November 2010

How long will it take the Washington press corps to discover the big story in Washington?

by Paul Woodward 11.17.2010

The story so far: November 8: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) files a 260-page motion [large pdf -- don't attempt to download without broadband] in the District of Columbia Superior Court, in which AIPAC is attempting to fend off a $20 million defamation suit from former employee Steven J Rosen who claims he [...]

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AIPAC is on the brink

by News Sources 11.17.2010

The Forward reports: The espionage case against two senior officials of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington was dropped last year. But it has not been forgotten, and is now threatening to draw the lobby into new depths of mudslinging. Papers filed in the civil lawsuit of former lobbyist Steve Rosen against his previous employers at [...]

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Clear evidence that Stuxnet targeted Natanz nuclear centrifuges

by Paul Woodward 11.16.2010

The latest evidence revealed by two independent groups of researchers studying the code in the Stuxnet malware — the world’s first identified cyber weapon — indicates the Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz was almost certainly the target for attack. Not only was it aimed at programmable logic controllers that regulate motor speeds in a [...]

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The overestimation of our power and the underestimation of resistance

by News Sources 11.16.2010

Patrick Porter writes: The road to strategic hell is paved with good intentions. Consider the words of General Sir David Richards, the chief of defence staff. We can’t defeat al-Qaida and its ilk, he believes, but we can contain it. In other words, we might never destroy it physically or ideologically but we can limit [...]

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Billions can be saved in defense budget: McCain

by News Sources 11.16.2010

Reuters reports: Senator John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said billions of dollars could be saved from the defense budget by cutting lawmakers’ pet projects, known as earmarks, and fixing troubled arms programs. McCain told a foreign policy forum on Monday that he is confident Defense Secretary Robert Gates will [...]

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From the top there’s only one way forward: down

by Paul Woodward 11.16.2010

Mature cosmological systems recognize the cyclical nature of change: that growth is followed by decay and that power gathered is later dispersed. These are not ideas readily embraced by an imperial power and thus America has driven itself into a trap which it cannot back out of without undermining its own image of preeminence. The [...]

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AIPAC bares all to quash Rosen lawsuit

by Paul Woodward 11.16.2010

Maybe the days of the Israel lobby are numbered — not because it’s about to fall apart but because the terms of discourse will change. That is, we will no longer be speaking about a “lobby” as such but more explicitly about the evidence that the state of Israel has effectively pulled off a soft [...]

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Washington’s shameless and slavish devotion to Israel

by News Sources 11.15.2010

Mark Perry writes: A legendary story from our early history has it that Thomas Jefferson so hated John Jay that he ordered Pierre L’Enfant — the civil engineer who designed our capital city — to excise any reference to Jay (including “J Street”) from his plans. The story is apocryphal, but the history behind it [...]

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Why America will come to regret the craven deal Obama is offering Netanyahu

by News Sources 11.15.2010

Christopher Hitchens writes: Those of us who keep an eye on the parties of God are avid students of the weekly Sabbath sermons of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. In these and other venues, usually broadcast, this elderly Sephardic ayatollah provides an action-packed diet that seldom disappoints. A few months ago, he favored his devout audience with [...]

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Cantor recants

by News Sources 11.15.2010

MJ Rosenberg writes: [Soon-to-be House Majority Leader Eric Cantor] has been an AIPAC cutout since he first was elected to office. He’s been to more AIPAC meetings than he can probably count. And he should have figured out by now that the lobby is extremely careful, obsessively careful, to always emphasize loyalty to the United [...]

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Dark lord, dark victory — America’s dark passage

by News Sources 11.15.2010

At Kosmos Journal, Michael Vlahos writes: The fall of the Soviet Union initiated a new passage of American identity. Then the 9/11 War took us a long way down the road to journey’s end. This passage is also a migration. America has not simply abandoned one collective identity for another; we have become a different [...]

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Is America bribing Bibi or blackmailing him?

by News Sources 11.15.2010

The Economist‘s Lexington blog says: Until this weekend, most people assumed that Israel enjoyed an unconditional American promise to maintain its military edge, and a nearly unconditional promise to support it in the United Nations. Now it seems that President Obama is making the continuation of some of these things conditional on Israel’s acceptance of [...]

