occult secrets of the hauptlings

One reason for conspiracy theories being regarded with disdain is the intellectual dishonesty of people like Nico Haupt, who can take this, from wired :

The Navy SM-3, designed for midcourse defense, is hitting its targets in tests and is already deployed aboard warships in the Sea of Japan; the Army’s Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense system is hitting its targets too and will deploy beginning in 2009. Meanwhile, the PAC-3 version of the Army’s Patriot is being widely fielded for point defense against incoming ballistic missiles. What’s missing — besides rigorous testing for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense interceptors silo-based in Alaska and California — is a boost-phase weapon that can knock down ballistic missles while they’re still climbing into the sky, which is when they’re most vulnerable. So far, all the ideas and technologies for this easy-stage defense have a heap of problems. The Missile Defense Agency is pursuing two possibilities for boost-phase intercept. The YAL-1 Airborne Laser, mounted on a modified 747, is the riskiest. The combination of chemicals required for a laser powerful enough to kill a missile makes the airplane nothing short of a ticking chemical timebomb. More feasible is the Kinetic Energy Interceptor being designed by Northrop Grumman. This missile works a lot like a PAC-3 or SM-3, inasmuch as it literally strikes its target rather than just exploding near it [...]

and change it into this :

“…The Navy SM-3, designed for midcourse defense, is hitting its targets in tests..The combination of chemicals required for a laser powerful enough to kill a missile makes the airplane nothing short of a ticking chemical timebomb..”

speaks for itself i guess

thank god for small mercies

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has dropped his proposal to teach the Holocaust to children following a wave of protests from left wing politicians. He told the annual conference of the French Jewish umbrella group last month that every pupil should be assigned a name of a Jewish deportee during the Nazi rule and then research the family. Critics objected to the plan, arguing that it would cause schoolchildren to suffer trauma. The government will explore other avenues to “encourage children in classrooms to look at, not other children in particular, but rather a given situation in a given city,” according to former government minister and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil. She agreed with opponents of the proposal, saying it was “unimaginable, unbearable and unjust.”

reuters & ap both make this same false claim

Iran must pay more than $33 million to the family of a US-born Israeli diplomat killed in a 1992 terror attack, a federal judge said Monday. US District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle said Iran was responsible for the truck bombing at the Israeli Embassy in Argentina. The blast killed 29 people, including David Ben-Rafael, who was born in the United States before emigrating to Israel. Hizbullah accepted responsibility for the bombing, and the United States has held Iran responsible for helping to finance and organize the group’s activities. US law normally prevents people from suing foreign nations, but an exception is made for nations that support terrorism. Iran was designated a state sponsor of terror in 1984. In a similar ruling in September, a federal judge ruled that Iran must pay $2.65 billion to the families of the 241 US service members killed in the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut. Although Iran has faced several hefty judgments like this in the past, it has refused to acknowledge the lawsuits and has not sent lawyers to defend itself. Huvelle awarded the money to Ben-Rafael’s widow, father and children for wrongful death and pain and suffering. The ruling allows the family to try to collect Iranian assets from various sources around the world. Finding and seizing that money will be difficult, however – AP via JPost

Iran must pay more than $33 million dollars to the family of a U.S.-born Israeli diplomat killed in a 1992 terror attack, a United States federal judge said Monday. U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle said Iran was responsible for the truck bombing at the Israeli Embassy in Argentina. The blast killed 29 people, including David Ben-Rafael, who was born in the United States before emigrating to Israel. Hezbollah accepted responsibility for the bombing, and the United States has held Iran responsible for helping finance and organize the group’s activities. U.S. law normally prevents people from suing foreign nations, but an exception is made for nations that support terrorism. Iran was designated a state sponsor of terror in 1984. In a similar ruling in September, a federal judge ruled that Iran must pay $2.65 billion dollars to the families of the 241 U.S. service members killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Although Iran has faced several hefty judgments like this in the past, it has refused to acknowledge the lawsuits and has not sent lawyers to defend itself. Huvelle awarded the money to Ben-Rafael’s widow, father and children for wrongful death and pain and suffering. The ruling allows the family to try to collect Iranian assets from various sources around the world, however the family may face severe difficulties in retrieving these – Reuters via Haaretz

lévy’s pet hates

Bernard-Henri Lévy’s plan for the french left
Serge Halimi, Monde Diplo

In his latest book (1) Bernard-Henri Lévy lists “laboratories brewing atrocities”. This list features, in order of appearance:

