http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/in-germany-neo-nazi-murders-surface-a-contradiction/248414/

Germans are widely hostile to far-right groups, but opposition to multi-culturalism is on the rise — and getting violent

The murders of about ten Germans between 2000 and 2007 are back in the public eye. That’s because police have now found two handguns, as well as the bodies of two suspects, which link the murders to neo-Nazi groups.

The details of the original murders are no less ugly than the recent discovery. The victims were largely of foreign origin, including ethnic Turks, an ethic Greek, and a policewoman. The BBC provides extra background for those who are unfamiliar with the case, but the lingering image is a haunting one: kebab store owners shot in the face in broad daylight.

It’s hard to think of a country that would be blasé about neo-Nazi-perpetrated murders. But there are extra reasons for the furor here, in which stories on the murders have quickly shot to the top of the most-read, most-commented, and most-recommended lists on the major German papers’ sites: this case treads on very sensitive ground for Germany.

The German far-right is about as marginalized in Germany as it possibly could be. Skinheads are treated with a mixture of scorn and disgust, and though free speech is protected in the country, there are a number of exceptions, including hate speech and Holocaust denial. It is not uncommon in some German cities to see an extremist passing out pamphlets with a disgruntled-looking policeman standing guard. The officer isn’t just there to monitor the pamphleteer, I’ve had several Germans suggest to me on such occasions: he or she is also there to make sure that some passer-by doesn’t become so enraged by the sight of a neo-Nazi as to start a fight. In a country where even Scientology, widely ignored in the U.S., is seen by many as a threat to democracy and Tom Cruise’s role in Valkyrie is an affront, neo-Nazis provoke a lot of anger. That neo-Nazis could carry out these murders, and that the extent of the perpetrators’ network is not yet known, gets people pretty worked up.

The other deeply delicate element of this case involves the victims. Though right-wing extremists get little sympathy in Germany, foreigners — Muslim immigrants in particular — haven’t been getting much sympathy either, recently. Last fall, debate raged over a book by Thilo Sarrazin, then-director of Germany’s central bank, arguing that Muslim immigrants pose an existential threat to the country. Unintegrated, poor, and fertile, so the argument went, the spread of African and Middle Eastern immigrants needs to be combated, ideally by well-educated Germans out-breeding them. Though many found the argument horrendously offensive and dangerous, over 30 percent of survey respondents at the time, the BBC reported, “believed the country was ‘overrun by foreigners.’”

That October, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared “multiculturalism” a failure, noting that many immigrants to the country remained unintegrated, arguing that it was time to demand more integration effort from the immigrants themselves. Turkish immigrants in particular can at times be treated with distrust by Germans wary of Muslim extremism — or those wary of Turkish teenage gangs, one of which had members convicted in 2003 of violence against German classmates.

What Germans are thus finding themselves confronted with right now is a shockingly extremist manifestation of German-immigrant tension, perpetrated by the deeply hated neo-Nazis. They want to know how it happened. “Take the brown threat seriously, now!” exclaims an op-ed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, arguing that for too long leftist extremists have been seen as “intelligent and dangerous” while right-wing extremists have been seen as moronic, one-off wingnuts. A rash of articles are dedicated to the topic of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which monitors extremists of many stripes (including Scientologists). Have officials, the articles ask, underestimated right-wing extremists? Is this a new form of right-wing terrorism? To what extent were the three suspects of the cell part of a larger network? And how did they remain undetected for so long?

These are all questions that Germans are raising, and not just in a philosophical post-mortem. The latest annual report from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution shows that, from 2009 to 2010, crimes with a right-wing extremist background fell, neo-Nazi groups gained roughly 600 members, and set a new record for number of demonstrations: 240.

But there’s a still more poignant — and completely unintentional — illustration of the tensions in this case up on the agency’s site. It’s the tip box, where the agency encourages readers to click and “Call to act against terrorism and violence!” The tip line instruction is written in three languages for the benefit of potential informers: German, Arabic, and Turkish. Turns out, though, reporting a rogue imam wasn’t the worst those kebab store owners had to worry about.

Secret Report on Investigators’ Failures
How Neo-Nazi Terror Cell Gave Authorities the Slip

By Sven Röbel, Holger Stark and Steffen Winter for DER SPIEGEL

A secret report on the neo-Nazi terror cell which allegedly killed at least 10 people reveals a series of serious mistakes by Germany’s law enforcement agencies. The authorities had the group under surveillance and could have stopped the murder spree before it even began, if they had only acted.

Part 1

The photo was taken from a safe distance, from the other side of the street, opposite number 11 in Bernhardstrasse in the center of the eastern German city of Chemnitz. The man in the picture is wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. His hair is cropped short, with only the top a few millimeters longer, almost giving him the look of a punk with a Mohawk hairstyle. It could be Uwe Böhnhardt, but the officers weren’t sure.

For several hours, agents of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, had been following a group of neo-Nazis from one mall to the next, and finally to Bernhardstrasse.

The address was known to be a safe house used by three neo-Nazis who had been in hiding for years: Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos and Beate Zschäpe. Two of their supporters lived there.

The photo shows the man who could be Böhnhardt in three-quarter profile. He’s carrying a number of unidentifiable objects under his left arm. The date was Saturday, May 6, 2000. Four months later, the men would murder their first victim.

A Catalog of Failure

The picture can be found among a series of documents currently being evaluated by German investigators. Together they read like a catalog of failure. May 6, 2000 marks the low point in the investigation into what would later become the Zwickau cell. Rarely had the authorities made so many mistakes.

On that fateful Saturday 11 years ago, police officers and intelligence agents could have prevented an escalation of the violence that would eventually claim the lives of eight people of Turkish descent, a Greek man, and one female police officer, all allegedly shot by Böhnhardt and Mundlos between September 2000 and April 2007. The case, which came to light in early November after Mundlos shot Böhnhardt and himself in a recreational vehicle in Eisenach following a botched bank robbery, has shocked Germany. Now it turns out that the authorities could have stopped the killing spree of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), as the group dubbed itself, before it really got going.

But the officers didn’t take action when they discovered that Böhnhardt, Mundlos and Zschäpe were hiding in Chemnitz. The neo-Nazis were observed, but not arrested. They were therefore free to plan their murderous attacks.

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution detailed the failure of the surveillance operation in Chemnitz and other similar blunders in an around 30-page confidential report that was sent to the German government, the relevant committee of the German parliament and the federal states shortly before Christmas. In the document, which SPIEGEL has obtained, intelligence agents describe in detail the hunt for the three neo-Nazis. They list who collected money, who was responsible for procuring weapons, and who had contact to the underground. And they describe how the intelligence agency managed to get an informer close enough to the cell that he was eventually able to establish direct contact.

Lack of Trust

The classified report and research subsequently conducted by SPIEGEL in Saxony and Thuringia show that the authorities were very well informed about the fugitive neo-Nazis up until 2001. In fact the security services knew far more about the neo-Nazi trio than has been admitted to date. They even had evidence to suggest the neo-Nazis planned to carry out armed attacks once they had gone into hiding. The document also shows there was no truth to the claim that the German authorities hadn’t kept a close enough eye on right-wing extremists.

Worse still, it paints the picture of a country whose security apparatus has failed. Information wasn’t passed on to the relevant authorities soon enough, if at all, while the police, the intelligence agency, regional and federal authorities often simply didn’t trust one another.

The state derives its monopoly on the legitimate use of force from the promise to protect its citizens. In the case of the nine immigrants and the police officer Michèle Kiesewetter who were allegedly murdered by the neo-Nazis, the state failed to keep its promise — albeit out of incompetence rather than criminal intent. There is no evidence so far of any collusion between the intelligence services and the neo-Nazis.

