Monthly Archives: November 2010

Bibi, Tom Friedman, and U.S. Jews divesting from Israel

Bradley Burston writes:

Ahead of a New Orleans address to the General Assembly [GA] of the Jewish Federations of North America, sources quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as having said that there is fundamental support for Israel within the United States.

“We may have lost Thomas Friedman, but I don’t think we lost America,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying.

I was getting ready to leave for the airport, when my wife caught me unawares. This was the first inkling I would have of something I was to learn again and again:

Where it comes to any issue of the Mideast conflict, and where it comes to questions relating to the complex relations between the U.S. Jewish community and Israel, you can either answer in three hours, or in one sentence. This was hers:

“You know what it is – American Jews are divesting from Israel.”

This is what I was to see in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Marin County, Portland and Seattle. It’s not that they’re getting involved in significant numbers in the divestment movement. It’s that American Jews are divesting emotionally. They are quietly – but in terms of impact, dramatically – withdrawing altogether.

Not just Jews. Americans. And the younger they are, that is, the more crucial they are to Israel’s future, the more likely they are to divest.

Facebooktwittermail

First sign of the new U.S. political reality — Netanyahu’s swagger

At JTA, Ron Kampeas writes:

The sharpest signal of what last week’s elections meant for Jews came not from Washington but from New Orleans, Nova Scotia and Australia.

In New Orleans, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech Monday calling for moving beyond sanctions to mounting a “credible military threat” against Iran as a means of avoiding war.

“Containment will not work,” Netanyahu said in his address to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America.

The prime minister’s remarks echoed the precise terminology used by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in Nova Scotia two days earlier, when he told the Halifax International Security Forum that “containment is off the table.” The likely new majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), referred to a “credible military threat” in the days before the election.

It was a clear sign that Netanyahu feels empowered by the Republican sweep last week of the House of Representatives to trump the Obama administration’s emphasis on peacemaking with the Palestinians with his own priority: confronting Iran.

Facebooktwittermail

Police step in to protect young Jewish protesters from Jewish mob violence — in New Orleans

For more details on the protest during Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly in New Orleans yesterday, see the post below.

One of the protesters has now provided her own first hand account of what happened. Although sheriffs were in attendance to provide security for the event, in the end the police needed to protect the protesters from the mob!

Rae Abileah writes:

I stood up and unfurled a pink banner that read, “The settlements betray Jewish values” and in Hebrew: “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” a verse from Deuteronomy. The crowd had grown increasingly hostile with each disruption, and I was instantly attacked from all sides. A man in the row in front of me pulled the El Al seat cover off his chair and tried to gag me with it. Another man came up from the side and grabbed me by the throat. I fell into a pile of chairs until two female sheriffs buoyed me up and hustled me out of the room. The police later confided that they were trying to protect me from the angry mob and get me out of there in one piece.

Facebooktwittermail

Tribal loyalty versus the integrity of the individual

(Young Jews disrupt Netanyahu at Jewish General Assembly from stefanie fox on Vimeo.)

Human beings are animals, but the aspects of our nature that can most fittingly be called animalistic, most often express themselves collectively. They require the abandonment of a sense of self, a loss of the awareness of individual autonomy and personal integrity as individual will submerges in collective will.

When individuals from Jewish Voice of Peace disrupted Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in New Orleans yesterday, waves of anger swept through the audience.

Jeff Shapira from San Antonio grabbed one of the protesters by the throat, but when later asked whether he had ever put a woman in a choke hold before, he responded: “Not really. No. I really did not know what was going to happen, I wanted to keep her in check. I was trying to help.”

As can be seen in the video above, a rabbi in the audience performed his own ritualistic denunciation of the protests by tearing and biting one of the protest banners as though he was slaughtering a sacrificial animal.

The collective judgement was, no doubt, that these are all appropriate ways of dealing with “self-hating” Jews — the only type of Jew who can be expected to criticize Israel.

