Category Archives: Issues

Guantánamo: the most expensive prison in the world

The Miami Herald reports: Guards get combat pay, just like troops in Afghanistan, without the risk of being blown up. Some commanders get to bring their families to this war-on-terror deployment. And each captive gets $38.45 worth of food a day.

The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning.

That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil.

It’s still funded as an open-ended battlefield necessity, although the last prisoner arrived in March 2008. But it functions more like a gated community in an American suburb than a forward-operating base in one of Afghanistan’s violent provinces.

Congress, charged now with cutting $1.5 trillion from the budget by Christmas, provided $139 million to operate the center last year, and has made every effort to keep it open — even as a former deputy commander of the detention center calls it “expensive” and “inefficient.”

“It’s a slow-motion Berlin Airlift — that’s been going on for 10 years,” says retired Army Brig. Gen. Greg Zanetti, a West Point graduate who in 2008 was deputy commander at the detention center.

Both its location and temporary nature drive up costs, says Zanetti. While there, he wrote a secret study that compared the operation to Alcatraz, noting that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had closed it in 1963 because it was too expensive.

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Taliban target mobile phone masts to prevent tipoffs from Afghan civilians

The Guardian reports: Afghanistan’s communications infrastructure has become the latest casualty of the intensified war between Nato and the Taliban, with mobile phone companies reporting crippling attacks on their network of transmission masts.

The onslaught came in the wake of a decree by Hamid Karzai ordering phone companies to defy insurgent demands to shut down transmission networks in large parts of the country during the night.

The mobile phone networks are a key battleground in the war on the Taliban as the vast majority of anti-insurgent tipoffs from Afghan civilians are made at night, through phone calls.

The phone industry says the damage has been so great that the numbers of hours of coverage available to all phone users has fallen significantly – the first time there has been such a fall.

After a decade of explosive growth in public access to phones, which are now part of everyday life for millions of Afghans, the falloff is an extraordinary change of fortunes for an industry that is often cited as one of the country’s biggest post-2001 success stories.

The Taliban began attacking transmission masts in 2007, but the damage was limited and the attacks were often aimed only at extorting money from companies.

But since mid-summer attacks have soared, with up to 30 towers being destroyed or damaged in one 20-day period. Previously a loss of five would be considered a bad month.

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How the 99 percent beat Keystone XL

Jamie Henn writes: On Thursday afternoon, President Obama announced that the State Department will be sending plans for TransCanada’s controversial Keystone XL pipeline back to the drawing board. Most analysts think the 12- to 18-month delay will cause enough cost overruns and missed contracts that TransCanada will have to scrap the project altogether.

Keystone XL was going to be another fuse to the largest carbon bomb in North America: the Canadian tar sands. The tar sands are the dirtiest fuel on the face of the planet, and our top climate scientist says fully exploiting them could be “essentially game over” for the climate. We haven’t defused the bomb yet, but fighting Keystone has taught us a lot about how to dismantle it.

This fight started in indigenous communities in Canada and quickly spread down the pipeline route to ranchers in Nebraska and farmers in Texas. National environmental groups picked up the beat a while back. But it was the bravery of 1,253 people that transformed Keystone XL from a regional fight into the most important environmental question facing President Obama before the 2012 election.

For two weeks this August, one person after another was led away from the White House in handcuffs protesting Keystone XL. The sit-in united a uniquely diverse movement, from consummate D.C. insiders to indigenous leaders to Tea Party supporters. I was arrested on the second Wednesday with an architect from Philadelphia, a lawyer from National Resources Defense Council, and Darryl Hannah.

From those 1,253 people, the movement quickly spread. Protests met President Obama at nearly every public campaign stop. Groups of 50 to 100 people started visiting Obama for America offices to say, “We’re not going to donate or volunteer for your campaign until President Obama lives up to the promises he made in 2008, stands up to Big Oil, and kills this pipeline.” Hundreds of people were arrested in Ottawa to turn up the heat on the Canadian government. And this Sunday, more than 12,000 people surrounded the White House in a Keystone XL protest.

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Young U.S. Jews aim Occupy movement at Birthright Israel

Haaretz reports: As the various “occupy” movements spread across the United States, headed by the massive Occupy Wall Street events, a group of young Jewish Americans is taking the notion of the “99%” against the ruling “1%” to debunk what they see as the hypocritical U.S. Jewish leadership.