Jörg Ziercke, the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), admits that public confidence in the rule of law has been “shaken to the core” by the killings. Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich even worries about the “highly political” consequences for “Germany’s image in the world.” A central memorial service will be held for the victims, and people suspected of aiding and abetting the murderers are to be put on trial. The classified report submitted to parliament is only the first attempt to address the official blackout.

Suitcases with Swastikas

For all their mistakes, the authorities’ instincts appear to have been good at the very outset. In the fall of 1997, Böhnhardt deposited several suitcases with swastikas on them and containing explosives somewhere in the eastern state of Thuringia. On Nov. 24 of that year, intelligence agents in Thuringia began their first surveillance operation. For a week they watched as Mundlos, Zschäpe and Böhnhardt carried pipes out of an apartment and purchased rubber rings and 2 liters (about half a gallon) of methylated spirits. Were they making a bomb?

The trio then surreptitiously transported the materials to a garage at a sewage treatment plant in the city of Jena. Böhnhardt parked his red Opel car a block from the garage and walked the rest of the way, constantly looking over his shoulder as he went. In official jargon, such excessive caution is known as “shaking,” and Böhnhardt “shook” so hard that a single agent was able to follow the trio unnoticed all the way to the garage.

The files contain a hand-drawn sketch of the complex of garages in which the intelligence agency suspected the neo-Nazis had stashed a bomb. An arrow points to the relevant garage door. The findings were reported to the police, who searched the garage on Jan. 26, 1998 and discovered 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds) of explosives and ready-to-use pipe bombs. But the neo-Nazis themselves managed to flee.

Whereas the responsible prosecutor’s office in the city of Gera underestimated the importance of the find and refused to recognize any reason to suspect terrorist activity, the intelligence agency launched an in-depth investigation, dubbed Operation Drilling. Agents began searching for more clues, but although the intelligence agency and detectives at the State Office of Criminal Investigation (LKA) cooperated, the two remained wary of one another. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution was aided by a high-level source whose identity it refused to divulge to the police: Tino Brandt, codename “Otto,” the head of a far-right militant group called Thüringer Heimatschutz (“Thuringian Homeland Protection”), which numbered up to 170 members.

With his curly blond hair and square schoolboy’s glasses, Brandt looked like a harmless kid. But he had charisma and the necessary ruthlessness to not only lead the local neo-Nazi scene but also betray it to the authorities at the same time. He knew Böhnhardt, Mundlos and Zschäpe personally.

Links to NPD

It appears the three neo-Nazis were primarily supported by former associates from the Thüringer Heimatschutz and another right-wing extremist group called Kameradschaft Jena (“Jena Comradeship”), including Ralf Wohlleben — a Heimatschutz activist who later became an official in the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) — and André K., the head of the Kameradschaft Jena. Investigators now know that Wohlleben and K. played a key role in the history of the Zwickau cell.

On Feb. 12, 1998, two weeks after the trio went underground, K. allegedly traveled to Berlin where, according to “Otto,” he met Frank Schwerdt, a member of the NPD’s national executive. They apparently discussed addresses abroad where the trio could hide. That information is crucial because if it is true it would suggest a link between the NPD’s leaders and the NSU’s support network. Today, Schwerdt recalls that K. asked him to help the fugitives, but insists he turned the request down. “I neither wanted to, nor could have done so,” Schwerdt says.

K. allegedly had another rendezvous in Berlin, this one with a far-right official who rented out recreational vehicles. Later on, Böhnhardt and Mundlos frequently fled in an RV after their murders or bank robberies. So was the idea for this hatched in February 1998?

K. was clearly one of the trio’s earliest supporters, and probably the most important man in the months after they disappeared, especially in the attempt to help them escape abroad. In April, three months after the three neo-Nazis went into hiding, K. allegedly approached Claus Nordbruch on the sidelines of a conference organized by the far-right Society for Free Journalism. Nordbruch is a German citizen who now lives in South Africa, where he owns a farm. He has an illustrious reputation in the far-right scene.

The intelligence agency believes K. may also have spoken to him “about a possible hiding place on the farm.” Indeed André K. and another right-wing extremist from Thuringia flew to South Africa on Aug. 8, 1998 for four weeks.

Read the rest and parts 2 and 3 here at this link:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,806449,00.html

From Tunisia to Egypt, Islamists are gaining the popular vote. Far from threatening stability, this makes it a real possibility
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/27/islamist-arab-spring-west-fears?newsfeed=true

Ennahda, the Islamic party in Tunisia, won 41% of the seats of the Tunisian constitutional assembly last month, causing consternation in the west. But Ennahda will not be an exception on the Arab scene. Last Friday the Islamic Justice and Development Party took the biggest share of the vote in Morocco and will lead the new coalition government for the first time in history. And tomorrow Egypt’s elections begin, with the Muslim Brotherhood predicted to become the largest party. There may be more to come. Should free and fair elections be held in Yemen, once the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh falls, the Yemeni Congregation for Reform, also Islamic, will win by a significant majority. This pattern will repeat itself whenever the democratic process takes its course.

In the west, this phenomenon has led to a debate about the “problem” of the rise of political Islam. In the Arab world, too, there has been mounting tension between Islamists and secularists, who feel anxious about Islamic groups. Many voices warn that the Arab spring will lead to an Islamic winter, and that the Islamists, though claiming to support democracy, will soon turn against it. In the west, stereotypical images that took root in the aftermath of 9/11 have come to the fore again. In the Arab world, a secular anti-democracy camp has emerged in both Tunisia and Egypt whose pretext for opposing democratisation is that the Islamists are likely to be the victors.

But the uproar that has accompanied the Islamists’ gains is unhelpful; a calm and well-informed debate about the rise of political Islam is long overdue.

First, we must define our terms. “Islamist” is used in the Muslim world to describe Muslims who participate in the public sphere, using Islam as a basis. It is understood that this participation is not at odds with democracy. In the west, however, the term routinely describes those who use violence as a means and an end – thus Jihadist Salafism, exemplified by al-Qaida, is called “Islamist” in the west, despite the fact that it rejects democratic political participation (Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida, criticised Hamas when it decided to take part in the elections for the Palestinian legislative council, and has repeatedly criticised the Muslim Brotherhood for opposing the use of violence).

This disconnect in the understanding of the term in the west and in the Muslim world was often exploited by despotic Arab regimes to suppress Islamic movements with democratic political programmes. It is time we were clear.

Reform-based Islamic movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, work within the political process. They learned a bitter lesson from their armed conflict in Syria against the regime of Hafez al-Assad in 1982, which cost the lives of more than 20,000 people and led to the incarceration or banishment of many thousands more. The Syrian experience convinced mainstream Islamic movements to avoid armed struggle and to observe “strategic patience” instead.

Second, we must understand the history of the region. In western discourse Islamists are seen as newcomers to politics, gullible zealots who are motivated by a radical ideology and lack experience. In fact, they have played a major role in the Arab political scene since the 1920s. Islamic movements have often been in opposition, but since the 1940s they have participated in parliamentary elections, entered alliances with secular, nationalist and socialist groups, and participated in several governments – in Sudan, Jordan, Yemen and Algeria. They have also forged alliances with non-Islamic regimes, like the Nimeiri regime in Sudan in 1977.

A number of other events have had an impact on the collective Muslim mind, and have led to the maturation of political Islam: the much-debated Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979; the military coup in Sudan in 1989; the success of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front in the 1991 elections and the army’s subsequent denial of its right to govern; the conquest of much of Afghan territory by the Taliban in 1996 leading to the establishment of its Islamic emirate; and the success in 2006 of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections. The Hamas win was not recognised, nor was the national unity government formed. Instead, a siege was imposed on Gaza to suffocate the movement.

