the painting.

You see, the owner of the painting can do anything he wants with it (within the bounds of the non-aggression axiom). He can throw rancid tomatoes at it, he can hang it upside down, he can embed a block of wood straight through the middle of it. It’s his or her right as the owner. He may not, however, legally duplicate the pattern of paint on the canvas. There is an existing moral prohibition against duplicating it and then selling those duplicates as the original—it’s called fraud. There is no such moral prohibition against merely duplicating it, or, for that matter, duplicating it with the intention of selling the duplicates (assuming one doesn’t claim they are original). The reason he may not duplicate it is that the “creator,” the copyright holder, doesn’t allow it. Granted, there are some exceptions, such Creative Commons or other copyleft licenses which explicitly grant the right to copy within the framework of copyright law. Nevertheless, unless otherwise stated by the copyright holder, the legal assumption is that unauthorized duplication is not permitted.

Can anyone please explain to me how someone can be a just owner of something, yet not be allowed to exercise his or her ownership rights over it? He can throw rancid tomatoes at the painting, but not duplicate the pattern that makes the painting a painting, rather than just canvas and paint? Or, to use a different type of copyrightable pattern, how can someone own their own brain yet not own the part of it containing a song they memorized?

The logical conclusion is that the natural right of property and the idea of copyright, and of intellectual property in general, are fundamentally incompatible and conflict sharply. You cannot own something and have someone else dictate to you what you can and cannot do with it, without that being an element voluntarily arrived at through contract. In absence of a contract, the dictating party is initiating aggression against the just owner of an item. Intellectual property is an assault on tangible property.

What we’re looking at is protectionism in disguise—government giving preferential treatment to one specific industry at the expense of the rest of society. Now, let’s go back to the copyright holder, the mysterious third party who was hurt by me copying the CD’s contents. What I’ve done by copying my friend’s CD is violate a government-imposed monopoly on copying the CD’s contents, the monopoly belonging to the copyright holder. Hence, according to the idea of intellectual property, I’m a thief. I’ve had the audacity to compete with the beneficiary of the monopoly. That is the sense in which I’ve supposedly hurt a third party.

Let’s take a quick look at the current “copyright wars” being waged, in light of the above description of copyright. The music industry in particular and the broader copyright-dependent entertainment industries in general are in decline. Their profit margins are going down, and they don’t like it. The consumers aren’t as pleased with their products as they once were. The seemingly rational course of action for the industry is to look into why consumers aren’t pleased with their products, see what they can do better, innovate, and drop their prices to increase demand. What do the industries (by which I mean the members of the IFPI and MPA) do, however?

None of the above.

In fact, not only are they unwilling to innovate, they have gone to the extreme of starting to sue their own potential and real customers—with the number of lawsuits now over being over 20,000. I’m not a business major, but I’m pretty damn sure that’s not a good way to gain favour with your customers. In their view, every copy made is a lost sale; each person who makes a copy—and a download from a file-sharing network is a copy—must equal a lost sale. Because I’m sure you’ve all gone and bought every single song or movie you’ve heard or seen at a friend’s place, on the radio, on TV, and so on. Let’s cut the crap, okay?

There are many theories on why the entertainment industries’ profits are going down the drain. My own personal favourites are as follows:

1. Lack of innovation and fear of technology. The industries have always been afraid of new technology. The radio, the player-piano, the phonograph, the VCR, cassette tapes etc. were seen as threats by the industry, which responded by attempting to restrict sales and ownership. They’re notoriously skeptical towards new technology, and will bend over backwards to prevent it from becoming commonplace. They’re unwilling to experiment and find new ways to fulfill customer demand. Apple practically had to force iTunes onto the market, the record labels weren’t willing to go along with it at first. They weren’t willing to only sell individual songs, they wanted whole albums sold.One glaring example of the entertainment industries’ fear of technology was ex-MPAA president Jack Valenti’s 1982 statement to a U.S. Congressional panel:

   “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

   As we all know, VCRs went on to become one of the biggest profit sources for Hollywood in history, and now we have DVDs and Blu-Ray discs filling the VCR’s role.

2. Appealing to the lowest common denominator. This applies both to movies and music, but in my opinion, especially music. With their tight working relationship with radio and MTV-like TV channels, the IFPI members of the music industry have, until the last decade, had a virtual choke hold on customers. The radio and TV was the way new music was promoted and exposed to the customer. This is why a good portion of the popular music available today (which, of course, is a subjective opinion—but one many people would echo) is of dubious quality. Need I mention anything more than Britney Spears? The control they once had is now eroding. This is, I believe, one of the core reasons behind their stubborn unwillingness to embrace new technology, and especially the Internet: they give consumers more choice.Movies and news media, of course, aren’t exempt. Every year, Hollywood cranks out hundreds of movies, on which only a handful are truly worth spending one’s finite time. Who truly needs to see movies like Brüno? I mean, okay, it’s mildly humorous. But it’s far from intelligent.

   Here is an article by Michael Crichton discussing the quality of the media, with emphasis on news media in particular. While that isn’t directly what this article is discussing, its observations can be applied to that of the entertainment media as well.

3. Treating the customer like a criminal. You walk into a cinema, buy a ticket, sit down and wait for the movie to start. Then you see this.Doesn’t give you the impression that they like or trust their customers a whole lot, does it?

   But that’s just the beginning of it. The entertainment industries lobby politicians to strengthen and lengthen and broaden the scope of copyright laws. When last I checked, copyright in the U.S. lasts for life + 70 years. Who can claim that a musician should still have a monopoly on his or her works 70 years after they die?

   Furthermore, they lobby for laws like the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which, among other things, further erodes property rights in that it makes reverse engineering DRM systems illegal. What’s DRM, you ask? DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Restrictions might be a more apt term than rights. DRM is, in short, copy protection technology. It’s there on your DVDs, your Blu-Ray discs, your Audible audiobooks, and unfortunately many other places also. Sure, one could have DRM without copyright, but it wouldn’t make much sense to do so. DRM makes it difficult, but not impossible, to make copies of the contents of a medium such as a DVD. It’s a failed attempt by the copyright industries to use technology to prevent the use of other technology.

   The results of using DRM have been mainly preventing non-tech-savvy users from making backups of their own discs (as tech-savvy users can figure out ways to copy them anyway) and to introduce unnecessary inconvenience to the customer. Here are a few examples.

4. The entertainment industries’ crusade against file sharing. A truly stillborn, yet relentlessly continued policy. This harks back to #1 & #3, but deserves a mention of its own. File sharing, which is to say, people sharing media content in the form of digital files such as MP3s, has had a history dating back to the beginning of the digital computer age, but in its current, Internet based incarnation dates back only a decade. It started with Shawn Fanning releasing Napster in 1999. There were a few file-sharing networks prior to Napster, such as HotLine and Audiogalaxy, but Napster is the first one that got real traction. Millions of users copying music files from each other via the Internet. The music industry freaked.

They had Napster shut down. Due to its centralized nature, it was a simple case of shutting down the central coordinating server. Since then, file sharing has been a whack-a-mole game with the entertainment industries’ lawyers and paid politicians constantly trying to shut down various file-sharing networks, and new ones—more decentralized, anonymized and secure—popping up to fill their place. And with every blow, they make file sharing an even stronger movement. This isn’t just me being dramatic, it’s a simple fact. They give it publicity. For example, ThePirateBay, a Swedish BitTorrent (a popular file-sharing technology) tracker and search engine, was attempted to be shut down multiple times by various governments, as well as many national government attempting to ban Internet providers in their respective countries from allowing their users to access the site. Every single attempt has been met with ridicule, and ThePirateBay’s user base grew exponentially as a result of the publicity. The previous owners of ThePirateBay are now on trial for promoting copyright infringement. More on ThePirateBay’s legal saga.