In a mission statement titled “Occupy the Occupiers: A Jewish Call to Action,” the Young, Jewish, and Proud (YJP), described as the youth wing of the left-leaning Jewish Voice for Peace movement, called out to young Jews to “stand up to the 1% in our own community, the powerful institutions that support Israel’s corporate-backed military control of the Palestinian people and act as the gatekeepers for our community.”

In one event meant to demonstrate the kind of grass-roots dissent shown in other “occupy” events, YJP members disrupted a New York event sponsored by Birthright Israel Alumni Community, using the now famous “human microphone” to interrupt a speech by venture capitalist and author Steven Pease.

Speaking of the incident to the YJP website, one participant, Liza Behrendt, said the event was meant to protest the Birthright program – in which Jewish youths are given a tour of Israel.

“Birthright is a symptom of a larger structural problem in the Jewish institutional world in which our version of the 1%, a handful of wealthy donors including people like the Schustermans or Sheldon Adelson, is able to dictate the social and political agenda of the 99%. That’s because Jewish institutions are so dependent on the 1% for funds,” Behrendt said.

Behrendt criticized Birthright as “free propaganda trips for predominantly middle and upper class American Jews while urgent needs in the United States and Israel go unmet.”

“At the same time, within the dominant Jewish institutions, like Hillel, critical thinking about Israel is not only discouraged but actively suppressed,” she added.

Another participant, Carolyn Klaasen, quoted on the movement’s website as referring to the event, said that the recent “occupy” movement made her feel that “such actions are far more in line with Jewish tradition than this event, which lifted up as a model of ‘success’ people like illegal settlement builder Lev Leviev who profit from exploitation of others.”

“That is part of the problem we’re protesting in the Occupy movement,” Klaasen added.

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Palestinians may push for U.N. vote they expect to lose

The Guardian reports: The Palestinians are resigned to losing their battle for majority backing within the United Nations security council for their application for full UN membership but may still press for a vote next week in an attempt to discomfort countries who abstain or vote against.

The security council is to meet in New York on Friday to consider a report on the Palestinian bid. However, the Palestinians have failed to muster the required two-thirds majority among its 15 members, thus sparing the US the need to use its veto to prevent the application being approved.

The Palestinians will also officially receive the report on Friday and the leadership will meet to decide future steps, according to a Palestinian official. “There will definitely be no vote [at the security council] tomorrow,” he said.

One of the options for the Palestinians to consider is to demand a vote next week, knowing they will lose. “Let these countries publicly justify why they will not support a Palestinian state,” said the official. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, looked “deeply uncomfortable” in the House of Commons this week when explaining Britain’s decision to abstain in any vote, he added.

Another option is to take their case to the UN general assembly without a security council vote. The Palestinians are expected to win the support of more than two-thirds of the UN’s 193 countries, but the general assembly can only approve upgraded observer status rather than full membership.

However, enhanced “non-member state” status may allow the Palestinians access to international bodies such as the international criminal court.

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Why is the Oakland Police Department hiding the truth about its violent crackdown on the Occupy protests?

Joshua Holland writes: After three notably violent crackdowns on protesters in as many weeks, Oakland Police Department officials have refused a request by the ACLU of Northern California to release police reports documenting their use of force as required by law.

“We saw events that we found extremely troubling, and which violated provisions of Oakland’s own crowd control policy,” Linda Lye, a staff attorney with ACLU of Northern California told AlterNet.

After recent police actions in Oakland gained national attention, “there was a lot of lip service paid to transparency and accountability and the public’s interest in monitoring the situation,” she said. “But then OPD proceeded to say that it was invoking one of the statutory exceptions to the Public Records Act for the vast majority of our requests.”

The exception officials cited exempted documents prepared pursuant to a criminal investigation, but, says Lye, “these records weren’t notes of a detective working on a murder case. These were very different records — they’re reports documenting the use of force during a massive police enforcement action, and many are required pursuant to routine reporting procedures under Oakland’s own policies.” She added, “Not only does the law require that they release the records, but the overall situation demands that they do so.”

