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Targeting Whistleblowers:
Truth Telling Julian Assange Endangered
By Stephen Lendman | Al-Jazeerah | June 14, 2010
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20Editorials/2010/June/14%20o/Targeting%20Whistleblowers%20Truth%20Telling%20Julian%20Assange%20
Endangered%20By%20Stephen%20Lendman.htm
More than ever under Obama, we live in a secret society, in which whistleblowers and journalists are targeted for doing their job – why Helen Thomas, unfairly pilloried by the pro-Israeli chorus, last July said his administration was “controlling the press,” during a White House Robert Gibbs briefing, then afterward added: “It’s shocking. It’s really shocking …. What the hell do they think we are, puppets? They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”
On April 16, journalist John Cole wrote: “The message is clear – you torture people and then destroy the evidence, and you get off without so much as a sternly worded letter. If you are a whistle blower outlining criminal behavior by the government, you get prosecuted.”
In fact, it’s worse. Under Bush, torture was official policy. It remains so under Obama who absolved CIA torturers, despite unequivocal evidence of their guilt. But leaking it risks criminal prosecution for revealing state secrets and endangering national security.
On June 7, New York Times writer Elisabeth Bumiller headlined, “Army Leak Suspect Is Turned In, by Ex-Hacker,” explaining that US Army intelligence analyst Specialist Bradley Manning told Adrian Lamo that he leaked the following materials to WikiLeaks:
– “260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables and video of a (US) airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year,” and
– an “explosive (39 minute) video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.”
Manning called it “collateral murder,” a crime he felt obliged to expose.
Lamo told the military, saying “I outed Brad Manning as an alleged leaker out of duty. I would never (and have never) outed an Ordinary Decent Criminal. There’s a difference.” He didn’t explain or how any criminal can be decent.
On June 7, the military command in Iraq arrested Manning, saying in Pentagon boilerplate:
“The Department of Defense takes the management of classified information very seriously because it affects our national security, the lives of our soldiers, and our operations abroad.”
So far, Manning is uncharged and is being held in Kuwait pending further action.
On June 6 in wired.com, Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter broke the story in their article headlined, “US Intelligence Analyst Arrested in WikiLeaks Video Probe,” explaining:
The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division arrested Manning after Lamo outed him. The State Department said it wasn’t aware of the arrest.The FBI had no comment, then later the Defense Department confirmed his arrest for allegedly leaking classified information.
According to army spokesman Gary Tallman:
“If you have a security clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide classified information to anyone who doesn’t have security clearance or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially the law.”
Manning said:
“Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful and horrifying. (The documents describe) almost criminal political back dealings. (They belong) in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark corner in Washington, DC. (Our government is involved in) incredible things, awful things.”
He exposed cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians and reporters, the perpetrators laughing on video like it was a game – the public unaware that Pentagon rules-of-engagement (ROEs) target Iraqi and Afghan civilians as well as alleged combatants.
On June 11, New York Times writer Scott Shane headlined, “Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press,” saying:
“In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions,” citing actions against Thomas A. Drake (discussed below), and Times columnist James Risen, subpoenaed (by Bush and Obama) to disclose his sources for his book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.”
Lucy Dalglish, executive director for Reporters Committee for Freedom, explained:
“The message they are sending to everyone is ‘You leak to the media, we will get you.’ As far as I can tell there is absolutely no difference (between Bush and Obama), and (he) seems to be paying more attention to it. This is going to get nasty.”
Attorney General Eric Holder approved the subpoena, his Justice Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, saying: “As a general matter, we have consistently said that leaks of classified information are something we take extremely seriously.”
Risen’s lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, explained that the subpoena relates to his report about covert CIA measures to subvert Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. “We will be fighting to quash” it, he said. “Jim is the highest calibre of reporter and adhered to the highest standards of his profession. And he intends to honor the promise of confidentiality he made to (his) source or sources.”
Risen’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, is handling the matter, but a Times statement said:
“Our view, however, is that confidential sources are vital in getting information to the public, and a subpoena issued more than four years after the book was published hardly seems to be important enough to outweigh the protection an author needs to have.”
First brought in 2006 by Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the grand jury session expired without resolution. Holder will impanel a new one. Risen faces possible prosecution and jail time for honoring his confidentiality commitment, what no reporter should ever violate.
WikiLeaks – What It Is, How It Operates
Calling itself “the intelligence agency of the people,” WikiLeaks says it’s “a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblower, journalist and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public” that has a right to know.
Only when they’re told “the true plans and behavior of their governments” can they decide whether or not they deserve support, or as Jack Kennedy said on April 27, 1961:
“The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers, which are cited to justify it.”
WikiLeaks believes that “Principled leaking has changed the course of history for the better; it can alter the course of history in the present; it can lead us to a better future.” It can expose abuses of power by “rel(ying) upon the power of overt fact to enable and empower citizens to bring feared and corrupt governments and corporations to justice,” and help make nominal democracies real ones.
Secrecy and Targeting Whistleblowers and Journalists Under Obama
Under Obama,
more than ever before, we live in a secret society, in which whistleblowers and journalists are targeted for doing their job – why Helen Thomas, unfairly pilloried by the pro-Israeli chorus, last July said his administration was “controlling the press,” during a White House Robert Gibbs briefing, then afterward added:
“It’s shocking. It’s really shocking….What the hell do they think we are, puppets? They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”
In a July 1, 2009 interview with CNSNews.com, she said even Nixon didn’t exert press control like Obama, saying: “Nixon didn’t try to do that. They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try …. I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to (a) fare-thee-well for town halls, the press conferences. It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”
In February 2009, the Free Flow of Information Act was introduced in the House and Senate. In March, the lower body passed it overwhelmingly, after which it stalled in Senate Committee.
At the time, the Obama administration weakened it in opposition to strong congressional support – on the pretext of national security considerations over the public’s right to know, to let prosecutors judicially force reporters and whistleblowers to reveal their sources. Though the bill never passed, the administration uses it to prevent exposure of information it wants suppressed, more aggressively than any of his predecessors, another measure of a man promising change.
Thomas Drake was an Obama administration target, a former National Security Agency (NSA) “senior executive,” indicted on April 15, 2010, on multiple charges of “willful retention of classified information, obstruction of justice and making false statements,” according to Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division.
The 10-count indictment alleges he gave Baltimore Sun reporter Sibohan Gorman classified NSA documents about the agency. In fact, she wrote about waste and mismanagement in its “Trailblazer” project (a program analyzing data on computer networks), and illegal spying activities, saying on May 18, 2006 in her article headlined, “NSA Killed System That Sifted Phone Data Legally” that:
“Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records – an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection – agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it.”
Her stories, however, focused mainly on the Trailblazer $1.2 billion initiative that one insider called “the biggest boondoggle going on now in the intelligence community,” what the public had every right to know.
Drake’s leaks exposed illegal NSA spying, its enormous amount of waste and fraud, and the formation of a public/private national security/surveillance state, incentivizing profiteers to hype fear for their own bottom-line self-interest.
As a candidate, Obama promised transparency, accountability, and reform of extremist Bush policies. As president, he usurped unchecked surveillance powers, including warrantless wiretapping, accessing personal records, monitoring financial transactions, and tracking emails, Internet and cell phone use to gather secret evidence for prosecutions. He also claims Justice Department immunity from illegal spying suits, an interpretation no member of Congress or administration ever made, not even Bush or his Republican allies.
As a result, his national security state targets activists, political dissidents, anti-war protestors, Muslims, Latino immigrants, lawyers who defend them, whistleblowers, journalists who expose federal crimes, corruption, and excesses who won’t disclose their sources, and WikiLeaks, cited in a 2008 Pentagon report as a major US security threat, important to shut down by deterring, discouraging or prosecuting its sources. More on that below.
At a time of extreme government secrecy, lawlessness, and betrayal of the public trust, exposes and public debate more than ever are vital – whistleblowers, WikiLeaks, and courageous reporters essential to an open society, one endangered without them.
WikiLeaks March 15, 2010 Release: “US Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks”
The group’s founder, Julian Assange, described a 32-page February 2008 counterintelligence investigation “to fatally marginalize the organization.”
However, after two years, without success, at least so far.
It called WikiLeaks “a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army, (jeopardizing) DoD personnel, equipment, facilities, or installations. Such information (could help) foreign intelligence and security services (FISS), foreign military forces, foreign insurgents, and foreign terrorist groups (by providing them) information (they could use to attack) US force(s), both within the United States and abroad” – typical Pentagon boilerplate to hype threats and deter whistleblowers from exposing government crimes and excesses, what the public has every right to know.
In response, WikiLeaks said protecting the identity of leakers takes high priority. It operates “to expose unethical practices, illegal behavior, and wrongdoing within corrupt (government agencies and) corporations (as well as) oppressive regimes” abroad, some in collusion with Washington.
The goal – expose wrongdoing, demand accountability, and support democratic principles in a free and open society – what governments are supposed to do, but when they don’t, organizations like WikiLeaks exhibit the highest form of patriotism, to be lauded, not spied on, pilloried, or destroyed.
Among its many accusations, DOD claimed WikiLeaks:
– has possible DOD moles giving it sensitive or classified information;
– uses its site to post fabricated and manipulated information;
– has 2,000 pages of leaked army documents with information about US and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, including on the kinds and numbers of equipment assigned to US Central Command;
– Julian Assange wrote and co-authored articles, based on leaked information, “to facilitate action by the US Congress to force the withdrawal of US troops by cutting off funding for the war(s);”
– leaked information “could aid enemy forces in planning terrorist attacks, (choose) the most effective type and emplacement of improvised explosive devices (IEDs)” and use other ways to target US military units, convoys, and bases;
– data published is misinterpreted, manipulated misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda;
– a November 9, 2007 report said US forces “had almost certainly violated the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC),” and has 2,386 low grade chemical weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan;
– the same report charged DOD with illegal white phosphorous use in the 2004 Fallujah attack;
– the Bush administration was accused of torture and denying ICRC representatives access to Guantanamo detainees;
– details were provided on DOD’s use of asymmetric tactics, techniques, and procedures in the April 2004 Fallujah assault; and
– many other accusations and concerns were listed, including whether “foreign organizations …. foreign military services, foreign insurgents, or terrorist groups provide funding or material support to Wikileaks.org.”
