Operation Enduring Scam Endures in Afghanistan

The Great Afghan Corruption Scam - How Operation Enduring Freedom Mutated into Operation Enduring Corruption

by Dilip Hiro  - Tom Dispatch

Washington has vociferously denounced Afghan corruption as a major obstacle to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. This has been widely reported. Only one crucial element is missing from this routine censure: a credible explanation of why American nation-building failed there. No wonder. To do so, the U.S. would have to denounce itself.

Corruption in Afghanistan today is acute and permeates all sectors of society. In recent years, anecdotal evidence on the subject has been superseded by the studies of researchers, surveys by NGOs, and periodic reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 

 

There is also the Corruption Perceptions Index of the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI). Last year, it bracketed Afghanistan with two other countries as the most corrupt on Earth.

None of these documents, however, refers to the single most important fact when it comes to corruption: that it’s Washington-based. It is, in fact, rooted in the massive build-up of U.S. forces there from 2005 onward, the accompanying expansion of American forward operating bases, camps, and combat outposts from 29 in 2005 to nearly 400 five years later, and above all, the tsunami of cash that went with all of this.

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, How the Pentagon Corrupted Afghanistan

America’s post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush’s administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, and various oil companies, as well as a set of mercenary rent-a-gun outfits like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy that came into their own in this period. It took the plunge into Iraq in March 2003, sweeping those corporations and an increasingly privatized military in with it. In the process, Iraq would become an example not of the free market system, but of a particularly venal form of crony capitalism (or, as Naomi Klein has labeled it, “disaster capitalism”).

Add in another factor: in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began pouring money into the Pentagon, into, that is, an organization whose budget has never been able to pass an audit. There was so staggeringly much money to throw around then -- and hubris to spare as well. Among the first acts of L. Paul Bremer III, the new American proconsul in Baghdad, was the disbanding of Saddam Hussein’s army (creating an unemployed potential insurgent class) and the closing down of a whole range of state enterprises along with the privatization of the economy (creating their unemployed foot soldiers). All of this, in turn, paved the way for a bonanza of “reconstruction” contracts granted, of course, to the administration’s favorite corporations to rebuild the country. There were slush funds aplenty; money went missing without anyone blinking; and American occupation officials reportedly “systematically looted” Iraqi funds.

In April 2003, when American troops entered Baghdad, it was already aflame and being looted by its own citizens. As it turned out, the petty looters soon enough went home -- and then the real looting of the country began. The occupiers, thanks to the U.N., fully controlled Iraq’s finances and no one at the U.N. or elsewhere had the slightest ability to exercise any real supervision over what the occupation regime did or how it spent Iraq’s money. Via a document labeled “Order 17,” Bremer granted every foreigner connected to the occupation enterprise the full freedom of the land, not to be interfered with in any way by Iraqis or any Iraqi political or legal institution. He gave them all, that is, an official get-out-of-jail-free card.

Who could be surprised, then, that the massive corporate attempt to rebuild Iraq would result in a plague of overbilling, remarkable amounts of shoddy or useless work, and a blown $60 billion “reconstruction” effort that would leave the country with massive unemployment and without reliable electricity, water, or sewage systems? Could there be a sadder story of how war making and corruption were being wedded on a gigantic scale in an already fading new century? As it turned out, the answer to that question was: yes.

Iraqi corruption was no anomaly of war, as TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro makes clear today. Just consider the way Washington turned the “liberation” of Afghanistan into another field day for corruption. Tom

The Great Afghan Corruption Scam - How Operation Enduring Freedom Mutated into Operation Enduring Corruption

by Dilip Hiro 

Last month, when an Afghan court sentenced Sher Khan Farnood and Khalil Ullah Ferozi, the chairman and chief executive of the Kabul Bank, for looting its deposits in a gigantic Ponzi scheme, the event received some media attention. Typically, however, the critical role of the Americans in the bank’s murky past was missing in action.

Founded as a private company in 2004, the Kabul Bank was promptly hailed by American officials in Afghanistan as a linchpin in the country’s emerging free market economic order. In 2005, action followed words. The Pentagon, paymaster for the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), signed a contract with the bank to disperse the salaries of ANSF soldiers and policemen.

With that, the fledgling financial institution acquired an impressive cash flow. Moreover, such blatant American support generated confidence among better-off Afghans. Soon enough, they were lining up to deposit their money. Starting in 2006, the surging inflow of cash encouraged Farnood and Ferozi to begin skimming off depositors’ funds as unsecured loans to themselves through fake front companies. Thus was born the world’s largest banking scam (when calculated as a percentage of the country’s gross domestic product) with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acting as its midwife.

How It All Happened

There exists a statistical connection between the sums expended by Washington in Afghanistan and worsening corruption in that hapless nation. It is to be found in the TI’s Corruption Index. In 2005, Afghanistan ranked 117th among the 158 countries surveyed. By 2007, as American greenbacks poured into the country, only two of 179 nations surpassed it in corruption. Since 2011, it has remained at the very bottom of that index.

What changed between 2005 and 2007? By the spring of 2006, the Taliban insurgency had already gained control of 20 districts in the southern part of the country and was challenging U.S. and NATO forces in the strategic Kandahar area. With a sectarian war by then raging in U.S.-occupied Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld felt that he could increase the American military presence in Afghanistan only marginally.

This started to change when Robert Gates took over at the Pentagon in December 2006. He began bolstering U.S. combat units there. As a result, forward operating bases multiplied, as did combat outposts and military camps. Building new sites or upgrading old ones on the double meant that the Pentagon started awarding contracts to local Afghan construction companies unaccustomed to handling such tasks quickly. They, in turn, subcontracted tasks out to those who greased their palms. With the infusion of ever more piles of Pentagon dollars, corruption only spread.

Later, each of these bases and outposts had to be supplied with food, water, fuel, and other necessities as well as war materials. In addition, the Pentagon accelerated its program of bolstering the nascent Afghan security forces by covering the full cost of training, equipping, and paying its personnel, as well as building bases and outposts for them. As a consequence, contracts to Afghan transport companies ballooned, as would contracts to Afghan private security outfits to protect the trucks hauling provisions and materials in that increasingly war-torn country.

So, of course, did the opportunities for graft.

Between 2005 and 2007, when American combat forces in Afghanistan doubled, the Pentagon’s budget for the Afghan War leaped from $17.2 billion to $34.9 billion annually. ANSF personnel also doubled, from 66,000 to 125,000 troops and policemen, though at a relatively marginal cost to the Pentagon. At $16,000 a year, the burden of maintaining an Afghan soldier was a paltry 2% of the $800,000 it cost to maintain his American counterpart.

In this period, opportunities for corruption rose exponentially. Why? In part, because the Pentagon was unable to protect the supply convoys of its Afghan contractors, something that would have required tens of thousands more U.S. troops. The distance between the main supply center at Bagram Air Base near the capital Kabul and the city of Kandahar in the Taliban-infested south was 300 miles; and the Taliban heartland in Helmand Province lay another 100 miles from Kandahar. Since Afghanistan lacks railroads, the only way to transport goods and people was to use the roads.

The Bagram-Kandahar highway was peppered with roadblocks, each manned by the armed fighters of the dominant warlord, who collected an arbitrary “transit tax.” The only way the transport companies could perform their job was by buying safe passage from the rulers of the highway and so parting with bribes of approximately $1,500 per truck between Bagram and Kandahar, and another $1,500 between Kandahar and Helmand. All of this came from the cash the Pentagon was so profligately doling out.

The warlords and private security contractors, in turn, gave bribes to the Taliban for the safe passage of these convoys. In essence, therefore, the Pentagon was helping finance its enemy in order to distribute necessary supplies to its bases. In addition, on “safe” roads, checkpoints were often manned by Afghan policemen, who extorted bribes by threatening to pass advance information about a convoy on to the Taliban.

This process became an important element in systematic graft on a grand scale triggered by the $60 billion a year that the Pentagon was, by 2009, spending on its Afghan War.

