intel to die for

“They’re remarkable, we’re learning things,” said Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington, of the photographs. “This is intel to die for,” Andreas Persbo, an analyst in London at the Verification Research, Training and Information Center, a private group that promotes arms control, said in a comment on the blog site Arms Control Wonk. — William J. Broad, NYT

chickenshit quote of the day

Obama says of Rev. Wright : “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate.” Six times in just this clip, Obama indulges in the imperialist vice of referring to the USA as “America.”

comment to the jstreet article on salon

Taking back the debate over Israel
Sick of right-wing Jews speaking in their name, progressive American Jews have launched J Street to change the way the game is played in Washington. By Gary Kamiya [2008-04-29]

It seems to me to be a means to cover Kadima’s rear

That is to say, if you watch their video advert, the positive payload is on Olmert, which means Kadima. Now, Kadima is itself a sort of centrist fusion of cadres from Likud on the one side and Labor on the other, with the sadly insignificant Meretz hanging onto its coat-tails. Olmert and Co. are well aware that as things stand in the USA, the AIPAC machine could bring down the Kadima government within a month or so if it put its mind to it, and naturally they don’t want that to happen.

But, really, what IS the Kadima policy? When Olmert took up the prime ministership in 2006 he was talking in terms of something called in hebrew, “hitkansut,” which is usually translated as “convergence,” more or less accurately, but the essential idea was that the settlers would be “converged” behind the wall, and the settlers who still remained beyond it would eventually have to look after themselves. However, this is not quite as straightforward as it seems, because at no point did he even consider giving up control of the ribbon of land immediately abutting the west bank of the Jordan river. If you visualise this, you will see that it is not the settlers who are being “converged” (i.e. concentrated behind a protective barrier) but the remaining Palestinians who are being “converged” by being concentrated in the remaining space between the Israeli controlled territories to both West and East of them. This is not a problem that can be solved by any amount of stylistics, and it is not on JStreet’s agenda, or anyone else’s, to abandon the aforesaid ribbon of land on the riverbank. See the problem?

p.s.—on a personal note—I am one of the reportedly non-existent Kansas O’Flaherty fans. I have links to all sixteen episodes on my blog, here.
Rowan Berkeley (i.e. Niqnaq)
Comment Permalink (at Salon.com}

pepe escobar : what did israel bomb in syria?

There is a gigantic, and constantly growing, downloadable .pdf file on the Federation of American Scientists site, which contains everything you can think of from open sources about this affair, arranged in chronological order:
812 pp. 14.6 MB

rev. wright on bill moyers april 26

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

rev. jeremiah wright video index

Bill Moyers, April 26
NAACP, Detroit, April 27
National Press Club, April 28

institution d.o.l. : just cause

discover the network, so to speak

More on the Likudist Fronts (extracts)
Jim Lobe, Antiwar Blog

Further to last month’s post, “Is the Pentagon Policy Shop Funding Likudist Fronts?, Devon Gaffney Cross’ London-based Policy Forum for International Security Affairs, Jeffrey Gedmin’s Case for Freedom, and Anatol Sharansky’s One Jerusalem, all appear to have a common, Israel-based IP address, interlocking directorates, and common participation at last June’s Prague Conference on Democracy and Security, about which I’ve written twice, here and here. One Jerusalem’s director, a New York-based attorney named Allen Roth, it turns out, is a long-time aide and adviser to Ronald Lauder, who reportedly gave $1m to One Jerusalem to launch a campaign against Bush’s Annapolis conference last fall. In his capacity as president of the World Jewish Congress, a post to which he was elected in 2007, Lauder appealed to Ehud Olmert not to do anything that would compromise Israeli sovereignty over the entire city.

Gedmin is the former director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which sent a five-person delegation, led by Richard Perle and Michael Novak, to the Prague Conference. Shortly after 9/11, in November, 2001, Gedmin became head of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, where his job, according to right-wing Philanthropy Roundtable’s National Terror Guidebook, was to “explain key Bush administration policies and challenge the more common assumptions held by Europeans about the United States,” somewhat similarly to Devon Gaffney Cross, who began operating her Policy Forum in London in 2002. Gedmin boasted to his new colleagues that he was bringing to his new job a $1m grant from Lauder’s foundation. The Berlin office was also awarded a $1.7m grant in FY 2005 from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, then overseen by Liz Cheney, to “bring together key policy makers, opinion leaders, NGO representatives, media, and human rights activists from the Middle East, Europe and the US to discuss practical steps toward the promotion of civil society and democracy in the region.”