DOD concluded that successfully identifying, prosecuting, and terminating the employment of leakers “would damage and potentially destroy” WikiLeaks’ operation and deter others from supplying information. It also stressed “the need for strong counterintelligence, antiterrorism, force protection, information assurance, INFOSEC, and OPSEC programs to train Army personnel” on ways to prevent leaks and report “suspicious activities.”
Julian Assange is a man with a mission – total transparency.
WikiLeaks is a vital resource by providing key information on how governments and corporations betray the public interest. Given America’s tradition of war crimes, corruption and other abuses of power, no wonder DOD is concerned, thankfully so far without success, or according to WikiLeaks:
Its activities are “the strongest way we have of generating the true democracy and good governance on which all mankind’s dreams depend,” and may have a chance to achieve from their work and others like them – grassroots activism, power and determination, the only way change ever comes, never from the top down, a lesson to internalize, remember, and act on.
A Final Note
On June 10, Daily Beast writer Philip Shenon headlined, “Pentagon Manhunt,” saying:
“Anxious that WikiLeaks may be on the verge of publishing a batch of secret State Department cables, investigators are desperately searching for founder Julian Assange.”
In early June, he was scheduled to speak at New York’s Personal Democracy Forum, but was advised against it for his safety. Instead, he appeared via Skype from Australia.
Interviewed about Assange, famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg believes he could be in danger, saying:
“I happen to have been the target of a White House hit squad myself. On May 3, 1972, a dozen CIA assets from the Bay of Pigs, Cuban emigres, were brought up from Miami with orders to ‘incapacitate me totally.’ ” Ellsberg asked if that meant to kill him, and was told “It means to incapacitate you totally. But you have to understand these guys never use the word ‘kill.’ ”
Is Assange now in danger? “Absolutely.
On the same basis, I was….Obama is now proclaiming rights of life and death, being judge, jury, and executioner of Americans without due process” at home or abroad, besides non-citizens anywhere as well, the rule of law be damned. “No president has ever claimed that and possibly no one since John the First.”
Ellsberg’s advice to Assange:
“Stay out of the US. Otherwise, keep doing what he is doing. It’s pretty valuable….He is serving our democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country. He is doing very good work for our democracy,” something Obama, like his predecessors, works daily to subvert.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20Editorials/2010/June/14%20o/Targeting%20Whistleblowers%20Truth%20Telling%20Julian%20Assange%20Endangered%20By%20Stephen%20Lendman.htm
The New York Times' Next Martyr
The government has subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen, asking him to reveal the secret sources he used in his book about the Bush Administration and the CIA. Meaning James Risen could be the next Judy Miller.
Not Judy Miller in the sense of being a government patsy; Judy Miller in the sense of sitting in jail in order to protect sources. According to the NYT, the government wants to know who Risen's sources were for his reporting on "the C.I.A.'s effort to disrupt Iranian nuclear research;" Risen has a lawyer and plans to fight the subpoena, and presumably would go to jail to protect his sources. (This has happened to him before). The Obama administration, disappointing the free press once again! At least James Risen knows Bill Keller will keep his commissary account full.
[NYT]
Thursday
Saturday
US 911 Hegemony 2010
By Paul Craig Roberts
Former Assistant Secretary to US Treasury
2-25-10
The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper's website for the past three days was the "Inside the Beltway" report, "Explosive News", about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.
I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously. How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust?
How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires?
"A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7", reports the newspaper.
The paper reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provided "insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction" and are "calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials".
The newspaper reports that Richard Gage, the spokesperson for the architects and engineers said: "Government officials will be notified that "Misprision of Treason,' US Code 18 (Sec. 2382) is a serious Federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial".
There is now an organization, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. At the main press conference in San Francisco, Eric Lawyer,the head of that organization, announced the firefighters' support for the architects and engineers' demands.
He reported that no forensic investigation was made of the fires that are alleged to have destroyed the three buildings and that this failure constitutes a crime.
Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed.
He also reported that there exist more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.
Also at the press conference, physicist Steven Jones presented the evidence of Nano-Thermite in the residue of the WTC buildings found by an international panel of scientists led by University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Professor Niels Harrit.
Nano-Thermite is a high-tech explosive/pyrotechnic capable of instantly melting steel girders.
Before we yell "conspiracy theory," we should be aware that the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists offer no theory. They provide evidence that challenges the official theory.
This evidence is not going to go away.
If expressing doubts or reservations about the official story in the 9/11 Commission Report makes a person a conspiracy theory kook, then we have to include in this category both co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the Commission's legal counsel, all of whom have written books in which they clearly acknowledge that they were lied to by Government officials when they conducted their investigation, or, rather, when they presided over the investigation conducted by the Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, a member of President George W. Bush's transition team and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a co-author of Bush Secretary of State Condi "Mushroom" Rice.
There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them.
Despite expensive wars that threaten Social Security and Medicare, wars based on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, non-existent Saddam Hussein connections to al Qaida, non-existent Afghan participation in the 9/11 attacks, and the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons that are being hyped as the reason for the next American war of aggression in the Middle East, more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the Government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.
Moreover, it doesn't matter to these Americans how often the Government changes its story.
For example, Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him. Over the years video after video was served up to the gullible American public of bin Laden's pronouncements. Experts dismissed these videos as fakes, but Americans remained their gullible selves. Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 "mastermind" emerged to take bin Laden's place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee who was waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attack.
In the Middle Ages confessions extracted by torture constituted evidence, but self-incrimination has been a no-no in the U.S. legal system since our founding. But with the Bush regime and the Republican federal judges, whom we were assured would defend the U.S. Constitution, the self-incrimination of Sheik Mohammed stands today as the only evidence the U.S. government has that Muslim terrorists pulled off 9/11.
If you consider the feats attributed to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, they are simply unbelievable. Sheik Mohammed is a more brilliant, capable superhero than V in the fantasy movie, "V for Vendetta". Sheik Mohammed outwitted all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies along with those of all U.S. allies or puppets, including Israel's Mossad.
No intelligence service on earth, or all of them combined, was a match for Sheik Mohammed.
Sheik Mohammed outwitted the U.S. National Security Council, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, NORAD, the U.S. Air Force, and Air Traffic Control. He caused Airport Security to fail four times in one morning. He caused the state-of-the-art air defenses of the Pentagon to fail, allowing a hijacked airliner, which was off course all morning while the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in history, was unable to get aloft intercepter aircraft, to crash into the Pentagon.
Sheik Mohammed was able to perform these feats with unqualified pilots.
Sheik Mohammed, even as a waterboarded detainee, has managed to prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from releasing the many confiscated videos that would show, according to the official story, the hijacked airliner hitting the Penagon.
How naive do you have to be to believe that any human, or for that matter Hollywood fantasy character, is this powerful and capable?
If Sheik Mohammed has these superhuman capabilities, how did the incompetent Americans catch him? This guy is a patsy tortured into confession in order to keep the American naifs believing the government's conspiracy theory.
What is going on here is that the US government has to bring the 9/11 mystery to an end. The Government must put on trial and convict a culprit so that it can close the case before it explodes. Anyone waterboarded 183 times would confess to anything.
The US government has responded to the evidence being arrayed against its outlandish 9/11 conspiracy theory by redefining the war on terror from external to internal enemies. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on February 21 that American extremists are now as big a concern as international terrorists. Extremists, of course, are people who get in the way of the government's agenda, such as the 1,000 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
The group used to be 100, now it is 1,000. What if it becomes 10,000?
Cass Sunstein, an Obama regime official, has a solution for the 9/11 skeptics: Infiltrate them and provoke them into statements and actions that can be used to discredit or to arrest them. But get rid of them at all cost.
Why employ such extreme measures against alleged kooks if they only provide entertainment and laughs? Is the government worried that they are on to something?
Instead, why doesn't the US Government simply confront the evidence that is presented and answer it?
If the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists are merely kooks, it would be a simple matter to acknowledge their evidence and refute it.
Why is it necessary to infiltrate them with police agents and to set them up?
Many Americans would reply that "their" government would never even dream of killing Americans by hijacking airliners and destroying buildings in order to advance a government agenda. But on February 3, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the US government can assassinate its own citizens when they are overseas. No arrest, trial, or conviction of a capital crime is necessary. Just straight out murder.
Obviously, if the US government can murder its citizens abroad it can murder them at home, and has done so. For example, 100 Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco, Texas, by the Clinton administration for no legitimate reason. The government just decided to use its power knowing that it could get away with it, which it did.
Americans who think "their" government is some kind of morally pure operation would do well to familiarize themselves with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plot drawn up by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and fabricate evidence blaming Castro so that the US could gain domestic and international support for regime change in Cuba. The secret plan was nixed by President John F. Kennedy and was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board.
It is available online in the National Security Archive. There are numerous online accounts available, including Wikipedia. James Bamford's book, Body of Secrets, also summarizes the plot:
"Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman [Gen. Lemnitzer] and every member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war".
Prior to 9/11 the American neoconservatives were explicit that the wars of aggression that they intended to launch in the Middle East required "a new Pearl Harbor".
For their own good and that of the wider world, Americans need to pay attention to the growing body of experts who are telling them that the government's account of 9/11 fails their investigation. 9/11 launched the neoconservative plan for US world hegemony.
As I write, the US government is purchasing the agreement of foreign governments that border Russia to accept US missile interceptor bases. The US intends to ring Russia with US missile bases from Poland through central Europe and Kosovo to Georgia, Azerbaijan and central Asia.
US envoy Richard Holbrooke declared on February 20 2010 that al Qaida is moving into former Central Asian constituent parts of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Holbrooke is soliciting US bases in these former Soviet Republics under the guise of the ever-expanding "war on terror".
The United States has already encircled Iran with military bases. The US government intends to neutralize China by seizing control over the Middle East and cutting China off from oil.
This plan assumes that Russia and China, nuclear armed states, will be intimidated by US anti-missile defenses and will acquiesce in US hegemony and that China will lack oil for its industries and military.