Hugo Chávez, “whose anti-neo-liberal rhetoric recalls ‘fascist or Nazi-style regimes’ according to Latin-America’s bishops”.

Etienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida, held responsible for the “widely publicised rediscovery… of a theoretician, driven by his hatred of free markets to espouse Nazism: Carl Schmitt. He is presented as the saviour of a left that has lost its bearings.”

Slavoj Zizek and Peter Sloterdijk: “A significant number of European intellectuals have wholeheartedly embraced this curious, indeed hallucinatory, notion that a Nazi thinker [Schmitt] could rescue the left from its current problems. Heidegger used to say that only a god could save us. Now, echoing the idea, this leftwing fringe repeats that only a Nazi can save us.”

Emmanuel Mounier and Jean-Marie Domenach: “The idea [attributed to them] that the real danger was not the Soviet Union, but the United States, not communism but Americanism, resurfaces among the ideologists of the new right in the 1980s, and then in all the neo-Nazi sects, mentioned above, such as Nouvelle Résistance, and finally in [France’s] National Front.”

Le Monde diplomatique: “An editorial of Le Monde diplomatique explaining that America … has found a secret weapon for ‘domesticating souls’… almost exactly the same words as Drieu la Rochelle (2) used …. Or here again, in the same issue … the foul stench arising from the condemnation of the ‘cosmopolitan establishment of bankers and corporate lawyers’ that dominates the US, and therefore the world. Maurras (3), or nowadays Le Pen, would say the same… In yet another article, by Loïc Wacquant and Pierre Bourdieu … how can one not react to the disturbing similarities with another strain of anti-Americanism, the one and only true variety, hatched by Arthur Moeller Van den Bruck, the man who invented the idea of the Third Reich.”

Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 “was no more than a variation on the old isolationist, populist, ultra-nationalist and chauvinistic ideas of Pat Buchanan and other rightwing US extremists”.

Harold Pinter: “You would think you were listening to Pinter, Chomsky, Bourdieu or a neo-Trotskyist. But no. The nerve, the investigative style, the obsession with manipulation … it all brings us back, I fear, to the ravings of the tsarist police fabricating its famous fake that supposedly proved Jewish domination of the world.”

Noam Chomsky: “this maniacal negationist”.

Olivier Besancenot and the Attac organisation: “Why have we never heard any of them, ever, telling us what they think about Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, who repeatedly says that he dreams of annihilating Israel?”

Referring to Lévy’s publications in 1979, Cornelius Castoriadis found “a good sample of devious Stalinist techniques”. This is a severe criticism, particularly as Lévy claims to write “without any sense of controversy”, though “I do of course simplify”, and even suggests the reader “look at things calmly and with a cool head”. He sees himself as being “trained, I think, to be curious and respectful”.

Lévy defends the US industrialist Henry Ford, who inspired Adolf Hitler. As Lévy himself acknowledges, his commitment to the cause of Darfur brought him into contact with “an increasing number of Islamic militants, sometimes even Islamists, linked in particular to Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.” (The preacher Louis Farrakhan is, among other things, an anti-semite.)

Perhaps it would be most effective to refer Lévy to his own writings: “Sometimes, overwhelmed by exhaustion or disgust, it is just too hard to go on. What is the point in trying to make someone see reason, when they just will not listen?” Just so.

Notes

(1) Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ce grand cadavre á la renverse, Grasset, Paris, 2007.

(2) French writer who headed La Nouvelle Revue française during the Occupation and advocated collaboration with the Nazi authorities.