All of these elements combine to form a highly unfavourable impression of the copyright industry in consumers’ eyes. Technology is making traditional entertainment industry business models obsolete. Instead of innovating, the industries are using the hammer of government to force their customers to comply with 1970s business models—and now those customers are rebelling. As a result, the measures applied by governments to coerce them just keep getting more and more draconian. The ACTA, or Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international copyright treaty which is being negotiated in secrecy, is just the latest in a series of totalitarian treaties promoted by the copyright-dependent entertainment industries.

That treaty, if passed, would mark the death of the Internet as we know it; pretty much every single website and service with user-uploaded content would be forced out of business by the sheer cost of compliance. Bye-bye YouTube, Flickr, Google Book Search, digg, Wikipedia, etc.

We can’t let this insanity go on any longer – eliminate imaginary property!

[Thanks for editorial help from John T.]

Vedad Krehic is a student studying digital media production in Norway. Send him mail.

RELATED:

• Intellectual Property — A Libertarian Critique
• Stephan Kinsella on ‘Intellectual Property’ and Libertarianism (mp3)
• Should You Give Away Your Precious IP?
• Copyright Communism?
• IP: It’s a Market Failure Argument
• The Mercantilism of Our Time
• Monopoly Kills Creativity

At the 1990 Mises University at Stanford, Professor Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) spoke on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the future for freed markets in a lecture titled, “The Future of Austrian Economics.” Educational and always humorous, he shows the flaws of the U.S.S.R. weren’t practical blunders, but ideological and methodological flaws of “planning the modern industrial State” which made its demise inevitable from the start and why compromising radical philosophy with the irrational “doesn’t work”. (49:39):

More from Prof. Rothbard:

• Murray Rothbard on Political Strategy (Video)
• Rothbard on Keynes: Hero or Villian? (mp3)
• The Founding of the Federal Reserve (Video)
• Rothbard: The State is a Counterfeiter
• Dr. Murray N. Rothbard: “America’s Two Just Wars”

His full archive is at Mises.org.

Prisoners, physicians and psychologists describe ‘humiliating punishments’ and ‘deteriorating’ conditions during the Obama Administration at the U.S.-run detention center, Andrew Wander reports at al Jazeera.

by Andrew Wander

9 Nov 09 | AJE

On the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, 21-year-old Mohammed el Gharani was sitting in a segregation cell in Guantanamo Bay’s high security Echo Block.

He remembers the excitement among his fellow prisoners at the prospect of an Obama presidency. “Everyone was very hopeful; people were saying he was going to change things, that he would close the prison,” Gharani, who was released in June, says.

“Even the guards were telling us that if he won, things would improve for us.”

They were to be disappointed. A year after Obama’s election win, Al Jazeera has learnt that despite the new president’s pledge to close the prison and improve the conditions of detainees held by the U.S. military, prisoners believe that their treatment has deteriorated on his watch.

Authorities at the prison deny mistreating the inmates, but interviews with former detainees, letters from current prisoners and sworn testimony from independent medical experts who have visited the prison have painted a disturbing picture of psychological and physical abuse very much at odds with White House rhetoric on prisoner treatment.

While no-one is alleging a return to the early days of the prison, when detainees were subjected to “enhanced interrogation” techniques that are today widely regarded as torture, prisoners say day-to-day life at Guantanamo has become harder under the Obama administration.

Within days of Obama’s inauguration and subsequent announcement that he would close Guantanamo, prisoners say authorities introduced new regulations and revoked previous privileges at the prison.

“They took away group recreation for prisoners in segregation, which was the only time we saw anyone,” Gharani remembers. “They took away the books we had from the library. They even sprayed pepper spray into my cell while I was sleeping, so I’d wake up unable to breathe.”

Gharani says he was beaten so badly by guards that he is still suffering pain today.

‘Humiliating rules’

Al Jazeera has obtained letters written by those currently being held in Guantanamo that tell a similar story. In one, written in March, a prisoner, who has asked that he remains anonymous for fear of repercussions, says he is writing to “depict to what degree our conditions inside Guantanamo detention have deteriorated” since Obama took office.

“I am in the very same cell, wearing the same uniform, eating the same food, yet treated much worse compared to mid-2008,” the prisoner writes. “We are unable to understand the goals of the policy of more restrictions and inflexibility.”

According to the letter, prison authorities inflict “humiliating punishments” on inmates and prisoners face ”intentional mental and physical harm”.

“The situation is worsening with the advent of the new management,” the prisoner writes, noting, like Gharani, that the new rules were imposed in January this year. Conditions, he says, “do not fit the lowest standard of human living”.

Separately, two prisoners have complained to their lawyer that their belongings, including their bedding, were removed from their cells on several occasions for no reason. Each time, they were told that the removal was a “mistake,” and the belongings were returned, only to be confiscated again.

More disturbingly, the same two prisoners say that during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, their recreation time was moved to prevent them from taking part in traditional group prayer.

Using religion to punish prisoners is illegal under international law. Authorities at Guantanamo deny the prisoners are kept from practising their religion, although they concede that recreation times are sometimes moved “due to operational needs”.

They say that personal belongings are not removed from cells “unless detainees misuse the items”; the prisoners categorically deny that they did so.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which monitors prisoner treatment at Guantanamo, declined to comment on specific allegations at the prison, but says that it recognises the cumulative effect low-level abuse can have on the well-being of prisoners in general.

“In some cases, a single act may amount to torture,” ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno says. “In others, ill treatment may be the result of a number of methods used over time, which, taken individually and out of context, may seem harmless.”

Read the full article

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Professor Gary Chartier on: ‘promoting access, affordability, and choice by ending privileges for corporations, professionals, and the otherwise politically connected’.

by Gary Chartier

[Updated from article originally posted at the Center for a Stateless Society in August]

The Golden Rule gives us good reason to value at least three goals related to the provision of medical care.

• We typically value our own physical well being, so we’d probably like our own bodies taken care of. If we do, we have good reason to want other people to have access to health care services. Taking access seriously as a goal means maximizing the number of people with access to decent health-care.
• We likely value choice: we don’t like other people to run our lives or constrain our options. If we do, we have good reason to want other people not to be pushed around. Taking choice seriously as a goal means minimizing interference with everyone’s freedom to make health-care choices.
• We value affordability. We don’t want to pay a lot personally for health care, and we don’t want institutions in which we participate to have to do so. So we have good reason not to want other people or institutions to have to pay a lot for health care, either. Taking affordability seriously as a goal means minimizing the net overall cost of health-care to (at least) the national economy.

The question participants in current debates about health care have to confront is: which otherwise just institutional arrangements can enable us to achieve these goals? The degree to which health care services are accessible and affordable and to which people are able to choose health care providers and therapies is determined by structural, political factors. So we have to identify legal norms it makes sense for us to support and (in appropriate circumstances) enact and implement in light of the Golden Rule.

I want to argue here that we can and should work effectively to achieve the goals of access, choice, and affordability by working for the across-the-board elimination of legal privileges that allow privileged elites to reap monopoly profits and limit people’s access to care by making and keeping them poor.

Tensions among the Goals

At first blush, it might seem as if achieving all of these goals at once would be difficult or impossible.

One option consistent with maintaining the current model of health-care delivery would involve letting people sink or swim in a crisis-ridden economy. In this case, we could achieve affordability while preserving choice. But of course we would be ignoring the implications of the Golden Rule regarding the importance of access.