The US government is delusional. Russian military and political leaders have responded to the obvious threat by declaring NATO a direct threat to the security of Russia and by announcing a change in Russian war doctrine to the pre-emptive launch of nuclear weapons. The Chinese are too confident to be bullied by a washed-up American "superpower".
The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war.
The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of "their" government, are facilitating this outcome.
Former Assistant Secretary to US Treasury
2-25-10
The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper's website for the past three days was the "Inside the Beltway" report, "Explosive News", about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.
I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously. How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust?
How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires?
"A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7", reports the newspaper.
The paper reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provided "insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction" and are "calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials".
The newspaper reports that Richard Gage, the spokesperson for the architects and engineers said: "Government officials will be notified that "Misprision of Treason,' US Code 18 (Sec. 2382) is a serious Federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial".
There is now an organization, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. At the main press conference in San Francisco, Eric Lawyer,the head of that organization, announced the firefighters' support for the architects and engineers' demands.
He reported that no forensic investigation was made of the fires that are alleged to have destroyed the three buildings and that this failure constitutes a crime.
Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed.
He also reported that there exist more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.
Also at the press conference, physicist Steven Jones presented the evidence of Nano-Thermite in the residue of the WTC buildings found by an international panel of scientists led by University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Professor Niels Harrit.
Nano-Thermite is a high-tech explosive/pyrotechnic capable of instantly melting steel girders.
Before we yell "conspiracy theory," we should be aware that the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists offer no theory. They provide evidence that challenges the official theory.
This evidence is not going to go away.
If expressing doubts or reservations about the official story in the 9/11 Commission Report makes a person a conspiracy theory kook, then we have to include in this category both co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the Commission's legal counsel, all of whom have written books in which they clearly acknowledge that they were lied to by Government officials when they conducted their investigation, or, rather, when they presided over the investigation conducted by the Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, a member of President George W. Bush's transition team and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a co-author of Bush Secretary of State Condi "Mushroom" Rice.
There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them.
Despite expensive wars that threaten Social Security and Medicare, wars based on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, non-existent Saddam Hussein connections to al Qaida, non-existent Afghan participation in the 9/11 attacks, and the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons that are being hyped as the reason for the next American war of aggression in the Middle East, more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the Government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.
Moreover, it doesn't matter to these Americans how often the Government changes its story.
For example, Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him. Over the years video after video was served up to the gullible American public of bin Laden's pronouncements. Experts dismissed these videos as fakes, but Americans remained their gullible selves. Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 "mastermind" emerged to take bin Laden's place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee who was waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attack.
In the Middle Ages confessions extracted by torture constituted evidence, but self-incrimination has been a no-no in the U.S. legal system since our founding. But with the Bush regime and the Republican federal judges, whom we were assured would defend the U.S. Constitution, the self-incrimination of Sheik Mohammed stands today as the only evidence the U.S. government has that Muslim terrorists pulled off 9/11.
If you consider the feats attributed to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, they are simply unbelievable. Sheik Mohammed is a more brilliant, capable superhero than V in the fantasy movie, "V for Vendetta". Sheik Mohammed outwitted all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies along with those of all U.S. allies or puppets, including Israel's Mossad.
No intelligence service on earth, or all of them combined, was a match for Sheik Mohammed.
Sheik Mohammed outwitted the U.S. National Security Council, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, NORAD, the U.S. Air Force, and Air Traffic Control. He caused Airport Security to fail four times in one morning. He caused the state-of-the-art air defenses of the Pentagon to fail, allowing a hijacked airliner, which was off course all morning while the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in history, was unable to get aloft intercepter aircraft, to crash into the Pentagon.
Sheik Mohammed was able to perform these feats with unqualified pilots.
Sheik Mohammed, even as a waterboarded detainee, has managed to prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from releasing the many confiscated videos that would show, according to the official story, the hijacked airliner hitting the Penagon.
How naive do you have to be to believe that any human, or for that matter Hollywood fantasy character, is this powerful and capable?
If Sheik Mohammed has these superhuman capabilities, how did the incompetent Americans catch him? This guy is a patsy tortured into confession in order to keep the American naifs believing the government's conspiracy theory.
What is going on here is that the US government has to bring the 9/11 mystery to an end. The Government must put on trial and convict a culprit so that it can close the case before it explodes. Anyone waterboarded 183 times would confess to anything.
The US government has responded to the evidence being arrayed against its outlandish 9/11 conspiracy theory by redefining the war on terror from external to internal enemies. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on February 21 that American extremists are now as big a concern as international terrorists. Extremists, of course, are people who get in the way of the government's agenda, such as the 1,000 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
The group used to be 100, now it is 1,000. What if it becomes 10,000?
Cass Sunstein, an Obama regime official, has a solution for the 9/11 skeptics: Infiltrate them and provoke them into statements and actions that can be used to discredit or to arrest them. But get rid of them at all cost.
Why employ such extreme measures against alleged kooks if they only provide entertainment and laughs? Is the government worried that they are on to something?
Instead, why doesn't the US Government simply confront the evidence that is presented and answer it?
If the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists are merely kooks, it would be a simple matter to acknowledge their evidence and refute it.
Why is it necessary to infiltrate them with police agents and to set them up?
Many Americans would reply that "their" government would never even dream of killing Americans by hijacking airliners and destroying buildings in order to advance a government agenda. But on February 3, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the US government can assassinate its own citizens when they are overseas. No arrest, trial, or conviction of a capital crime is necessary. Just straight out murder.
Obviously, if the US government can murder its citizens abroad it can murder them at home, and has done so. For example, 100 Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco, Texas, by the Clinton administration for no legitimate reason. The government just decided to use its power knowing that it could get away with it, which it did.
Americans who think "their" government is some kind of morally pure operation would do well to familiarize themselves with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plot drawn up by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and fabricate evidence blaming Castro so that the US could gain domestic and international support for regime change in Cuba. The secret plan was nixed by President John F. Kennedy and was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board.
It is available online in the National Security Archive. There are numerous online accounts available, including Wikipedia. James Bamford's book, Body of Secrets, also summarizes the plot:
"Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman [Gen. Lemnitzer] and every member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war".
Prior to 9/11 the American neoconservatives were explicit that the wars of aggression that they intended to launch in the Middle East required "a new Pearl Harbor".
For their own good and that of the wider world, Americans need to pay attention to the growing body of experts who are telling them that the government's account of 9/11 fails their investigation. 9/11 launched the neoconservative plan for US world hegemony.
As I write, the US government is purchasing the agreement of foreign governments that border Russia to accept US missile interceptor bases. The US intends to ring Russia with US missile bases from Poland through central Europe and Kosovo to Georgia, Azerbaijan and central Asia.
US envoy Richard Holbrooke declared on February 20 2010 that al Qaida is moving into former Central Asian constituent parts of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Holbrooke is soliciting US bases in these former Soviet Republics under the guise of the ever-expanding "war on terror".
The United States has already encircled Iran with military bases. The US government intends to neutralize China by seizing control over the Middle East and cutting China off from oil.
This plan assumes that Russia and China, nuclear armed states, will be intimidated by US anti-missile defenses and will acquiesce in US hegemony and that China will lack oil for its industries and military.
The US government is delusional. Russian military and political leaders have responded to the obvious threat by declaring NATO a direct threat to the security of Russia and by announcing a change in Russian war doctrine to the pre-emptive launch of nuclear weapons. The Chinese are too confident to be bullied by a washed-up American "superpower".
The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war.
The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of "their" government, are facilitating this outcome.
Friday
EU Credit Crisis
Weekend Edition May 28 - 30, 2010
Business as Usual on Capital Hill
Credit Storm in Europe By MIKE WHITNEY Credit market turmoil in the Eurozone has ignited frenzied trading on global markets. On Tuesday, shares tumbled nearly 300 points on the Dow Jones before launching an unconvincing 257-point late-day comeback. Wednesday the mayhem continued; all the major indexes seesawed wildly as positive news on durable goods was nixed by reports on wobbly EU banks. Erratic selling pushed the S&P down to 1,067 while the Dow slipped below 10,000 for the first time since February 7. The rise in Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate) is increasing volatility, a red flag indicating trouble in interbank lending. Banks are wary of each other’s collateral as Greece and other underwater Club Med members appear to be headed for debt-restructuring. Libor is not yet at pre-Lehman levels, but the rate that banks charge each other for short-term loans has rocketed to a 10-month high. Improving economic data have not eased fears of another meltdown or removed the rot at the heart of the system. The banks are still loaded with loans and assets that are losing value. The credit system is breaking down.
When banks post collateral overnight for short-term loans, the collateral is effectively downgraded, limiting the banks’ access to capital. This is what triggered the financial crisis two years ago, a run on repo. Regulated "depository" institutions now rely on a funding system that operates beyond government oversight, a shadow banking system. The banks exchange collateral, in the form of bundled securities and bonds with institutional investors (aka---"shadow banks"; investment banks, hedge funds, insurers) via repurchase agreements (repo) for short-term loans. The repo market now rivals the traditional banking system in terms of size but lacks the guard rails and stop signs that make the regulated system safe. The system is inherently unstable and crisis-prone as a recently released paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) admits. Moody's rating agency summarized the paper's findings like this: the tri-party repo market “will remain a major source of systemic risk, especially given the current market volatility and the fact that the Federal Reserve’s primary dealer emergency lending facilities are no longer in place...... the market remains structurally vulnerable to a repo run...... If cash investors pulled away in a stressed environment, the clearing banks would be faced with a choice (as they were several times in 2008) of taking on large secured credit exposure to dealers or severely constraining intra-day credit to them. Such market mechanics can exacerbate the effect of a systemic and/or a dealer-specific crisis.....Until the remaining issues in the tri-party repo market are resolved, the risk of a repo run remains in place. (Moody's, thanks to zero hedge)
It's too bad Congress doesn't take time to read Moody's analysis before gutting the derivatives and capital requirements provisions in the new reform bill. It might help them understand that by placating Wall Street they're laying the groundwork for another financial disaster.