Then there were the petty bribes that ordinary Afghans regularly pay to civil servants and policemen. These are extracted from citizens for favors or preferential treatment by officials in public service ministries when it comes to such basics as gaining entrance to school for a child, securing a bed in a hospital, or getting a driver’s license or building permit. They represent a commonplace phenomenon not just in Afghanistan, but also elsewhere in South and Southwest Asia.

While ignoring Pentagon-financed sleaze on an industrial scale, the NGOs and UNDOC go through the ritual of quantifying corruption in the country by questioning a sample of Afghans regarding the small bribes -- popularly called baksheesh (literally, “gratuity”) -- they pay to public officials. They come up with such earth-shaking conclusions as that 50% of the population paid a bribe in 2012, “down” from 58% in 2009 (the year of the previous survey).

A 2009 survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) focusing on petty or administrative corruption put the total for such bribery nationally at $1 billion -- less, that is, than half the $2.16 billion that the Pentagon disbursed in a single gigantic contract under the label of “Host Nation Trucking” for ferrying supplies to its bases.

Soaking the Pentagon-funded Security Forces

Another major source of systematic corruption: the filching of Pentagon money via salaries paid to “ghost soldiers” and policemen, recruits enrolled in the Afghan security forces who don’t exist. Here, too, Washington’s funds became the basis for embezzlement and “Afghan” corruption.

Up to 90% of Afghan troops and police are illiterate, and about a quarter of the force deserts annually. This has provided rich opportunities for commanders to pad their lists of soldiers with so-called ghosts, keep them on the books, and pocket their salaries. (It is worth recalling that this practice became similarly widespread in the South Vietnamese army during the American war in Vietnam.)

Besides filching salaries, enterprising police and army commanders have made money by reselling Pentagon war materials. For instance, according to documents leaked by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, a police chief in the eastern town of Zurmat reported fictitious firefights with the Taliban, and upon being restocked with thousands of rounds of ammunition, sold them to a bazaar merchant. Another provincial police commissioner purloined food and uniforms, while leaving his men cold and underfed in the winter. Such acts led to the creation of a significant black market in U.S. military equipment and goods of every sort.

In its drive to win the hearts and minds of Afghan villagers, the Pentagon’s policymakers also gave cash directly to U.S. officers to fund the building of wells, schools, and health clinics in areas where they were posted. The stress was on quick, visible results -- and they were indeed quick and visible: the funds generally ended up in the pockets of rural power brokers with little oversight and no accountability, particularly when the American officer involved usually left the area after a relatively brief tour of duty.

Later, the State Department’s Agency for International Development (USAID) took over this role. As with the Pentagon, most of the money it distributed ended up in the pockets of those local power brokers. By some accounts, USAID lost up to 90 cents of each dollar spent on certain projects. According to a Congressional report published in June 2011, much of the $19 billion in foreign aid that the U.S. pumped into Afghanistan after 2001 was probably destabilizing the country in the long term.

Staggering amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars allocated to aid Afghanistan were spent so quickly and profligately that they circumvented any anti-corruption, transparency, or accountability controls and safeguards that existed on paper. However, those who amassed bagsful of dollars faced a problem. Afghanistan’s underdeveloped $12 billion economy -- a sum Washington spent in that country in a single month in 2011 -- did not offer many avenues for legitimate profitable investment. Therefore, most of this cash garnered on a colossal scale exited the country, large parts of it ending up in banks and real estate in the Gulf emirates, especially freewheeling Dubai.

U.S. Diplomats Ignored Kabul Bank Shenanigans

Kabul Bank caught the essence of all this in a single Afghan institution, the brainchild of an Afghan who stood out as a man for all seasons. In their enthusiasm to welcome the founding of an ambitious private bank, American officials, wedded to their free market theology, overlooked the shady background of Kabul Bank Chairman Farnood. An ethnic Uzbek, he moved to Moscow during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Toward the end of that decade, he started an informal money transfer business or hawala that would prove useful for drug smugglers who wanted to transfer their cash into Afghanistan and the adjoining Socialist Republic of Tajikistan.

Before the Russian authorities shut down his outfit for money laundering in 1998, Farnood escaped to Dubai. As the main hub of the hawala business covering Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and the Indian subcontinent, it was a perfect refuge for him. There he also became known as a sharp poker player.

The Russian interior ministry pursued him, but by 2007, when it got Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for him, he was the honorable chairman of Kabul Bank (with his former bodyguard, Ferozi, as its chief executive officer). And his bank had acquired nearly a million customers, including 250,000 Afghan security soldiers and policemen. Unsurprisingly, the interior ministry in Kabul ignored the Interpol warrant. So apparently did the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

When news of his jaw-dropping embezzlement and Ponzi scheme broke in September 2010, USAID officials expressed surprise and shock. They would have had to be blind and deaf not to have seen or heard the dark rumors about their star financial institution that had already been swirling around Kabul’s diplomatic and financial circles. They could not, however, maintain the charade of ignorance once WikiLeaks published Kabul embassy cables, some of them dating from 2009, mentioning the bank’s scandalous transgressions.

By September 2010, almost $1 billion had gone missing from the bank, with Farnood and Ferozi pocketing $900 million, significant amounts of which they invested in luxurious villas in Dubai. Last month, a few liberal Western journalists made a point of the way Afghan judges had dropped the most serious charges of embezzlement, forgery, and money laundering against Farnood and Ferozi, convicting them instead of “breach of trust.” However, none of the journalists or commentators pointed out the inconvenient fact that U.S. officials had heartily approved of the bank’s founding, had helped raise its stature and improve its cash flow, and had later overlooked the egregious misdeeds of its prime founders.

In the next two years, as Washington draws down its forces in Afghanistan and the situation there disintegrates further, there will undoubtedly be more stories about “Afghan” corruption. Given that, it’s well worth recalling the following facts: it was the U.S. that flooded the country with military and aid funds, while expediently skipping any process of oversight, and so turned Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Corruption.

 

 

Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of 33 books, the most recent being Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (Yale University Press, New Haven and London).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Dilip Hiro

Leaked!: Harper Government Aims to Conquer Internet

Harper Government Using 'Slash and Burn Tactics' to Reduce Online Information

by Vincent Gogolek - FIPA

The B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) had recently received leaked documents detailing a new federal government plan to make government websites a whole lot less informative.

Since being tipped off to the plan, FIPA has attempted to obtain details under the Access to Information Act. Unfortunately, we keep running into roadblocks thrown up by the Treasury Board, the domain of -- you guessed it -- open government minister Tony Clement. First, Clement's department demanded thousands of dollars in fees to process the request. Now they're insisting on hundreds of days of delays to allow for unspecified "consultations."

Frustrating as this process has been, our leaked documents show it's no surprise that the government is dragging things out.

In our hot little hands, we hold a PowerPoint presentation that outlines the federal government's Web Renewal Action! Plan (available in two parts here and here). Scheduled to roll out at the end of this month, the plan will bring about some major changes in how government information is posted and archived online, and not for the better.

Authorized by the prime minister himself (see slide 2 of part one), it clearly outlines the government's intention to drastically cut the number of government websites available to Canadians. Initially, the page count will be slashed to six, with the ultimate goal of consolidating all online Government of Canada information into one big website.

Even more worrisome is the fact that the government is also contemplating making content available according to popularity (see slides 4 and 6 of part one), preserving only that which receives a suitable number of clicks. Because everyone knows the most important information is always the most popular.

Although the deadline for the change is the end of this month, many of the proposed changes have already taken place.

Note, for example, the new blue and white motif that now graces some ministerial websites, as well as the Government of Canada landing page. More standardized layouts have also been introduced.

But that consolidation is coming at a steep cost. Information has already started to disappear from the revamped websites. The Department of Justice website used to include a section for minister's speeches, archived by year. In the transition to the new format, that section was apparently axed.

Though perhaps this is because Justice Minister Rob Nicholson hadn't posted a single speech since March 2010 and it was starting to get embarrassing.