Perhaps one of the most influential experiences has been that of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, which won the elections in 2002. It has been a source of inspiration for many Islamic movements. Although the AKP does not describe itself as Islamic, its 10 years of political experience have led to a model that many Islamists regard as successful. The model has three important characteristics: a general Islamic frame of reference; a multi-party democracy; and significant economic growth.

These varied political experiences have had a profound impact on political Islam’s flexibility and capacity for political action, and on its philosophy, too.

However, political Islam has also faced enormous pressures from dictatorial Arab regimes, pressures that became more intense after 9/11. Islamic institutions were suppressed. Islamic activists were imprisoned, tortured and killed. Such experiences gave rise to a profound bitterness. Given the history, it is only natural that we should hear overzealous slogans or intolerant threats from some activists. Some of those now at the forefront of election campaigns were only recently released from prison. It would not be fair to expect them to use the voice of professional diplomats.

Despite this, the Islamic political discourse has generally been balanced. The Tunisian Islamic movement has set a good example. Although Ennahda suffered under Ben Ali’s regime, its leaders developed a tolerant discourse and managed to open up to moderate secular and leftist political groups. The movement’s leaders have reassured Tunisian citizens that it will not interfere in their personal lives and that it will respect their right to choose. The movement also presented a progressive model of women’s participation, with 42 female Ennahda members in the constitutional assembly.

The Islamic movement’s approach to the west has also been balanced, despite the fact that western countries supported despotic Arab regimes. Islamists know the importance of international communication in an economically and politically interconnected world.

Now there is a unique opportunity for the west: to demonstrate that it will no longer support despotic regimes by supporting instead the democratic process in the Arab world, by refusing to intervene in favour of one party against another and by accepting the results of the democratic process, even when it is not the result they would have chosen. Democracy is the only option for bringing stability, security and tolerance to the region, and it is the dearest thing to the hearts of Arabs, who will not forgive any attempts to derail it.

The region has suffered a lot as a result of attempts to exclude Islamists and deny them a role in the public sphere. Undoubtedly, Islamists’ participation in governance will give rise to a number of challenges, both within the Islamic ranks and with regard to relations with other local and international forces. Islamists should be careful not to fall into the trap of feeling overconfident: they must accommodate other trends, even if it means making painful concessions. Our societies need political consensus, and the participation of all political groups, regardless of their electoral weight. It is this interplay between Islamists and others that will both guarantee the maturation of the Arab democratic transition and lead to an Arab political consensus and stability that has been missing for decades.

Drowning In Hypocrisy

By Paul Craig Roberts

There is no question that Bush/Cheney/Obama have trashed the US Constitution, US statutory law, and international law. But Washington, having overthrown justice, has established that might is right. No foreign government is going to send its forces into the US to drag the war criminals out and place them on trial.

::::::::

The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy. Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the US is maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against Iran and to convince Iran that “it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

If it requires 11 aircraft carriers to deal with Iran, how many will Panetta need to project power against Russia and China? But to get on with the main point, Iran has been trying “to deal with us through diplomacy.” The response from Washington has been belligerent threats of military attack, unfounded and irresponsible accusations that Iran is making a nuclear weapon, sanctions and an oil embargo. Washington’s accusations echo Israel’s and are contradicted by Washington’s own intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Why doesn’t Washington respond to Iran in a civilized manner with diplomacy? Really, which of the two countries is the greatest threat to peace?

Washington sends the FBI to raid the homes of peace activists and puts a grand jury to work to create a case against them for aiding a nebulous enemy by protesting Washington’s wars. The Department of Homeland Security unleashes goon cop thugs to brutalize peaceful Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. Washington fabricates cases against Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Tarek Mehanna that negate the First Amendment by equating free speech with terrorism and spying. Chicago mayor and former Obama White House chief-of-staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, pushes an ordinance that outlaws public protests in the City of Chicago. The list goes on. And in the midst of it all Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Washington hypocrites accuse Russia and China of stifling dissent.

Washington’s grotesque hypocrisy goes unremarked by the American “media” and in the debates for the Republican presidential nomination. The corrupt Obama “Justice” Department turns a blind eye while goon cop thugs commit gratuitous violence against the citizens who pay the goon cop thugs’ undeserved salaries.

But it is in the War Crimes Arena where Washington shows the greatest hypocrisy. The self-righteous bigots in Washington are forever rounding up heads of weak states whose countries were afflicted by civil wars and sending them off to be tried as war criminals. All the while Washington indiscriminately kills large numbers of civilians in six or more countries, dismissing its own war crimes as “collateral damage.” Washington violates its own law and international law by torturing people.

On January 13, 2012, Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy Newspapers reported that Spanish judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutierrez re-launched an investigation into Washington’s torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Prison. The previous day British authorities opened an investigation into CIA renditions of kidnapped persons to Libya for torture.

Rosenberg reports that although the Obama regime has refused to investigate the obvious crimes of the Bush regime, and one might add its own obvious crimes, “other countries are still interested in determining whether Bush-era anti-terror practices violated international law.”

There is no question that Bush/Cheney/Obama have trashed the US Constitution, US statutory law, and international law. But Washington, having overthrown justice, has established that might is right. No foreign government is going to send its forces into the US to drag the war criminals out and place them on trial.

The War Criminal Court at the Hague is reserved for Washington’s show trials. No foreign government is going to pay Washington several hundred millions of dollars to turn Bush, Cheney, Obama and their minions over to them in the way the US bought Milosevic from Serbia in order to create the necessary spectacle at the War Crimes Tribunal to justify Washington’s naked aggression against Serbia.

No government can be perfect, because all governments are composed of humans, especially those humans most attracted by power and profit. Nevertheless, in my lifetime I have witnessed an extraordinary deterioration in the integrity of government in the United States. We have reached the point where nothing that our government says is believable. Not even the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the GDP growth rate, much less Washington’s reasons for its wars, its police state, and its foreign and domestic policies.

Washington has kept America at war for 10 years while millions of Americans lost their jobs and their homes. War and a faltering economy have exploded the national debt, and a looming bankruptcy is being blamed on Social Security and Medicare.

The pursuit of war continues. On January 23 Washington’s servile puppets — the EU member states — did Washington’s bidding and imposed an oil embargo on Iran, despite the pleas of Greece, a member of the EU. Greece’s final ruin will come from the higher oil prices from the embargo, as the Greek government realizes.

The embargo is a reckless act. If the US navy tries to intercept oil tankers carrying Iranian oil, large scale war could break out. This, many believe, is Washington’s aim.

It is easy for an embargo to become a blockade, which is an act of war. Remember how easily the UN Security Council’s “no-fly zone” over Libya was turned by the US and its NATO puppets into a military attack on Libya’s armed forces and population centers supportive of Gaddafi.

As the western “democracies” become increasingly lawless, the mask of law that imperialism wears is stripped away and with it the sheen of morality that has been used to cloak hegemonic ambitions. With Iran surrounded and with two of Washington’s fleets in the Persian Gulf, another war of aggression seems inevitable.

Experts say that an attack on Iran by the US and NATO will disrupt the flow of oil that the world needs. The crazed drive for hegemony is so compelling that Washington and its EU puppets show no hesitation in putting their own struggling economies at risk of sharply rising energy costs.

War abroad and austerity at home is the policy that is being imposed on the western “democracies.”

Submitters Website: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/

Submitters Bio:

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for “his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy.” Roberts is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.