When Lehman failed, Fed chair Ben Bernanke stepped in as lender of last resort to keep the banking system functioning. He deftly shifted from lending facilities to quantitative easing (QE)--a ploy that allowed the Fed to relieve the Wall Street behemoths of their toxic assets and non performing loans. The Fed's efforts revived the economy but transferred gigantic losses onto its own balance sheet. The EU lacks the political infrastructure to enact a similar fiscal strategy. When banks collapse in Spain or Greece, the losses must be written down, adding to deflationary pressures. That has world leaders worried that their economies will be pulled back into recession. Here's a recent post from David Rosenberg which sums up the present situation:
"The downdraft in the market in recent weeks reflects the financial risk related to the European debt crisis, the monetary tightening in China and the re-regulation of the financial sector that is currently making its way through to Congress. The next leg down in the equity market specifically and cyclical assets more generally is economic risk. Equities went into this period of turbulence priced for peak earnings in 2011 and with a tailwind of positive earnings revision and positive guidance ratios from the corporate sector. If the ECRI and the Conference Board’s own index of leading economic indicators, which dipped 0.1 per cent in April, are prescient, then they are portending a period of sub-par economic growth ahead." (Breakfast with Dave, David Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff.)
The media characterize troubles in the EU as a "sovereign debt crisis", reflecting "deficit cutting" the political agenda of its authors. In fact, this is a straightforward banking crisis, undercapitalized banks whose downgraded assets are leading them towards default. The banks alone are responsible. In the US the problem has been resolved by the historic bank/state merger. "Too big to fail" implies that the primary function of the state is to preserve its core financial institutions. For many reasons, this remedy won't work in Europe. The individual countries will have to bailout banks at their own expense or resolve them through the bankruptcy courts.
Austerity measures in the Eurozone will derail Obama's efforts to increase exports to compensate for the slowdown in consumer spending. The administration's economic strategy, to large extent, depends on a weak dollar, a strong EU and a prosperous China. That plan vaporized earlier this week when Spanish regulators took over CajaSur one of the country's biggest mortgage lenders. Spain's property crash is intensifying the contraction and pushing banks to the brink. As credit tightens and economic activity slows, the prospects of a strong rebound become more remote. The downturn could last for years.
Deteriorating conditions in Europe have set off alarms at the Fed. For Fed chair Ben Bernanke, the trouble in the EU money markets and commercial paper markets must seem like a recurrent nightmare, Lehman all over again. Bernanke wants to stop the repricing of bank assets that would trigger firesales and another round of deflation. So, he's reopening "swap lines" to help EU banks roll over their short-term loans. His proposal would slash rates to near-zero and make the Fed liable in the exchange of questionable loans and assets, putting both the taxpayer and the dollar at risk. Here's a clip from the Wall Street Journal:
"The Federal Reserve has a lever it can pull to help European officials combat a worsening financial crisis: Reducing the interest rate it charges on U.S. dollar loans it makes through the European Central Bank to dollar-starved commercial banks in Europe....
“The loans currently are priced one percentage point above a market rate called Overnight Indexed Swaps (OIS), which tracks the expected path of the Fed's benchmark federal funds rate. The loans are set above OIS to discourage foreign banks from using the government program too aggressively. But the Fed could reduce that penalty to encourage more borrowing and ease some of the financial strain on foreign banks in need of dollars....Many European banks, and their U.S. branches, need dollar funds because they hold U.S. dollar assets. But lenders have become more wary of extending them the cash. That's made dollar loans more costly for European borrowers and the funding they do get is has been for shorter maturities." ("Fed's Next Move Could Be Reduced Rate on Dollar-Euro Swaps", Jon Hilsenrath, Wall Street Journal)
The Fed is operating far beyond its mandate to maintain price stability and full employment. It's applying its own arbitrary pricing mechanism and usurping the authority of the EU central bank. Here's how Clifford Rossi explains the Fed's action in a recent post on Institutional Risk Analysis:
"The mechanism for the bailout of Europe is the Fed's provision of dollar credit in virtually unlimited amounts via central bank swaps lines.....the Fed swap lines help the bankrupt nations of the EU ignore their mounting fiscal problems......Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is engaged in a little geopolitical engineering in Europe -- and the people of the EU do not yet realize that a political change in control has occurred.... the leaders of Europe now find themselves beholden to the Fed for their continued political existence.... Chairman Bernanke and the FOMC have but to terminate the Fed's swap lines with the various central banks of Europe or start selling the MBS portfolio in the US, and governments from Washington to Berlin will start to fall." ("More fed swap Lines for Europe and the End of Globalization", Clifford Rossi, Institutional Risk Analysis)
The swap lines are designed to keep asset prices artificially high, so the contagion doesn't spread to the US where accounting gimmickry helps to hide bank losses. Bernanke is perpetuating the repo scam, by assisting banks and other financial institutions to amplify crumbs of capital into huge bubbles which can take down the whole economy. The Wall Street Journal exposed a similar repo scam this week in an above-the-fold article on Wednesday. Here's an excerpt:
"Three big banks--Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and Citigroup Inc.—are among the most active at temporarily shedding debt just before reporting their finances to the public, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. The practice, known as end-of-quarter "window dressing" on Wall Street, suggests that the banks are carrying more risk most of the time than their investors or customers can easily see....
“Over the past 10 quarters, the three banks have lowered their net borrowings in the "repurchase," or repo, market by an average of 41 per cent at the ends of the quarters, compared with their average net repo borrowings for the entire quarter, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data. Once a new quarter begins, they boost those levels...
“The data suggest ‘conscious balance-sheet management,’ said Robert Willens, an accounting specialist who heads Robert Willens LLC. If there are big gaps between average quarterly and quarter-end data, he said, the quarter-end numbers "are at best meaningless and at worst misleading and disingenuous." ("Banks trim Debt, Obscuring Risks", Michael Rapoport and Tom Mcginty, Wall Street Journal)
So the banks are intentionally masking their leverage to conceal their true condition to investors. And it’s all done with derivatives and repo; the lethal combo that led to the crisis of '08. Unfortunately, Wall Street's lobbying campaign has been so successful that, even now, real change is unlikely. In fact, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank openly opposes Blanche Lincoln's comprehensive derivatives legislation saying that it "goes too far". Frank has signaled that the bill would be killed or rewritten in committee. Derivatives trading is a main profit-center for the nation's largest banks and they have spent millions to preserve the status quo.
"I don't see the need for a separate rule regarding derivatives because the restriction on banks engaging in proprietary activities would apply to derivatives as well as everything else," Frank said on Monday.
Even without Frank's support, the bill would have faced fierce resistance from a contingent of Wall Street Democrats who were planning to strip the critical provisions from the legislation.
Rep Michael McMahon (NY-D) defended the banks saying, “The House bill is based on principles on how to reduce risk and make the system more transparent, it’s not based on wiping out the system or destroying the system and that’s what the provision does."
The credit storm in the EU has had no effect on Congress. Wall Street has won this round. The window for real reform has closed, and now it's "business as usual" until the next catastrophe.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state and can be reached atfergiewhitney@msn.com
Continuity of Government
FRIDAY, APRIL 11, 2008
Evidence is Growing: Continuity of Government Plan is Currently in Effect
In two previous posts (here and here), I showed that Continuity of Government (COG) plans were implemented on September 11th, and I argued that it is possible that they have never been suspended.
Now, one of the top investigative journalists in the country, Larisa Alexandrovna (the lead journalist at Raw Story), says:
"it seems to me that this administration has justified its crimes by NOT suspending the state of emergency that went up on September 11, 2001. They are using emergency powers if you look at the whole of the spying, military actions inside the US, etc. I would wager that if asked, this administration will admit that we have been in a state of emergency for their tenure in office."
Remember that Continuity of Government plans -- that is, the measures that go into effect in case of emergency -- suspend the Constitutional form of government, cut elected officials out of the loop, and may even allow the government to tell the media what it can and cannot report.
Remember also that the entire Homeland Security Committee of the U.S. Congress has been denied access to the government's Continuity of Government Plans even though it has clearance to view such plans (video; or here is the transcript). Indeed, a member of that Committee has said "Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right”.
If we are in a state of emergency and COG plans are in effect, then Congress acting even more obviously like corporate and military lapdogs than normal and totally ignoring the will of the people would make sense. It would make sense that "impeachment is off the table", because Congress would not even be sitting at the table under a non-constitutional COG form of government; and Congress certainly would not be a co-equal branch of government with the Executive branch.
If we are in a state of emergency and COG plans are in effect, then the corporate media's acting even more obviously like the disinformation arm of the government than usual would make sense.
Given the stakes, it is vital that we demand that Congress and the White House state on the record whether or not Continuity of Government plans are currently in effect. We're not going to make any progress on whatever issue is most important to us -- peace, liberty, election integrity/vote fraud, 9/11 truth, etc. -- if we are living under a COG regime and we don't even know it.
And our strategy will be different depending on whether we are living under a COG regime or a Constitutional form of government.
We have to find out one way or another.
For a full discussion on COG, see this.
http://www.constitutionally.blogspot.com/
Evidence is Growing: Continuity of Government Plan is Currently in Effect
In two previous posts (here and here), I showed that Continuity of Government (COG) plans were implemented on September 11th, and I argued that it is possible that they have never been suspended.
Now, one of the top investigative journalists in the country, Larisa Alexandrovna (the lead journalist at Raw Story), says:
"it seems to me that this administration has justified its crimes by NOT suspending the state of emergency that went up on September 11, 2001. They are using emergency powers if you look at the whole of the spying, military actions inside the US, etc. I would wager that if asked, this administration will admit that we have been in a state of emergency for their tenure in office."
Remember that Continuity of Government plans -- that is, the measures that go into effect in case of emergency -- suspend the Constitutional form of government, cut elected officials out of the loop, and may even allow the government to tell the media what it can and cannot report.
Remember also that the entire Homeland Security Committee of the U.S. Congress has been denied access to the government's Continuity of Government Plans even though it has clearance to view such plans (video; or here is the transcript). Indeed, a member of that Committee has said "Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right”.
If we are in a state of emergency and COG plans are in effect, then Congress acting even more obviously like corporate and military lapdogs than normal and totally ignoring the will of the people would make sense. It would make sense that "impeachment is off the table", because Congress would not even be sitting at the table under a non-constitutional COG form of government; and Congress certainly would not be a co-equal branch of government with the Executive branch.