(3) Leader and principal thinker of the reactionary Action Française.

the dom pérignon socialist manifesto

Serge Halimi, Monde Diplo
(Serge Halimi is the director of Le Monde diplomatique)

Last September Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of the luxury conglomerate company LVMH, held a little “do” to mark the 60th birthday of the couture house of Dior.

He spared no expense, with Dom Pérignon champagne, caviar, 75 waiters for 25 tables, 14 cooks, 4,000 roses and 8,000 sprigs of lily of the valley (the late Christian Dior’s signature flower). But then the 270 guests were rather special too, including the justice minister Rachida Dati; the interior minister Brice Hortefeux and his wife, dressed by Dior; the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë; the television news anchor Claire Chazal, also draped in Dior; former foreign minister Hubert Védrine and the parliamentary leader of the governing UMP Party, Jean-François Copé; Elton John and Farah Diba, wife of the late Shah of Iran (1). Also present was the prime minister, François Fillon, who only four days later said: “I am in charge of a bankrupt state. This has got to stop.”

There is nothing new about billionaires indulging in conspicuous consumption. But the social portent of such festivities now reaches beyond the pages of glossy magazines.

The election of President Nicolas Sarkozy heralds a new approach to the exercise of power, completing the merger of several parts of France’s elite: big bosses, opinion-makers and political leaders, right and left, providing they uphold free-market principles. Ideally they should be very rich too.

Arnault is the richest man in France, worth an estimated $21bn in 2006. He is a personal friend of the president, whom he invited to the wedding of his daughter Delphine — a big occasion, with guests including six members of the government of the day, and Copé and Védrine (who is on the LVMH board). A long truck was chartered to transport the bridal dress without creasing it.

Arnault owns a financial daily, La Tribune, which he is selling to buy Les Echos, a more influential paper. The staff of both are against the project, but Sarkozy backs his friend. In 2006 LVMH handed out 1,789,359 stock options, including 450,000 to its boss. The government has recently awarded substantial tax breaks to the wealthy, including Arnault, perhaps as a token of its gratitude for holding down inflation by keeping tight control over pay. Many of those who manufacture Arnault’s luxury goods earn only the minimum wage.

Britain’s Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, asks Arnault for advice, but in France the tycoon is convinced he is seen as a pariah: “The problem for business leaders in France is that the country has difficulty accepting a market economy. I think Marxist ideas still exert an influence. Over the last 20 years their influence has even increased in political discourse” (2).

Arnault must be living in a different France from everybody else. His friend is now president and even the Socialist opposition, following the example of its British counterpart, talks about little else but rehabilitating free-market values, individualism, merit and money. Meanwhile Bernard-Henri Lévy — a neo-liberal, pro-US socialite, astute manager of an immense fortune and established star of intellectual show business — has just published a book (3), which he hopes will establish him as a key Socialist Party (PS) thinker.

The restoration marches on

France resembles a plutocracy; money is all that counts. The government abounds with corporate lawyers. Influential MPs such as Copé make no secret of their ambition to fulfil their public mission while making a fortune in business. With recurrent scandals in the stock market and finance, growing public fascination with billionaires and frequent lobbying, France is turning into another Monaco-style principality.

The recent wedding of Socialist MP Henri Weber was an extravagant celebrity event attended by former leftists, such as Bernard Kouchner, who are now ministers in the rightwing government (4). Jacques Attali, once a special adviser to François Mitterrand, was also on the guest list. He recently accepted Sarkozy’s proposal to chair the newly established Committee for the Liberation of French Growth and is proving a keen advocate of competition and mass distribution. The restoration marches on.

On 13 June 1971, in a speech at the Epinay congress (5), Mitterrand condemned “all the powers of money, money that corrupts, money that buys, money that kills, money that brings ruin and money that rots even the conscience of men”. Now Lévy is suggesting that the PS should organise a congress to make a new start, an “anti-Epinay”. He does not see the corruption, death, ruin and rot in money, but rather “its ability to replace war with trade, closed worlds with open borders. Thanks to [money], negotiations, transactions and compromise take the place of impatience, violence, barter, rapine, arbitrary settlements and fanaticism” (6).