Alarm as corporate giants target developing countries

by Felicity Lawrence

Diabetes, obesity and heart disease rates are soaring in developing countries, as multinationals find new ways of selling processed food to the poor

Nestlé is using a floating supermarket to take its products to remote communities in the Amazon. Unilever has a small army of door-to-door vendors selling to low-income villages in India and west and east Africa. The brewer SABMiller has developed cheap beers in some African countries as part of a “price ladder” to its premium lager brands, and, as a leading Coca-Cola bottler and distributor, is aiming to double fizzy drinks sales in South African townships.

As affluent western markets reach saturation point, global food and drink firms have been opening up new frontiers among people living on $2 a day in low- and middle-income countries. The world’s poor have become their vehicle for growth.

The companies say they are finding innovative ways to give isolated people the kind of choices the rich have enjoyed for years and are providing valuable jobs and incomes to some of the most marginalised. But health campaigners are raising the alarm. They fear the arrival of highly processed food and drink is also a vector for the lifestyle diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and alcoholism, which are increasing at unprecedented rates in developing countries.

The South African minister of health, Aaron Motsoaledi, gives a grim interpretation of what that means for his country when he spoke to the Guardian earlier this month: “Health budgets will break because of the cost of amputations, artificial limbs, wheelchairs and cardiac surgery.”

A UN summit in New York in September confirmed the scale of the health crisis. Nearly two-thirds of all deaths worldwide in 2008 were attributable to lifestyle diseases. By 2030 these non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are expected to be the cause of nearly five times as many deaths as the traditional, infectious scourges of poor nations such as TB, malaria and Aids.

Last year 39% of acquisition deals by consumer goods companies were in emerging markets, compared with just 1% in 2008, according to the Grocer’s OC&C Global 50 league table.

As diets and lifestyles in developing countries change, their patterns of disease are following those seen in industrialised countries in the north equally rapidly. But for poor countries there is a double whammy: they have started suffering from high rates of NCDs before they have managed to deal with hunger and malnutrition.The double burden is devastating both their economic growth and their health budgets.

In South Africa, about a quarter of schoolchildren are now obese or overweight, as are 60% of women and 31% of men. Diabetes rates are soaring. Yet, nearly 20% of children aged one to nine have stunted growth, having suffered the kind of long-term malnutrition that leaves irreversible damage.

Moreover, obesity and malnutrition often occur in the same household, according to Leonie Joubert, a researcher at the University of Cape Town’s centre of criminology, and author of a forthcoming book on food security. “It’s not a case of having massive starvation on one end of the spectrum, and gluttony on the other. We have this kind of ‘hidden hunger’, almost pervasive in poorer communities where it’s easy to fill the hole in one’s belly with low-nutrient, cheap, empty-calorie foods to satisfy one’s hunger now, but not meet the body’s long-term nutritional needs.”

Dr Motsoaledi is a medically trained former anti-apartheid activist, and does not shy away from the dramatic. He marked the day the 7 billionth child was thought to have been born in to the global population by scrubbing up and delivering a baby himself by caesarean section. He then tied the new mother’s tubes as his contribution to family planning.
Taking radical action

Pushing through radical action on NCDs is of his priorities. He said: “When I was a medical student under apartheid, heart attacks were a rare thing for black people. “The main illnesses then were TB, malaria and kwashiorkor [malnutrition from protein deficiency]. That’s no longer true. Africans are eating more and more junk processed foods instead of their traditional diet. My mother hardly went to the shop. Anything you wanted to eat you grew and took straight from the soil. We had free range chickens, vegetables. I used to walk a long distance to school. My children hardly walk a metre from the car. Children are put in front of the TV and they eat junk in front of it. It is not a life of activity. It’s a globalised world; we can’t expect to be left untouched.”

He wantsto curb the marketing of tobacco and alcohol and regulate junk food, starting with reducing salt in bread and eliminating transfats, but he anticipates a fight. “There’s going to be war over this next year.” .

“It is like climate change. Are we going to do something about it when we are looking down the barrel of a gun and it is at its worst, when budgets have become unmanageable because of the sheer weight of disease? If those of us in power don’t do something now, that is what will happen. Anybody who dilly dallies on non-communicable diseases will be forced to act when the situation is out of control.”

The main obstacle to action was profit. “Industry is resisting very strongly, of course. The only reason people are not doing enough is the bottom dollar.”

Governments trying to restrict the marketing activity have found themselves challenged in court. Motsoaledi is watching the case brought by the tobacco industry against the Australian government, which wants to ban all branding on cigarette packs. “I want a similar structure for alcohol control,” he says.

He knows that he is likely to be the target of determined lobbying as well as legal action..

Unlike the UK secretary of state for health, who has invited food and alcohol companies to join his “responsibility deals” on public health, Motsoaledi sees no place for industry in helping draw up policy. “You cannot make policy with them, they will just shape it for their profits. You can’t sit in the same room with a national brewer and come up with a policy on alcohol to benefit the nation.” The interests Motsoaledi is taking on are indeed powerful and quick to defend themselves. SABMiller, the largest brewer in South Africa, points out in documents on its “alcohol responsibility” web pages that it supports 3% of the total employment in South Africa, and generates taxes – mostly from excise duty on its products – that account for 5% of the government’s tax revenue. It believes industry can play a role in tackling health problems and argues that its marketing promotes brand loyalty, not greater drinking. Kristin Wolfe, head of alcohol policy at SABMiller, said: “We market to our target consumer; we don’t go after non-drinkers. What the UN wanted in New York was a whole societal approach. Marketing is seen as just one factor. It has to be responsible, but there’s a distinction between harmful drinking and marketing. It’s a more enlightened approach to get industry to do what it can; we will make better progress,.” The company points to its investment in projects to tackle alcohol harm and bring unlicensed outlets within regulation.

Thandi Puoane, a professor at University of Western Cape, has tracked the increase in NCDs since the end of apartheid. With sanctions lifted and freedom of movement introduced after the multiracial elections in 1994, there was a rapid change in the profile of disease. Large numbers of black people have moved from rural areas where they had to walk miles for water and fuel to the townships on the edge of the cities. The townships are overcrowded, unemployment is high and infrastructure, such as electricity and sanitation, poor or nonexistent. Fast-food outlets and imports of processed foods proliferated after markets re-opened.

Large numbers of people moved to townships, where infrastructure is poor.

“People coming here buy fatty, sugary food and drink because it’s cheap and it feels a luxury not to cook,” Puoane said. “Cooking fuel is expensive. They can buy from street vendors on credit. Fear of crime, often fuelled by alcohol, stops them taking exercise. They think they are happy because they are fat and when they go back to their rural areas people say, ‘you must be doing well, you have put on weight’.” Being thin and losing weight is associated with Aids and TB, which makes being overweight seem more acceptable.
Opening health clubs

Khayelitsha, a township that sprawls for miles alongside the highway from Cape Town to the Cape flats, is one of the largest and fastest growing in South Africa. Unofficial estimates put its population at a million. Here you can see the crisis of obesity and other NCDs writ large. Unemployment is nearly 60%, and 70% of residents live in shacks with no running water. Alcohol use and violent crime are high and many people are overweight, particularly among women and teenage girls.

The faculty of public health at the university has pioneered health clubs to address the problem.

Lungiswa Tsolekile, a dietitian working on the health project, described some of the cultural barriers to being healthy in this environment, as she took me on a tour. A said access to affordable fresh food was limited. Street stalls sold cheap but often fatty foods, such as the chicken skin discarded by poultry factories, or chicken feet, tripe and sheep’s heads. Processed soup, often high in salt, is popular as a cheap gravy to go with the staple of maize porridge. Every other shack shop, and even a church hall, is adorned with Coca-Cola branding. Retail giants have arrived, and Walmart has just taken over one of the large South African chains, but a taxi to the nearest supermarket for fresh fruit and vegetables costs four rand, more than many can spare. She pointed out the numerous billboards advertising alcohol, too.