Gedmin is in charge of US government broadcasting to Arab and Iranian audiences on issues such as US policy in the Middle East and the Gulf. Another AEI alumnus, James Glassman, is chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the RFE/RL’s oversight body, and has been nominated to serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. The same IP address that is home to One Jerusalem, Case for Freedom, and Policy Forum also hosts the personal blog of Caroline Glick ,who “travels several times a year to Washington to brief senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.” Gaffney is Devon Cross’ brother and a beneficiary of casino king Irving Moskowitz. Zacharias Gertler, who served with Roth as a director of Cross’s Policy Forum until last May, was credited by yet another close Netanyahu and One Jerusalem associate, Dore Gold, with being “the real force who inspired” his 2003 book, Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, in which Gertler’s help and encouragement are noted, directly before those of Yigal Carmon, the president and co-founder with Meyrav Wurmser of MEMRI, and of Allen Roth and Steven Schneier, a major Netanyahu fund-raiser who also attended the Prague conference as a representative of the Policy Forum. Gold’s writings are a frequent feature on one jerusalem’s website [...]

wapo lies to conceal israeli war crimes

Here, for comparison, is al Jazeera’s video report:

Mother, 4 Children Die After Israel Strikes Gaza
Griff Witte, Washington Post, April 29, 2008

A mother and four children were killed in Gaza on Monday after an Israeli airstrike targeting two gunmen sparked an explosion that destroyed the family’s kitchen. Israeli military officials said the blast was caused by explosives that the two gunmen were carrying in backpacks. But Gazan medical officials said the Israeli fire had directly struck the one-story, corrugated metal home of the Abu Meiteg family as the children and their mother began to eat breakfast. The children ranged in age from 1 1/2 to 5. The blast also killed a teenager passing by the home, and the Israeli military said he may have been one of the targeted gunmen. The Israeli military blamed Hamas for the deaths, saying the organization was using civilians “as human shields and risking their lives by keeping bombs and explosives near them.” Military spokeswoman Maj. Avital Leibovich said that two gunmen with backpacks slung over their shoulders were approaching Israeli soldiers Monday morning and that an airstrike was called in to intercept them.

london’s guardian puts the boot in

Wright says criticism of his views are attack on US black churches
Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian, April 29 2008

Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago pastor whose provocative sermons have damaged Barack Obama’s campaign, yesterday condemned criticism of his views as an attack on America’s black churches. Yesterday’s appearance was Wright’s third in four days as he tried to counter the media uproar over his sermons. But his combination of defiance and sarcastic one-liners looked more likely to inflame a controversy that has turned Wright into a hate figure of the rightwing cable networks, and allowed critics to paint Obama as unpatriotic and divisive. Much of yesterday’s prepared speech, before a largely African-American audience, was devoted to the history of black US churches. Wright argued the soundbites that have done such damage to the Obama campaign came from a failure to understand traditions of black worship. “This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright,” he said. “It has nothing to do with Senator Obama. It is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition.” But that line of thought was quickly overtaken by Wright’s testy exchanges with the moderator. Within hours, cable television pundits declared Wright’s appearance a disaster for the Obama campaign, complicating its efforts to win over white working class voters in North Carolina and Indiana on May 6.

The Republican John McCain on Sunday launched his first attack on Wright. Republicans in North Carolina have used footage of Wright’s sermons in attack ads against Democratic candidates. Yesterday Obama, who was campaigning in North Carolina, was forced once again to distance himself from the leader of a church he has attended for 20 years. “I have said before and I will say again that some of the comments Reverend Wright has made offend me and I understand why they have offended the American people,” he told reporters. Obama sought last month to answer doubts about Wright with a well-received address on race. But the racial divide exposed by Wright’s comments remained palpable. A handful of picketers outside the National Press Club carried signs reading “Wright is an Obamination”, “Wright is Wrong”, and “Chickens Come Home to Roost”. Inside, Wright faced questions such as: “Do you think people of other races would feel welcome at your church?”