Meanwhile, Alfred Grosser, a Jewish intellectual and Holocaust survivor who is the keynote speaker at a ceremony marking the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht in Frankfurt tonight, has similarly been attacked because he describes himself as pro-Palestinian.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s deputy chief of mission in Germany, Emmanuel Nahshon, said that Frankfurt’s decision to invite Mr. Grosser to speak at the memorial “casts an unfortunate and unnecessary shadow on the event.” He also said that Mr. Grosser’s criticism of Israel was “illegitimate and immoral,” and suggested that his “extreme opinions are tainted by self-hatred.”

The campaign to demean and delegitimize individual Jews by describing them as being afflicted by self-hatred is transparently coercive. There is perhaps a sense that the tribe cannot allow itself to rip itself apart by rejecting any of its members, but those who display what is cast as a form of tribal disloyalty must be neutered and silenced — both as a form of punishment and as a way of signalling to waverers the risks involved in stepping out of line. Rather than the threat of exile, there is the threat of being branded a lesser Jew, a self-hating Jew.

But the phrase itself — self-hating — seems to indicate more. This “self” is a particular form of Jewish identity which recognizes no such thing as a fully autonomous individual identity. A tribal consciousness, which rejects true autonomy, cannot accommodate expressions of personal conscience through dissent. The putative self which is supposedly being hated, exists inside the individual only in as much as the individual mirrors the collective

While social mechanisms such as these stretch all the way back to the origins of primate behavior, in the age of complex, diverse modern societies, they point in a darker direction: this is where fascism finds its base.

—

The New Orleans protesters later described who they are and why they took their action:

They also released a declaration at Young Jewish and Proud:

A vision of collective identity, purpose and values written by and for young Jews committed to justice in Israel and Palestine. It is an invitation and call to action for both our peers and our elders, launched as a counter-protest at the 2010 Jewish Federation General Assembly in New Orleans. [Read their full declaration.]

Facebooktwittermail

Britain’s Abu Ghraib

The Guardian reports:

Evidence of the alleged systematic and brutal mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at a secret British military interrogation centre that is being described as “the UK’s Abu Ghraib” emerged yesterday during high court proceedings brought by more than 200 former inmates.

The court was told there was evidence that detainees were starved, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation and threatened with execution at the shadowy facilities near Basra operated by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team, or JFIT.

It also received allegations that JFIT’s prisoners were beaten, forced to kneel in stressful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and that some were subjected to electric shocks. Some of the prisoners say that they were subject to sexual humiliation by women soldiers, while others allege that they were held for days in cells as small as one metre square.

Michael Fordham QC, for the former inmates, said the question needed to be asked: “Is this Britain’s Abu Ghraib?”

The evidence of abuse is emerging weeks after defence officials admitted that British soldiers and airmen are suspected of being responsible for the murder and manslaughter of a number of Iraqi civilians, in addition to the high-profile case of Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist tortured to death by troops in September 2003. One man is alleged to have been kicked to death aboard an RAF helicopter, while two others died after being held for questioning.

Facebooktwittermail

America’s ever-expanding knowledge deficit

At Salon, Justin Elliot reports:

An August Pew poll found that a growing number of Americans — 18 percent — falsely believe that President Obama is a Muslim. Why does that figure keep rising? It’s a difficult question, but it may partly be explained by the remarkable success of videos like this one, which has racked up over 2.5 million views in just three months on YouTube. It’s titled, “”BREAKING NEWS! – Is Barack Obama Really A Saudi / Muslim ‘Plant’ in the White House?”

The thrust of the video, put up by YouTube user ppsimmons, is this: The wife of an American-born Israeli author, Avi Lipkin, monitors the Egyptian media. She saw a broadcast in which the Egyptian foreign minister said that Obama personally told the him that Obama is a Muslim — and that the president is hiding that fact (and also that he is going to betray Israel).