The ShopRite supermarket we visited was packed with people pushing basket-sized trolleys – the average spend here is small by European standards. There was fresh food available, but a kilo of tomatoes cost more than a 2-litre bottle of cola. At the entrance to the store, leaflets were promoting cut-price alcohol with free mobile phone deals; the aisle ends had special offers for Nestlé’s coffee-style caffeine drink Ricoffy listing dextrin (a starch sugar) and dextrose (a form of sugar) as its two main ingredients, and Nestlé’s Cremora, a coffee creamer whose principle ingredients are glucose syrup solids and palm fat. The checkout was stacked with sweets alongside “funeral plan pay-as-you-go” starter packs.

“We use physical exercise in the health clubs as a vehicle to help with other aspects of health, including cooking sessions on how to prepare healthy food with traditional ingredients. We pick up a lot of hypertension, high blood glucose and diabetes,” Tsolekile said.

Nestlé meanwhile sees itself as “providing products that are healthier, safe and affordable for consumers wherever they are”. It says it gives consumers the information they need to make healthier choices, through the labelling and sponsored education programmes.”Often in emerging markets, processed food appeals to consumers because it is guaranteed to be safe. It can also help address deficiencies. We fortify many of what we call our popularly positioned products to help meet this need,” a Nestlé spokesman said. “Our range of products in South Africa and in Brazil is wider than that offered by many of our competitors. We are always looking for ways to improve both the taste and nutritional value of our products.”

Unilever believes its door-to-door sales network has helped lift people out of poverty. Trevor Gorin, its global media relations director, said: “It has essentially empowered people in rural communities, largely women, to become entrepreneurs, generating income – with all the concomitant benefits this income generates.” “Most of the Unilever products sold through it are home and personal care products to improve sanitation and personal hygiene. The food products are usually things like stock cubes and tea.”
Nestle floating supermarket

Nestlé’s floating supermarket took its maiden voyage on the Amazon last year and has been distributing its products to around 800,000 isolated riverside people each month ever since. Christened Nestlé Até Você, Nestle comes to you, the boat carries around 300 branded processed lines, including ice creams, and infant milk , but no other foods. The products are in smaller pack sizes to make them more affordable. The boat also acts as a collection point for the network of door-to-door saleswomen Nestlé has recruited to promote its brands. Targeting consumers from socioeconomic classes C, D and E is part of the company’s strategic plan for growth, it says. Nestlé has also set up a network of more than 7,500 resellers and 220 microdistributors to reach those at the bottom of the pyramid in the slums of Rio and São Paulo and other major Brazilian cities.

by CLAIRE PROVOST

The banks of the Niger river, in southern Mali, have been flooded by a steady stream of foreigners. Coveted by foreign investors eager to snap up large tracts of fertile farmland, the river basin has been at the centre of a race to get hold of African land at rock-bottom prices. Meanwhile, last week, hundreds of smallholder farmers and civil society activists flocked to the same river basin for the first international conference to tackle the global rush for land.

West Africa’s largest river, the Niger is thought to sustain over 100-million people as it snakes 4,180km through Mali and Niger before emptying into Nigeria’s colossal Niger Delta. In Mali, the Office du Niger is home to the vast majority of the country’s largescale land deals, seen by campaigners as emblematic of the “land grabs” taking place in developing countries. Recent estimates suggest that foreign investment in Mali’s limited arable land jumped by 60% between 2009 and 2010. But the potential knock-on effects of these land deals on local communities’ access to water has rarely made it centre-stage.

Ongoing research from the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development seeks to redress this blindspot, honing in on how such land deals might affect water access for fishing, farming and pastoralist communities. In a policy paper out on Thursday, the IIED’s Jamie Skinner and Lorenzo Cotula warn that an alarming number of African governments seem to be signing away water rights for decades, with major implications for local communities.

Investors in farmland are, understandably, after land with high growing potential — either land with lots of rainfall or land that can be irrigated. What Skinner and Cotula note is a worrying trend where governments are being rushed into signing away water rights during negotiations where they were initially only considering leasing land.

Free water
In many cases, say Skinner and Cotula, governments seem willing to simply provide water free of charge. In Mali and Sudan, for example, some investors have been given unrestricted access to as much water as they need. In other cases, where investors must pay to use water, they are often charged according to how much land is irrigated rather than how much water is used.

The role water plays in fuelling the global rush for land has received significant attention. It is no coincidence, observers say, that the most aggressive foreign investors are also those facing water shortages at home. This year, risk analysis firm Maplecroft said the results from its water stress index showed why India, South Korea and China, along with the oil rich Gulf states, are racing to buy land in developing countries and grow crops abroad. The chairperson and former CEO of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, has gone so far as to say the global rush for farmland is actually a “great water grab”. He writes in Foreign Policy: “With the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.”

But the effect of these deals on local communities’ water access has been a black hole in the debate around land grabs. And it is a severe omission, according to Skinner and Cotula, who stress how long-term contractural commitments with investors can jeopardise water access not only for those living near the agricultural investments but also for those living downstream. “When land is assigned to private investors, the deal only impacts directly on existing users of that land,” they explain. “Allocating water to irrigated agriculture potentially affects a much broader range of users.”

A 2011 report from researchers at the University of Manchester highlights similar concerns: “Impacts are likely to be far more extensive than might be anticipated from the area of land occupied … restriction or interruption of flows of water in an area occupied in one part of the landscape will have potentially widespread downstream impacts.”

According to the IIED paper, in some cases estimates of potential water requirements have run so large that major dam projects are being considered to ensure supply. The controversial Gibe III dam in Ethiopia, for example, will help irrigate 150 000 hectares that the government has allocated to investors. A report published by the African Development Bank says the project could lower the water level of Kenya’s Lake Turkana, on which around half a million people depend, by eight metres by 2024.

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-11-27-africas-great-water-grab

US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes

By Ray McGovern

Recent comments by U.S and Israeli military leaders indicate that the intelligence services of the two countries agree that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear bomb, a crack in the Western narrative that the U.S. press corps won’t accept.

::::::::
This article cross-posted from Consortium News

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak meeting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2007

Has Iran decided to build a nuclear bomb? That would seem to be the central question in the current bellicose debate over whether the world should simply cripple Iran’s economy and inflict severe pain on its civilian population or launch a preemptive war to destroy its nuclear capability while possibly achieving “regime change.”

And if you’ve been reading the New York Times or following the rest of the Fawning Corporate Media, you’d likely assume that everyone who matters agrees that the answer to the question is yes, although the FCM adds the caveat that Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. The line is included with an almost perceptible wink and an “oh, yeah.”

However, a consensus seems to be emerging among the intelligence and military agencies of the United States — and Israel — that Iran has NOT made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. In recent days, that judgment has been expressed by high-profile figures in the defense establishments of the two countries — U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

You might think that you would have heard more about that, wouldn’t you? U.S. and Israel agree that Iran is NOT building a nuclear bomb. However, this joint assessment that Iran has NOT decided to build a nuclear bomb apparently represented too big a change in the accepted narrative for the Times and the rest of the FCM to process.

Yet, on Jan. 18, the day before U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey arrived for talks in Israel, Israeli Defense Minister Barak gave an interview to Israeli Army radio in which he addressed with striking candor how he assesses Iran’s nuclear program. It was not the normal pabulum.