The Aboriginal Portal, established in 2001, is also gone. Today, the site simply hosts a piece of text declaring that, since there is now more information on aboriginal issues available elsewhere online, the records once archived in the portal are no longer necessary. According to the government, "search engines and social media have rendered the portal website obsolete." Apparently Twitter has displaced properly vetted and archived government records.

These slash-and-burn tactics, though, are not without opposition. Librarians at the Universities of Toronto and Alberta wisely crawl-captured the content before it was stuffed down the memory hole. Clearly these information experts aren't convinced that information has a "best before" date. Many of the links they managed to grab, however, are already dead.

A number of these cuts to archived materials were announced in the last federal budget:

Further to the 2012 Budget, the decision has been made to completely transition all publications published by the Publishing Program and publications provided by departments to the Depository Services Program from traditional print to exclusively electronic publication in two years.

But there's a small problem. The staff for digitization at Libraries and Archives Canada has also been cut by 50 per cent. This means that new publications will go up online, but older information in hard copy is even less likely to become available.

Long-term research and evidence-based policy making are about to get a lot tougher.

This is all on top of the frequent erasure and/or alteration of electronic information under this government. Recall the mysterious disappearance of information about environmental protection from the Navigable Waters Act online FAQ after a Harper government minister was embarrassed in the House.

But we are saying this based on the information that has leaked out so far. So if anyone at Treasury Board has concerns with the completeness of the details in this blog post, feel free to send us any information you wish. Starting with what we have already requested through ATI.

All of it.


Vincent Gogolek is the Executive Director of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association. You can follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@BCFIPA

Cyprus: Life Beneath the Sword

Cyprus Day 3: The Sword of Damocles Still Hangs Over the Island

by Patrick Henningsen - 21st Century Wire

PAPHOS – While bureaucrats and technocrats in Nicosia have been busy trying agree on an even more horrible haircut than the each of the previous Troika proposals, the EU’s deadly pathogen has begun to spread to the far corners of the country, hitting the southern seaside tourist town of Paphos.
Cyprus managed to avoid the initial danger of an all out bank run and the potential for mass rioting this week, which is probably down to the fact that no Cypriot wants to see their country become a lawless banana republic in the Mediterranean.

But that calm will not last for long if banking oligarchs continue to pressurize this economy.

Capital controls and frozen bank deposits mean that thousands of businesses are now being strangled of operating funds. It’s a very bad scene. One successful Paphos bar owner, named Nicolas, is being hit particularly hard, and told us that his story is the same as every local trader he knows.

He explained, “Our credit card merchant account was with Laiki Bank and we cannot access it anymore, so we cannot take cards. People aren’t spending money. All my suppliers are demanding cash for deliveries, and we just haven’t got enough. They’ve got our cheques in the bank but we don’t have the funds to cover them. Staff need to be paid in cash daily now. My emergency funds are frozen in another bank account and cannot be accessed for 45 days. On top of that, tourism is down, and there’s no foreign money coming in anymore. We’ll be lucky if we’re still here in 4 or 6 months time”.

He adds, “The only thing which might remedy the situation is if the government impose austerity cuts on government spending”.

Listen to more of this interview here:

Day 3 Audio Highlights: Cyprus_Wipe_Out

PHOTO: Not quite Damocles, but local Nicosian demonstrates 
the concept to us in front of Bank of Cyprus.

In other words, things are likely to get much worse, as the Sword of Damocles is now hanging over the head of every Cypriot.

The story of Damocles is rather poignant in more ways than one. The story goes like this…

Dionysius (II) was a fourth century B.C. tyrant of Syracuse, a city in Magna Graecia, the Greek area of southern Italy. To all appearances Dionysius was very rich and comfortable, with all the luxuries money could buy, tasteful clothing and jewelry, and delectable food. He even had court flatterers (adsentatores) to inflate his ego. One of these ingratiators was the court sycophant, Damocles. Damocles used to make comments to the king about his wealth and luxurious life. One day when Damocles complimented the tyrant on his abundance and power, Dionysius turned to Damocles and said, “If you think I’m so lucky, how would you like to try out my life?”
Damocles readily agreed, and so Dionysius ordered everything to be prepared for Damocles to experience what life as Dionysius was like. Damocles was enjoying himself immensely… until he noticed a sharp sword hovering over his head, that was suspended from the ceiling by a horse hair. This, the tyrant explained to Damocles, was what life as ruler was really like.
Damocles, alarmed, quickly revised his idea of what made up a good life, and asked to be excused. He then eagerly returned to his poorer, but safer life.”

The story of Damocles can be applied two ways here. Everyone we spoke to here on Cyprus is aware that this sword is hanging over them, suspended by threads. That is obvious to the thousands of small to medium size businesses who are all hanging in there, and barely holding on in the face of capital controls and an acute liquidity shortage. If they didn’t have sufficient cash reserves before this crisis hit, then it’s doubtful that they will be able to weather the storm indefinitely.

The deeper aspect of Damocles here, is that before joining the EU and opting into the euro single currency, Cyprus was a closed economy and could more easily manage its domestic and incoming cash. It’s currency, the Cypriot Pound, was one of the strongest in the world. It filled a gap in the international market by offering a secure and profitable offshore destination for capital investment. Why worry when everyone seemed to be doing well? Then came the Russian money, and then the housing bubble, and the euro – which turned this small island of 800,000 into a speculative free-for-all, where incoming cheap money corrupted nearly every level of Cypriot society. This period of speculative gambling based in Nicosia was transposed on top of an already existing, pre-euro layer of backhanders and fat brown envelopes.

It was a perfect storm for our Damocles. All the while, shrewd shylocks in New York, London, Berlin and their court administrators in Brussels, where watching closely, and simply waiting for someone to spring the trap. Arguably, that someone was a Dubai-backed, high-flying Greek tycoon, Andreas Vgenopoulos, who took control of Cyprus’s Laiki Bank and proceeded to attach the Cyprus banks to a sinking Greek financial system.

You can blame Vgenopoulos, or Laiki management, or you can blame the money laundering, or the Troika. You can even blame the corrupt politicians, but in the end, all anyone could do in the end is stand and watch its balance sheet go up in flames. and watch it sink to the bottom. Corruption in Nicosia left the Troika mafia in control of the entire country of Cyprus. Like Damocles, some older Cypriots are now longing for their old farming lives, where living off the land was part and parcel of living here.

 
PHOTO: The bank run never happened, partly because 
everyone knew there would be capital controls.

As is always the case these days, the elite financial wars and ponzi schemes end in disaster for the average saver, and even worse for the above average saver. The people are asked to pay for the collective losses of the elite.

A local restaurant owner in Larnaca, Mr Petreu, told us a story which made my heart sink, and one which illustrates the Greek tragedy unfolding before our eyes here. His business is already being ravaged by an EU funded motorway project which is running along the beach front and will cut off most of his trade as a result. Contractors are moving at a snails pace and is expected to take two years to complete. Eurocrats and the firms profiting from the work have offered no compensation, and some suspect that this EU road works project was lobbied for in Brussels and done by design, in order to crush already struggling long-term resident businesses, in order to redevelop the area with modern multimillion dollar properties and casinos in Larnaca in a bid to attract Gulf state billions and wealthy Northern European money there. Now the banking crisis has hit as a left-hook, knockout punch.

He explains, “For 29 years, I have always paid my rent on time, but this week I had to call my landlord to tell her to reduce my rent or I cannot afford to pay it. So I gave her that choice – reduce the rent or take me to court because either way, I can no longer afford it.” 

The next call could be to his daughter at university, saying he cannot afford to help finance her higher education any longer.

These are the stories which people like Christine La Garde and Angela Merkel will never hear, even though they have the power to rectify the situation. If you still think they really care, then you are probably still in denial.

SEE ALSO:
Cyprus Day 1: Fear and Loathing in Nicosia
Cyprus Day 2: As the Dust Settles, Talk of Reciprocity and Whispers of Retribution

RT in Cyprus: ‘Troika will take everything and push Russians out’

-
Watch the UK Column Live TV program on Tues at 1pm GMT, and visit the UK Column website for more reports from Cyprus.