All of this is narrated not by Lipkin, but by an unidentified man (possibly the YouTube user). Lipkin, who sometimes using the alias “Victor Mordecai,” is a former IDF spokesman and current right-wing speaker and writer on Islamic terrorism. He told Salon in an email that the YouTube video is an accurate portrayal of his beliefs.

“My wife, Rachel, has been listening to the Arabic language media from her office in Kol Israel Radio in Jerusalem, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “It is ironic, because the whole Islamic world knows the American president is a Moslem. The only ones who don’t know it or want to know it are the Americans, themselves.”

There is no evidence presented that this Egyptian interview ever happened. And the YouTube video itself (which was apparently put up not by Lipkin, but by one of his fans) could well be the product of a lone conspiracy theorist. Which makes it all the more remarkable that it has racked up 2.5 million views.

The video does actually identify its narrator: PCG. That is, Pastor Carl Gallups from the Hickory Hammock Baptist Church in Milton, Florida. Online shoppers who want to accessorize their faith might enjoy visiting the church’s gift shop where they will find a fine line of “CHRISTIAN and GOD AND COUNTRY T-Shirts, Gifts Accessories and Home Items.”

Pastor Gallups was given national attention in late June when he was named as a runner-up in one of Keith Olbermann’s “worst person in the world” lists after the release another popular YouTube video: “EXCLUSIVE! OIL SPILL IN GULF – Hand of God? Connection to Israel?”

To the extent that Gallups’ videos have gone “viral” (at least prior to receiving attention from MSNBC and Salon), the pathways of proliferation they have followed seem somewhat predictable. Spreading out from Pastor Gallups’ own congregation, along with listeners to his Freedom Friday show on northwest Florida’s 1330 AM Weby talk radio, these are messages spreading most likely among the already converted. Which is to say, people whose worldview is confirmed — not challenged — by claims such as that the Saudi Arabian monarchy is in control of the US government or that the BP Gulf oil spill was an expression of the wrath of God in reaction to the Obama administration applying pressure on the Netanyahu government.

Are these ideas that can only be accepted by people who have lost any grasp on reason? I think not.

The issue is the boundaries that circumscribe the pool of information that individuals draw upon as they form their understanding of the world. People like Gallups present a view of America and the world that has its own internal logic which holds up through the reinforcement of rigid definitions about what constitute legitimate and illegitimate sources of information.

Progressives, liberals, conservatives, evangelicals, and atheists, all employ the same form of prejudicial review in accessing the credibility of information, which is to attach weight to the source before assessing the value of the information. We attend to who is speaking before we hear what they are saying. Where we differ is in how broad and deep or narrow and shallow is the pool of imputed credibility we draw upon.

This is worth remembering at a time when it’s easy to believe that a wave of irrationality is sweeping across America.

Facebooktwittermail

Anwar al Awlaki: wanted dead, not alive

Patrick Cockburn writes:

Anwar al-Awlaki, the militant Islamic cleric in hiding in Yemen, was being denounced in the US and Britain last week as an arch-conspirator against the West, leading to hundreds of videos of his speeches and interviews being hurriedly removed from YouTube.

Awlaki, an eloquent preacher, is alleged to have radicalised Roshonara Choudhry, the theology student who stabbed Stephen Timms MP for voting for the Iraq war. Awlaki was also in contact with militant Muslims who later attacked American targets, such as the Nigerian student with explosives sewn into his underpants and the US officer who shot dead 13 of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood.

On the videos of Awlaki still available on YouTube, often excerpts from his speeches broadcast on US TV, his message remains chillingly clear. In a soft, measured voice he describes how he was born in America, lived there for 21 years and became an Islamic preacher, advocating non-violence until the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This turned him into a supporter of holy war against America: “I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against Islam is binding for Muslims.”

(That should of course read “jihad against America” and Cockburn’s gaffe should have been caught by the Independent‘s editors.)

The fact that Awlaki is currently being turned into a larger than life figure is highlighted in this report from Yemen, appearing in the Los Angeles Times:

“Anwar Awlaki?”