Another option would be to limit choice by rationing. It’s not clear that this would ultimately reduce net health care expenditures (both because actual rationing decisions would almost certainly lead to cartelization that would benefit privileged elites and because it would be almost impossible for rationing decisions to be made rationally), but perhaps it might do so initially. In this case, we’d have access and perhaps some limited initial degree of affordability, but at the cost of choice.

Or we could try to find a way to dramatically expand access to health care in something like the current health-care market. The problem is that we know what doctors charge. We know what hospitals charge. We know what drug manufacturers charge. We know what medical device manufacturers charge. We know what insurers charge to, we’re told, make it all possible. And we know the charges are anything but insubstantial. Delivering health care services at current prices would be very costly. A plan that offered everyone these services at current prices would help us to achieve the goals of access and choice. But affordability would suffer if access were achieved while current price levels were maintained.

Reducing Costs by Abolishing Privileges for Politically Favored Groups

So it might appear, at first glance, as if there were a real problem achieving all three goals. But I believe that’s because of an assumption that isn’t being made explicit in most of the discussions being conducted on-line, on TV, and in the print media by Beltway insiders. That’s the assumption that privileged, well-connected political actors can and should keep their privileges. The options getting the most attention in today’s health-care debate are options that largely treat monopolistic and quasi-monopolistic privileges enjoyed by the politically connected as unproblematic. If we want to achieve all three goals for health care reform simultaneously, we need to support the abolition of these privileges.

Access and affordability are limited by a range of factors.

• Drug companies and medical device manufacturers reap monopoly profits because the law gives them patent rights. Patents don’t make good economic sense, despite what their corporate apologists might tell you. But they do ratchet up the profits of those who own them, at the expense of ordinary people.
• Working hand-in-hand with health-care professionals’ groups, state and national laws impose licensing requirements that limit who can provide health care services. By constraining the numbers of people who practice various health professions and the kinds of services particular professionals can perform, these requirements boost the incomes of health professionals and artificially inflate the prices of their services.
• Hospital licensing and accreditation requirements similarly limit the number of hospitals in operation, and therefore pad the pockets of existing hospitals while driving up the prices people have to pay for hospital stays and other services.
• Legal limitations on advertising and price competition in the area of health care services also make it easy for health care professionals to maintain high incomes.
• The FDA approval process adds to drug costs (and lengthens the times-to-markets of many products) in ways that certainly aren’t always to the benefit of health-care consumers.

These kinds of legal privileges are sold to the public, of course, as designed in various ways to help ordinary people. But their practical—and, in many cases, intended—effect is to take money away from ordinary health-care consumers and transfer it to people and organizations with more political privileges.

These are hardly the only legal privileges politicians confer on the well-connected that help to keep health-care costs high.

• Rules that provide tax incentives for employers to purchase health insurance for employees tend to make it easier for insurance companies to charge higher prices than they likely would be able to charge to individual consumers.
• State rules that preclude the purchase of insurance across state lines also make it easier for insurance companies to charge high premiums and reap handsome profits.
• Rules that limit who can be an insurer in the first place can have a similar effect. A physician who wanted to offer patients care on a flat-fee-per-year basis was recently prevented from doing so because this arrangement looked too much like insurance, and the physician wasn’t a licensed insurer. Who benefited? Not the patients, clearly—but the insurance industry.
• Agricultural subsidies also contribute to health-care costs by encouraging the purchase of lots of low-nutrition foods. Purchasing these items simultaneously redirects resources that could be used to buy foods that made positive contributions to people’s health away from the purchase of such foods and encourages the purchase of items that may actually decrease health and thus boost health care costs.

Another dubious legal privilege that also drives up costs: the opportunity for plaintiffs in tort cases to obtain punitive damages. A punitive damage award can turn an individual person into a scapegoat, someone to be “taught a lesson” on behalf of the entire class of victims of conduct like his or her own. Punitive damage awards drive up costs unnecessarily while forcing health-care professionals and hospitals to focus on practicing defensive medicine.

Increasing Access by Challenging Policies that Make and Keep People Poor

Political factors drive up the costs of health care dramatically. They also limit access to care by driving down the incomes of people who might want access to care but can’t afford it.

Sales and similar taxes impact even the poorest people. And state and federal income taxes certainly reduce the resources available to the working poor and blue-collar Americans.

These taxes indirectly confer special privileges on the various beneficiaries of the spending they make possible. And special privileges exert other negative consequences on economically vulnerable people.

Some kinds of jobs require business licenses, or other kinds of permissions from local authorities to start up. Maybe the licenses require costly and dispensable equipment or unnecessary certification, or maybe they just involve prohibitive up-front costs. (Think about how much it costs to obtain a New York taxicab medallion.) Sometimes, they preclude people using the low-cost facilities that are their own homes for business purposes, imposing the heavy burden of working elsewhere. And sometimes—as when Tulare, California, officials recently shut down a little girl’s lemonade stand because it didn’t have a license—licensing requirements are just exercises in petty tyranny. Whatever their form or their motivation, the burdens created by licensing requirements fall hardest on poor people.

Those same requirements impact where poor people can find housing: housing that doesn’t meet someone else’s standards of middle-class acceptability is denied to poor people who could pay for it, but who might be unable to pay for anything else. And the burden on the poor is only increased when certain kinds of jobs are denied to people at all—like selling medications in locations other than legally approved pharmacies supervised by licensed pharmacists.

Tariffs also hurt poor people by significantly increasing the costs they need to pay for imported goods (including, often enough, food needed for good health that would be less expensive than domestic alternatives absent import duties). Though often touted as propping up poor workers’ incomes, they serve primarily to boost the profits of poorly performing domestic producers at the expense of both domestic consumers (especially poor ones) and foreign producers.

Politically guaranteed privileges are responsible in multiple ways for many corporate profits. In an environment in which this is so, unionization can help to improve workers’ economic positions. Legally imposed limitations on union activity can tend to reduce unions’ influence, and so to reduce the incomes of workers who might make more were they free to engage in more radical bargaining tactics.

And of course the executives and major shareholders of the largest corporations control an enormous amount of wealth because of subsidies, cost-plus contracts, and the insulation from competitive pressure created by patents and tariffs. Absent the illegitimate privileges these members of the elite receive, the wealth concentrated in these large firms would doubtless be more widely dispersed.

An Initial Agenda

So: if we want to support structural, political changes that will make health care more affordable and accessible while increasing choice, we should support legal changes that would:

• Eliminate legal protection for patents;
• End the FDA approval process, along with all other attempts to use the force of law to limit the commercial accessibility of remedies desired by health-care consumers;
• Eliminate hospital accreditation and professional licensing rules;
• Limit malpractice awards to actual damages plus reasonable costs of recovery (including reasonable legal fees);
• Repeal legal constraints on the sale of insurance across state lines;
• Eliminate legal rules preventing the operation of what amount to insurance schemes by health professionals;
• Alter the federal and state tax codes to de-link employment and insurance; and
• Eliminate agricultural subsidies.

More broadly, concern for the poor should prompt us to boost people’s incomes, and so their access to health care, by supporting legal changes that would:

• Eliminate licensing, zoning, and related restrictions that help to keep people from starting small, low-capital businesses;
• Eliminate rules that prevent poor people from entering businesses the law currently treats as off-limits;
• End rules that force poor people to choose between the kind of housing middle-class planners and neighborhood busybodies prefer—and no housing at all;
• Eliminate import duties;
• Reduce or eliminate tax burdens that fall primarily on poor people—sharply increasing the standard income tax deduction and the Earned Income Tax Credit;
• Repeal state limitations on collective bargaining, including compulsory arbitration requirements, prohibitions on secondary boycotts, back-to-work orders, and “right-to-work” laws;
• Treat as unowned any firms dependent enough on special benefits conferred by the state (subsidies, tariffs, patents, and other monopolistic favors) to count as creatures of illegitimate privilege, and spread their wealth to ordinary people—mutualizing them by allowing their workers to homestead them just as they might other unowned property.