Denman Island Suffers April Fools' Chemtrail Assault

Denman Island Suffers April Fools' Chemtrail Assault

Shots taken from 9 am until 11am this morning; monday april first that is the southern tip of Denman Island and the light station Chrome Island in the view.

Our clear blue sky has gone...

I have been outside working in the garden all week from 9am until 3pm and over the past 7 days we have had 4 jets fly over.  we are not on a flight path.  Today in 3 hours i saw about 8 jets...

guess the joke is one us eh?

Dimon's Girl: Mary Jo White Named New Securities Exchange Commission's Top Cop

New SEC Head Once Acted for Wall St Wonder Boy Dimon

by TRNN

Dimitri Lascaris: New director of SEC was a Wall St. defense attorney who will now regulate former clients. 

 

Dimitri Lascaris is a partner with the Canadian law firm of Siskinds where he heads the firms securities class actions group. Before joining Siskinds, he practiced securities law in the New York and Paris offices of a major Wall Street law firm. Last year, he was named by Canadian Lawyer Magazine as one of the 25 most influential lawyers in Canada. He is currently prosecuting numerous securities class actions in Canada, including the Sino-Forest class action in which his clients just negotiated the largest auditor settlement in Canadian history – a $117 million settlement with the accounting firm, Ernst & Young. 

Shielding Wall Street While Prying into America's Bank Accounts

Obama's New SEC 'Sheriff:' No Conflict of Interest When it Comes to Shielding Wall Street's Pin Striped Mafia

by Tom Burghardt - Anti-Fascist Calling

One indelible sign of state capture by pirate corporations and the financial jackals holding sway on Wall Street and the City of London is the ease with which former "regulators" slip into plum positions with the firms whom they supposedly "regulated" as "public servants."

While the drone kill-crazy Obama regime has done yeoman's work cementing in place extra-constitutional policies first enacted by the Bush gang--only to exceed Bushist depredations by a whole order of magnitude--kool-aid sipping "progressives" and troglodytic "conservatives" have given the president a free pass when it comes to policing the financial criminals who blew up the world economy.

But when it comes to US spy agencies probing and sweeping up your financial information, well, the sky's the limit!

As Reuters reported last week, the administration "is drawing up plans" to give securocrats "full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document."

That Treasury plan would give secret state apparatchiks, including those ensconced at CIA, NSA and the Pentagon free reign to rummage through the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network's (FinCEN) massive database of "suspicious activity reports" routinely filed by "banks, securities dealers, casinos and money and wire transfer agencies." The FBI and DHS already have full access to that database under the Orwellian USA Patriot Act.

Under the proposal, FinCen data will be linked "with a computer network used by US defense and law enforcement agencies to share classified information called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System," according to Reuters.

And since requirements for filing SARs are "so strict," banks often "over-report," this "raises the possibility that the financial details of ordinary citizens could wind up in the hands of spy agencies," where it will live in perpetuity, "criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial," as Cryptohippie famously warned.

Got that? While Wall Street drug banks are handled with care because of the "collateral consequences" that might result from a criminal referral for laundering billions of narco-dollars, the average citizen's financial data will be fair game.

Which brings us back to Obama's anemic regulatory regime and the "sheriffs" eager to do the bankster's bidding.

Wall Street's Choice

As one of the filthiest dens of corruption in Washington, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is in a league of its own.

In late January, when the president announced he was nominating former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), The New York Times, as they are wont to do, proclaimed that the "White House delivered a strong message to Wall Street."

A rather ironic assertion considering the tens of millions of dollars "earned" defending Wall Street criminals by Debevoise & Plimpton partner Mary Jo and her millionaire lawyer husband John, a partner at the white shoe corporate litigation shop Cravath, Swaine & Moore, as Above the Law disclosed.

Keep in mind that White will soon lead an agency that for years covered-up financial crimes by routinely shredding tens of thousands of case files on everything from insider trading, securities fraud, market manipulation and the Madoff and Stanford Ponzi schemes, as a 2011 Rolling Stone investigation disclosed.

As I reported nearly three years ago during my investigation into now-convicted fraudster Allen Stanford's ties to the CIA over his role in laundering oceans of cash for the Agency's narcotrafficking assets, the SEC's Fort Worth office "stood down" multiple probes "at the request of another federal agency," which regional head of enforcement Stephen J. Korotash "declined to name."

Indeed, a 2010 report by the SEC's Office of the Inspector General found that another "former head of Enforcement in Fort Worth," Spencer C. Barasch, "played a significant role in multiple decisions over the years to quash investigations of Stanford," and sought to represent the dodgy banker "on three separate occasions after he left the Commission, and in fact represented Stanford briefly in 2006 before he was informed by the SEC Ethics Office that it was improper to do so."

Barasch eventually paid a $50,000 fine for ethics violations and "moved on."

Despite the SEC's documented history of sleaze and lax enforcement of rules that would earn the average citizen a one-way ticket to the slammer, on March 19 the Senate Banking Committee approved White's nomination by a vote of 21-1; the lone dissenter was Sherrod Brown (D-OH). A vote by the full Senate could come as early as next week and she is expected to be confirmed easily.

As a former US Attorney for the Southern District in New York (1993-2002), White has been described by corporate media as a "tough as nails" prosecutor for her role in bringing down Mafia wise guy John Gotti and for running to ground criminal mastermind Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (For a gripping account of how the FBI and US prosecutor's office botched that investigation and "foamed the runway" for the mass murder of 3,000 people on 9/11, readers should train their sights on Peter Lance's exposé, 1000 Years for Revenge).

White's record when it came to holding financial criminals to account however, was even more dubious; in fact, for more than a decade she's defended them.

Times' stenographers dialed back their glowing encomiums for the Obama nominee, writing that "translating that message into action will not be easy, given the complexities of the market and Wall Street's aggressive nature."

As reliable hands on the financial beat, Dealbook reporters routinely trumpet everything from the Justice Department's sweetheart deal with drug money laundering and terrorist-coddling banking giant HSBC to kissing Jamie Dimon's hem over billions of JPMorgan Chase losses last year in what were euphemistically described as a "bad bet on derivatives."

In the January puff-piece, reporters Ben Protess and Benjamin Weiser outdid themselves, claiming that with the White nomination "the president showed a renewed resolve to hold Wall Street accountable for wrongdoing."

However, a less than laudatory piece published by Bloomberg News took those fatuous claims to task. Financial columnist Jonathan Weil observed that while "The Securities and Exchange Commission couldn't get Ken Lewis on any securities-law violations after he helped drive Bank of America Corp. into the ground as its chief executive officer," the agency "is poised to get his attorney as its new chairman--and Morgan Stanley's, too."

But hey, it's not like the SEC is chock-a-block with conflicts of interest, right? Well, if a bracing read is what the doctor ordered, then turn your attention to a damning study released last month by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). Entitled, Dangerous Liaisons: Revolving Door at SEC Creates Risk of Regulatory Capture, author Michael Smallberg takes us on a 60-page tour of insider dealing and corruption that would make a Roman emperor blush.


According to Smallberg:

 "Between 2001 and 2010, more than 400 SEC alumni filed nearly 2,000 disclosure statements saying they planned to represent employers or clients before the agency. These alumni have represented companies during SEC investigations, lobbied the agency on proposed regulations, obtained waivers to soften the blow of enforcement actions, and helped clients win exemptions from federal law. On the other side of the revolving door, when industry veterans join the SEC, they may be in a position to oversee their former employers or clients, or may be forced to recuse themselves from working on crucial agency issues."

Talk about an agency blind in both eyes by design!

A Counsel with 'Juice'

One of the more egregious cases which came to light was SEC's handling of a 2005 insider trading case involving former agency enforcement head, Linda Thomsen, White and her client, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack.