A legal observer from the National Lawyers Guild told AlterNet that they had received “numerous reports of excessive force” after riot police evicted the encampment in front of City Hall during the early morning hours of October 25. According to Lye, one of the difficulties sorting out exactly what happened stems from the fact that, according to reports, as many as 17 police agencies were involved in the raid, which, according to the National Lawyers Guild observer, resulted in a head injury requiring hospitalization and three broken hands.

The following evening, as protesters regrouped, police dispersed crowds with round after round of teargas, flash-bang grenades and “less lethal” projectiles. Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen suffered a traumatic head injury when he was struck by some sort of projectile – reportedly a teargas canister – in the melee. As a group of people rushed to drag the unconscious Olsen to safety, police threw a flash-bang grenade into their midst.

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Citizen journalism challenges police and leads the media

Robert Mackey writes: The Oakland Police Department is investigating two incidents of apparent misconduct by officers during a protest last week, which were recorded by activists and posted online.

One of the brief clips, which shows a police officer firing a beanbag round directly at an activist with a camera in his hand, is shocking but similar in kind to other clips that have appeared to show the use of excessive force against protesters inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in recent weeks.

The other video, which records the last 57 seconds of a confrontation between a filmmaker and a police officer waiting to deploy on a quiet side street, shows no violence, but might say more about the potential for citizen journalism to change the power dynamic between citizens and the police.

The clip begins with the filmmaker, known as BLK PXLS, asking an officer to explain why he has covered the nameplate on his uniform with dark tape, in apparent violation of a section of the California penal code. After the officer refuses to reply, the filmmaker appeals to a superior officer who eventually pulls the tape from the officer’s uniform.

The video ends with a message from the filmmaker encouraging others to follow his example: “If you see cops not serving the people or participating in officer misconduct, film it! Hold them accountable!”

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Yes, it is Wall Street’s fault

Gene Lyons writes: So here’s my question: If the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 effectively caused the Wall Street meltdown of 2007 by forcing banks to make bad home loans to improvident poor people (and we all know exactly who I mean), how come it took 30 years for the housing bubble to burst?

Next question: If fuzzy-thinking Democratic do-gooders enacted such laws in defiance of common sense and sound economics, why didn’t Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush I or Bush II do something? Was Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., secretly running the country?

Exactly how did the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the United States — the investment bankers and corporate execs who host the $1,000-a-plate fundraisers, scoop up the Cabinet appointments and ambassadorships, and party down at White House galas — end up having less power over the U.S. economy than unskilled day laborers in Newark, N.J., or Oakland, Calif.?

Maybe some “resident scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, or another of the comfortable Washington think tanks devoted to keeping Scrooge McDuck’s bullion pool topped-up, can teach us how things got so upside-down. Because under normal circumstances, the national motto is neither “e pluribus unum” nor “In God We Trust.”

It’s “Money Talks.”

Money was talking big-time last week. Clearly annoyed by the unkempt ragamuffins of Occupy Wall Street, New York’s dapper billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered himself of a conspiracy theory so absurd that it had previously been confined to such dark corners of American life as the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity programs and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp … [T]hey were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will … And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”

Actually, “annoyed” is too mild to describe a sophisticated Wall Street player like Bloomberg resorting to so crude and poisonous a political lie. He can’t possibly believe it. For all its ragtag, hippie-dippie aspects, Occupy Wall Street must have people at Manhattan’s most elegant dinner parties running scared.

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We’re spending more on nukes than we did during the Cold War?!

Adam Weinstein writes: On April 5, 2009, President Barack Obama took the stage before 20,000 people in Prague’s Hradcany Square to offer an ambitious global vision. “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” he told the open-air audience in the former Eastern Bloc capital. “To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.”

The timing of his bold promise seemed perfect. Russia was ready to whittle down its destructive power; a year later, Obama and President Dmitri Medvedev would sign a treaty limiting both countries to 1,500 active warheads—though still enough to annihilate millions of people, a 50 percent reduction to each nation’s atomic arsenal. Back home, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were scrutinizing the federal budget for unnecessary spending, and nuclear weapons no longer appeared to be off limits.

Even the military brass was moving away from relying upon nuclear deterrence. The Pentagon’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (PDF) concluded that “[t]he massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the Cold War era of bipolar military confrontation is poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorists and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons.”