The approach I’ve outlined here would ensure that poor people had more money. By eliminating monopolies (and quasi-monopolistic market distortions like tax subsidies for particular insurance choices), it would also ensure that less money was spent overall on health-care services and that the costs of such services for individuals were much lower, and that these services were thus much more accessible. At the same time, it would preserve choice, avoiding top-down rationing. It would help us make significant progress toward reaching all three of the health-care reform goals we have good reason to want.

Most options currently on the table call, effectively, for tinkering with the existing, deeply flawed, American health-care system. They leave many elite privileges and monopoly profits intact. By contrast, the approach I’ve suggested here would be anything but a continuation of the status quo. Indeed, it would be a dramatic attack on the status quo, one that redistributed wealth from privileged monopolists to ordinary people, and dramatically increased the likelihood of access to inexpensive, high-quality medical care for all Americans.

Gary Chartier is an associate professor of law and business ethics and associate dean of the School of Business at La Sierra University, author of Economic Justice and Natural Law and the forthcoming The Conscience of an Anarchist as well as articles in journals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Theory, Religious Studies, and the Journal of Social Philosophy, and a contributor to the Center for a Stateless Society. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and a J.D. from the UCLA.

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As Georgia has committed more troops to the U.S.-led Afghanistan occupation, Barrington Alliance, Inc.—a collaborator within the military industrial complex, based in the Chicagoland area—will send $100m in small arms and ammunition with a ’sophisticated’ surface-to-air strike system to the war criminal regime, sources confirm to Russia Today. (1:59):

U.S. to Send $100M Worth of Weapons to Georgia—Intelligence

9 Nov 09 | RT

The U.S. has offered to sell Georgia up to $100 million worth of weapons, which would include, among others, a sophisticated air defense system, small arms and ammunition, according to Russian security services.

Russia’s General Staff says the offer was made by a private arms manufacturer after Tbilisi asked Washington for its military assistance, Itar-Tass news agency reports.

Russia has repeatedly criticized the U.S., Israel and other countries for supplying weapons to Georgia, and after last year’s war in South Ossetia called for an embargo on all arms deals with Tbilisi.

The head of the General Staff, Aleksandr Shlyakhturov, told the agency that, according to the information at their disposal, “Georgia, is still getting military assistance from NATO members, Israel and Ukraine.”

He added that NATO countries mainly supply Georgia with small arms and ammunition, while the U.S. leads training of the staff, Israel provides it with unmanned aircrafts, and Ukraine with tanks and air defense systems.

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Michael Gaddy at LewRockwell.com (LRC) on the inconsistencies in the reckless media coverage of the Ft. Hood Massacre and how it serves the health of the War Party State.

by Michael Gaddy

9 Nov 09 | LRC

The facts as presented by the Army and the media reference the shooting at Fort Hood just don’t compute. While I routinely dismiss any “facts” disseminated by the Army and the state’s propaganda wing, sometimes referred to as the mainstream media (MSM), there are some glaring inconsistencies in what has been reported about this tragedy.

First is the report the perpetrator was dead and then hours later the revelation that he was still alive. Exactly how long does it take to determine if a person is dead or alive? Could it be no one knew whom the shooter or shooters were and a story had to be concocted for public consumption? What happened to the two other “suspects” that were detained? What did they do to qualify as suspects and more importantly, what information surfaced that led to their release? One of the suspects reportedly stated he “was with the shooter.”

Second is the number of victims from a single shooter. Let us not forget this shooting did not occur at the mall, it occurred on a military installation where the victims had been trained in military tactics and some were combat veterans. We are to believe they did nothing to stop a single shooter and he was allowed to reload several times and continue shooting and the only thing that stopped him was the arrival of a police officer after the gunman had gunned down over 40 people?

And how so very convenient for the state, a perpetrator who was both anti-war and a Muslim; just doesn’t get any better than that. Could this be an example of following the philosophy of Rahm Emanuel on dealing with a crisis?

Third was the shutting down of communications in and around Ft. Hood for hours. While the Army and the media will explain this in various scenarios, it also provided the Army with a chance to create whatever story it was they wanted to provide the public on the terrible tragedy. Of course we all know the Army would never distort or lie about the facts involving the deaths of innocents. Well, there is that My Lai thing. People on the ground have told me cell phone towers were jammed to prevent unauthorized dissemination of information after the shooting. Again, the Army would not want any information contrary to the company line emerging from this disaster.

All too convenient for the Army was the rapid release of negative information related to the alleged shooter. It was said he received a negative evaluation report and that he had caused “red flags” to be raised some months ago concerning emails. Do we know anything this detailed about the “suspects” who were released? The caveat was added that it was unclear as to whether the suspect was the author of those emails. So, months ago, alarms were raised about emails the suspect might have sent, yet, in all those months the Army has been unable to determine who wrote them. Yeah, right. If red flags were in fact raised months ago, why did the Army do nothing? Going back to the 9/11 paradigm, we see the same evidence exhibited: the state had prior warnings but did not act on them. This proves unequivocally the government is either incompetent or complicit in both events. Yet, the state would have us all unarmed and depending on them for protection.

President Obama pledged, “to get answers to every single question about this event” but he also promised an end to signing statements, a transparent government, no more torture of detainees, and many more lies.

There has been speculation on the Internet that the shooting could have been a revolt against the Army from soldiers faced with stop-loss and multiple combat tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. While there is no evidence to support this theory, there is also no evidence to support the official Army version of events. Suicides among military personnel and veterans are at alarming levels, yet the Department of Defense does more to hide these facts than it does to deal with them.

The last thing the state can let happen is an awakening by its enforcement arm (military and LE) that they are nothing but tools of oppression and in fact, slaves to the monster they serve. While the military is trained and encouraged to kill and bomb in the name of the state, they are forbidden the means of protection for themselves and their loved ones once they are outside the killing zones designated by the state.

All is not normal inside the military community. This is not just seen in our military, instruments of oppression in other countries are revolting as well.

While it is doubtful we will ever learn the truth of exactly what happened at Ft. Hood, we know with a degree of certainty the truth will never be revealed by the Army or the media. Could this have been a false flag event to divert the attention of the American public from the debates and planned demonstrations against the health care fiasco? Could it have simply been another MK Ultra event to further demonize the anti-war element in this country and to lay another crime at the feet of the current villain du jour: Muslims? Could there be a connection between this alleged shooter and his fellow Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho, other than an oblique reference to Cho having a Muslim influence?

One must always ask this question when faced with a story that is issued and controlled by the State: Cui Bono? Wonderful, is it not, the state is empowered with the unique ability to investigate its own lies and the power of the media and academia to demonize any who would question its veracity, and the support of Boobus, whose livelihood depends on the state’s power to redistribute the wealth of the nation from producers to parasites.

Michael Gaddy is an Army veteran of Vietnam, Grenada and Beirut who frequently contributes to LewRockwell.com. Send him mail.

Prof. Chomsky discusses: e-media; the hypocritically selective nuclear hysteria; “sensibility” and “tragedy” within the ‘tea party movement’; cynical scapegoating, the natural inclinations of the human species; the business propaganda against government by those who embrace government; a world without war or a world without people; the evolution of the antiwar movement; the immoral elite debate on the Afghanistan occupation, campaign funding predicting policy; and the manufactured sectarian America.