This definition of capital as a rampart against fanaticism is very much in vogue and seems unlikely to upset members of the property-owning classes such as Arnault, Arnaud Lagardère, the man behind the media and aerospace conglomerate of the same name, or François Pinault, owner of the PPR global retailing group. The last two are close friends of Lévy, who has no qualms about tailoring his columns to suit their interests.

Who cares about Lévy? For the past 30 years his fan club has acclaimed his work and the media have made a fuss, yet no one would think of buying one of his books once the public relations barrage subsides. The title of his autobiography, Comédie, suggests that even he sometimes realises the whole process is a farce.

In 1979 Cornelius Castoriadis admitted to being baffled by him: “How can a country with a fine, long-standing culture allow a writer to get away with such nonsense, with critics lauding his work and the reading public obediently lapping it up? No one silences nor imprisons those who point out it is all a sham, yet their words make no difference” (7). He optimistically added: “This piffle will certainly go out of fashion. Much like all contemporary products it has built-in obsolescence.” Nearly 30 years later the piffle is still selling.

This trade in nonsense is doubly revealing of our current malaise. The excesses of Lévy’s prose and its repetition on TV and radio no longer prompt any response. His habitual targets — the “left of the left” and the writers least in thrall to the media —must have given up the struggle. Meanwhile his pro-US, free-market ideas are in tune with those of a growing number of socialist leaders. Diminishing resistance goes hand in hand with greater impact. Any cultural scene, and by extension public debate, that can allow a writer to accuse Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar, Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek of being anti-semitic is in trouble. It is strange that any of them should be suspected of taking their cue from a “Nazi thinker” (see “Lévy’s pet hates”). When the left starts taking its inspiration from Lévy, it further proves that it is dead on its feet.

Fans and favours

Lévy’s friends have recently gratified him with favours (interviews with Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, a leading radio personality, and Jean-Marie Colombani, the former editor of Le Monde; an immediate review in the same paper, a huge spread in Paris Match, front-page coverage in Le Nouvel Observateur). But he has recruited new fans, who in their youthful enthusiasm are all the more eager to serve his cause. Nicolas Demorand, on the France Inter radio station, and Philippe Val, the editor of the satiric journal Charlie Hebdo, are no fools; yet when Lévy calls key contemporary leftwing writers fascists, anti-semites or Nazis, they pretend not to notice. After encouraging Lévy to make liberal use of insults and bad language, Demorand let him conclude by saying: “We are the guardians of words on this programme.” Demorand may look forward to a long career.

Following its third consecutive defeat in a presidential election, the PS is tempted to lean even further to the right. Having embraced “realism” in the early 1980s, the idea of “breaking with capitalism” has become meaningless. But media and business leaders keep demanding that the party should go even further, espousing free-market values more absolutely. Last August this pressure led to an outburst from the MP Henri Emmanuelli: “How dare they ask a party that has produced the director of the World Trade Organisation [Pascal Lamy] and very probably the future director of the International Monetary Fund [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] finally to accept the market economy?”

In 1986, 1993 and 2002, the election defeats of the PS pushed the party line a few degrees to the left — a move it could afford, it hardly being possible to blame their electoral misfortunes on having strayed too far to the left. Nor did Ségolène Royal lean far leftwards during last year’s presidential campaign (in which Lévy was closely involved). In the face of Sarkozy’s aggressive rightwing policies, the PS could surely afford to adopt a more militant stance, however superficial it might be in practice.

Encouraged by the Blairist ambitions of several PS leaders, Lévy has wheeled out his media battlewagon to ward off any such eventuality. He plans to dictate to any hypothetical leftwing government the ultimate theoretical basis for future neo-liberal, anti-revolutionary policies. In 1986 Lévy supported the deregulation of broadcasting. In 1995 he condemned striking railway and public transport workers, highlighting the lack of responsibility of the public sector which was “in the process of assuming all the characteristics of what we once called a Soviet-style economy” (8). Two years later he mocked those who “demonise money and all those who deal in it”. Now he has written a book specially for the left, to rid it of its “poisons”. But the worst thing is that people actually listen.