Mmmmm.

“Is he a doctor? I don’t think I know him.”

Americans may regard the U.S.-born cleric with the beard and hard stare as a new face of terror, but when you mention Awlaki in the Yemeni capital, it’s as if you’ve asked someone to solve a complicated bit of arithmetic. Eyes narrow, faces scrunch.

“I don’t know who he is. I work all day and don’t watch a lot of TV,” said Ibrahim Abdulrab, standing over an ironing board with a pile of shirts at his feet.

The radical preacher is on the CIA’s assassination list and is believed to be hiding with Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen’s mountainous tribal lands. He is implicated in a number of plots, including inspiring a U.S. Army psychiatrist who is charged with killing 13 people a year ago at Ft. Hood, Texas, and the recent attempt to blow up aircraft with packages of concealed explosives.

Internet videos, website manifestos and pundit rhetoric are splicing Awlaki into the American consciousness. But he is largely unknown here or referred to as an apparition hiding in a distant crevice. Even his Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is scoffed at by many as an invention, a ploy by Washington and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to advance larger agendas.

What’s interesting about the way in which Awlaki has rapidly been elevated to the status of latest and greatest threat to America is that his potency as a radicalizing force is clearly being amplified by those who regard him as a threat.

As Cockburn notes: “Most alarming for the US and British governments, Awlaki’s words are directed primarily at English-speaking Muslims. He asks how American Muslims can give their loyalty to a country that is at war with Islam.”

These are the competing narratives of the ideological fight in which Awlaki has been cast as the West’s new nemesis:

On the one hand Western governments claim that the most dire threat to democracy comes from small groups of Islamic extremists, mostly scattered across the Middle East — even while inside these threatened Western countries, life continues largely as normal with little or no evidence that these are nations at war — such as during the US midterm elections where war barely got mentioned.

On the other hand, ideologues such as Awlaki assert that America and its allies are engaged in a war against Islam — that claim being rather strongly reinforced by the fact that the Middle East has been ripped apart by a decade of war in which the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of casualties have been Muslim men, women and children.

As vehemently as Western politicians might deny the existence of a war against Islam, Muslims do not have to be wild-eyed conspiracy theorists to conclude otherwise.

So this leads to the question of how exactly the threat posed by Awlaki is being measured. Is it, as we have been told, that he has had an instrumental role in planning acts of terrorism? Or is it that he poses an unacceptable risk because he has the capacity radicalize others in the same way that he himself was radicalized and that worst of all, these others are, so to speak, on the wrong side of the border?

If Awlaki can be assassinated because he expresses what have simply been deemed dangerous ideas then we live in an era in which democracy is being destroyed in the name of saving democracy.

The Predator drones now hunting Awlaki are not simply in the business of thwarting future acts of terrorism. Awlaki’s death will ensure that he never goes on trial — a prospect whose improbability is underlined by the fact that he has been selected for assassination even while in the United States no warrant for his arrest has been issued.

Facebooktwittermail

GOP senator pushes for war to ‘neuter’ Iran

AFP reports:

The United States faces a possible war with Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions and a “period of confrontation” with China over its currency, a top US lawmaker warned Saturday.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said his fellow conservative, fresh from their historic elections romp this week, support “bold” action to deal with Iran.

If President Barack Obama “decides to be tough with Iran beyond sanctions, I think he is going to feel a lot of Republican support for the idea that we cannot let Iran develop a nuclear weapon,” he told the Halifax International Security Forum.

“The last thing America wants is another military conflict, but the last thing the world needs is a nuclear-armed Iran… Containment is off the table.”

The South Carolina Republican saw the United States going to war with the Islamic republic “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime.”

Facebooktwittermail

Bloomberg to America: lay off the Chinese

The Wall Street Journal reports:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on a visit to Hong Kong and the neighboring city of Shenzhen, had some harsh criticism for his own fellow Americans: Stop blaming the Chinese for their problems.