Part One (9:56):

Part Two (9:56):

Part Three (9:56):

Part Four (9:56):

Part Five (9:56):

Part Six (9:56):

Part Seven (9:56):

Noam Chomsky is a libertarian socialist Institute Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known as the ‘father of modern lingustics’, cognitive scientist, political activist, most cited living author of over 100 books on linguistics, political science and media, one of the world’s leading intellectuals and of an elite few in the history of the world to be at the top of two fields: linguistics and political science.

Seymour Hersh’s most recent article features a sick peek into the mind of a relatively honest president and explores the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The militant takeovers of regions in Paksitan and its Army’s conflict this year have left about two million lives “torn apart”  with “hundreds of thousands of civilians were crowded into government-run tent cities” after what “residents had described nights of heavy, indiscriminate bombing and shelling, followed in the morning by Army sweeps” without warning, Seymour Hersh reports at The New Yorker this weekend. About which, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was asked by the reporter.

“Zardari did not dispute that there were difficulties in the refugee camps—the heat, the lack of facilities,” Mr. Hersh reports. “But he insisted that the fault lay with the civilians, who, he said, had been far too tolerant of the Taliban. The suffering could serve a useful purpose: after a summer in the tents, the citizens of Swat might have learned a lesson and would not ‘let the Taliban back into their cities’.”

Last June, Sabrina Tavernise reported at The New York Times that nearly three million people were forced to flee their homes in the first six months of 2009, referring to it as Pakistan’s “worst refugee crisis since partition from India in 1947. Only about a third of the displaced had found refuge with relatives at that point, many of whom left their homes to make it easier for the government to re-establish its authority in their villages. “The more time passes, the more good will is lost, and the more likely they are to become frustrated with the war effort,” she reported.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, “an eminent Pakistani journalist”, told Mr. Hersh that when the Taliban “got into power they went crazy and became brutal”, however:

The turmoil did not end with the Army’s invasion. “Most of the people who were in the refugee camps told us that the Army was equally bad. There was so much killing,” Yusufzai said. The government had placed limits on reporters who tried to enter the Swat Valley during the attack, but afterward Yusufzai and his colleagues were able to interview officers. “They told us they hated what they were doing—‘We were trained to fight Indians.’ ” But that changed when they sustained heavy losses, especially of junior officers. “They were killing everybody after their colleagues were killed—just like the Americans with their Predator missiles,” Yusufzai said. “What the Army did not understand, and what the Americans don’t understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family.” What looked like a tactical victory could turn out to be a strategic failure.

Mr. Hersh continued that Pres. Zardari’s strategy was to bribe the Taliban—as the U.S. did with ‘insurgents’ in Iraq. “His long-term solution, Zardari said, was to provide new business opportunities in Swat and turn the Taliban into entrepreneurs. ‘Money is the best incentive,’ he said. ‘They can be rented.’,” Mr. Hersh reports.

On Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal—the focus of Mr. Hersh’s article—the president “spoke with derision about what he depicted as America’s obsession with the vulnerability of his nation’s nuclear arsenal”, saying, “Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan. It’s a fear being spread by the few who seek to scare the many.”

Pres. Zardari turned the tables to discuss India’s nuclear arsenal, the reason for Pakistan’s, saying the U.S. should supply more military welfare to Pakistan because it’s a “a balance-of-power issue”.

“A former State Department official who worked on nuclear issues with Pakistan after September 11th said that he’d come to understand that the Pakistanis ‘believe that any information we get from them would be shared with others—perhaps even the Indians. To know the command-and-control processes of their nuclear weapons is one thing. To know where the weapons actually are is another thing’,” Mr. Hersh reports after stating: “The triggers are a key element in American contingency plans. An American former senior intelligence official said that a team that has trained for years to remove or dismantle parts of the Pakistani arsenal has now been augmented by a unit of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the élite counterterrorism group. He added that the unit, which had earlier focused on the warheads’ cores, has begun to concentrate on evacuating the triggers, which have no radioactive material and are thus much easier to handle.”

JSOC, once headed by commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal, is most notably used for targeted assassinations. Mr. Hersh, earlier this year, referred to it as an “assassination wing” of the executive branch—as “Congress has no oversight of it”—based on the research he’s conducting for a new book. This is the unit “evacuating the triggers” connected to one of the most significant, clandestine nuclear arsenals in the world.

The scare over Pakistan’s arsenal is directly related to the existential partnership between many elements with Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.), the Pakistani government’s intelligence wing, and Taliban faction in Pakistan—to aid in the struggle against Indian occupation of Kashmir—and in Afghanistan to maintain perpetuity in preventing the fractured U.S.-occupied nation-state from becoming a client-state of India. Other interests have related to natural gas pipelines in Central Asia and disrupting Afghan officials from the ability to monopolize taxing opium trafficking into Pakistan. This relationship began with the I.S.I. as the middleman between the U.S. and the mujahideen during the U.S. aid of the latter’s resistance against the Soviet invasion of the 80’s.

As critical as I am of the I.S.I. (probably more than the U.K.’s MI-6 and Israel’s Mossad), blame it heavily for a role in the 26/11 Mumbai Attacks of a year ago and providing propaganda for foreign forces to corrupt the civilian government of Pakistan, the worry of a Pakistani nuclear arsenal falling into non-civilian militant hands wouldn’t happen without the consent of the U.S. In other words, the chances is insignificantly minuscle—well within the margin of error to, probably, decimal points.

Were the U.S. to leave the region, it’s pretty uncontroversial that Indian intelligence—Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)—is competent and well-infiltrated to alert adequate forces in the region with heavy interest in a de facto safeguarded Pakistani arsenal. These forces being the extremely powerful Indian Army and nuclear arsenal with second-strike capacity, Russia and China.

Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the greatly outspoken former head of I.S.I., told Mr. Hersh that the U.S. would be wise to not press the nuclear issue because Russia and China would back Pakistan.

As crazy as the man who maintained those mujahideen ties, with the Taliban that emerged to rule most of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, can be at many times—though, the two Asian powers have a vested in taking RAW tips of Pakistan’s arsenal being at risk very seriously—a disarmed Pakistan empowers India to a point which Russia and China would not be comfortable. At the moment, the three governments are sharing mutual economic and geopolitical interests without making any moves to disrupt this alliance. In short, there is almost a silent agreement that the three remain on the same footing. Only the U.S. could disrupt this, leaving India in a place to target its greatest foe or risk, what trends show to become, great economic prosperity.

India is playing all sides of every coin very well, in a Machiavellian sense, with the U.S. not pressuring it to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and ceasing to scrutinize India’s enrichment and expansion of its nuclear arsenal. In this sense, India is America’s ‘Israel of the East’.

There are elements of radicalization in Pakistan brewing. The once relatively extraordinarily secular nationalist society isn’t a ‘hot bed’ for the next wave of ‘Islamofascist militancy’. The people are reacting to a rational distrust toward their government. Pres. Zardari’s cold words, like those to Mr. Hersh regarding refugees, and his collaboration with the Obama Administration beefing up airstrikes that enact wanton destruction of people and their property are ending the honeymoon civilians had in reaction to the end of the brutal dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf. After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pres. Zardari’s wife, any change would’ve been lauded as a step toward freedom. The harsh realization is that it oppressive institutions continue to exist at extreme levels.