The break with the past Lévy proposes is no different from that promised by Sarkozy. “For reasons related to its past and the history of its national software [sic], the whole of France is resisting free-market principles,” he writes, rather as the president might. He adds: “The question of whether the revolution is possible has given way to another question that is even more disturbing and above all more radical, namely whether the revolution is desirable. The answer to this question has become ‘No’, clearly ‘No’.” Pierre Moscovici (who is close to Strauss-Kahn) promptly picked up the ball and wrote: “Bernard-Henri Lévy concludes with an appeal to the melancholic left in opposition to the lyrical left, to a left stripped of its revolutionary Utopia, the ‘dream that always ends in a nightmare’… That is also my version of the left” (9).

But is Lévy really best placed to suggest solutions to suit most people? His book hardly ever deals with the economy or finance, inequality, relocation of production, occupational hazards or purchasing power. Apart from a 10-page chapter on France’s underprivileged housing estates, there is no mention of social issues. A few ideas, essentially comparing his opponents to fascists, float past, unrelated to their causes. He devotes half a chapter to the Khmer Rouge (in Cambodia), pointing out that they “sampled the work of [Charles] Bettelheim, Althusser, Lacan”, but overlooking the fact that the US war in southeast Asia increased their power at least as much as the three French writers did.

’I write in hotels’

No one can be blamed for their origins, but it is unlikely that Lévy has suffered a great deal from inequality. So why does his manifesto for the left so completely disregard the topic? During an interview in 1984 he explained how he works: “I do not write in cafés, but in hotels. All over the world. In Paris, in a room at the Pont-Royal, number 812, because it looks out over the roofs, commanding a view of the city. Also room 911 at the Georges-V. … My stamping ground reaches from the Jardin du Luxembourg, where I live, to the rue des Saints-Pères, where we are now, or the Récamier, where I often lunch. In the afternoon I like the Twickenham, or otherwise the [café] Flore, and [the flat in] Rue Madame” (10).

Since then his home ground has reached into other enchanted worlds. At the wedding of Pinault junior, in 1996, he “arrived in style, landing on the lawn of the château in a helicopter”. When he married the actress Arielle Dombasle, in 1993, “a plane was chartered to transport guests to La Colombe d’Or, the mythical hotel in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Paris Match obtained exclusive rights to cover the event, with a six-page spread worthy of a royal wedding, not to mention the front page which featured an emotional Arielle in a white dress with a low-cut back, designed by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel” (11). Guests included Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest person in France), Jack Lang, the former minister, and Alain Carignon, then mayor of Grenoble, as well as the columnist Louis Pauwels and Jean-Luc Lagardère.

Lévy believes we forget how much we owe to capitalism. “We think we are attacking George Soros,” he warns, “but in fact we are murdering Gavroche” (a key figure in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables). Here again Lévy has something in common with Sarkozy, who rolls out a succession of reforms, the better to thwart his adversaries, unable to counter-attack on all sides simultaneously. The writer piles on names, approximations and historical wisecracks. The historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet noted this habit in 1979: “Whether he is dealing with the history of the Bible, Ancient Greece or even contemporary affairs, Lévy displays, in every field, the same alarming ignorance and stunning presumption” (12). Lévy had written that Heinrich Himmler, who actually committed suicide in May 1945, gave evidence six months later at the Nuremberg trial. In another instance he presented François Guizot, a conservative, free-market thinker in Restoration France, as one of the forerunners of the Paris Commune when he had in fact supported its bloody repression.

Many on the left have praised Lévy’s latest book. “The left we have yet to reinvent should draw inspiration from this work. It has a fresh, youthful energy I particularly appreciate,” said Lang (13). Moscovici, Vincent Peillon and Manuel Valls, all of whom are vying for the leadership of the PS, joined in the praise. Valls was one of those to whom Sarkozy offered a cabinet job. This came to nothing, but nevertheless suggests that the two men see more or less eye to eye. Valls subsequently hailed the policy statement of the incoming prime minister, François Fillon, as “on a par with the country’s expectations”, adding that he was prepared to “support the majority provided it listens to us” (the PS). He supports the current reform of special pensions and is calling for a change in the party’s name.