Question: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: …confusion stems from the fact that people ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case….

Question: How long will it take from the moment Iran decides to turn it into effective weapons until it has nuclear warheads?

Barak: I don’t know; one has to estimate. … Some say a year, others say 18 months. It doesn’t really matter. To do that, Iran would have to announce it is leaving the [UN International Atomic Energy Agency] inspection regime and stop responding to IAEA’s criticism, etc.

Why haven’t they [the Iranians] done that? Because they realize that … when it became clear to everyone that Iran was trying to acquire nuclear weapons, this would constitute definite proof that time is actually running out. This could generate either harsher sanctions or other action against them. They do not want that.

Question: Has the United States asked or demanded that the government inform the Americans in advance, should it decide on military action?

Barak: I don’t want to get into that. We have not made a decision to opt for that, we have not decided on a decision-making date. The whole thing is very far off. …

Question: You said the whole thing is “very far off.” Do you mean weeks, months, years?

Barak: I wouldn’t want to provide any estimates. It’s certainly not urgent. I don’t want to relate to it as though tomorrow it will happen.

As noted in my Jan. 19 article, “Israel Tamps Down Iran War Threats,” which was based mostly on reports from the Israeli press before I had access to the complete transcript of the interview, I noted that Barak appeared to be identifying himself with the consistent assessment of U.S. intelligence community since late 2007 that Iran has not made a decision to go forward with a nuclear bomb.

A Momentous NIE

A formal National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 — a consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies — contradicted the encrusted conventional wisdom that “of course” Iran’s nuclear development program must be aimed at producing nuclear weapons. The NIE stated:

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; … Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.”

The Key Judgments of that Estimate elicited a vituperative reaction from some Israeli officials and in neoconservative circles in the United States. It also angered then-President George W. Bush, who joined the Israelis in expressing disagreement with the judgments. In January 2008, Bush flew to Israel to commiserate with Israeli officials who he said should have been “furious with the United States over the NIE.”

While Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, is replete with bizarre candor, nothing beats his admission that “the NIE tied my hands on the military side,” preventing him from ordering a preemptive war against Iran, an action favored by hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney.

For me personally it was heartening to discover that my former colleagues in the CIA’s analytical division had restored the old ethos of telling difficult truths to power, after the disgraceful years under CIA leaders like George Tenet and John McLaughlin when the CIA followed the politically safer route of telling the powerful what they wanted to hear.

It had been three decades since I chaired a couple of National Intelligence Estimates, but fate never gave me the chance to manage one that played such a key role in preventing an unnecessary and disastrous war — as the November 2007 NIE did.

In such pressure-cooker situations, the Estimates job is not for the malleable or the faint-hearted. The ethos was to speak with courage, and without fear or favor, but that is often easier said than done. In my days, however, we analysts enjoyed career protection for telling it like we saw it. It was an incredible boost to morale to see that happening again in 2007.

Ever since the NIE was published, however, powerful politicians and media pundits have sought to chip away at its conclusions, suggesting that the analysts were hopelessly naïve or politically motivated or vengeful; out to punish Bush and Cheney for the heavy-handed tactics used to push false and dubious claims about Iraq’s WMD in 2002 and 2003.

A New Conventional Wisdom

There emerged in Official Washington a new conventional wisdom that the NIE was erroneous and wasn’t worth mentioning anymore. Though the Obama administration has stood by it, the New York Times and other FCM outlets routinely would state that the United States and Israel agreed that Iran was developing a nuclear bomb and then add the wink-wink denial by Iran.

However, on Jan. 8, Defense Secretary Panetta told Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” that “the responsible thing to do right now is to keep putting diplomatic and economic pressure on them [the Iranians] … and to make sure that they do not make the decision to proceed with the development of a nuclear weapon.”

Panetta was making the implicit point that the Iranians had not made that decision, but just in case someone might miss his meaning, Panetta posed the direct question to himself: “Are they [the Iranians] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.”

Barak’s Jan. 18 statement to Israeli Army radio indicated that his views dovetail with those of Panetta — and their comments apparently are backed up by the assessments of each nation’s intelligence analysts. In its report on Defense Minister Barak’s remarks, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Jan. 19 summed up the change in the position of Israeli leaders as follows:

“The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present … to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb. The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon — or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.”

At the New York Times, the initial coverage of Barak’s interview focused on another element. An article by Isabel Kershner and Rick Gladstone appeared on Jan. 19 on page A5 under the headline “Decision on Whether to Attack Iran is ‘Far Off,’ Israeli Defense Minister Says.”

To their credit, the Times’ Kershner and Gladstone did not shrink from offering an accurate translation of what Barak said on the key point of IAEA inspections: “The Iranians have not ended the oversight exercised by the International Atomic Energy Agency. … They have not done that because they know that that would constitute proof of the military nature of their nuclear program and that would provoke stronger international sanctions or other types of action against their country.”

But missing from the Times’ article was Barak’s more direct assessment that Iran apparently had not made a decision to press ahead toward construction of a nuclear bomb. That would have undercut the boilerplate in almost every Times story saying that U.S. and Israeli officials believe Iran is working on a nuclear bomb.

But That’s Not the Right Line!

So, what to do? Not surprisingly, the next day (Jan. 20), the Times ran an article by its Middle East bureau chief Ethan Bronner in which he stated categorically: “Israel and the United States both say that Iran is pursuing the building of nuclear weapons — an assertion denied by Iran….”

By Jan. 21, the Times had time to prepare an entire page (A8) of articles setting the record “straight,” so to speak, on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions: Here are the most telling excerpts, by article (emphasis mine):

1- “European Union Moves Closer to Imposing Tough Sanctions on Iran,” by Steven Erlanger, Paris:

“Senior French officials are concerned that these measures [sanctions] … will not be strong enough to push the Iranian government into serious, substantive negotiations on its nuclear program which the West says is aimed at producing weapons.

“In his annual speech on French diplomacy on Friday, President Nicolas Sarkozy accused Iran of lying, and he denounced what he called its ‘senseless race for a nuclear bomb.’

“Iran says it is enriching uranium solely for peaceful uses and denies a military intent. But few in the West believe Tehran, which has not cooperated fully with inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and has been pursuing some technologies that have only a military use.”

(Pardon me, please. I’m having a bad flashback. Anyone remember the Times’ peerless reporting on those infamous “aluminum tubes” that supposedly were destined for nuclear centrifuges — until some folks did a Google search and found they were for the artillery then used by Iraq?)

2- “China Leader Warns Iran Not to Make Nuclear Arms,” by Michael Wines, Beijing…

“Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wrapped up a six-day Middle East tour this week with stronger-than-usual criticism of Iran’s defiance on its nuclear program….

“Mr. Wen’s comments on Iran were unusually pointed for Chinese diplomacy. In Doha, Qatar’s capital, he said China ‘adamantly opposes Iran developing and possessing nuclear weapons.’

“Western nations suspect that Iran is working toward building a nuclear weapon, while Iran insists its program is peaceful.”

3- “U.S. General Urges Closer Ties With Israel.” by Isabel Kershner, Jerusalem…

“Though Iran continues to insist that its nuclear program is only for civilian purposes, Israel, the United Stated, and much of the West are convinced that Iran is working to develop a weapons program. …”

Never (Let Up) on Sunday

Next it was time for the Times to trot out David Sanger from the Washington bullpen. Many will remember him as one of the Times’ stenographers/cheerleaders for the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in March 2003. An effusive hawk also on Iran, Sanger was promoted to a position as chief Washington correspondent, apparently for services rendered.