An article for Mr. Hersh on geopolitical relations as tense as those between India and Pakistan wouldn’t be complete without some very entertaining chest-thumping from officials on both sides that is worth reading. Otherwise, if you’re as wonky as I am on Central Asian relations and nuclear geopolitics, the article isn’t as provocative as those in Mr. Hersh’s archive.

I’m still sickened that the Pakistani president said what he said, though I really shouldn’t be surprised. That’s government.

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On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous”, George Will of The Washington Post points to India’s recent run on the dollar as an indicator for a coming fall in the subjective greenback in favor of “other better stores of value”. Veteran White House correspondent for ABC, Sam Donaldson, says if that’s the case, “then, we’d better throw Ben Bernanke and the Fed out… Let’s get rid of them now before they do further damage.” (2:13):

Subcommittee Guts Ron Paul’s Bill to Audit the Fed

by Charles Scaliger

3 Nov 09 | The New American

The Federal Reserve Transparency Act (H.R. 1207), Congressman Ron Paul’s landmark bill to audit the Federal Reserve, has been gutted in a House subcommittee as it works its way toward a vote in the full House. The bill, which has garnered an astonishing 308 cosponsors from both parties, has attracted the scalpel of North Carolina Democrat Mel Watt (whose district happens to include Charlotte, the home of Bank of America, America’s largest commercial bank). According to Congressman Paul, whose Campaign for Liberty posted a video on the bill last weekend, Watt has cut out “just about everything” in prepping the bill for a full committee vote. (6:42):

The bill in its original form required audits of Fed transactions with foreign banks, of its deliberations on monetary policy, of the activities of the Open Market Committee, and disclosure of communications between the Federal Reserve Board and reserve banks. All of these provisions, according to Congressman Paul, have been removed. “There’s nothing left,” Paul told Bloomberg News in a telephone interview. “This is not a partisan issue. People all over the country want to know what the Fed is up to, and this legislation was supposed to help them do that.”

Congressman Paul intends to try to reinstate the bill’s original language and provisions in full committee deliberations, and is hopeful that many of the bill’s hundreds of co-sponsors will exert appropriate pressure on the committee to bring the bill in its pristinity to a full House vote sooner rather than later.

One of the bill’s most powerful sponsors, Congressman Barney Frank (chair of the House Financial Services Committee), intends that the bill in its final form require a lapse of time between Fed actions and their disclosure to auditors and Congressional overseers. Frank believes that a delay would “lessen market impact” while ensuring Fed accountability in the longer run. Congressman Paul, however, is opposed to any such dilution of the bill’s language, believing that any mandated delays in holding the Fed accountable would allow the central bank too much room to evade responsibility.

Congressman Paul is still optimistic that the bill will pass in some form, given the magnitude of support it has received. He noted that the Federal Reserve and the interests that defend its so-called “independence” (read: “secrecy”) are very entrenched and unlikely to yield without a fight.

The current struggle underway to subject the Federal Reserve to congressional scrutiny may turn out to be as historically significant as President Andrew Jackson’s titanic contest of wills with the arrogant, crafty head of the Second Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle. The latter, in trying to stave off the dissolution of his beloved seat of power, used the resources of the bank to create a recession and marshaled all his allies in Congress and business against Old Hickory, but ultimately lost the battle. Whether Congressman Paul and his allies can carry the day against Fed Chairman Bernanke and his host of establishment supporters remains to be seen.

*************

(h/t: SaveOurSovereignty3)

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The “Affordable Health Care for America Act”: some facts and falsehoods about the latest push towards socialized medicine from Freedomain Radio. (18:11):

References: http://www.fdrurl.com/tn60

Stefan Molyneux runs Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web. His books, podcasts, and videos are available free on the web. Mr. Molyneux accepts donations with the utmost gratitude.

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Against the assessment of his national security adviser, the president will reportedly increase the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan by 34,000 in 2010.

President Barack Obama could announce he will send another 34,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan after completing a week-long trip to Asia and a Nov. 23 meeting with NATO allies, Jonathan Landay reports at McClatchy.

Officials within the military and the Obama Administration confirm the plan will add:

• One Marine and three Army brigades, totaling up to 23,000 combat and support troops;
• 7,000 troops to “man and support a new division headquarters for the international force’s Regional Command (RC) South in Kandahar”; and
• Up to 4,000 additional trainers

Though the plan falls well short of the request following the assessment of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who said the situation was risking “mission failure” without a full-scale counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. The “low risk option”, he reportedly said, would be an increase of 80,000 troops. , Mr. Landay reported October 16 with Nancy Youssef.

Officials told them “his medium risk option” was an increase of 40- to 45,000 troops with around 20,000 being a “high risk option”. They added that the U.S. can only send an additional 30,000 troops “without putting excessive strains on the Army and Marine Corps” and report that Gen. McChrystal says that such a plan would not suffice.

Saturday’s report adds, with Nancy Youssef and John Walcott contributing:

Coalition forces now include 67,000 U.S. and 42,000 troops from other countries. The Army’s counterinsurgency manual estimates that an all-out counterinsurgency campaign in a country with Afghanistan’s population would require about 600,000 troops.

Although the administration privately is holding out little hope of persuading Canada or the Netherlands to abandon their plans to withdraw combat troops, much less getting additional allied troops, it wants to avoid creating the impression—at home and abroad—that the U.S. “is going it alone” in Afghanistan, said one military official.

In an interview with The New York Times, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, “complained that the American administration is leaving its NATO allies in the dark about its new strategy”, McClatchy adds.

The Administration also wants “time to launch a public relations offensive to convince an increasingly skeptical public and a wary Democratic Congress—which must agree to fund the administration’s plan—that the war, now in its ninth year and inflicting rising casualties, is one of ‘necessity’, as Obama said earlier this year”.

General James Jones, national security adviser to the Administration, told Der Spiegel, this weekend: “Generals always ask for more troops…. You can keep on putting troops in, and you could have 200,000 troops there and Afghanistan will swallow them up as it has done in the past.”

Instead of a nation-building mission, Gen. Jones said the focus should be “a better plan with the allies to gradually turn over responsibility for the country to Afghan institutions and organizations in as short a time as possible”, adding: “And we will put much more emphasis on battling corruption and putting competent and honest people in positions of authority. We will be working with our friends and allies to do that.”

“Other military officers, particularly in the Army, warn that committing more troops to Afghanistan could risk ‘breaking’ the force by reducing the time soldiers can spend at home between deployments, overtaxing equipment and destroying families,” McClatchy reports. “Those problems could worsen if Iraq’s January elections are delayed or disrupted, and with them the administration’s timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from that country.”

The Administration made it clear that withdrawing was not an option on the table. The only alternative to a COIN strategy—focused on aiding the Afghan government in establishing its monopoly on power and “winning the hearts and minds” of the local population—was a counterterrorism (CT) strategy, proposed by Vice President Joe Biden, to focus on targeted assassinations stretching into Pakistan.

The assassinations would target leaders of the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, according to intelligence and committed by unmanned aircrafts (drones). The Administration has committed more airstrikes in 2009 than the Bush Administration did in the three years prior—greatly increasing the civilian casualties, aiding militant recruiting and further dividing the population away from sympathizing with ISAF.

Early on, it seemed this proposal was not taken seriously. The rhetoric just wasn’t as blunt as the president saying a “drastic reduction in troops” was “not an option”. Officials and experts have all predicted the president would add at least 10- to 15,000 more troops, but nowhere near 80,000 to find what’s been called a “middle ground”.