As the debate rages over China’s trade and currencies policies, the 68-year-old Bloomberg, now in his third term as mayor of New York, was tough on China’s critics in the U.S. He spoke to reporters Saturday in Hong Kong after addressing a meeting of leaders from top cities around the world, dubbed the C40, focused on climate change and environment.

“I think in America, we’ve got to stop blaming the Chinese and blaming everybody else and take a look at ourselves,” he said.

A day earlier, Mr. Bloomberg visited several businesses (incluing a solar panel maker) in Shenzhen, a manufacturing hub that borders Hong Kong.

China’s big push into solar and other environmentally friendly energy technologies has begun to attract negative attention. Last month, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said it would investigate China’s policies over complaints that the country was using tactics that violated its World Trade Organization commitments to shut other countries out of the burgeoning market for clean energy.

Mr. Bloomberg attacked the notion that using Chinese-made technology to promote green energy in the U.S. was politically objectionable. “Let me get this straight: There’s a country on the other side of the world that is taking their taxpayers’ dollars, and trying to sell subsidized things so we can buy them cheaper, and have better products, and we’re going to criticize that?”

Earlier, in an interview, the mayor was deeply, undiplomatically critical of provincialism and populism in U.S. Congress.

“If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate—they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.”

The mayor said his biggest impression from meeting his mayoral counterparts from China (the C40 includes about a half dozen heads of major cities in China) was their focus on environmental issues.

In the past, he said, “they have focused on jobs, jobs, jobs, economic development at all costs. Now all of a sudden they are realizing their rivers are becoming undrinkable, their air is killing people.”

Facebooktwittermail

Somewhere in hell, Joseph Stalin is smiling

Tony Keller writes:

In the 1930s, that great legal innovator Joseph Stalin introduced the show trial. The accused would stand up in court and willingly, even eagerly, confess to the most fantastical crimes. At the first great show trial, in 1936, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other former senior Communist party members admitted to being members of a terrorist organization. They said they had plotted to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. In the following years, as Stalin’s purges picked up steam, show trials featured increasingly incredible stories, usually involving the accused admitting to being agents of Western imperialism.

What made men confess to things that were unlikely, sometimes impossible and usually unsupported by other evidence? Torture. Sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against their wives and children. To stop the pain, you had to confess to whatever it was that the interrogators wanted to hear. And then you had to get up in court and willingly confess to it all over again.

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

Facebooktwittermail

Obama’s problem simply defined: it was the banks

James K Galbraith writes:

Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy’s failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure — to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy.

As Krugman rightly stipulates, Monday-morning quarterbacks should say exactly what different play they would have called. Paul’s answer is that the stimulus package should have been bigger. No disagreement: I was one voice calling for a much larger program back when. Yet this answer is not sufficient.

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

Up to a point, one can defend the decisions taken in September-October 2008 under the stress of a rapidly collapsing financial system. The Bush administration was, by that time, nearly defunct. Panic was in the air, as was political blackmail — with the threat that the October through January months might be irreparably brutal. Stopgaps were needed, they were concocted, and they held the line.

But one cannot defend the actions of Team Obama on taking office. Law, policy and politics all pointed in one direction: turn the systemically dangerous banks over to Sheila Bair and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Insure the depositors, replace the management, fire the lobbyists, audit the books, prosecute the frauds, and restructure and downsize the institutions. The financial system would have been cleaned up. And the big bankers would have been beaten as a political force.

Facebooktwittermail

Is Islamic finance the new challenge to Wall Street?

Andrew Sheng writes:

In the 1990s, Islamic finance was a fledgling fringe industry. But today, its size has grown from roughly US$150 billion to about US$1 trillion in size. This is of course still small relative to some of the largest global fund managers and universal banks, who manage more than US$1 trillion each. But the double-digit growth and potential size of the market cannot be ignored. Some pundits think that the market size will reach US$2 trillion within the next five years.