In his book Lévy pays tribute to Valls: “Although many socialists still cling to their socialism much as a repertory actor hangs on to a familiar part, the most lucid among them — Manuel Valls, the MP for the Essonne, springs to mind — know there is no salvation for the left without a clean break with the past, and consequently a change of name.” Valls quickly wrote a review of this “brilliant book” for Les Echos, though he failed to mention that in so doing he was merely returning the author’s compliment. He even singled out for special praise the passage in which he was mentioned (14).

Valls, suspected by some of his fellow travellers of harbouring rightwing sympathies, added: “Those who say this book is simply a celebration of neo-liberal values and a conservative left refuse to admit that it is a sincere attempt at introspection by a writer who quite certainly belongs on the left.” He did acknowledge, though, that Lévy tended to disregard social issues. Not so long ago, anyone admitting, as Lévy did, to being “slightly deaf to social concerns” (15) would have been banished by the left. Such ostracism would now be considered archaic, or “Marxist” as Arnault would say.

Lévy’s political ideas are clear enough. He promotes free-market values and condemns radicalism. While Sarkozy is in power, Lévy manufactures for him a “moral left”, with plenty of emotion and indignation. Not the sort of left that might greatly hinder the government, which, in the words of a former captain of industry, is “methodically dismantling the programme of the National Council of the Resistance” (16).

Notes

(1) For an account of the party, see “L’ére monarchic”, Point de vue, Paris, 26 September 2007.

(2) France 2 television, 11 December 2006.

(3) Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ce grand cadavre á la renverse, Grasset, Paris, 2007.

(4) Ariane Chemin, “La gauche á la noce”, Le Monde, 3 October 2007.

(5) The congress launched the Socialist Party in its current form, setting it on the path to victory 10 years later.

(6) Ibid. When not marked otherwise, subsequent quotes from the author are taken from this work.

(7) Cornelius Castoriadis, “L’industrie du vide”, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 9 July 1979.

(8) Le Point, Paris, 2 December 1995.

(9) Pierre Moscovici, “La gauche mélancolique de Bernard-Henri Lévy”, Le Monde, 12 October 2007.

(10) VSD, Paris, 8 November 1984.

(11) Philippe Cohen, BHL, Fayard, Paris.

(12) Letter dated 12 June 1979 to the director of Le Canard enchaîné. Full text at: www.mondediplomatique.fr/dossiers/bhl/

(13) Paris Match, 11 October 2007.

(14) Les Echos, Paris, 8 October 2007.

(15) Libération, Paris, 8 October 2007.

(16) Denis Kessler, Challenges, Paris, 4 October 2007. Jean Moulin formed the National Council of the Resistance (CNR) in 1943 to coordinate the actions of the French Resistance. Some of the proposals it decided in March 1944 were put into practice after the war.

qui est le vrai neo-”con”?