The mainstream poli-intellectual class is generally only criticizing policy, not ethics. They don’t form opinions as the ‘op’ in ‘op-ed’ would suggest. They identify two, maybe three, common threads that seem to be regurgitated most and pick a bandwagon. The so-called ‘realists’ usually deviate by immediately brushing off the most extremely hawkish ‘option’ as devoid of reality and the most ethical as… devoid of reality. Only their opinion, the most controversial of the three, said in a calm tone, in true reality [sic].

David Ignatius at The Washington Post (WaPo), reporting from Afghanistan, strongly supports a heavy increase in troops: “I think he should add enough troops to continue the mission he endorsed in March to ‘reverse the Taliban’s gains‘ and improve security in Afghanistan’s population centers. I don’t know whether the right number is the roughly 40,000 that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has recommended, but it should be the minimum number necessary.”

Thomas Friedman at the NYT was, surprisingly, more realistic that usual: “We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.”

Fareed Zakaria, international editor of Newsweek, is predictably following the lead of Thomas Ricks, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Mr. Ricks and his cronies are pushing a COIN-CT hybrid—population control in the urban areas and targeted assassinations in the rural areas and Pakistan.

“I think Gen. McChrystal’s plan, which calls for a major troop increase in order to carry out a counterinsurgency campaign, is better than any alternative I can see (especially a return to whack-a-mole counterterrorism, supposedly advocated by VP Biden),” Mr. Ricks wrote at The Daily Beast.

“In other words, let the Taliban try to set up bases in these remote areas with prickly locals. NATO forces can then periodically disrupt the Taliban rather than the other way around,” Mr. Zakaria follows-up in his Newsweek column, after Mr. Ricks gave his take on Mr. Zakaria’s CNN Sunday program, the week before. “In fact, the crucial judgments that have to be made involve what the troops will do and how much of Afghanistan to cover. Ricks said to me, ‘Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?’ That sounds like a middle course that is smart and practical, which might need some more forces or perhaps can make do with the almost 100,000 already there.”

And there you have it. ‘Realpolitik‘ in action. CNAS is the new PNAC.

There’s an opinion missing from the intellectual circle jerk, though…. The people who actually own the land ISAF is occupying: the Afghan people.

“If the foreign forces are not seen so by Afghans already, they are on the cusp of being regarded as occupiers, with little to show people for their extended presence, fueling wild conspiracies about why they remain here,” Alissa Rubin reports at the NYT (on Saturday, when no one reads it).

Sean Smith of the London Guardian spent a month with U.S. troops and saw the Afghans make it very clear they want the troops to leave (7:09):

C.I.A. and military officials have confirmed that Ahmed Wali Karzai, provincial council chairman of Kandahar and brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, “gets regular payments from the [Agency], and has for much of the past eight years”.

“He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists,” the report added.

A top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that “a major source of Mr. Karzai’s influence over the drug trade” is “his control over key bridges”, making him “able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges”.

One has to ask about the ones who have been assassinated by U.S. forces from leads out of the C.I.A. The poppy fields selected to be incinerated. The traveling factions hunted down.

The targets chosen by Mr. Karzai to ’supply information’ to the C.I.A. are obviously the people not paying the taxman. The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime reported the Taliban is also collecting taxes. Of course, the Karzais want a surge of foreign forces. They want to knock out the tax-collecting competition like any mafia called a “government”. And as the Karzais receive more beef, the resistance polarizes: it significantly fights back which begs for more C.I.A.; or goes away and the Karzais get their opium monopoly.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to the Carter Administration and architect of the mujahideen insurgency to defeat the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is largely critical of the U.S. self-defeating strategy.

He notes to al Jazeera that the 2001 U.S. invasion started with the Air Force, a small number of Special Forces troops in the hundreds that sustained a larger partnership with homegrown resistance—mostly, cynical druglords whose interests were plundered by the ruling Taliban—and there was little resistance from the locals after the small Taliban ruling faction was overthrown. But now, the U.S. troop levels are over 60,000 and the “military commanders are telling us we’re not winning. What’s that tell you? Where’s the resistance? Obviously, it’s from the Taliban.”

But it’s not “The Taliban”, as in those overthrown in 2001. He continues: “It’s Afghans. Afghans who increasingly identify themselves with something they were pleased to be seen overthrown eight years ago. That’s a bad trend.”

Asked if the U.S. is following a trend similar to that of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—which led to the U.S.S.R. demise—in the 80’s, he replies, “I’ve been saying that for three years.” Last month, he said it was due to the “Afghan perception that [U.S. troops] are foreign invaders“.

The U.S. and U.K. presence in Central Asia is largely due to its natural gas resources and Afghanistan is necessary for a pipeline, former U.K. ambassador Craig Murray says.

“Enron acquired Uzbekistan’s natural gas rights. Turkmenistan, next door to Uzbekistan, has even more natural gas, incredible amounts of natural gas,” he says. “The natural gas reserves of Turkmenistan are equal in worth to the oil reserves of Iraq, if not greater. But you can’t get it out. There’s no way out of Central Asia for this oil and gas, except through Russia, and the Russians won’t let it go to the West, or through Iran, which the Americans aren’t keen on. The only way to get it out would be to have a pipeline going over Afghanistan.”

He added: “There are so many lies about Afghanistan. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s about drugs, it’s about the abuse of human rights, it’s about degradation, and it’s about all of us paying, through our taxes, for wars which benefit a tiny clique.”

The Obama Administration was “disappointed” with an Italian court convicting 23 Americans—including 22 C.I.A. agents—tried in absentia for the 2003 illegal kidnapping of Osama Mustafa Hassan, a Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar. The imam was shipped to Egypt, held without charges and tortured until his release in 2007. Writer, historian and radio host Webster Tarpley discusses the significance with Cedric Moon at Russia Today (5:49):

Scott Horton, an international law scholar and blogger at Harper’s Magazine, wrote soon after the judgment:

The decision came despite strenuous efforts by the American and Italian governments to shut the case down. The Italian government argued that prosecutors were using official secrets to make their case and appealed the matter to the Constitutional Court, which upheld the objection. The Milan court concluded that, even striking the official secrets from the trial record, sufficient evidence existed to proceed. In its final verdict, the court also suggested that a number of defendants were guilty but, once official secrets were extracted, the evidence was insufficient to convict. The court also found that three individuals had diplomatic immunity and thus would also escape punishment [despite] copious evidence establishing their guilt. Among them was the C.I.A.’s former Rome station chief, Jeff Castelli, whom prosecutors saw as the plot’s ringleader.

The convicted Americans face arrest only if they travel outside the United States, since U.S. authorities have made it clear that they will not cooperate with European authorities pursuing C.I.A. kidnapping cases. However, Italian prosecutors can now issue a European Arrest Warrant for the seizure and removal to Italy of any of the 23 Americans, should they set foot in the European Union.

Most observers, however, view the sentence as largely symbolic. When legal proceedings are concluded, it is widely expected that the United States and Italy will work out a resolution of the matter involving an act of clemency. The case serves principally to establish that the CIA extraordinary renditions program, especially when it involves torture or torture-by-proxy, is viewed as a criminal act, subjecting all who support it to potential prosecution.

The Milan decision offers a useful contrast with the decision of an American appeals court in New York dealing with another rendition case on Monday. In both cases, the courts considered claims of immunity, state secrecy, and a torture victim’s claim to compensation for his sufferings. In both cases, the United States applied enormous political pressure to shut down the case. Yet the outcomes could not have been more different. In the New York case, the Court of Appeals bowed to government pressure to refuse to hear the torture victim’s appeal. The decision, rendered by a group of largely Republican judges, is filled with breezy language openly acknowledging that the case turned on an extraordinary rendition, and suggesting that this was simply a policy choice for the government. The Italian court proved zealously independent of government influence from the beginning of the case down to judgment. It viewed extraordinary rendition linked to torture as a particularly grave crime, taking careful note of the historical precedents that supported that perspective. While the court accepted that state secrecy concerns restricted the court’s consideration of certain evidence, it nevertheless proceeded and rested its conclusions on evidence that was not protected. Similarly, the Italian court gave claims of immunity narrow applicability, so that only a handful of defendants could rely upon them. The court took the view that these highly technical defenses would give government actors some comfort, but it rejected the idea that they could escape accountability for a serious crime altogether.