If we are in a state of emergency and COG plans are in effect, then the corporate media's acting even more obviously like the disinformation arm of the government than usual would make sense.
Given the stakes, it is vital that we demand that Congress and the White House state on the record whether or not Continuity of Government plans are currently in effect. We're not going to make any progress on whatever issue is most important to us -- peace, liberty, election integrity/vote fraud, 9/11 truth, etc. -- if we are living under a COG regime and we don't even know it.
And our strategy will be different depending on whether we are living under a COG regime or a Constitutional form of government.
We have to find out one way or another.
For a full discussion on COG, see this.
http://www.constitutionally.blogspot.com/
Doom Loop
Shooting Banks
Obama’s impotent assault on Wall Street.
Peter Boone and Simon JohnsonFebruary 24, 2010
On January 21, in an abrupt change of policy, President Obama announced his intention to take on the big bankers who have brought us so much trouble. “If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have,” he said with a clenched jaw at a press conference.
The president’s conviction seemed genuine in no small part because at his back, figuratively and literally, the president had Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman and economic éminence grise. Arguably the most respected man in all of finance--and a lion held at bay (or in a far away office) over the past year by the president’s closest advisers--Volcker has devised two simple rules to defang our financial system. First, no bank would be allowed to engage in “proprietary trading,” in which it takes risks using its own capital in ways that are completely separate from services provided to clients. Second, there would be a cap on the size of our largest banks, relative to the size of total liabilities in the banking system. “Too big to fail” would finally become “too big to exist.”
After a long struggle, it would seem the president has become convinced that our financial sector has grown dangerous and needs to be reined in. It has long been clear that the framework in which bank executives are rewarded for taking huge risks during boom times, and taxpayers are punished for such excesses during bad times, is not sustainable. And now, the hubris of top bankers--spurning audiences with the president and paying themselves huge bonuses, despite White House protests--has finally caught up with them. Even Wall Street cannot moon the giant and get away with it. The course of financial-sector reform is corrected.
Yet, for all of Volcker’s good analysis, his presence does not necessarily change anything. To determine if the Obama administration is serious about solving the underlying crisis in finance, we need to get past Volcker’s totemic visage and examine the substance of his rules. Burrowing a bit deeper, unfortunately, we find out how little would actually change.
The president is absolutely correct that our priority should be to limit the size of our largest banks and to reduce substantially the risks that can be taken by any financial entity that is backed, implicitly or explicitly, by the federal government. As a result of the crisis and various government rescue efforts, the largest six banks in our economy now have total assets in excess of 63 percent of GDP (based on the latest available data). This is a significant increase from even 2006, when the same banks’ assets were around 55 percent of GDP, and a complete transformation compared with the situation in the United States just 15 years ago, when the six largest banks had combined assets of only around 17 percent of GDP. If the status quo persists, we are set up for another round of the boom-bailout-bust cycle that the head of financial stability at the Bank of England now terms a “doom loop.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/2009/09/15/break-up-the-big-banks/
Unfortunately, the specifics of the so-called Volcker Rules wouldn’t address this problem. For one thing, proprietary trading is but a small part of what these banks do. For most of the major banks, such activity accounts for less than 5 percent of total revenue--even at Goldman Sachs, which is, in some senses, the largest hedge fund in the world (backed by the U.S. government through its access to the Fed’s discount window), proprietary trading accounts for only around 10 percent of total revenue on average. Even if we could strip this activity from the banks, it would reduce their size only slightly--and the too-big-to-fail banks would find ways to take similar-sized risks because their upside during a boom would still be big, and their downside in a bust would dramatically damage the economy, thereby forcing the government into some sort of rescue.
Implementing the proposed nominal size cap would not make any difference either. The Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 specified a size cap for banks: No single bank may hold more than 10 percent of total retail deposits. This cap was not related to antitrust concerns, as 10 percent of a national market is too low to imply pricing power. Rather, this was a sensible macro-prudential preventive measure--don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Unfortunately, since 1994, two limitations of Riegle-Neal have become clear: (1) The growth of big banks was not fueled by retail deposits, but rather by various forms of “wholesale” financing (in which financial institutions lend to other financial institutions); (2) The cap was not enforced by lax regulators, so Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo all received waivers in recent years.
Responding to this failure by limiting the size of individual banks relative to total nominal liabilities of the financial system does not make sense, as this would not be “bubble proof.” For example, if housing prices were to increase tenfold, the nominal assets and liabilities of the financial system would presumably also increase markedly relative to the size of the real economy--as was the case in Japan during the 1980s. When the bubble bursts, it is the size of individual banks relative to GDP that is the more robust indicator of the damage caused when that bank fails--hence the degree to which it will be regarded as too big to fail.
Even in the most generous interpretation, the administration is proposing only to freeze the size of our largest banks, not to reduce their scale. The evening after the announcement of the Volcker Rules, when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner appeared on “NewsHour” and was asked whether the new rules implied that the largest banks would be “broken up” as they divested their proprietary trading operations and complied with the size cap, his response was clear: “No, this does not propose that.” And a senior administration official explained, “The liability cap will be structured in such a way that it constrains future growth that leads to excessive concentration in our financial system. It’s not designed to reduce the share of any existing firm.”
Why would anyone regard 20 years of reckless expansion, a massive global crisis, and the most generous bailout in recorded history as the recipe for creating “right-sized” banks? There is absolutely no evidence, for example, that the increase in bank scale since the mid-’90s has brought social benefits. (There are no economies of scale for banks above $100 billion in total assets, but our biggest banks are now in the $800 billion$2 trillion range--and those figures do not properly account for their holdings of and potential losses on derivatives.) By contrast, the huge social costs are readily apparent--in terms of direct financial rescues, the fiscal stimulus needed to prevent another Great Depression, and the appalling number of lost jobs (eight million gone since December 2007, and still counting). Volcker Rules or no, the president apparently still doesn’t get this.
Unfortunately, even if he did, it might not make much difference. The banks understand that if they are large enough and all get into trouble in a roughly similar manner at about the same time, there will be incredibly generous bailouts. When forced to choose between global economic collapse and expensive financial system rescue, they reckon that no government will really let them fail. And they have every basis for this belief--the people who run our mega-banks have, with very few exceptions, kept their jobs, their bonuses, their pensions, and most of their social prestige.
The banks have the power to preserve this arrangement. While the U.S. financial system has a long tradition of functioning well with a relatively large number of banks and other intermediaries, in recent years, it has been transformed into a highly concentrated system for key products. The big four have half of the market for mortgages and two-thirds of the market for credit cards. Five banks have over 95 percent of the market for over-the-counter derivatives. Three U.S. banks have over 40 percent of the global market for stock underwriting. This degree of market power brings with it not just antitrust concerns, which this administration has declined to act on, and a huge amount of economic risk--but great political influence as well.
The banks are going to use that power to block legislation containing any meaningful financial reform. And they are likely to succeed. Their current political donations surpass those given by most other interest groups, and the limit on their future donations has just been lifted by the Supreme Court. These banks and their allies are already targeting at least one member of Congress who supported the 2009 credit card bill. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and long-standing champion of the financial sector, recently railed against the big banks for not cooperating with financial reform; but he is freer to speak out now that he is no longer seeking reelection. Senator Richard Shelby, the committee’s ranking minority member, is steadfastly opposed to reform; he and other top Republicans eagerly await the arrival of largesse from big banks. Hill staffers remark that the financial Godfathers’ message is quite clear: If you cross us, we will bury you at the polls. Nothing in the Volcker Rules would change this relationship between Wall Street and Washington.
It is still possible that the White House could go all-in against the distorted incentives at large banks and the corrupted regulatory structures that have created our “doom loop,” and make this the central campaign issue for November. Branding opponents as supporters of too big to fail could get traction, at least if led by an articulate and impassioned president. The gamble would be that pro-reform representatives and senators could swim against the tide of big bank campaign contributions.
But, even here, there is a problem. After the Volcker Rules announcement on January 21, the White House went all out for the reconfirmation of Ben Bernanke. Bernanke did well during the “rescue” phase of the economic crisis--hence the case for reappointing him. But he was also deeply involved in the disastrous regulatory failures and excessively loose credit policies of 2003-2008, at the Fed and in the White House. And, most disconcerting, in his testimony--and even more in his written answers to follow-up questions--he played down the problem of too big to fail, arguing that regulation could prevent the big banks from getting into trouble.
Unfortunately, solutions that depend on smarter, better regulatory supervision and corrective action ignore the political constraints on regulation and the political power of today’s large banks. The idea that we can simply regulate huge banks more effectively assumes that regulators will have the incentive to do so, despite everything we know about regulatory capture and political constraints on regulation. It assumes that regulators will be able to identify the excess risks that banks are taking, overcome the banks’ arguments that they have appropriate safety mechanisms in place, resist political pressure (from the administration and Congress) to leave the banks alone for the sake of the economy, and impose controversial corrective measures that will be too complicated to defend in public. And, of course, it assumes that important regulatory agencies will not fall into the hands of people like Alan Greenspan (or Ben Bernanke), who believe that government regulation is rendered largely unnecessary by the free market.
Gently backing away from Bernanke--or at least not being so enthusiastic--would have sent a clearer signal that the president is truly prepared to be tough on big banks and their supporters. Unless Bernanke unexpectedly changes his stripes, his reappointment gives up a major hostage to fortune--and to those Democrats and Republicans opposing serious financial reform. Here lies the crux of the problem: The Obama administration lacks an inner core of smart, well-informed advisers who are deeply skeptical of big banks and eager to do whatever it takes to break a cycle that points to financial and fiscal doom. While Paul Volcker’s belated ascension from the basement is an encouraging sign, he remains a lone voice in an otherwise inertial regime.
Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.” But, as the White House begins to campaign for the November midterms, what has it done differently than any other administration would have? How will it counter anyone who argues, simply and truthfully, that the crisis is over and we wasted it? The Volcker Rules are not the answer.
Peter Boone is a research associate at the London School of Economics Center for Economic Performance, a principal in Salute Capital Management Ltd., and chair of Effective Intervention. Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT Sloan, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and co-author, with James Kwak, of the forthcoming book, 13 BANKERS.