In his Jan. 22 article, “Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections,” Sanger pulls out all the stops, even resurrecting Condoleezza Rice’s “mushroom cloud” to scare all of us — and, not least, the Iranians. He wrote:

“‘From the perception of the Iranians, life may look better on the other side of the mushroom cloud,’ said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He may be right: while the Obama administration has vowed that it will never tolerate Iran as a nuclear weapons state, a few officials admit that they may have to settle for a “nuclear capable’ Iran that has the technology, the nuclear fuel and the expertise to become a nuclear power in a matter of weeks or months.”

Were that not enough, enter the national champion of the Times cheerleading squad that prepared the American people in 2002 and early 2003 for the attack on Iraq, former Executive Editor Bill Keller. He graced us the next day (Jan. 23) with an op-ed entitled “Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran?” — though he wasn’t favoring a military strike, at least not right now. Here’s Keller:

“The actual state of the [nuclear] program is not entirely clear, but the best open-source estimates are that if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered full-speed-ahead — which there is no sign he has done — they could have an actual weapon in a year or so. … In practice, Obama’s policy promises to be tougher than Bush’s. Because Obama started out with an offer of direct talks — which the Iranians foolishly spurned — world opinion has shifted in our direction.”

Wow. With Iraqi egg still all over his face, the disgraced Keller gets to “spurn” history itself — to rewrite the facts. Sorry, Bill, it was not Iran, but rather Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other neocons in the U.S. Department of State and White House (with you and neocon allies in the press cheering them on), who “foolishly spurned” an offer by Iran in 2010 to trade about half its low-enriched uranium for medical isotopes. It was a deal negotiated by Turkey and Brazil, but it was viewed by the neocons as an obstacle to ratcheting up the sanctions.

In his Jan. 23 column, with more sophomoric glibness, Keller wrote this:

“We may now have sufficient global support to enact the one measure that would be genuinely crippling — a boycott of Iranian oil. The Iranians take this threat to their economic livelihood seriously enough that people who follow the subject no longer minimize the chance of a naval confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz. It’s not impossible that we will get war with Iran even without bombing its nuclear facilities.”

How neat! War without even trying!

The Paper of (Checkered Record)

Guidance To All NYT Hands: Are you getting the picture? After all, what does Defense Minister Barak know? Or Defense Secretary Panetta? Or the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community? Or apparently even Israeli intelligence?

The marching orders from the Times’ management appear to be that you should pay no heed to those sources of information. Just repeat the mantra: Everyone knows Iran is hard at work on the Bomb.

As is well known, other newspapers and media outlets take their cue from the Times. Small wonder, then, that USA Today seemed to be following the same guidance on Jan. 23, as can be seen in its major editorial on military action against Iran:

“The U.S. and Iran will keep steaming toward confrontation, Iran intent on acquiring the bomb to establish itself as a regional power, and the U.S. intent on preventing it to protect allies and avoid a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.

“One day, the U.S. is likely to face a wrenching choice: bomb Iran, with the nation fully united and prepared for the consequences, or let Iran have the weapons, along with a Cold War-like doctrine ensuring Iran’s nuclear annihilation if it ever uses them. In that context, sanctions remain the last best hope for a satisfactory solution.”

And, of course, the U.S. press corps almost never adds the context that Israel already possesses an undeclared arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons, or that Iran is essentially surrounded by nuclear weapons states, including India, Pakistan, Russia, China and — at sea — the United States.

PBS Equally Guilty

PBS’s behavior adhered to its customary don’t-offend-the-politicians-who-might-otherwise-cut-our-budget attitude on the Jan. 18 “NewsHour” — about 12 hours after Ehud Barak’s interview started making the rounds. Host Margaret Warner set the stage for an interview with neocon Dennis Ross and Vali Nasr (a professor at Tufts) by using a thoroughly misleading clip from former Sen. Rick Santorum’s Jan. 1 appearance on “Meet the Press.”

Warner started by saying:

“Back in the U.S. many Republican presidential candidates have been vowing they’d be even tougher with Tehran. Former Senator Rick Santorum spoke on NBC’s Meet the Press: ‘I would be saying to the Iranians, you open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors, or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes and make it very public that we are doing so.’”

Santorum seemed totally unaware that there are U.N. inspectors in Iran, and host David Gregory did nothing to correct him, leaving Santorum’s remark unchallenged. The blogosphere immediately lit up with requests for NBC to tell their viewers that there are already U.N. inspectors in Iran, which unlike Israel is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allows IAEA inspections.

During the Warner interview, Dennis Ross performed true to form, projecting supreme confidence that he knows more about Iran’s nuclear program than the Israeli Defense Minister and the U.S. intelligence community combined:

Margaret Warner: “If you hamstring their [Iran's] Central Bank, and the U.S. persuades all these other big customers not to buy Iranian oil, that could be thought of as an act of war on the part of the Iranians. Is that a danger?”

Ross: “I think there’s a context here. The context is that the Iranians continue to pursue a nuclear program. And unmistakably to many, that is a nuclear program whose purpose is to achieve nuclear weapons. That has a very high danger, a very high consequence. So the idea that they could continue with that and not realize that at some point they have to make a choice, and if they don’t make the choice, the price they’re going to pay is a very high one, that’s the logic of increasing the pressure.”

Never mind that the Israeli Defense Minister had told the press something quite different some 12 hours before.

Still, it is interesting that Barak’s comments on how Israeli intelligence views Iran’s nuclear program now mesh so closely with the NIE in 2007. This is the new and significant story here, as I believe any objective journalist would agree.

However, the FCM — led by the New York Times — cannot countenance admitting that they have been hyping the threat from Iran as they did with Iraq’s non-existent WMDs just nine years ago. So they keep repeating the line that Israel and the U.S. agree that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.

In this up-is-down world, America’s newspaper of record won’t even report accurately what Israel (or the CIA) thinks on this important issue, if that goes against the alarmist conventional wisdom that the neocons favor. Thus, we have this divergence between what the U.S. media is reporting as flat fact — i.e., that Israel and the United States believe Iran is building a bomb (though Iran denies it) — and the statements from senior Israeli and U.S. officials that Iran has NOT decided to build a bomb.

While this might strike some as splitting hairs — since peaceful nuclear expertise can have potential military use — this hair is a very important one. If Iran is not working on building a nuclear bomb, then the threats of preemptive war are not only unjustified, they could be exactly the motivation for Iran to decide that it does need a nuclear bomb to protect itself and its people.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/US-Israel-Iran-NOT-Buildi-by-Ray-McGovern-120124-402.html

Submitters Bio:

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). His website is raymondmcgovern.com

Canadians Want Legislation to Regulate Sex-Specific Abortion

by Joel Boyce

http://www.care2.com/causes/canadians-want-legislation-to-regulate-sex-specific-abortion.html

A recent Angus-Reid poll reveals that a majority of Canadians are in favor of legislation restricting gender-based abortion. Somewhat counter-intuitively, women were more in favor of restricting abortion rights on this particular basis than men. Sixty percent of those polled (including both genders) supported such legislation, but 66 percent of women supported it.

Why ask this question all of a sudden, and in Canada, no less? The flashpoint seems to be an editorial last week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, which claimed sex-specific abortion is a growing problem. The writer argued for withholding information on an unborn child’s sex until the 30th week.

The poll also asked about legislation restricting access to abortion based on other factors. There was somewhat less consensus here, with only 51 percent of those surveyed supporting restrictions based on the stage of the pregnancy (which is far more medically relevant than sex).