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Aung San Suu Kyi’s release

by News Sources 11.15.2010

The Los Angeles Times reports: A day after her release from detention, opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi on Sunday met dozens of ambassadors, hundreds of journalists and thousands of Myanmar citizens, underscoring the importance of dialogue, strength and determination in the battle for democracy in her country. As a [...]

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The trickledown revolution

by News Sources 11.15.2010

Arundhati Roy writes: On the 64th anniversary of India’s Independence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh climbed into his bullet-proof soapbox in the Red Fort to deliver a passionless, bone-chillingly banal speech to the nation. Listening to him, who would have guessed that he was addressing a country that, despite having the second-highest economic growth rate in [...]

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The cauldron of global violence

by News Sources 11.15.2010

At a time when there are those who still insist that Western civilization is the preeminent source of global stability, two snapshots of the last 1,000 years help put things in perspective. First, an animation of Europe’s fluid borders should make it clear that the West has always been an amorphous concept that can only [...]

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Tom Engelhardt: war to the horizon

by TomDispatch 11.14.2010

The stimulus package in Kabul By Tom Engelhardt You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going to end, is it?  Not ever.  Rationally, you know perfectly well that whatever your “it” might be will indeed end, because everything does, but your gut tells you something different. I had [...]

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How much is a three-month settlement freeze really worth?

by News Sources 11.14.2010

The offer of a free squadron of F-35 joint strike fighters is “an offer hard to refuse” a senior Israeli defense official tells the Jerusalem Post, but Aluf Benn suggests the Obama administration wants more than a brief extension of the settlement freeze in return. The goal is a coalition shake-up. To date, Netanyahu was [...]

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Iraq’s disappearing Christians are Bush and Blair’s legacy

by News Sources 11.14.2010

William Dalrymple writes: When George W Bush sent the US into Iraq in 2003, he believed he would be replacing Saddam Hussein with a peaceful, pro-American Arab democracy that would naturally look to the Christian west for support. In reality, seven years on, it appears that he has instead created a highly radicalised pro-Iranian sectarian [...]

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India’s sound advice on Iran

by News Sources 11.14.2010

Stephen Kinzer writes: This week in New Delhi, President Obama went further than any of his predecessors toward embracing India as an ally, and most Indians are thrilled by this warm treatment. This does not mean, however, that the two countries will align all of their foreign policies. In some areas, India would like the [...]

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Bush’s Decision Points is a terrifying journey into the authoritarian mind

by News Sources 11.14.2010

Anis Shivani writes: This would be less grim to talk about if Bush weren’t still with us. But he is, in every way that matters. The Bush Doctrine lives. No leading American politician can disavow the two key aspects of the Bush Doctrine: that we cannot distinguish terrorists from the countries where they live, and [...]

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A nation of the richest is not the richest nation

by News Sources 11.14.2010

Robert Freeman writes: For the past thirty years the rich have been waging war on the middle class. It’s been astonishingly effective, partly because it has been undeclared. But even that pretense is now being abandoned. The President’s National Deficit Commission has effectively declared that the rich will now go after what is left of [...]

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Israelis united by fear

by News Sources 11.14.2010

Uri Avnery writes: On Saturday evening, two weeks ago, we returned by taxi from the annual memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin, and as usual got into a conversation with our driver. Generally, these conversations flow smoothly, with lots of laughs. Rachel loves them, because they bring us face-to-face with people we don’t normally meet. The [...]

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Netanyahu assumes command in Washington

by Paul Woodward 11.13.2010

After winning the US midterm elections, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu hardly needs to worry about holding his own coalition government together. The fact that he so transparently now has Washington in his pocket should duly impress anyone who might have doubted America’s willingness to tolerate its increasingly servile relationship with Israel. Even so, after [...]

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The legitimacy of the delegitimizers

by News Sources 11.13.2010

Matthew Taylor writes: When North American Jews gathered in New Orleans for their annual General Assembly earlier this week, the mainstream Jewish establishment unveiled a new initiative to counteract the growing international condemnation of Israel’s policies of occupation and land theft. The big plan: delegitimize the delegitimizers. The Jewish Federations of North America announced at [...]

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