Obama’s impotent assault on Wall Street.
Peter Boone and Simon JohnsonFebruary 24, 2010
On January 21, in an abrupt change of policy, President Obama announced his intention to take on the big bankers who have brought us so much trouble. “If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have,” he said with a clenched jaw at a press conference.
The president’s conviction seemed genuine in no small part because at his back, figuratively and literally, the president had Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman and economic éminence grise. Arguably the most respected man in all of finance--and a lion held at bay (or in a far away office) over the past year by the president’s closest advisers--Volcker has devised two simple rules to defang our financial system. First, no bank would be allowed to engage in “proprietary trading,” in which it takes risks using its own capital in ways that are completely separate from services provided to clients. Second, there would be a cap on the size of our largest banks, relative to the size of total liabilities in the banking system. “Too big to fail” would finally become “too big to exist.”
After a long struggle, it would seem the president has become convinced that our financial sector has grown dangerous and needs to be reined in. It has long been clear that the framework in which bank executives are rewarded for taking huge risks during boom times, and taxpayers are punished for such excesses during bad times, is not sustainable. And now, the hubris of top bankers--spurning audiences with the president and paying themselves huge bonuses, despite White House protests--has finally caught up with them. Even Wall Street cannot moon the giant and get away with it. The course of financial-sector reform is corrected.
Yet, for all of Volcker’s good analysis, his presence does not necessarily change anything. To determine if the Obama administration is serious about solving the underlying crisis in finance, we need to get past Volcker’s totemic visage and examine the substance of his rules. Burrowing a bit deeper, unfortunately, we find out how little would actually change.
The president is absolutely correct that our priority should be to limit the size of our largest banks and to reduce substantially the risks that can be taken by any financial entity that is backed, implicitly or explicitly, by the federal government. As a result of the crisis and various government rescue efforts, the largest six banks in our economy now have total assets in excess of 63 percent of GDP (based on the latest available data). This is a significant increase from even 2006, when the same banks’ assets were around 55 percent of GDP, and a complete transformation compared with the situation in the United States just 15 years ago, when the six largest banks had combined assets of only around 17 percent of GDP. If the status quo persists, we are set up for another round of the boom-bailout-bust cycle that the head of financial stability at the Bank of England now terms a “doom loop.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/2009/09/15/break-up-the-big-banks/
Unfortunately, the specifics of the so-called Volcker Rules wouldn’t address this problem. For one thing, proprietary trading is but a small part of what these banks do. For most of the major banks, such activity accounts for less than 5 percent of total revenue--even at Goldman Sachs, which is, in some senses, the largest hedge fund in the world (backed by the U.S. government through its access to the Fed’s discount window), proprietary trading accounts for only around 10 percent of total revenue on average. Even if we could strip this activity from the banks, it would reduce their size only slightly--and the too-big-to-fail banks would find ways to take similar-sized risks because their upside during a boom would still be big, and their downside in a bust would dramatically damage the economy, thereby forcing the government into some sort of rescue.
Implementing the proposed nominal size cap would not make any difference either. The Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 specified a size cap for banks: No single bank may hold more than 10 percent of total retail deposits. This cap was not related to antitrust concerns, as 10 percent of a national market is too low to imply pricing power. Rather, this was a sensible macro-prudential preventive measure--don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Unfortunately, since 1994, two limitations of Riegle-Neal have become clear: (1) The growth of big banks was not fueled by retail deposits, but rather by various forms of “wholesale” financing (in which financial institutions lend to other financial institutions); (2) The cap was not enforced by lax regulators, so Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo all received waivers in recent years.
Responding to this failure by limiting the size of individual banks relative to total nominal liabilities of the financial system does not make sense, as this would not be “bubble proof.” For example, if housing prices were to increase tenfold, the nominal assets and liabilities of the financial system would presumably also increase markedly relative to the size of the real economy--as was the case in Japan during the 1980s. When the bubble bursts, it is the size of individual banks relative to GDP that is the more robust indicator of the damage caused when that bank fails--hence the degree to which it will be regarded as too big to fail.
Even in the most generous interpretation, the administration is proposing only to freeze the size of our largest banks, not to reduce their scale. The evening after the announcement of the Volcker Rules, when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner appeared on “NewsHour” and was asked whether the new rules implied that the largest banks would be “broken up” as they divested their proprietary trading operations and complied with the size cap, his response was clear: “No, this does not propose that.” And a senior administration official explained, “The liability cap will be structured in such a way that it constrains future growth that leads to excessive concentration in our financial system. It’s not designed to reduce the share of any existing firm.”
Why would anyone regard 20 years of reckless expansion, a massive global crisis, and the most generous bailout in recorded history as the recipe for creating “right-sized” banks? There is absolutely no evidence, for example, that the increase in bank scale since the mid-’90s has brought social benefits. (There are no economies of scale for banks above $100 billion in total assets, but our biggest banks are now in the $800 billion$2 trillion range--and those figures do not properly account for their holdings of and potential losses on derivatives.) By contrast, the huge social costs are readily apparent--in terms of direct financial rescues, the fiscal stimulus needed to prevent another Great Depression, and the appalling number of lost jobs (eight million gone since December 2007, and still counting). Volcker Rules or no, the president apparently still doesn’t get this.
Unfortunately, even if he did, it might not make much difference. The banks understand that if they are large enough and all get into trouble in a roughly similar manner at about the same time, there will be incredibly generous bailouts. When forced to choose between global economic collapse and expensive financial system rescue, they reckon that no government will really let them fail. And they have every basis for this belief--the people who run our mega-banks have, with very few exceptions, kept their jobs, their bonuses, their pensions, and most of their social prestige.
The banks have the power to preserve this arrangement. While the U.S. financial system has a long tradition of functioning well with a relatively large number of banks and other intermediaries, in recent years, it has been transformed into a highly concentrated system for key products. The big four have half of the market for mortgages and two-thirds of the market for credit cards. Five banks have over 95 percent of the market for over-the-counter derivatives. Three U.S. banks have over 40 percent of the global market for stock underwriting. This degree of market power brings with it not just antitrust concerns, which this administration has declined to act on, and a huge amount of economic risk--but great political influence as well.
The banks are going to use that power to block legislation containing any meaningful financial reform. And they are likely to succeed. Their current political donations surpass those given by most other interest groups, and the limit on their future donations has just been lifted by the Supreme Court. These banks and their allies are already targeting at least one member of Congress who supported the 2009 credit card bill. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and long-standing champion of the financial sector, recently railed against the big banks for not cooperating with financial reform; but he is freer to speak out now that he is no longer seeking reelection. Senator Richard Shelby, the committee’s ranking minority member, is steadfastly opposed to reform; he and other top Republicans eagerly await the arrival of largesse from big banks. Hill staffers remark that the financial Godfathers’ message is quite clear: If you cross us, we will bury you at the polls. Nothing in the Volcker Rules would change this relationship between Wall Street and Washington.
It is still possible that the White House could go all-in against the distorted incentives at large banks and the corrupted regulatory structures that have created our “doom loop,” and make this the central campaign issue for November. Branding opponents as supporters of too big to fail could get traction, at least if led by an articulate and impassioned president. The gamble would be that pro-reform representatives and senators could swim against the tide of big bank campaign contributions.
But, even here, there is a problem. After the Volcker Rules announcement on January 21, the White House went all out for the reconfirmation of Ben Bernanke. Bernanke did well during the “rescue” phase of the economic crisis--hence the case for reappointing him. But he was also deeply involved in the disastrous regulatory failures and excessively loose credit policies of 2003-2008, at the Fed and in the White House. And, most disconcerting, in his testimony--and even more in his written answers to follow-up questions--he played down the problem of too big to fail, arguing that regulation could prevent the big banks from getting into trouble.
Unfortunately, solutions that depend on smarter, better regulatory supervision and corrective action ignore the political constraints on regulation and the political power of today’s large banks. The idea that we can simply regulate huge banks more effectively assumes that regulators will have the incentive to do so, despite everything we know about regulatory capture and political constraints on regulation. It assumes that regulators will be able to identify the excess risks that banks are taking, overcome the banks’ arguments that they have appropriate safety mechanisms in place, resist political pressure (from the administration and Congress) to leave the banks alone for the sake of the economy, and impose controversial corrective measures that will be too complicated to defend in public. And, of course, it assumes that important regulatory agencies will not fall into the hands of people like Alan Greenspan (or Ben Bernanke), who believe that government regulation is rendered largely unnecessary by the free market.
Gently backing away from Bernanke--or at least not being so enthusiastic--would have sent a clearer signal that the president is truly prepared to be tough on big banks and their supporters. Unless Bernanke unexpectedly changes his stripes, his reappointment gives up a major hostage to fortune--and to those Democrats and Republicans opposing serious financial reform. Here lies the crux of the problem: The Obama administration lacks an inner core of smart, well-informed advisers who are deeply skeptical of big banks and eager to do whatever it takes to break a cycle that points to financial and fiscal doom. While Paul Volcker’s belated ascension from the basement is an encouraging sign, he remains a lone voice in an otherwise inertial regime.
Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.” But, as the White House begins to campaign for the November midterms, what has it done differently than any other administration would have? How will it counter anyone who argues, simply and truthfully, that the crisis is over and we wasted it? The Volcker Rules are not the answer.
Peter Boone is a research associate at the London School of Economics Center for Economic Performance, a principal in Salute Capital Management Ltd., and chair of Effective Intervention. Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT Sloan, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and co-author, with James Kwak, of the forthcoming book, 13 BANKERS.
Thursday
Hezbollah warns Israel over gas fields
[Home]
Published & posted Sun, 13 Jun 2010
With Israel set to lay claim to natural gas fields recently discovered in the Mediterranean, the resistance movement of Hezbollah moves to warn Tel Aviv against extracting from Lebanon's resources.
Hezbollah's Executive Council Chief Hashem Safieddine said on Saturday that the movement would not allow Israel to loot Lebanese gas resources.
The remarks come as earlier this week, Lebanese parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri called for speedy action by the government to begin exploring its options in the newly discovered field off the northern port of Haifa.