The most telling difference focuses on the rights of the torture victim. The New York court concluded that the victim’s claims were overwhelmed by the government’s interest in protecting political actors against embarrassment. The Italian court insisted not only on the punishment of the perpetrators but also on the compensation of the torture victim. The Milan court sentenced the defendants to pay compensation to Abu Omar and his wife of €1.5 million ($2.3 million).

See Armando Spataro, the Italian prosecutor on the case, and Mr. Horton discuss the case, ‘extraordinary rendition’ and the steps taken from the verdict with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!

A report stated ‘real unemployment could be around an all-time high 17.5%. Gerald Celente, a trends forecaster and economist, tells Russia Today that under the algorithm used before the Clinton Administration, ‘real unemployment could be around 22.1% (4:09):

True U.S. Unemployment Rate Stands at 17.5%

by Stephen Webster

7 Nov 09 | Raw Story

According to figures released by the Department of Labor, the real marker of American unemployment stands at 17.5 percent—a figure which takes into account under-employed workers and those who have not sought work in the last four weeks, according to a published report.

“If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression,” reporter David Leonhardt wrote in Friday’s edition of The New York Times.

The report continued: “In all, more than one out of every six workers—17.5 percent—were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.”

While official unemployment statistics were not available during the Great Depression, Department of Labor economists working with the Times estimated that some 30 percent of the U.S. workforce was put out during that period, the report added.

President Barack Obama called the figures “sobering,” responding to widespread media accounts that placed the figure just over 10 percent, noting the department’s calculation of workers who are actively searching for jobs.

“To that end, my economic team is looking at ideas such as additional investments in our aging roads and bridges, incentives to create jobs and steps to increase the flow of credit to small businesses,” the president said.

Fred Dickson at D.A. Davidson & Co. said the report “continues to point to an economy that is struggling, but the picture is not nearly as dire as seen at the beginning of the year.”

“Slowly, the trajectory is improving, but, given the huge number of unemployed and underemployed, our view of a very slow economic recovery in 2010 and 2011 remains very much in place,” he added. “This report will not do much to encourage the Fed to raise rates anytime soon.”

The number of unemployed persons increased to 15.7 million. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed has risen by 8.2 million, the Labor Department said.

The world’s largest economy grew at a seasonally adjusted 3.5 percent annual rate in the July-September period. The increase was the first since the second quarter of 2008.

For the U.S. economic community, the recession will not be over until it is declared by a research panel, National Bureau of Economic Research, recognized as the official arbiter of business cycles.

President Obama on Friday signed a measure to extend unemployment benefits and enact a new tax credit for home buyers.

Think tank discovers after file released from an FOIA suit that an Israeli intelligence agent was a staffer for the Israel Lobby. Prosecutors recently dropped espionage charges from two high-level AIPAC staffers.

7 Nov 09 | Press TV

A newly declassified Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) file indicates that an Israeli intelligence agent was among the staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“[F.B.I. Washington Field Office (W.F.O.)] files disclose that AIPAC is a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group staffed by U.S. citizens,” says the 13 August 1984 document—a secret communication from the W.F.O. to the F.B.I. director.

“W.F.O. files contain an unsubstantiated allegation that a member of the Israeli Intelligence Service was a staff member of AIPAC,” it adds.

The secret FBI document was declassified and handed over to the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP) after it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

IRMEP needed the documents to file a third amicus brief urging Judge T.S. Ellis not to drop the charges brought against AIPAC workers Steve J. Rosen and Keith Weissman under the 1917 Espionage Act.

On May 1, 2009, the Department of Justice dismissed the espionage charges against the two former AIPAC staffers.

Department of Defense Employee Col. Lawrence Franklin who was indicted along with the AIPAC workers in 2005, however, pleaded guilty to the charges, admitting that he had provided classified information about Iran to two AIPAC employees.

Apparently the Israeli agent had promised to facilitate the appointment of Re. Jane Harman (D-CA) as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in exchange for the information.

It is widely believed that the 1984 and 2005 espionage incidents were not isolated events.

As part of a defamation lawsuit he has launched against AIPAC, Rosen intends to show that obtaining and leveraging classified U.S. government information in the service of Israel is common practice at AIPAC.

He claims it was unfair for AIPAC to fire and smear him in the press after he was indicted on espionage charges in 2005. AIPAC lawyers, however, are hoping to get the case thrown out on technicalities before it goes to trial in early 2010.

AIPAC, considered the most powerful and connected lobbying group in Washington, is known for the influence that it holds over US foreign policy.

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter has also accused AIPAC of putting a great deal of pressure on politicians running for office who do not share AIPAC goals.

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“It is possible that having been at Walter Reed and having heard all these stories and been an Army psychiatrist and then knowing that he was going to deploy, that all of that caused him to snap,” said Aaron Glantz, editor of New America Media who focuses on the effects of the Iraq War on U.S. military personnel, to Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!.

by Mark Ames

6 Nov 09 | AlterNet

That alleged killer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is a Muslim is not enough to explain the motive for the attacks.

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the most shocking thing about Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas. I’ll start with this: there’s nothing all that ground-breaking about it. Happens all the time, it’s just that we’re a nation of amnesiacs who forget all the unpleasantries, and refuse to learn the valuable lessons.

For starters, Fort Hood is located in Killeen, Texas—where one of the deadliest rampage shootings in American history took place in 1991, when an unemployed ex-Navy enlistee, George Hennard Jr., crashed his pickup into a popular cafeteria, pulled out two handguns (Hasan also used two handguns), and murdered 23 people before taking his own life. The day before the massacre, Hennard was eating a hamburger in a local restaurant watching the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and, according to the manager, “When an interview with Anita Hill came on, he just went off. He started screaming, ‘You dumb bitch! You bastards opened the door for all the women!’”

So yesterday’s Fort Hood shooting isn’t the worst or most deranged mass-killing in Killeen’s history—not by a longshot. The mainstream media is enabling the screaming about the Muslim traitors in our midst, but Hasan killed far fewer Americans than the white, racist George Hennard. And they were bested by the federal government in nearby Waco Texas, in 1993, when federal forces slaughtered some 75 men, women and children in the Branch Davidian compound.

But in what may seem like a strange coincidence, Maj. Hasan and Killeen are connected to another American shooting rampage. Killeen held the record for America’s worst shooting massacre until 2007, when Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 33 fellow students. And Malik Nadal Hasan graduated from Virginia Tech in 1997. Both Hasan and Cho were bullied and harassed—Hasan’s cousin told reporters that after 9/11, his military comrades regularly abused him, calling him “camel jockey.” But the cousin insisted that Hasan’s opposition to the war didn’t grow out of the bullying, but rather from the stories he heard while interning as a psychiatric counselor to veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Hasan even hired an attorney to try to come to a settlement with the US government and leave the service, but they wouldn’t settle for a deal and instead forced him to deploy. He apparently fought it up to the day before his deployment—and instead of going to the war, he brought the war to the US military.

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Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond. Listen to his interviews with Scott Horton on AntiWar Radio.

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