[...] On Saturday, in a scene which has become one of the most sought-after clips on internet video sites, President Sarkozy was drawn into an unseemly slanging match with a visitor to the Salon de L’Agriculture in Paris. M. Sarkozy tried to shake the middle-aged man’s hand during a walk-about. The bystander told the President not to touch him. M. Sarkozy replied, ‘Casse-toi’, or ‘get lost’. The man told him to take his dirty hands off him. The President responded: “Casse-toi, alors, pauvre con, va.” ‘Con‘ is a fairly mild swear word in French. The President’s words can be translated as: “Sod off, you arsehole, get lost.” The incident has caused a great outcry in France, with M. Sarkozy’s opponents claiming – not for the first time – that he behaved in an unpresidential way. Quite apart from anything else, the exchange was, on both sides, in the familiar second person or ‘tu’ instead of the formal ‘vous’. This, in itself, was startling to the ears of many of M. Sarkozy’s older and more conservative supporters. In a panel interview with readers of Le Parisien on Monday – published yesterday – a 40-year-old woman, Claude-Sophie Giraudet, told M. Sarkosy that she had been shocked ‘as a mother’ by his behaviour. She compared his reaction to that of the French footballer Zinedine Zidane, sent off in the World Cup final in 2006 for butting an Italian defender who had insulted his sister. In the published reply, President Sarkozy said: “It is difficult, even when you are a President, not to respond to an insult … Just because you’re President, you’re not there for people to wipe their feet on. All the same, it would have been better if I hadn’t replied to him.” The editor of Le Parisien, Dominique de Montvalon, later revealed that M. Sarkozy had not expressed the ’slightest regret’ at the time. The final words were added by the Elysée Palace when the text was revised, something commonly allowed to politicians in France but rarely elsewhere. The Elysée Palace said that the added words were ‘in the spirit’ of what the President had meant to say. In the verbatim text, according to Le Parisien, M. Sarkozy admitted that he should not have said ‘casse-toi’ or get lost. He did not express regrets for replying to the man, or using the word ‘con‘ [...]

- John Lichfield, The Independent (London)

no shame

IDF Military Advocate General Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit ruled on Tuesday that there would be no need to open a Military Police investigation into the November 2006 incident in which 21 Palestinians were killed from an errant IDF shell in the town of Beit Hanoun in Gaza. Mendelblit also said that no legal measures would be taken against any party involved in the incident. Then-Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz ordered an investigative commission of inquiry be established to examine the circumstances surrounding the incident and determine the need for further proceedings. The special team was led by then- Deputy Ground Forces Commander Maj. Gen. Meir Kalifi and the findings were presented before Mendelblit. The IDF said in response to the ruling that Kalifi’s inquiry leaves no doubt that the incident was unintentional and stemmed from a grave and atypical malfunction in the control mechanism of the artillery machinery being used at the time. The malfunction fed incorrect data into the system used to calculate the trajectory of the shells. Upon investigation the malfunction was determined to be extremely rare and unfamiliar even to the expert artillery technicians trained to deal with that specific system. Therefore, the military advocacy determined, there was nothing to link any possible human error to the outcome of the incident. Mendleblit ruled that the conduct of those involved in the event was not negligent.

- Efrat Weiss, YNet

one of those hidden haaretz gems

T.A. cinema to screen ‘Jenin, Jenin’ on eve of director’s libel trial
Nirit Anderman, Haaretz, 25/02/2008

The Tel Aviv Cinematheque will screen Mohammed Bakri’s controversial film “Jenin, Jenin” on Monday night, on the eve of the director’s libel trial. Cinematheque director Alon Garbuz said the screening was “a show of support” for Bakri, who has been invited to attend the event. The film was banned by the Israeli Film Ratings Board in 2002, on the premise that it was libelous and might offend the public. This decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court, which nonetheless labeled it a “propagandistic lie.” The film describes events in Jenin during the Israel Defense Forces Operation Defensive Shield. After the Supreme Court’s ruling, Bakri and Israel’s cinematheques were sued in a civil law suit by five IDF reservists. The cinematheques reached a compromise with the plaintiffs, while Bakri is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday.

a key story about the pakistan incursions

Pakistan Shift Could Curtail Drone Strikes
Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger, NYT, February 22, 2008

American officials reached a quiet understanding with Pakistan’s leader last month to intensify secret strikes against suspected terrorists by pilotless aircraft launched in Pakistan, senior officials in both governments say. But the prospect of changes in Pakistan’s government has the Bush administration worried that the new operations could be curtailed. Among other things, the new arrangements allowed an increase in the number and scope of patrols and strikes by armed Predator surveillance aircraft launched from a secret base in Pakistan — a far more aggressive strategy to attack Al Qaeda and the Taliban than had existed before. But since opposition parties emerged victorious from the parliamentary election early this week, American officials are worried that the new, more permissive arrangement could be choked off in its infancy. In the weeks before Monday’s election, a series of meetings among President Bush’s national security advisers resulted in a significant relaxation of the rules under which American forces could aim attacks at suspected Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the tribal areas near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The change, described by senior American and Pakistani officials who would not speak for attribution because of the classified nature of the program, allows American military commanders greater leeway to choose from what one official who took part in the debate called “a Chinese menu” of strike options. Instead of having to confirm the identity of a suspected militant leader before attacking, this shift allowed American operators to strike convoys of vehicles that bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run, for instance, so long as the risk of civilian casualties is judged to be low.