"Israel is racing to make the case a fait accompli and was quick to present itself as an oil emirate, ignoring the fact that, according to the maps, the deposit extends into Lebanese waters," Berri said.
"Lebanon must take immediate action to defend its financial, political, economic and sovereign rights," he was quoted as saying by AFP.
Published & posted Sun, 13 Jun 2010
With Israel set to lay claim to natural gas fields recently discovered in the Mediterranean, the resistance movement of Hezbollah moves to warn Tel Aviv against extracting from Lebanon's resources.Hezbollah's Executive Council Chief Hashem Safieddine said on Saturday that the movement would not allow Israel to loot Lebanese gas resources.
The remarks come as earlier this week, Lebanese parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri called for speedy action by the government to begin exploring its options in the newly discovered field off the northern port of Haifa.
"Israel is racing to make the case a fait accompli and was quick to present itself as an oil emirate, ignoring the fact that, according to the maps, the deposit extends into Lebanese waters," Berri said.
"Lebanon must take immediate action to defend its financial, political, economic and sovereign rights," he was quoted as saying by AFP.
Iran - war games Jan 12
Iran to hold war games in int'l waters:
English.news.cn 2011-12-22 21:58:17
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2011-12/22/c_131322300.htm
TEHRAN, Dec. 22 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari on Thursday announced the upcoming launch of ten - day massive naval exercises in the international waters, the local satellite Press TV reported. Sayyari said at a press conference on Thursday that the naval maneuvers dubbed Velayat 90 will start on Saturday and will cover an area of 2,000 (1,250-mile) km stretching from the east of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Aden, the report said.
This is the first time that Iran's Navy carries out naval drills in such a vast area, he was quoted as saying. He said that the exercises will manifest Iran's military prowess and defense capabilities in the international waters, convey a message of peace and friendship to regional countries and test the newest military equipment among other objectives, said the report. He added that the newest missile systems and torpedoes will be employed in the maneuvers, adding that the most recent tactics used in subsurface battles will also be demonstrated.
Iranian destroyers, missile-launching vessels, logistic vessels, drones and coastal missiles will also be tested, said the Iranian commander, according to the report. Closing Strait of Hurmoz is under full control of Iran, he said but
did not mention about the exercise to close it, according to the state IRIB TV website.
Earlier this month, Parviz Sorouri, a member of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, said that Iran plans to practice its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important passages for exports of crude and oil products from littoral states of Persian Gulf. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said later that closing the Strait of Hormuz is not on Iran's agenda.
As Iran has announced it several times, the issue of closing the Strait of Hormuz is not on Iran's agenda since Iran believes in upholding the stability and peace of the region," said Mehmanparast.
Related:
Iran invites IAEA inspectors to visit its nuclear establishments TEHRAN, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- Iran's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Ali-Asghar Soltanieh said that the Islamic Republic has invited IAEA inspectors to visit the country's nuclear establishments, the local satellite Press TV reported on Wednesday.
Following a formal Iranian invitation extended to the IAEA inspectors to visit the country, Tehran is prepared to address concerns on its nuclear program, Soltanieh told Press TV in an interview on Wednesday.
http://groups.google.com/group/uk-911-truth
http://www.youtube.com/user/PublicEnquiry
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Diggers350/
http://www.reinvestigate911.org/
http://www.thisweek.org.uk/
http://www.911forum.org.uk
Settlers break into al-Aqsa Mosque
Thursday February 18, 2010 06:07
by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies
The al-Aqsa Foundation for Waqf and Heritage reported that the Israeli authorities started new excavations under the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.
The foundation stated that most of the digging is now concentrated in Bad Al Amoud (Damascus Gate) and Bab Al Sahera (also known as Herod's Gate), in the Old City of Jerusalem. It added that the digging is part of Israel’s plan of a network of tunnels under the Old City and the al-Aqsa Mosque. It warned that the digging is part of Israel’s plans to wipe out the Arab and Islamic history in Jerusalem, and the efforts to “construct their claimed temple under the al-Aqsa Mosque”.
In related news, a group of fundamentalist settlers broke into the al-Aqsa Mosque on Wednesday using the Moghrabi Gate. The settlers were accompanied by Israeli soldiers and policemen, the foundation said.
The settlers provoked Muslim worshipers and prevented them and the guards of the mosque from entering certain areas, and threatened to harm them.
Also on Wednesday, the family of Qadri Shahin, in the Old City, complained to the Israeli police in Jerusalem, that one of the machines used in the excavations caused a hole in a wall in their home, adjacent to the al-Aqsa Mosque.
Um Mohammad Shahin, said that her children found the hole in their room after seeing a digging tool being pulled out of their wall.
Qadri Shahin said that the family fears that the digging will cause the collapse of their home as it also caused a crack in its wall, undermining the foundations of the building.
Leviathan Gas Deposit
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/a-geopolitical-game-changer-1.295522
Geopolitical game changer
A door has been closed. But amid the roar, the creak of an opening window was faintly audible. This window, a gigantic deposit of natural gas called Leviathan, 6.5 times the size of Tel Aviv, was found, roughly 100 nautical miles from where the flotilla fiasco took place and well within Israel's extended territorial waters.
By Gal Luft
An old adage says that when God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window. To most people, last week's events off the coast of Gaza marked a sharp decline in Israel's strategic posture. The Mavi Marmara incident sparked international condemnation and delivered what may have been a death blow to Jerusalem's already precarious relations with Turkey. For decades that country was Israel's closest ally in the Muslim world, but since the election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it is increasingly in the thrall of fundamentalist Islam.
A door has been closed. But amid the roar, the creak of an opening window was faintly audible. This window, a gigantic deposit of natural gas called Leviathan, 6.5 times the size of Tel Aviv, was found, roughly 100 nautical miles from where the flotilla fiasco took place and well within Israel's extended territorial waters. This discovery may provide Israel with security in terms of its supply of electricity, turn it into an important natural gas exporter and provide a shot in the arm of some $300 billion over the life of the field - one-and-a-half times the national GDP - to the Israeli economy, already one of the most resilient in the world.
More importantly, this discovery is nothing short of a geopolitical game changer. To understand its magnitude, consider this: The world's biggest gas discovery in 2009, 238 billion cubic meters, was made by a U.S.-Israel consortium at a site called Tamar, 60 miles off the coast of Haifa. The nearby Leviathan field is estimated to be twice that size. Altogether the basin in the eastern Mediterranean to which those fields belong could contain an amount of gas equivalent to one-fifth of U.S. natural gas reserves. For a small country like Israel, such a bonanza could not have come at a better time.
Until recently, Israel was facing an energy predicament. Its fast-growing population - and the even faster-growing Palestinian Arab population to which it also supplies electricity - and the declining reserves of Egypt, its main gas supplier, required the identification of new sources of gas for electricity production. One alternative was to import natural gas from Russia and the Caspian Sea via Turkey. To this end, Turkey and Israel negotiated the construction of a subsea pipeline. But with the deterioration of their relations, this option gradually became unfeasible. Another option was to import gas from Qatar, hardly a reliable supplier. Yet a third, more costly, possibility was construction of a liquefied natural gas terminal, which would enable imports from various suppliers.
The discoveries at Tamar and Leviathan solved the problem: Israel will no longer have to import natural gas. Its dilemma now, rather, is deciding where to export the excess and how to reap the most geopolitical gains from its new status as an energy exporter.
Geographically, the most natural market is Europe, where any non-Russian gas is more than welcome. There are three ways for Israel to access this market. The first is to construct a pipeline to Turkey, where Israeli gas would join product from the Caspian region en route to Central Europe. This option is highly unlikely to be realized in the current atmosphere of Israel-Turkey relations.
Alternately, and more likely, Israel could construct a pipeline to Greece via Cyprus or pipe it inland, liquefy it and export it to any European liquefied natural gas terminal by sea. Europe is not the only potential market in such a scenario. Once liquefied, Israeli gas could be directed to China, South Korea and Japan, which collectively consume more than half of the world's LNG.
From a geopolitical standpoint, gas exports to India would be most beneficial to Israel. With hundreds of millions of its citizens facing energy poverty, India urgently needs reliable natural gas suppliers. One option for that country is to join the Iran-Pakistan pipeline - a project aimed at connecting Pakistan to Iran's South Pars field by 2014. Should India decide to extend the pipeline, it will become beholden to Iranian gas for decades to come, to the detriment of Western efforts to weaken Iran economically. Alternately, should India decide to construct LNG terminals along its coast, it will be able to import natural gas from Israel as well as other exporters, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The creation of an energy corridor from Israel to the Indian subcontinent would mean that Israel would have to retrofit the existing 150-mile oil pipeline linking the Red Sea port of Eilat with the Mediterranean port of Ashkelon. Once this pipeline commences operation, Russian and Caspian natural gas could reach the Asian markets as well.
Ironically, the biggest casualty of such an energy corridor will be none other than Turkey, which now enjoys an unchallenged status as an energy bridge between East and West. Energy transit fees are an important source of income to the Turkish economy.
In the coming years, Israel will have to decide whether to direct its gas to Asia or to compete with Turkey over access to the European gas market. Should it choose the latter, Turkish-Israeli relations will remain in rough seas.
Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, and co-author of "Turning Oil into Salt: Energy Independence through Fuel Choice" (BookSurge Publishing, 2009 ).
Governors NSL Letters
Obama Threatens 14 US Governors With Immediate Arrest
Posted by Europe on May 26, 2010 | 39 Comments
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/05/obama-threatens-14-us-governors-with-immediate-arrest/
A chilling report from the Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) prepared for Prime Minister Putin warns today that United States President Barack Obama
has had served on 14 US Governors National Security Letters (NSLs) warning that if their actions in attempting to form what are called State Defense Forces are not halted they will face “immediate” arrest for the crime of treason.
The use of NSLs in the United States was authorized by the Patriot Act law enacted after the September 11, 2001 attacks and forbids anyone receiving them from even acknowledging their existence, and was reauthorized by Obama’s “rubberstamp” Congress this past February over the objections of both civil and human rights groups who warned they mimic similar type “government security notices” enacted under both the former German Nazi and Soviet Communist regimes.