But shrinking America’s nuclear arsenal has turned out to be far easier said than done. Despite the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) cuts, federal spending on the atomic stockpile is actually beyond Cold War levels, driven by congressional hawks and powerful nuclear labs eager to “modernize” the arsenal and fund projects that could spark a new arms race.

During the Cold War, the United States spent, on average, $35 billion a year on its nuclear weapons complex. Today, it spends an estimated $55 billion. The nuclear weapons budget is spread across the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the government doesn’t publicly disclose how much it spends on its various aspects, from maintaining our nuclear arsenal to defending against other countries’ nukes. Altogether, it spent at least $52.4 billion on nuclear weapons in 2008, the last year anyone attempted to piece together the total cost, according to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. (And that doesn’t include classified programs.) That was five times the size of the State Department’s budget, seven times the EPA’s, and 14 times what the DOE spent on everything else it does.

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Hamas is becoming what it says it opposes

Chris McGreal reports: Samah Ahmed is once again a prisoner of Gaza, but this time it is at the hands of Hamas not Israel.

Years of travelling relatively freely after Israel lost control of the enclave’s border with Egypt came to an abrupt halt a few months ago when Ahmed’s strident criticisms of Hamas caught the attention of Gaza’s increasingly unpopular Islamist rulers.

Ahmed was beaten and stabbed at a political demonstration. Her brother was warned to keep her in line. Then Hamas stopped Ahmed leaving the Gaza Strip. Four times.

“I try to tell the truth and maybe the government didn’t like it,” she said of her blog. “Anything that is not organised by the Hamas government is viewed as against the government.”

Hamas has been enjoying a surge in popularity following the swap of the captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, for the release of more than a 1,000 Palestinian prisoners last month.

“The people are now looking up to Hamas,” said one of the movement’s leaders, Ismail Radwan. “With the prisoner release, Hamas has given to the people what no other faction has given. If there is an election tomorrow we will win even more votes than before.”

But the huge rallies to welcome the prisoners back masked growing disillusionment with the armed Islamist movement’s five-year rule amid rising dissatisfaction at corruption, suppression of political opposition and, above all, its claim that violent resistance to Israeli occupation is more important than jobs.

“The prisoner swap has boosted Hamas’s popularity for now,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at Al-Azhar university in Gaza. “But it won’t last more than a few months. Hamas’s popularity has declined every year it has been in power. Hamas control of Gaza brought an Israeli blockade and siege. Even though it was Israeli-imposed, a lot of people blame Hamas. The Palestinians voted Hamas for reform and change. They didn’t vote for siege and blockade and unemployment. They voted to end the corruption. None of that happened.”

Hamas’s upset election victory in 2006 was built largely on despair with the corruption, misgovernance and authoritarianism of the ruling Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat until his death two years earlier. Many residents of Gaza now voice similar complaints about Hamas.

“They’re back to the same old corruption,” said Mohammed Mansour, a human rights activist and part of a growing community of young people pressing for political change. “Hamas is a party that only benefits its own party, its own supporters. If you want a job, if you want to do business, you must be a supporter of Hamas. Some people in Hamas have got very rich. You see the big houses, you see the new cars.”

That has created resentment among Gazans struggling to get by in the face of mass unemployment and low incomes.

But the real despair is around the widespread lack of hope for change as Hamas touts armed conflict with Israel as more important that economic reconstruction, and the sometimes violent political feud with its arch-rival Fatah has divided the Palestinian territories. While Hamas controls Gaza, Fatah governs the West Bank – a situation that plays into Israel’s hands.

“I think people are different now,” said Ola Anan, a 27-year-old computer engineer. “It’s a long time since anything has changed. I think people feel hopeless that they’re going to change. If it’s going to change it’s only for the worse. A lot of people are losing faith in politics altogether. Sometimes I think we need to follow the Arab spring and create something new. People are so fed up.”

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Around the world in five revolutions: One reporter’s journey through the year’s protests in the Middle East, London, Athens, New York and Toronto

Jesse Rosenfeld writes: When 3,000 people marched through Toronto’s financial district on October 15, expanding the Occupy Wall Street protests north of the border, I scanned the crowd wondering if my home city could actually forge a connection with the social movements erupting around the globe. In the weeks that followed, I got my answer as hundreds of tents expanded across St. James Park, blocks from the heart of Canada’s financial district.