Taking into account party lines, the division was more or less what you’d expect, at least in terms of the Green Party being least supportive of any regulation on abortion, and the Progressive Conservatives being most in favor of it, with the remainder falling in between. However, the actual spread is surprisingly narrow. The most liberal party is 47 percent in favor of some regulation, and the most conservative is 57 percent in favor. Compared to the United States, it seems this is not such a terribly polarizing issue for us.

Back to the editorial that, apparently, prompted this poll: what constitutes a “growing” problem? The lack of numbers makes it difficult to weigh in on this matter. It’s clear that many people find the idea of selectively aborting a fetus based on its sex offensive, even if they otherwise support a liberal interpretation of women’s reproductive rights. But what are the practical consequences? Is there a significant medical danger in the increase in early-term abortions? Or is it something else?

In China, the preference for a male child has led to millions more sons being born than daughters. The shortage of girls below a certain age (dating to the advent of China’s one-child policy in the ’80s) is quickly becoming a family problem now that many of these preferred sons are unable to find wives.

The birth disparity is believed to result from a combination of preferentially aborting girls and infanticide. But, despite our large immigrant population, I’m not aware of a strong cultural bias in Canada preferring children of either sex.

According to this National Post article, many Canadians who take measures to plan the sex of a child are not preferentially valuing boys or girls more, but simply trying to balance their new child with the one(s) they already have. Many parents, it seems, want to have at least one boy and one girl, not just one or the other.

If this is indeed the case the majority of the time, I can tell you that, statistically, we should expect no future imbalance in the ratio of females to males, based on this behavior. Whether people find this type of abortion-based family planning upsetting, however, is an entirely different issue. I’ll keep my opinion to myself in this case.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/canadians-want-legislation-to-regulate-sex-specific-abortion.html#ixzz1kp8eERDU

Our nation’s military budget is grotesquely bloated.

Just about the only good thing to come out of last year’s debt ceiling debacle was that the law Congress passed to raise the debt ceiling has the potential to reduce defense spending by $492 billion over the next ten years.

It would normally be a very heavy lift to get Congress to pass any kind of reductions to defense spending. But the legislation that raised the debt ceiling was designed in the case of a deadlock on the Super Committee to mandate across-the-board cuts starting in 2013, including cuts to defense, that would be unattractive to both Democrats and Republicans alike.

The Super Committee did deadlock. And now that they are faced with the prospect of mandatory reductions in defense spending, we can count on members in both chambers of Congress and in both parties to try to shield the American war machine from any sort of funding reductions.

I just signed a petition telling Congress not to roll back cuts to defense spending. I hope you do, too.

You can find out more about this issue and take action at the link below.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/cut_defense/?r_by=34110-2109370-xTOFNWx&rc=paste1

After months of activism from people like you, President Obama announced in his State of the Union speech the creation of a new task force to investigate and hold banks accountable for causing the foreclosure crisis and financial meltdown.

The task force will have five co-chairs, one of whom is New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a progressive hero who has worked tirelessly to hold the Wall Street banks accountable for their crimes.

CREDO joined other groups in calling on President Obama to announce an investigation into the mortgage fraud that led to the economic collapse.

And we are heartened that the President of the United States responded to this grassroots pressure with such a high-profile mention in his State of the Union address.

This is especially remarkable when some were speculating that the president might use the address to announce a deal with the mortgage servicers that would grant the Wall Street banks immunity from prosecution of crimes that have not yet been investigated.

Given the White House’s abysmal record on holding Wall Street accountable, President Obama’s State of the Union announcement was so extraordinary that many of our allies in the progressive movement have declared victory.

We certainly hope they’re right, but from our perspective it is still too soon to know whether this will lead to the kind of meaningful justice the American people both need and deserve.

One of the greatest sources of potential good in the creation of this task force comes from the inclusion of New York Attorney General Schneiderman, who has been at the forefront of bank accountability fights, as one of its five co-chairs.

Yet aside from Attorney General Schneiderman, none of the other co-chairs has done literally anything that achieves our goal of holding banks accountable or prosecuting bankers for criminal activity.

What’s more, the task force won’t be independent but will be housed in the Justice Department’s Financial Fraud Task Force which President Obama established in 2009 “to hold accountable those who helped bring about the last financial crisis.” That earlier task force has failed to prosecute a single banker in conjunction with the mortgage crisis or hold Wall Street accountable in any kind of meaningful way.

It’s also concerning that three of Schneiderman’s four co-chairs are already members of the current, failed task force at the Department of Justice.1 This means they will have to start behaving very differently if this new task force will follow through on the president’s promise of a real investigation.

Time will tell whether Attorney General Schneiderman will be empowered to aggressively leverage the authority and investigatory resources of the federal government to hold banks accountable, or if his inclusion will serve as a little more than a symbolic ploy in an attempt to quiet the restive base that has reacted with outrage at the lack of accountability for Wall Street’s crimes.

We expect Attorney General Schneiderman will push very, very hard to make the work of the task force a meaningful step toward the prosecutions that have shamefully been missing from any federal action on Wall Street accountability in the last three years.

If Attorney General Schneiderman is able get his fellow co-chairs on board and launch investigations with teeth from his perch within the Department of Justice, this will be a good development indeed.

And we have no doubt that if Attorney General Schneiderman is muzzled in Washington, DC he will simply return to New York, where he can use subpoenas and his powers under the Martin Act to investigate and then prosecute. This is exactly what he did to help scuttle the terrible 50-state deal with the banks pushed by the Obama administration, as did several other Attorneys General, including California’s Kamala Harris and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto.

All that said, we still need to make sure that the Obama administration doesn’t close the door on accountability for foreclosure fraud even while it opens the door to investigate other kinds of misdeeds by Wall Street.

This is particularly important given the news over the weekend that a terrible settlement deal with mortgage servicers is closer than ever.

The robo-signing scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. It simply makes no sense for anyone to settle with the largest banks over foreclosure fraud when there has yet to be a full investigation despite what Reuters called “copious evidence” of “widespread forgery, perjury, obstruction of justice, and illegal foreclosures….” 2

Six months ago many people thought that this kind of mortgage servicer settlement was a done deal, and that in addition to letting the banks off the hook for fraud and misdeeds when servicing mortgages, the banks would also be given immunity for precisely the behavior President Obama has tasked this new task force with investigating.

Not a single Wall Street banker has gone to jail for crimes related to the mortgage servicing scandal or the financial meltdown. But thanks to your activism, we have thus far stopped the federal government and state attorneys general from giving a sweetheart deal to banks that lets them off the hook for massive amounts of mortgage and foreclosure fraud.

We will continue to fight together to bring Wall Street criminals to justice.

In the wake of the State of the Union we celebrate your activism and its continuing impact on the White House. When there are indictments we will celebrate victory.

Until then here are five things you can do to bring justice to Wall Street.

Tell New York Attorney Eric Schneiderman: Indict Wall Street criminals immediately and we will have your back.
Thank California Attorney General Kamala Harris for continuing to help block a bad 50-state settlement.
Tell your State Attorney General not to accept any settlement with the Wall Street banks that grants them immunity for crimes not yet investigated.
Tell House Democrats: Co-Sponsor the Baldwin resolution and go on the record opposing any deal that would grant mortgage servicers criminal or civil immunity for potential wrongdoing related to illegal mortgage and foreclosure practices.
Tell President Obama: Stop pressuring the state attorneys general to cut a sweetheart deal with the banks.

Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

1. “There’s Already a Financial Fraud Task Force,” David Dayen, FDL News Desk, 01-25-12.
2. “U.S. AG Eric Holder, DoJ Head Lanny Breuer Linked To Banks Accused Of Foreclosure Fraud ,” Scot J. Paltrow, Reuters, 01-19-12.