To the issue angering Obama against these State Governors, this report continues, is their attempt to reestablish what are called State Defense Forces which are described as follows:
“State Defense Forces (SDF) (also known as State Guards, State Military Reserves, or State Militias) in the United States are military units that operate under the sole authority of a state government; they are not regulated by the National Guard Bureau nor are they part of the Army National Guard of the United States.
State Defense Forces are authorized by state and federal law and are under the command of the governor of each state. State Defense Forces are distinct from their state’s National Guard in that they cannot become federal entities.
The federal government recognizes State Defense Forces under 32 U.S.C. § 109 which provides that State Defense Forces as a whole may not be called, ordered, or drafted into the Armed Forces of the United States, thus preserving their separation from the National Guard.”
Important to note is that Obama, as President of the United States is also its most powerful military leader known by the term of Commander in Chief, and is authorized by the Militia Act of 1903 to federalize his individual States National Guard Forces putting them under his command, something he does not have the power to do with State Defense Forces.
Obama’s fear of these State Defense Forces, this report says, rests with his not having power over them, and with the bulk of the US Military Forces he does control being stretched to near breaking with the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would leave these State military forces under the control of these Governors in “defacto control” of the United States.
The two US Governors spearheading this rebellion against Obama, this report states, are the Republican opposition party Governors of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty and Texas, Rick Perry; both of whom have a deep fear their President is destroying their Nation.
Governor Pawlenty’s fear of Obama is that since he took office he has appeased America’s enemies while at the same time shunning some of America’s most stalwart allies, especially Israel. Governor Pawlenty recently castigated Obama for abandoning the US missile defense plan for Europe by saying, “The lessons of history are clear: Appeasement and weakness did not stop the Nazis, did not stop the Soviets, and did not stop the terrorists before 9/11. We must stand strong with allies like Israel and eastern Europe in the face of growing challenges to our national security.”
Governor Perry has blasted Obama and warned his fellow Texans that the President is “hell bent on socialism” and is punishing his State by dumping tens-of-thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants into their cities and small towns. Governor Perry further warned Texans that that if “Barack Obama’s Washington doesn’t stop being so oppressive, Texans might feel compelled to renounce their American citizenry and secede from the union.”
Note: Following the end of the Civil War the rights of the individual US States to succeed from the Union was heard by their Supreme Court in a case called Texas v. White (1869) and who ruled that the Constitution did not permit States to secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding States intended to give effect to such ordinances, were “absolutely null”. However, the decision did allow some possibility of divisibility “through revolution, or through consent of the States.”
Obama, in fearing a revolution against him by the States, this report continues, has moved swiftly against them, including nationalizing nearly all National Guard Forces in Governor Pawlenty’s Minnesota in what is being described as their State’s largest call up of troops since World War II. Other reports coming from the United States are stating that Obama has also nationalized the National Guard forces in Georgia, Alabama, Kansas, and perhaps Texas too.
Though Obama may have taken from these dissident States their National Guard forces, the Governors of the States of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia still have under their sole command their State Defense Forces to go against US Federal forces.
Important to note in this report is its stating that there are no US laws prohibiting National Guard troops from also joining their State’s Defense Forces, but would create a dilemma for those soldiers should they be called to service by them both at the same time. This dilemma occurred for many American soldiers during their Civil War with the great majority of them choosing to serve their States instead of the Federal Government.
To Governor Pawlenty’s fears of Obama appeasing America’s enemies, while at the same time harming its longstanding allies, their remains no doubt as during this past week alone he has put Israel’s security in grave danger by releasing previously classified US documents relating to their nuclear programme, while at the same time removing sanctions on Russian arms makers supplying Iran. And in a move that even Russian military analysts are calling “insane”, Obama this week said he has decided to pre-announce to the World once-secret American ballistic missile tests and satellite launches.
To Governor Perry’s fears of Obama socializing the United States their remains no doubt either, and as we can read as reported yesterday by the USA Today News Service:
And in an even worse move against his own people who are still struggling to survive the growing Global economic collapse, new reports from the United States are stating that a “secret” programme found hidden in Obama’s socialist healthcare law called the Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act (CLASS Act) is about to take from them another $150-$250 a month from their paychecks forcing tens of millions more of them into abject poverty and debt slavery.
To the final outcome of these events it is not in our knowing, other than to remind these Americans of Dr. Igor Panarin’s 2008 prediction of the fate lying in store for them, and as we can read as reported by London’s Telegraph News Service in their article titled “US will collapse and break up, Russian analyst predicts”, and which says:
And to those Americans believing they will be able to defend themselves against the fast approaching onslaught meant to destroy them they should think again, for even as these words are being written, Obama, through the United Nations, is preparing to disarm them all under the so called UN Treaty On Arms Control that he ordered his government to sign.
The late great American dissident comedian George Carlin once said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it”….one can only hope these poor souls will awaken from their long slumber before all is lost.
A chilling report from the Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) prepared for Prime Minister Putin warns today that United States President Barack Obama has had served on 14 US Governors National Security Letters (NSLs) warning that if their actions in attempting to form what are called State Defense Forces are not halted they will face “immediate” arrest for the crime of treason.
The use of NSLs in the United States was authorized by the Patriot Act law enacted after the September 11, 2001 attacks and forbids anyone receiving them from even acknowledging their existence, and was reauthorized by Obama’s “rubberstamp” Congress this past February over the objections of both civil and human rights groups who warned they mimic similar type “government security notices” enacted under both the former German Nazi and Soviet Communist regimes.
To the issue angering Obama against these State Governors, this report continues, is their attempt to reestablish what are called State Defense Forces which are described as follows:
“State Defense Forces (SDF) (also known as State Guards, State Military Reserves, or State Militias) in the United States are military units that operate under the sole authority of a state government; they are not regulated by the National Guard Bureau nor are they part of the Army National Guard of the United States.
State Defense Forces are authorized by state and federal law and are under the command of the governor of each state. State Defense Forces are distinct from their state’s National Guard in that they cannot become federal entities.
The federal government recognizes State Defense Forces under 32 U.S.C. § 109 which provides that State Defense Forces as a whole may not be called, ordered, or drafted into the Armed Forces of the United States, thus preserving their separation from the National Guard.”
Important to note is that Obama, as President of the United States is also its most powerful military leader known by the term of Commander in Chief, and is authorized by the Militia Act of 1903 to federalize his individual States National Guard Forces putting them under his command, something he does not have the power to do with State Defense Forces.
Obama’s fear of these State Defense Forces, this report says, rests with his not having power over them, and with the bulk of the US Military Forces he does control being stretched to near breaking with the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would leave these State military forces under the control of these Governors in “defacto control” of the United States.
The two US Governors spearheading this rebellion against Obama, this report states, are the Republican opposition party Governors of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty and Texas, Rick Perry; both of whom have a deep fear their President is destroying their Nation.
Governor Pawlenty’s fear of Obama is that since he took office he has appeased America’s enemies while at the same time shunning some of America’s most stalwart allies, especially Israel. Governor Pawlenty recently castigated Obama for abandoning the US missile defense plan for Europe by saying, “The lessons of history are clear: Appeasement and weakness did not stop the Nazis, did not stop the Soviets, and did not stop the terrorists before 9/11. We must stand strong with allies like Israel and eastern Europe in the face of growing challenges to our national security.”
Governor Perry has blasted Obama and warned his fellow Texans that the President is “hell bent on socialism” and is punishing his State by dumping tens-of-thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants into their cities and small towns. Governor Perry further warned Texans that that if “Barack Obama’s Washington doesn’t stop being so oppressive, Texans might feel compelled to renounce their American citizenry and secede from the union.”
Note: Following the end of the Civil War the rights of the individual US States to succeed from the Union was heard by their Supreme Court in a case called Texas v. White (1869) and who ruled that the Constitution did not permit States to secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding States intended to give effect to such ordinances, were “absolutely null”. However, the decision did allow some possibility of divisibility “through revolution, or through consent of the States.”
Obama, in fearing a revolution against him by the States, this report continues, has moved swiftly against them, including nationalizing nearly all National Guard Forces in Governor Pawlenty’s Minnesota in what is being described as their State’s largest call up of troops since World War II. Other reports coming from the United States are stating that Obama has also nationalized the National Guard forces in Georgia, Alabama, Kansas, and perhaps Texas too.
Though Obama may have taken from these dissident States their National Guard forces, the Governors of the States of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia still have under their sole command their State Defense Forces to go against US Federal forces.
Important to note in this report is its stating that there are no US laws prohibiting National Guard troops from also joining their State’s Defense Forces, but would create a dilemma for those soldiers should they be called to service by them both at the same time. This dilemma occurred for many American soldiers during their Civil War with the great majority of them choosing to serve their States instead of the Federal Government.
To Governor Pawlenty’s fears of Obama appeasing America’s enemies, while at the same time harming its longstanding allies, their remains no doubt as during this past week alone he has put Israel’s security in grave danger by releasing previously classified US documents relating to their nuclear programme, while at the same time removing sanctions on Russian arms makers supplying Iran. And in a move that even Russian military analysts are calling “insane”, Obama this week said he has decided to pre-announce to the World once-secret American ballistic missile tests and satellite launches.
To Governor Perry’s fears of Obama socializing the United States their remains no doubt either, and as we can read as reported yesterday by the USA Today News Service:
And in an even worse move against his own people who are still struggling to survive the growing Global economic collapse, new reports from the United States are stating that a “secret” programme found hidden in Obama’s socialist healthcare law called the Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act (CLASS Act) is about to take from them another $150-$250 a month from their paychecks forcing tens of millions more of them into abject poverty and debt slavery.
To the final outcome of these events it is not in our knowing, other than to remind these Americans of Dr. Igor Panarin’s 2008 prediction of the fate lying in store for them, and as we can read as reported by London’s Telegraph News Service in their article titled “US will collapse and break up, Russian analyst predicts”, and which says:
And to those Americans believing they will be able to defend themselves against the fast approaching onslaught meant to destroy them they should think again, for even as these words are being written, Obama, through the United Nations, is preparing to disarm them all under the so called UN Treaty On Arms Control that he ordered his government to sign.
The late great American dissident comedian George Carlin once said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it”….one can only hope these poor souls will awaken from their long slumber before all is lost.
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