Wright did not disown the most controversial of the soundbites—that America bore some blame for the attacks of 9/11. “You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic principles,” he said. He also praised Louis Farrakhan, who many regard as anti-semitic, as “one of the most important voices in 20th and 21st century”. And he recalled the Tuskegee experiments, in which hundreds of black men in Alabama went untreated for syphilis so that doctors could study the progress of the disease. “Based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe that our government is capable of doing anything,” he said. He got the most enthusiastic applause as well as cheers for rejecting the notion that his criticism of the Iraq war or racism in America was unpatriotic. “My goddaughter’s unit arrived in Iraq this week, while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service, while sending over 4,000 American boys and girls to die over a lie!” He took a shot at the vice-president, Dick Cheney, saying: “I served six years in the military. Does that make me unpatriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?” It seemed as if Wright was stung by suggestions Obama had sought to distance himself from the man who brought him to the church, and presided over his marriage and the baptism of his two daughters. But Wright said that he has put Obama on notice that if he is elected next November, he can expect his old pastor to be watching. “I’m coming after you,” he said. “Whether he gets elected or not, I’m going to have to be answerable to God.”

Past Present
Jeremy Lott, Comment, Guardian, April 28, 2008

Over the weekend and in his speech at the National Press Club today, senator Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright tried very hard to work around the fact that he preaches a theology of grievance. This preaching has helped to bind many followers of Trinity United Church of Christ together in solidarity, and that bond has helped them to do many good things and transform lives. But it is still a solidarity of us versus them that the good reverend would denounce as racist and intolerable if espoused by white Americans.

On Friday, Bill Moyers ran an hour-long interview with Wright that was as softballish as any embattled public figure could ever hope for, and the reverend did a decent job representing himself. He didn’t apologise for past remarks, but, watching him interact with Moyers now contrasted with clips of past Jeremiads, viewers could at least come away with the sense that he’d mellowed. Wright insisted that these “soundbites” did not represent the totality of his message. When Moyers suggested that Americans did not really want to tolerate his preaching, Wright argued that was overblown. He said, rightly, that other regimes would have executed him for speaking out so audaciously. That must have given folks in the Obama campaign some hope that Wright would moderate his message. Though when they heard Wright pick a fight over Ebonics at the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in Detroit Sunday night, by mocking the speech patterns of former presidents Kennedy and Johnson, they went into full spin mode.

Before today’s speech, Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC of Obama that Wright “was his pastor” and that “the relationship isn’t that close.” Axelrod chided the press for giving this marginal figure—who, after all, had only led Obama to the faith, baptised him, officiated at his marriage, baptised his children and preached the sermon that gave the Democratic presidential hopeful the title of his campaign book—”a huge media platform”. The point of the Press Club address was to kick off the annual Samual DeWitt Proctor Conference of African-American religious scholars. Wright painted in broad strokes the development of black churches in the United States, from an underground movement that was suppressed by slave owners to the powerhouse that it’s become today. He touched on the role of white Christian churches in creating the underground railroad. And he laid out the three pillars of modern liberation theology: “liberation and transformation,” along with the “non-negotiable demand of reconciliation”.

Unfortunately, at right about question time, Wright started to lose it. He explained that the God of slave owners cannot be the same God that slaves worship, and that the God of Klansmen is not the God of the people that they terrorised. That may be true as far as it goes, but where are these slave owners or Klansmen? Americans fought a civil war and launched a great civil rights movement to put them in the past. Wright reiterated his notion of America as a nation conceived in terrorism and basically irredeemable. “You cannot do terrorism to other people and expect it never to come back to you,” he said. Thus he still stands by his infamous “chickens returning home to roost” preachment right after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of the wacky charge that Aids was invented by the American government and purposefully introduced to the black community, he explained: “I read different things.” He remains convinced that “our government is capable of doing anything.”

Of course, the best question of the morning was : why speak up now? Won’t it just hurt Barack Obama? Wright gave a baffling answer that had something to do with the black church, the late Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan and his mother. Wright claimed that he was speaking up as a preacher who was “not running for office” and thus didn’t give a fig for political considerations. However, he jokingly declared himself “open to being vice-president”. Let me just say, as an author of a book about the vice-presidency, that isn’t going to happen.