There are roughly 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, with 138 million in India and roughly 30 million in China. These are growing markets in terms of income and wealth. As the Muslim community seeks to invest in interest-free banking, Islamic funds have been growing in leaps and bounds. Today, there are roughly US$800 billion in Islamic banking funds, US$100 billion in the sukuk (or Islamic bond) market and another US$100 billion in takaful (Islamic insurance) and fund management business. Hong Kong, of course, introduced the Hang Seng Shariah Compliant China Index Fund in 2008 to attract Muslim investors.

As oil prices continue to remain at high levels, the Middle East oil-producers will continue to generate surpluses that must be parked somewhere. With the Western markets and economies under pressure, some of that money has moved Eastwards.

Will Islamic finance be a serious challenge to traditional Wall Street finance? That is a question that deserves a good answer.

Facebooktwittermail

The Tea Party is tapping into legitimate grievances

Noam Chomsky writes:

The U.S. midterm elections register a level of anger, fear and disillusionment in the country like nothing I can recall in my lifetime. Since the Democrats are in power, they bear the brunt of the revulsion over our current socioeconomic and political situation.

More than half the “mainstream Americans” in a Rasmussen poll last month said they view the Tea Party movement favorably—a reflection of the spirit of disenchantment.

The grievances are legitimate. For more than 30 years, real incomes for the majority of the population have stagnated or declined while work hours and insecurity have increased, along with debt. Wealth has accumulated, but in very few pockets, leading to unprecedented inequality.

Facebooktwittermail

Caliphate on the range? The shariah precedent in American courts

Asma Uddin writes:

Judging by how Oklahoma voted in the recent election, one might conclude that despite its tiny Muslim population, Oklahoma was on the verge of becoming an Islamic caliphate in Middle America. The reality is of course far different. Oklahoma State Question 755, which passed, asked voters whether state courts should be forbidden “from considering or using Sharia Law.” Similar legislation is being considered in Tennessee, and Louisiana recently became the first state to pass several bills banning international law from its courts. Although the Louisiana bills didn’t mention shariah explicitly, they were apparently motivated at least in part by a similar distaste for Muslims and their religious law, and a desire to “protect” constitutional law. These constitutional law protectors appear, however, to be a little fuzzy on what constitutional law actually means, how it allows for various forms of religious arbitration and what the state can and cannot do to regulate religious freedoms.

In the discussion and debate surrounding Question 755, supporters in search of an example where the bogeyman shariah was permitted inside American courtrooms kept pointing to a New Jersey case where the court denied a restraining order to a woman who was sexually assaulted by her then-husband. The judge ruled that the husband did not have a “criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault” her as the husband was merely under the impression that he was exercising his prerogative as a husband under Islamic law. What’s rarely reported, however, is that the decision was promptly overturned on appeal because the application of shariah, or the “cultural defense,” conflicted with civil law.

This example is noteworthy not just because the decision was overturned because it got the law wrong, or that it is the only one of its kind, but because it is an atypical example of how shariah has made an appearance in American courtrooms. The typical cases are far from frightening. For example, arbitration under shariah law is permitted in the U.S., just like arbitration according to Christian principles or Jewish religious tradition is permitted, or according to any other set of rules two contracting parties may agree to. Indeed, prominent Christian groups like PromiseKeepers have long required Christian arbitration clauses in their contracts with vendors.

Facebooktwittermail

Pentagon’s Cyber Command seeks authority to expand its battlefield

A defense official quote in this report from the Washington Post says: “Al Qaeda is everywhere.”

That’s the same as saying that anyone who has a blog is “everywhere” — presence on the web is by its nature global. Still, it’s a dubious claim when coming out of the mouth of a US government official because it will inevitably be used to justify the extension of government powers in ways that vastly exceed the size or scope of the threat that they are designed to counter.

The Pentagon’s new Cyber Command is seeking authority to carry out computer network attacks around the globe to protect U.S. interests, drawing objections from administration lawyers uncertain about the legality of offensive operations.