Before her tenure as the agency's chief enforcement officer, Thomsen was in private practice at the powerhouse New York law firm, Davis, Polk & Wardell. During the capitalist financial meltdown, the company represented upstanding corporate citizens such as AIG, Freddie Mack, Lehman Brothers and drug-tainted Citigroup. Bulking up a stable of attorneys well-versed in regulatory matters, the firm has hired other former SEC officials, including Commissioner Annette Nazareth and Linda Thomsen.

Before sailing off to greener shores at Davis, Polk, Nazareth's claim to fame was standing up a voluntary "supervisory regime" for the largest "investment bank holding companies" who "policed" themselves by cratering the economy and costing taxpayers trillions in bailouts.

That program, the Consolidated Supervised Entity was scrapped in 2008. Why? According to a press release by then SEC head Christopher Cox (no slouch himself when it came to defending his corporatist masters): "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work. When Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, it created a significant regulatory gap by failing to give to the SEC or any agency the authority to regulate large investment bank holding companies, like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns." (emphasis added)

A "gap" large enough to fly a fleet 747s through and still have enough wiggle room to launch a dozen Saturn 5s into deep space!

And that insider trading case?

According to Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone investigation, in September 2004 SEC investigator Gary Aguirre was tasked to look into an insider trading complaint against "a hedge-fund megastar named Art Samberg. One day, with no advance research or discussion, Samberg had suddenly started buying up huge quantities of shares in a firm called Heller Financial."

Samberg was the founder of the multibillion dollar hedge fund, Pequot Capital Management, a firm which invested in a multitude of private and public equities and what are known as "distressed securities." These are investment instruments held by firms or government entities (paging Fannie Mae!) that are either in default, under bankruptcy protection or will soon be heading south. The most common securities of this type are bonds and bank debt (think residential mortgage backed securities and other toxic assets). Since the financial crisis, a booming market in distressed securities have earned savvy hedge fund mangers billions in fees as they seek influence with regulators over how that debt is restructured.

And since "influence" in Washington and the "juice" that comes with it on Wall Street is the name of the game, well, you get the picture.

"'It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller,' Aguirre recalls. 'And he wasn't just buying shares--there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day.' A few weeks later, Heller was bought by General Electric--and Samberg pocketed $18 million."

"After some digging," Taibbi wrote, "Aguirre found himself focusing on one suspect as the likely source who had tipped Samberg off: John Mack, a close friend of Samberg's who had just stepped down as president of Morgan Stanley."

According to Taibbi:

"Mack flew to Switzerland to interview for a top job at Credit Suisse First Boston. Among the investment bank's clients, as it happened, was a firm called Heller Financial. We don't know for sure what Mack learned on his Swiss trip; years later, Mack would claim that he had thrown away his notes about the meetings."

Rather conveniently, one might say.

In any event after returning from his Swiss Alps sojourn, in a classic case of "you scratch my back" Samberg cut his buddy Mack into a deal with a tech firm called Lucent, "a favor that netted him [Mack] more than $10 million." Shortly thereafter, "Samberg began buying-up every Heller share in sight, right before it was snapped up by GE."

An insider trading case worthy of further scrutiny, right? But when Aguirre told his boss [Robert Hanson] that he intended to interview Mack and the other principals, "things started getting weird." Taibbi noted that Aguirre's boss told the investigator that Mack "had powerful political connections."

Indeed he did. Like other Wall Street banksters, Mack had been a fundraising "Ranger" for the 2004 George W. Bush campaign, and when it became clear that a new product line needed to be rolled out, Mack crossed party lines and backed Hillary Clinton's ill-starred 2008 bid for the Oval Office.

How's that for clubby "bipartisanship"!

A 2007 report (large PDF file) published by the Senate Finance Committee titled The Firing of an SEC Attorney and the Investigation of Pequot Management, disclosed that "at least three experienced SEC officials believed in the summer of 2005 that questioning John Mack was an appropriate next step in the Pequot Investigation."

Indeed, Senate investigators revealed that "the most significant aspect" of Mack's 2006 SEC testimony (after the statute of limitations for prosecution had expired) "is his acknowledgement that he went to Switzerland to discuss becoming CSFB's CEO from July 26-28, 2001."

"In view of the fact that Mack also spoke with Samberg immediately upon his return to the United States on July 29, 2001," Senate staff disclosed, "the trading day before Samberg began heavily betting on Heller Financial stock, and on the same night Mack was permitted into a lucrative deal, there was more than a sufficient basis to justify taking Mack's testimony in the summer of 2005."

After first being given the go-ahead to interview Mack, "Aguirre's direct line of supervisors" including Hanson, Mark Kreitman and Paul Berger, got cold feet. Unfortunately for Aguirre, this came after he had briefed attorneys at Mary Jo White's old stomping ground and "criminal authorities in the Southern District opened their own investigations" into dubious deals between Samberg and Mack.

At that point, Senate investigators averred, "his supervisors' attitudes shifted dramatically," that is, "when officials from Morgan Stanley began contacting the SEC to learn about the potential impact of the investigation on its prospective CEO, John Mack." Only then did Hanson warn Aguirre that "it would be difficult to subpoena John Mack because of his 'powerful political connections'."

Aguirre told Senate investigators that "in a face-to-face meeting" with his boss, "Hanson said it would be very difficult to get permission to question Mack because of Mack's 'powerful political connections'."

Hanson however, denied everything and said during his Senate testimony "That doesn't sound like something I would say."

"As a general matter," Hanson testified, "I try to alert folk above me about significant developments in investigations that may trigger calls and the like so that they are not caught flat footed. I also think that Paul [Berger] and Linda [Thomsen] would want to know if and when we are planning to take Mack's testimony so that they can anticipate the response, which may include press calls that will likely follow. Mack's counsel will have 'juice' as I described last night--meaning that they will reach out to Paul and Linda (and possibly others)."

And who was Mack's "juiced" attorney? Why none other than Mary Jo White!

Unbeknownst to Aguirre, his supervisors were trading emails about his imminent firing from the agency. "With no knowledge of those emails," Senate investigators disclosed that Aguirre wrote Hanson again stating, that "before and after the Mack decision, you have told [me] several times that the problem in taking Mack's exam is his political clout, e.g., all the people that Mary Jo White can contact with a phone call."

At the same time that Aguirre was seeking to subpoena Mack's testimony, Morgan Stanley's board hired Debevoise & Plimpton to vet their soon-to-be reinstalled CEO. "Only two days after being retained," the Senate reported, "White did what the SEC did not do until more than a year later. She questioned John Mack: 'The other thing that I did for the board to gather what information I could on that time frame was to interview John Mack himself,'" White told investigators.

But she did more than that, demonstrating she indeed had plenty of "juice."

"That evening," the Senate disclosed, "White sent Thomsen an e-mail message marked 'URGENT' and asked that Thomsen return the call 'this evening.' Aguirre complained that the next day White delivered the e-mails that he had subpoenaed from Morgan Stanley directly to Linda Thomsen."

"On June 27," Aguirre testified, "I learned that Mack-Samberg emails, which I had subpoenaed from Morgan Stanley, had been delivered directly to the Director of Enforcement, Linda Thomsen. Neither I nor other staff had heard of this happening before. Indeed, the subpoena explicitly stated that the documents were to be delivered to me."

Evidence reviewed by the Senate Finance Committee "suggests that the reluctance to question Mack represents a much more subtle and pervasive problem than an individual partisan political favor. SEC officials were overly deferential to Mack--not because of his politics--but because he was an 'industry captain' who could hire influential counsel to represent him."

"In a shocking move that was later singled out by Senate investigators," Taibbi wrote, "the director actually appeared to reassure White, dismissing the case against Mack as 'smoke' rather than 'fire'."

"Aguirre didn't stand a chance," Taibbi noted. "A month after he complained to his supervisors that he was being blocked from interviewing Mack, he was summarily fired, without notice. The case against Mack was immediately dropped: all depositions canceled, no further subpoenas issued. 'It all happened so fast, I needed a seat belt,' recalls Aguirre, who had just received a stellar performance review from his bosses. The SEC eventually paid Aguirre a settlement of $755,000 for wrongful dismissal."