Canada has been relatively sheltered from the global financial crisis and detached from global issues — especially those in the Arab world — by its insular political culture. But the determination by these Canadian protesters to chart a new course seemed to radiate the same mix of desperation, necessity and optimism I witnessed firsthand in the recent protests in the Middle East, Europe and the US.

While the gulf between conditions affecting the protesters in the Middle East and those in the West is stark, it is clear that young people in both contexts are being driven by rage, marginalization and the demand for democratic representation. In a role reversal unthinkable just a few short years ago, the young dispossessed in London, Athens, New York and Toronto are being inspired by Arab youth to take up the struggle for democratic liberation.

Several months prior to the launch of the Occupy Movement, I stood next to young Palestinians in the West Bank as they fought tooth and nail with Palestinian Authority security forces to hold the center of Ramallah and transform the city’s central square into a platform for discussion and social action.

I watched this pattern of protest beginning to emerge on the foggy afternoon of January 28, 2011 from my unofficial “office” of three previous years. Glued to Al Jazeera in the crowded Ramallah shisha café, where locals gather to smoke and argue politics over coffee, I found myself in an atmosphere that more resembled a live sports match than an unfolding political crisis.

The cafe hosts an eclectic mix of people, ranging from a core of grumpy old men to university students, local journalists and artists. With everyone glued to the TV on the main floor, cheers erupted as Mubarak’s police were pushed back by youth advancing on Cairo’s Tahrir square. Curses in Arabic rang out responding to police attacks in a tone I had previously heard used only against advancing Israeli soldiers.

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Israel may lack capability for effective strike on Iran nuclear facilities

Bloomberg reports: Concern that a new report on Iran’s nuclear program might spur an Israeli military strike ignores a central factor: Experts say the odds such an assault could succeed are slim.

“The Israelis actually have limited means of attacking Iran’s nuclear program,” said Richard Russell, a professor at the U.S. National Defense University’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies in Washington and a consultant to the U.S. command for the region. “This is a very, very difficult problem for the Israelis, and it’s getting more and more acute.”

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency yesterday reported on Iran’s efforts to develop a bomb small enough to put on a missile with enough range to hit Israel. Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, outlined anew in the report, are dispersed over a broad area 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) and multiple countries to the east of Tel Aviv. Some are underground.

Iran has repeatedly asserted that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian goals, such as power generation.

“The Israeli Air Force is capable of launching an attack on Iran and causing damage,” said Yiftah Shapir, director of the Military Balance Project at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies. “It is far from capable of disabling the Iran nuclear program. That would take at least a month of sustained bombing. That’s not something Israel can carry out alone.”

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End bonuses for bankers

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes: I have a solution for the problem of bankers who take risks that threaten the general public: Eliminate bonuses.

More than three years since the global financial crisis started, financial institutions are still blowing themselves up. The latest, MF Global, filed for bankruptcy protection last week after its chief executive, Jon S. Corzine, made risky investments in European bonds. So far, lenders and shareholders have been paying the price, not taxpayers. But it is only a matter of time before private risk-taking leads to another giant bailout like the ones the United States was forced to provide in 2008.

The promise of “no more bailouts,” enshrined in last year’s Wall Street reform law, is just that — a promise. The financiers (and their lawyers) will always stay one step ahead of the regulators. No one really knows what will happen the next time a giant bank goes bust because of its misunderstanding of risk.

Instead, it’s time for a fundamental reform: Any person who works for a company that, regardless of its current financial health, would require a taxpayer-financed bailout if it failed should not get a bonus, ever. In fact, all pay at systemically important financial institutions — big banks, but also some insurance companies and even huge hedge funds — should be strictly regulated.

Critics like the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators decry the bonus system for its lack of fairness and its contribution to widening inequality. But the greater problem is that it provides an incentive to take risks. The asymmetric nature of the bonus (an incentive for success without a corresponding disincentive for failure) causes hidden risks to accumulate in the financial system and become a catalyst for disaster. This violates the fundamental rules of capitalism; Adam Smith himself was wary of the effect of limiting liability, a bedrock principle of the modern corporation.

Bonuses are particularly dangerous because they invite bankers to game the system by hiding the risks of rare and hard-to-predict but consequential blow-ups, which I have called “black swan” events. The meltdown in the United States subprime mortgage market, which set off the global financial crisis, is only the latest example of such disasters.

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