Cyber Command’s chief, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who also heads the National Security Agency, wants sufficient maneuvering room for his new command to mount what he has called “the full spectrum” of operations in cyberspace.

Offensive actions could include shutting down part of an opponent’s computer network to preempt a cyber-attack against a U.S. target or changing a line of code in an adversary’s computer to render malicious software harmless. They are operations that destroy, disrupt or degrade targeted computers or networks.

But current and former officials say that senior policymakers and administration lawyers want to limit the military’s offensive computer operations to war zones such as Afghanistan, in part because the CIA argues that covert operations outside the battle zone are its responsibility and the State Department is concerned about diplomatic backlash.

The administration debate is part of a larger effort to craft a coherent strategy to guide the government in defending the United States against attacks on computer and information systems that officials say could damage power grids, corrupt financial transactions or disable an Internet provider.

The effort is fraught because of the unpredictability of some cyber-operations. An action against a target in one country could unintentionally disrupt servers in another, as happened when a cyber-warfare unit under Alexander’s command disabled a jihadist Web site in 2008. Policymakers are also struggling to delineate Cyber Command’s role in defending critical domestic networks in a way that does not violate Americans’ privacy.

Facebooktwittermail

Beware the white Obama

Pepe Escobar writes:

The American right’s “road map” for these past two years has been to declare Obama an abysmal failure since January 20, 2008, and to do absolutely zilch to help the country out of its political/economic/cultural quagmire. Now – at least in theory – their bluff has been called by the American electorate.

Or has it? To talk about incoherence is a huge understatement. Americans have told exit polls they almost equally blame Wall Street (35%), Bush (30%) and Obama (23%) for the current economic disaster. Obama royally screwed up by bailing out Wall Street the way he did. But now the electorate has decided to reward a whole bunch of clowns and crooks who caused the debacle in the first place – among other things by endorsing George W Bush’s tax cuts and two trillionnaire, unwinnable wars. The tearful John Boehner – probably the next speaker of the House – is very tight with (what else is new?) financial lobbyists. Angry Americans voted – once again – for Wall Street.

The heart of the (sorry) matter is that Obama and the Democrats did not even strive to meet the great expectations awakened by the 2008 “Change we can believe in” collective rapture. They sowed the seeds of their own doom instead. No wonder they were deserted en masse by young people, ethnic minorities, pacifists and environmentalists while at the same time masses of enraged centrists, moderates and independents sought refuge in the right. Add to it the electorate’s gullibility in its manipulation by corporate media.
[…]
Flash forward to 2012; to the sound of Aretha Franklin singing Don Covay’s See Saw – “going up, down, all around/ like a see saw” – scores of US voters will have finally noticed they threw the bums out just to bring in another basket of equally lame bums.

United States corporate media is not emitting a peep about it but Obama should really start worrying about his white mirror – Marco Rubio, who has just won a senate seat for Florida. Rubio, 39, intelligent, good-looking, good orator, promises the world to people and has “American Dream” written all over his bio.

Born in Miami, raised in Vegas (where his Cuban exile parents worked hard in a hotel), good football player, hard-working college student, law degree, Catholic, blonde wife from a Colombian family, four kids – as a bonus to the establishment Rubio is not a wacko (although Palin loves him unconditionally). Mike Huckabee – former presidential candidate and now Fox News pundit – says he’s “our Obama, with more substance”. And crucially, his political godfather is none other than Jeb Bush. Establishment Republicans won’t allow Palin to grab a presidential nomination even over their dead bodies. Thus Rubio may be their savior for 2012.

An inept/indecisive Obama allowed Republicans to get away with murder – as in not being held accountable for the monster financial/economic mess and on top of it being allowed to exploit and profit from the all-American rage provoked by their “policies”. Now, after the “shellacking”, it’s about time for the president to show some balls and start playing offense. He could start by firing everyone at the White House. It won’t happen. Get ready; white Obama will eat him for breakfast in 2012.

Facebooktwittermail