It gets better.

In a subsequent piece, Taibbi followed-up and discovered "not only did the SEC ultimately delay the interview of Mack until after the statute of limitations had expired, and not only did the agency demand an investigation into possible alternative sources for Samberg's tip (what Aguirre jokes was like 'O.J.'s search for the real killers'), but the SEC official who had quashed the Mack investigation, Paul Berger, took a lucrative job working for Morgan Stanley's law firm, Debevoise and Plimpton, just nine months after Aguirre was fired."

As it turned out, at the exact moment that Aguirre's investigation was being sabotaged, Senate investigators "uncovered an email to Berger from another SEC official, Lawrence West, who was also interviewing with Debevoise and Plimpton at the time."

"The e-mail was dated September 8, 2005 and addressed to Paul Berger with the subject line, 'Debevoise.' The body of the message read, 'Mary Jo [White] just called. I mentioned your interest'."

Taibbi observed:

"So Berger was passing notes in class to Mary Jo White about wanting to work for Morgan Stanley's law firm while he was in the middle of quashing an investigation into a major insider trading case involving the CEO of the bank. After the case dies, Berger later gets the multimillion-dollar posting and the circle is closed."

In later testimony to the Inspector General into Debevoise & Plimpton's eventual hiring of Berger by a firm that boasts on their web site that she leads a "team" which "includes eleven former Assistant US Attorneys," White's comments on whether Berger was considered too "aggressive" in prosecuting Wall Street criminals is all-too-revealing.

"You always have a spectrum on the aggressiveness scale for government types and was this an issue that was beyond real commitment to the job and the mission and bringing cases," White affirmed, "which is a positive thing in the government, to a point. Or was it a broader issue that could leave resentment in the business community or in the legal community that would hamper his ability to function well in the private sector?"

"It's certainly strange that White has to qualify the idea that bringing cases is a positive thing in a government official--that bringing cases is a 'positive thing . . . to a point'," Taibbi noted. "Can anyone imagine the future head of the DEA saying something like, 'For a prosecutor, bringing drug cases is a positive, to a point'?"

And what about Linda Thomsen? In 2008, the SEC's inspector general, H. David Kotz, urged disciplinary action against her over her role in Aguirre's squashed investigation of Samberg and Mack. While Samberg was eventually forced out of business, barred from working as an investment adviser and paid a $28 million fine for his shenanigans, Thomsen landed on her feet.

After refusing to answer relevant questions in 2009 before the House Committee on Financial Services probe into the SEC's failure to investigate the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, due to a "collective desire to preserve the integrity of the investigative and prosecution processes" mind you, Thomsen resigned and rejoined Davis, Polk and Wardell.

Later that year, Kotz released a report to Congress of the IG's investigation into a "Senior Officer" who provided "inside information" to a "former official." As it turns out that "Senior Officer" was Linda Thomsen and that "official" was her former boss Stephen Cutler who had jumped ship and joined JPMorgan Chase.

According to The New York Times:

"Kotz said his office has concluded its well-publicized investigation into whether the SEC's enforcement director, Linda Chatman Thomsen, inappropriately provided inside information to her former boss, Stephen Cutler, now the general counsel of JPMorgan Chase, amid the bank's negotiations to buy Bear Stearns in March 2008."

"The inquiry," the Times reported, "which began in response to an anonymous tip, confirmed that Mr. Cutler sought assurances from Ms. Thomsen before the takeover that JPMorgan would not be sued for prior actions by Bear Stearns."

And who was representing JPMorgan Chase in the wake of the Bear Stearns collapse? If you guessed Mary Jo White, you'd be right again.

Less than three years later, during Senate Banking Committee confirmation hearings, White told the panel that "the American people will be my client, and I will work as zealously as possible on behalf of them."

But when questioned by Sherrod Brown (D-OH) whether or not White agreed with US Attorney General Eric Holder's statement which affirmed that "federal prosecutors are instructed . . . to look at . . . collateral consequences" should a financial institution or its officers be criminally charged, White agreed.

In a follow-up question, Brown wondered whether there is "a two-tiered system where we exempt the biggest banks because they have the most employees and shareholders who could be affected by criminal prosecution?"

White's answer pretty much sums up everything that's bent about Washington's culture of impunity when it comes to the Wall Street crimes: "It's a factor that prosecutors are directed to consider."

"I do think the deferred prosecution instrument," White asserted, "has been used a great deal on a number of companies, [and] was designed to be tough in terms of monetary sanctions, monitors--everything but the charge itself that might cause what the prosecutor might consider to be negative and undesirable collateral consequences to the public interest."

But what about harsher sanctions such as stripped assets, handcuffs and a jail cell for drug money laundering and securities scamming banksters, punishments that might actually deter corporate crime?

Forgetaboutit!

 

Tom Burghardt  is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. www.antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/

Obama High-Wire Walkin' What in Israel?

Obama Walks the High Wire, Eyes Closed: When It Comes to Israel, Palestine, and Iran, It Could All Come Crashing Down

by Ira Chernus - TomDispatch

Barack Obama came to Israel and Palestine, saw what he wanted to see, and conquered the mainstream media with his eloquent words. U.S. and Israeli journalists called it a dream trip, the stuff that heroic myths are made of: a charismatic world leader taking charge of the Mideast peace process. 

But if the president doesn’t wake up and look at the hard realities he chose to ignore, his dream of being the great peacemaker will surely crumble, as it has before.

Like most myths, this one has elements of truth. Obama did say some important things. In a speech to young Israelis, he insisted that their nation’s occupation of the West Bank is not merely bad for their country, it is downright immoral, “not fair... not just ... not right.”

Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Obama's Risky Middle East Fantasy

Had you searched for “Israel, nuclear weapons” at Google News in the wake of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: “Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon” (CNN), “Obama vows to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive” (the Times of Israel), Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran (the San Angelo Times), “US, Israel increasingly concerned about construction of Iran’s plutonium-producing reactor” (Associated Press), “Obama says ‘there is still time’ to find diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute; Netanyahu hints at impatience” (NBC), “Iran’s leader threatens to level cities if Israel attacks, criticizes US nuclear talks” (Fox).

By now, we’re so used to such a world of headlines -- about Iran’s threatening nuclear weapons and its urge to “wipe out” Israel -- that we simply don’t see how strange it is. At the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia (theoretically because of sequester budget cuts), the U.S. continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran. That modest-sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever-tightening sanctions, its skies filled with U.S. spy drones, its offshore waters with U.S. warships. Its nuclear scientists have been assassinated, assumedly by agents connected to Israel, and its nuclear program attacked by Washington and Tel Aviv in the first cyberwar in history. As early as 2007, the U.S. Congress was already ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars for a covert program of destabilization that evidently involved cross-border activities, assumedly using U.S. special operations forces -- and that's only what's known about the pressure being exerted on Iran. With this, and the near-apocalyptic language of nuclear fear that surrounds it, has gone a powerful, if not always acknowledged, urge for what earlier in the new century was called “regime change.” (Who can forget the neocon quip of the pre-Iraq-invasion moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran”?)

And all of this is due, so we're told, to what remains a fantasy nuclear weapon, one that endangers no one because it doesn’t exist, and most observers don’t think that Tehran is in the process of preparing to build one either. In other words, the scariest thing in our world, or at least in the Middle Eastern part of it -- if you believe Washington, Tel Aviv, and much reporting on the subject -- is a nuclear will-o'-the-wisp. In the meantime, curiously enough, months can pass without significant focus on or discussion of Pakistan’s expanding nuclear arsenal. And yet, in that shaky, increasingly destabilized country, such an existing arsenal has to qualify as a genuine and growing regional danger.

