Autonomous Oblast

Nir Rosen
guardian.co.uk,

“Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.” LINK

Via: DeanWhitbread

Read : What You Don’t Know About Gaza
By RASHID KHALIDI
Published: January 7, 2009 NY Times

Dawn Johnsen new head of Office of Legal Counsel discussing the infamous Woo Torture Memo

Six minute video but worth your time. It discusses points we all know and understand at different levels. It does so with clarity.

From: Justice after Bush
Prosecuting an outlaw administration
By Scott Horton

Via:msbadkittie:

‘Americans may wish to avoid what is necessary. We may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naive. That all presidents commit crimes. We may pretend that George W. Bush and his senior officers could not have committed crimes significantly worse than those of their predecessors. We may fear what it would mean to acknowledge such crimes, much less to punish them. But avoiding this task, simply “moving on,” is not possible.

This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted “signing statements” that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.

No prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly lawless. Yet it is no simple matter to prosecute a former president or his senior officers. There is no precedent for such a prosecution, and even if there was, the very breadth and audacity of the administration’s activities would make the process so complex as to defy systems of justice far less fragmented than our own. But that only means choices must be made. Indeed, in weighing the enormity of the administration’s transgressions against the realistic prospect of justice, it is possible to determine not only the crime that calls most clearly for prosecution but also the crime that is most likely to be successfully prosecuted. In both cases, that crime is torture.’

Via: the Big Picture

Tear gas cannisters fired by Israeli soldiers fall from the sky on Palestinian and Israeli peace activists during a protest agaisnt the construction of Israel’s controversial security barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin, near Ramallah, on June 6, 2008. (Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images)

msbadkittie:

“The Bush administration approved the use of “waterboarding” on Al Qaeda detainees after receiving reports from government psychologists that it was “100 percent effective” in breaking the will of U.S. military personnel subjected to the technique during training, according to documents released today by a Senate Committee.

The Senate Armed Services report concludes that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques—including forcing detainees to stand naked, subjecting them to growling dogs and depriving them of sleep—were discussed by top members of the National Security Council and other senior administration officials inside the White House. Some officials expressed strong concerns about the legality of the methods. But the techniques were ultimately given the green light, based on government assessments that showed such methods were quick and effective in breaking down the resistance of U.S. military officers who were subjected to them in so-called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) classes…

Levin said the new documents and other material uncovered by his probe show how the abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were not, as administration officials initially contended, the result of a “few bad apples” but in fact the result of deliberate administration policy. But there is still a host of outstanding questions about that policy and how it was created.”

CFL Light bulbs, use less energy but present a Mercury Waste problem. Ponder that.

Commentary for Bitterlemons International on why Washington’s inclination to impose more sanctions on Iran prior to engaging in diplomacy may scuttle the chances for such talks in the first place, and undermine President-elect Obama’s ability to use the leverage that existing US sanctions on Iran provide.

Mandelbrot and Taleb discuss how little we understand about our current economy.

Via: bobinator & i1326