The new, looser rules of engagement may have their biggest impact at a secret Central Intelligence Agency base in Pakistan whose existence was described by American and Pakistani officials who had previously kept it secret to avoid embarrassing President Pervez Musharraf politically. Mr. Musharraf, whose party lost in this week’s election by margins that surprised American officials, has been accused by political rivals of being too close to the United States. The base in Pakistan is home to a handful of Predators — unmanned aircraft that are controlled from the United States. Two Hellfire missiles from one of those Predators are believed to have killed a senior Qaeda commander, Abu Laith al-Libi, in northwest Pakistan last month, though a senior Pakistani official said his government had still not confirmed that Mr. Libi was among the dead. A C.I.A. spokesman declined on Thursday to comment on any operations in Pakistan. The new agreements with Pakistan came after a trip to the country on Jan. 9 by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director. The American officials met with Mr. Musharraf as well as with the new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and offered a range of increased covert operations aimed at thwarting intensifying efforts by Al Qaeda and the Taliban to destabilize the Pakistani government. But Bush administration officials and American counterterrorism experts are expressing concern that these arrangements could come under review or be scaled back by the winners of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections. The two winning parties have said they want to enter talks with Pashtun tribal leaders who opposed the military government of Mr. Musharraf and who at times have supported the Taliban and given refuge to foreign Qaeda fighters. “A new government may be able to reach an accord with the militants, and that would buy the government a certain respite,” said Robert L. Grenier, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center. “But that would give the militants space to provide safe haven to Al Qaeda and other extremists engaged in attacks in Afghanistan.”

Xenia Dormandy, the director for South Asia at the National Security Council until 2005, said Thursday that if talks resulted in the kind of truce — and pullback of Pakistani troops — that Mr. Musharraf negotiated nearly two years ago, the militants would probably continue to gain strength. “If they try to replicate what we’ve already seen, I don’t know why the result would be any different,” she said. But she added that if the Pakistani military remained in the area, the government might retain some leverage. The question of what to do next in Pakistan is likely to preoccupy the Bush administration in its last year. Officials say there is clear, if unstated, pressure to make a last effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden before Mr. Bush leaves office. But several senior officials in the State Department have been warning that the administration’s full-scale backing of Mr. Musharraf was a wrong-headed strategy that could now blow up. Other administration officials warned not to read too much into the initial comments from Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party and widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, about reaching accords with the tribal leaders. Mr. Zardari, they noted, has made clear that he wants to defeat terrorism.

Opposition parties and analysts say American officials were misinterpreting the outcome of the elections, which were dominated by the country’s liberal, secular parties. An alliance of religious parties that controlled the provincial government in the North-West Frontier Province was driven from power and even lost the majority of seats in the tribal areas. Opposition parties say a new civilian-led government will be more effective at countering militancy than the military-dominated one under Mr. Musharraf. They say that Mr. Musharraf’s strategy has failed and that a new approach is needed. Instead, the opposition parties have called for a strategy in the tribal areas similar to the new counterinsurgency strategies employed by the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq. There, the United States has tried to use a combination of military force, reconstruction and political dialogue to turn local tribes against militants. The question, senior American and Pakistani officials said Thursday, was how the strategy to accomplish these common goals might change. “In the short term, there will be some confusion and some hiccups,” said Henry A. Crumpton, a former top State Department counterterrorism official. “But in the medium and longer term, there will be continued and perhaps even closer cooperation, because of our mutual interests.”