Similarly, you can read endlessly in the mainstream about President Obama’s recent triumphs in the Middle East and that Iranian nuclear program without ever stumbling upon anything of significance about the only genuine nuclear arsenal in the vicinity: Israel’s. On the rare occasions when it is even mentioned, it’s spoken of as if it might or might not exist. Israel, Fox News typically reports, “is believed to have the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Mideast.” It is, of course, Israeli policy (and a carefully crafted fiction) never to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal. But the arsenal itself isn’t just “believed” to exist, it is known to exist -- 100-300 nuclear weapons' worth or enough destructive power to turn not just Iran but the Greater Middle East into an ash heap.

To sum up: we continue to obsess about fantasy weapons, base an ever more threatening and dangerous policy in the region on their possible future existence, might conceivably end up in a war over them, and yet pay remarkably little attention to the existing nuclear weapons in the region. If this were the approach of countries other than either the U.S. or Israel, you would know what to make of it and undoubtedly words like “paranoia” and “fantasy” would quickly creep into any discussion.

With that in mind, let Ira Chernus, TomDispatch regular and an expert on separating fantasy from reality, take on the tough task of putting aside the media hosannas about the president’s recent Middle Eastern travels and making sense of what actually happened. Tom 

Obama Walks the High Wire, Eyes Closed: When It Comes to Israel, Palestine, and Iran, It Could All Come Crashing Down

by Ira Chernus

I’ve been decrying the immorality of the occupation for four decades, yet I must admit I never dreamed I would hear an American president, standing in Jerusalem, do the same.

Despite those words, however, Obama is no idealist. He’s a strategist. His Jerusalem speech was clearly meant to widen the gap between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the substantial center-left portion of Israeli Jews, who are open to a deal with the Palestinians and showed unexpected strength in recent elections. The growing political tensions in Israel and a weakened prime minister give the American president a potential opening to maneuver, manipulate, and perhaps even control the outcome of events.

How to do so, though? Obama himself probably has no clear idea. Whatever Washington’s Middle Eastern script, when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, it will require an extraordinary balancing act.

The president will have to satisfy (or mollify) both the center-left and the right in Israel, strike an equally perfect balance between divergent Israeli and Palestinian demands, march with Netanyahu up to the edge of war with Iran yet keep Israel from plunging over that particular cliff, calibrate the ratcheting up of punishing sanctions and other acts in relation to Iran so finely that the Iranians will, in the end, yield to U.S. demands without triggering a war, and prevent the Syrian civil war from spilling into Israel, which means controlling Lebanese politics, too. Don’t forget that he will have do it all while maintaining his liberal base at home and fending off the inevitable assault from the right.

Oh, yes. Then there are all the as-yet-unforeseeable variables that will also have to be managed. To call it a tall order is an understatement.

The Fantasy of Perfect Control

In American political culture, we expect no less from any president. After all, he is “the most powerful man in the world” -- so he should be able to walk such a high wire adroitly, without fretting too much about the consequences, should he fall.

Whatever else he may be doing, whenever an American president travels abroad, his overriding goal is to act out on the world stage a singular and deeply felt, if not always articulated, fantasy so many Americans love: that their leader and the nation he embodies have, like Superman, unlimited powers to control people and events around the globe.

In this scenario, the president of the United States is a man above every fray, who understands the true needs of both sides in any conflict, as befits his uniquely exceptional nation. That’s why he can go anywhere -- even Jerusalem or Ramallah -- and tell the locals what is true and right and how they should behave.

This mythic president can deftly maneuver his way across the most challenging of situations, sooner or later settling any dispute with a god-like sense of justice -- and without ever losing his perfect balance.

Like his country, he can be all things to all people. He never has to make painful sacrifices or suffer losses, as he proves that the American way will eventually triumph over all.

To make this fantasy seem convincingly real, the president -- and the faithful mainstream media who report it all -- must turn every place he visits into a fantasyland. They must exclude realities that might quickly puncture the idealized image. But reality has a nasty habit of showing up, even when it’s least wanted.

Israeli Realities Ignored

In fact, Israel is one place where the fantasy of U.S. control comes reasonably close to reality. The president has substantially more power over the Israelis than his critics on the left give him credit for. Netanyahu’s embarrassing apology to Turkey (with no reciprocity from Turkey guaranteed), his release of tax funds to the Palestinian Authority just days after Obama’s visit, and the truce that quickly ended Israel-Gaza fighting in November 2012, with a commitment to ease the blockade on Gaza, are only the latest of many examples of the way an American president can successfully pressure Israeli leaders.

But despite that reality, Obama has once again proven remarkably incapable of forcing the Israelis into serious, good-faith negotiations with the Palestinians -- mainly because he traveled to the Mideast with a stark reality in his pocket: the latest Gallup poll, showing American sympathy for Israel at an all-time high, while sympathy for the Palestinians has taken a nose-dive.

As always, pro-Israel attitudes are substantially stronger among Republicans than the rest of the U.S. public. If Obama pushes the Israelis to make genuine concessions for peace, he’ll give the GOP a huge opening to brand him as “soft on terrorists,” a label he has done everything possible to avoid -- including assassinating American citizens.

Given that implicit pressure (and the degree to which all presidential travels abroad are also little dramas made for domestic consumption), Obama promptly endorsed an Israeli myth of particular power: the myth of its national insecurity. Even in his Jerusalem peace speech he repeated the mantra that Israel’s security “can never be taken for granted” because Israel “is surrounded by many in this region who reject it, and many in the world who refuse to accept it.”

In the next breath, he contradicted the very premise of the myth of an eternally endangered, on-the-brink-of-being-wiped-out country by stating the obvious: “Those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere.” But he carefully ignored that fundamental reality during the rest of his visit, masking it behind a torrent of rhetoric about supposedly dire threats to Israel’s existence from every direction.

Most Americans already assume that Israel is as imperiled as it claims to be. The more Obama reinforces that myth, the more sympathy he builds for Israel and the less Israeli leaders have to respond to pressure on negotiations with the Palestinians. And as long as most Americans mistakenly see Israelis, not Palestinians, as the besieged victims of the present situation, they’ll punish any president who puts real pressure on Israel to make a just peace. No president, not even in a second term, is likely to risk paying that price.

Palestinian Realities Ignored

Even if Obama did try to force a peace agreement on the Israelis, the effort would be doomed to fail, because he excluded from his fantasy world two crucial realities about Palestine.

First, he treated the main roadblock to peace -- the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank -- as if it hardly existed. Far from renewing his demand for an end to expansion, he fell back on the vague language we’ve heard from many presidents before: “We do not consider continued settlement activity to be constructive”; “Settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace.” He even stood alongside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and called the settlements merely an “irritant,” a poor “excuse” to avoid coming to the peace table, more or less demanding that Abbas return to negotiations while Palestinian land continues to be eaten up, bit by bit.

In effect, Obama pressured the Palestinians to accept a real evil in the present for the sake of some hypothetical good in a hard-to-imagine future. Though that may make sense to the president, the Palestinian Authority understandably sees it as senseless to enter prolonged negotiations that would simply give Israel a green light and more time to gobble up Palestinian land.

Obama’s other glaring omission was his refusal to visit Gaza and meet its prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, of the ruling Hamas party. In his peace speech, Obama explicitly called on Israel to negotiate only with the Palestinian Authority, which rules in the West Bank, dismissing Hamas with the usual false picture: “Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with anyone who is dedicated to its destruction.”

In fact, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has been saying for years that his party is ready for a long-term truce that would, de facto, accept the existence of Israel inside its pre-1967 borders. These are, of course, the very borders Obama himself has called for as the basis for a final status agreement. In recent talks with the king of Jordan, Meshaal reportedly made his most explicit statement yet accepting such a two-state solution.

The only realistic hope for peace is to encourage this growing moderation in Hamas, which would open the way to a unified Hamas-Fatah government. The idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank alone, living happily side by side with Israel, while an impoverished and ignored Gaza somehow doesn’t cause trouble for anyone, is an impossible fantasy.

But the Obama administration and the Israeli government prefer such a fantasy world in which there’s simply no place for a conciliatory Hamas policy, because the globe must always be divided between “the international community” and a threatening “radical Islam,” its banner held high by Hamas as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and the greatest threat of all: Iran.

The Iranian Threat: When Myths Collide

Iran evokes the most dangerous clash between reality and fantasy. Obama has struck a devil’s bargain with Netanyahu: if you’ll negotiate with the Palestinians, I’ll endorse your endless warnings about a purported Iranian program that might -- just might -- produce a tiny number of nuclear weapons at some unknown date in the imagined future.

The very existence of such an Iranian program is highly doubtful. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that it doesn’t exist. Yet on his recent trip Obama plunged into the Israeli right’s fantasy world, where Iran will, sooner than you think, be nuking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

To protect that fantasy world the president had to ignore the very existence of Dimona, the “research center” where Israel has produced anywhere from 100 to 300 nuclear weapons. As Jonathan Schell recently pointed out, Israel’s goal is to maintain its long-standing monopoly as the only nuclear power in the greater Middle East. Its leaders have been threatening for years to attack Iran to keep that monopoly a sure thing into the distant future.

The American people seem perfectly ready to back them in this project. In the latest Gallup poll, 64% of Americans say that they sympathize with Israel and, chillingly, precisely the same percentage now tell Pew pollsters that they would support U.S. military action to prevent Iran from making nukes.

The U.S. Senate gets the message. Three-quarters of its members have signed on as co-sponsors of a formal Senate resolution (S.Res. 65) which solemnly warns of Iran’s “threats against the existence of the State of Israel” and “urges” that, if Israel is “compelled to take military action in self-defense” against Iran, the U.S. should “provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.”

“Self-defense”? “Compelled”? “Israel’s existence”? It all assumes the absurd notion that, even if Iran could manage to produce a few nukes, its leaders would choose to use them against a massively superior Israel, swiftly triggering Iran's national suicide.

That fantasy might provoke laughter in Tehran, but only if Iranian leaders could stop worrying for a moment about the very real threats being leveled at them. Unlike Obama, they’ve been looking directly at Dimona and its product for a long time.

In the world as seen from Tehran, and from most of the rest of the planet, it’s Israel, not Iran, that poses a nuclear threat to the region. If someday there were a Mideast nuclear arms race, Israel would clearly be the country that set it off. And if Congress can sway the president, long before that the U.S. might well be caught up in an Israeli-Iranian war. When the myth of Israel’s insecurity meets the myth of “the Iranian bomb,” the result has the potential to be explosive indeed.

That’s a very real and heavy price to pay for the fantasy that a president can walk the high wire, balancing everyone’s demands perfectly, without the danger of simply falling into the abyss.

Barack Obama took a brave step out of that fantasy world when he told the Israeli people directly that their occupation of the West Bank is not only foolish but immoral. If he really wants to earn his Nobel Peace Prize, he’ll have to demand an end to settlement expansion, visit Gaza and Dimona, and create a new narrative about Iran as well as Palestine filled with a much larger dose of reality. That story just might have a happy ending, the hope and change that the president has always promised us. The script he has followed so far has tragedy written all over it.

Ira Chernus is a TomDispatch regular and professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author, among other works, of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin and the online collection “MythicAmerica: Essays.” He blogs at MythicAmerica.us.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Ira Chernus

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Steve Lawson, Kiff Archer, Jason Moody, Janine Bandcroft April 1, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook

Spring has arrived to the Island, and with it a renewed sense of purpose seems evident for those who would defend yet the glorious wild lands and ocean we are blessed to live amidst. Like the perpetual turning of the seasons though, some environmental battles inexorably come round again.

Such is the case with Clayoquot Sound, where years of resistance to forestry and mining abuses prompted international recognition and designation as a UNESCO global Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site, but has still proven insufficient to stem the despoilers, who rising zombie-like from apparent mortal defeat come ever back demanding more.

Listen. Hear.

Clayoquot has already the dubious distinction of possessing the highest concentration of fish feed lots in the province, but that didn't stop Mainstream Canada, a subsidiary of Norwegian fish farm behemoth, Cermaq ASA from asking for another open net-pen operation. And, as they almost invariably do, Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans said, "OK!" It's an unwelcome development for locals, who view this operation as more than a fish farm too far.

Steve Lawson is National Coordinator of the First Nations Environment Network of Canada, and is a former board member of both the Canadian Environmental Network and the Marine and Terrestrial Committees of the Clayoquot Biosphere Reserve. He has lived most of the last fifty years on an island off Tofino; working as a fisher, tour boat skipper, and boat builder and designer among other things. Steve says he's; "...dedicated much of my life here on the coast to protecting old growth forests, wild salmon and other life and have tried to bring forward the understanding of nature and the traditional connections in order to promote the common good for all our relations."

Steve Lawson in the first half.

And; April Fools Day marks the opening of British Columbia's Grizzly hunt in the Great Bear Rainforest. Kiff Archer and Jason Moody live within the Great Bear, located along the mid-coast of BC, and they're both with the newly formed, Central Coast Grizzly Patrol. They were here at the start of last Fall's hunting season to talk about the beginning of the Coastal First Nations Coalition and its unilaterally declared ban on trophy hunting within their collective territories. The provincial government however neither recognizes the authority of the First Nations to do this, nor does it honour their demand for a ban on the hunt.

Kiff Archer and Jason Moody still standing tall in defense of the bears and other "trophy" targets in the Great Bear Rainforest in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz from our city's streets and beyond. But first, Steve Lawson and new battle lines being drawn in Clayoquot.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Libya Liberation Army Members Attack Mavi Marmara Aid Caravan

British activists en route to Gaza raped by Libyan soldiers

by Celine Hagbard - IMEMC News

Three women participating in a humanitarian aid caravan to Gaza were reportedly raped by Libyan soldiers in Benghazi, after being kidnapped by the soldiers and a taxi driver.

The caravan has been stalled at the Libyan-Egypt border for several weeks, after having travelled from Britain with humanitarian aid bound for Gaza.

The victims were taken to a Libyan hospital, where they were visited by Libya’s deputy Prime Minister, Awad al-Basari. He told reporters with the Libyan national television station al-Hurra, “Sadly [the perpetrators] belong to the army, but they don't reflect the ethics of Libya army."

Al-Basari added that the victims “are in a very bad psychological state. They were raped in front of others, in front of their father. This is a heinous crime.” He did not give any indication as to whether the perpetrators have been captured.

Two of the women were sisters, who were kidnapped along with their father. All three were part of the humanitarian aid caravan.

The caravan was organized by the aid group IHH, based in Turkey, and was named ‘The Mavi Marmara’ after a Turkish aid ship that was attacked by Israeli forces in international waters while en route to Gaza. Ten activists were killed in the attack, nine of whom were Turkish and one, Furkan Dorgan, who was American.

The Israeli government recently entered into talks with the Turkish government to apologize for that assault and determine a just compensation for the families of the victims.

Gaza: Against the Wall: Public presentation and slide show

“Gaza: Against the Wall” 

by www.kevinneish.ca

Victoria human rights activist Kevin Neish presents a slide show and discussion of his recent 5 week tour of Gaza. Amidst the Israeli forces’ rockets, hijackings, kidnappings, shootings and blackouts, the Palestinian people of Gaza carry on with their lives.

Public presentation and slide show
8 pm Friday April 26

Fernwood Community Association, 

1923 Fernwood Rd.

Admission by donation.

In Arabic they are called “sumud”, in English it's steadfast and unyielding. Mr. Neish volunteered as a human shield and human rights observer with farmers in their fields and with fishers at sea, along the Israeli border’s “shoot-to-kill buffer zone”. He documented his trip with photographs and essays at www.kevinneish.ca

Since 1989, Mr. Neish has volunteered as a human shield and human rights observer in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia and Palestine in the West Bank and now Gaza. He survived the Israeli assault on the Mavi Marmara in May 2010.




For immediate release

Contact: Kevin Neish 250-595-3991
neish@victoria.tc.ca