High Time for Hemp

High Time for Hemp

Monday, 11 February 2013 09:48By Jim Hightower, OtherWords | Op-Ed

Detail of rope made from hemp, showcased at the Eden Project, Cornwall, UK. (Photo:SnapKracklePop)This commonsense crop should become commonplace in the United States again.
Four years ago, Michelle Obama picked up a shovel to make a powerful symbolic statement about America’s food and farm future: She turned a patch of White House lawn into a working organic garden.
I’m guessing that now, as she begins another four years in the people’s mansion, the First Lady is asking herself: “What’s next? What can I do this time around to plant a crop of common sense in our country’s political soil that will link America’s farmers, consumers, environment, and grassroots economy into one big harvest of common good?”
If she’s asking this question, I’m happy to offer a one-word answer: Hemp. How about planting a good healthy stand of industrial hemp next to your organic garden?
Yes, hemp is a distant cousin of marijuana. But the industrial variety of cannabis lacks pot’s psychoactive punch. Industrial hemp won’t make anyone high, but it certainly can make us happy — because it would deliver a new economic and environmental high for America.
Our nation is the world’s biggest consumer of hemp products (from rope to shampoo, building materials to food), yet the mad masters of our insane and protracted Drug War have lumped hemp and marijuana together as “Schedule 1 controlled substances.” Our Land of the Free is the world’s only industrialized country that bans farmers from growing this benign, profitable, job-creating, and environmentally beneficial plant.
As Michael Bowman, a Colorado farmer, so aptly asks: “Can we just stop being stupid?” He’s one of the leaders of a national, bipartisan movement to legalize hemp production. As one small step, he’s seeking 100,000 signatures on a White House petition that simply asks President Barack Obama to honor the legalization of industrial hemp as a states rights issue, and to end its classification as a controlled substance. To sign, go to this website: petitions.whitehouse.gov.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Is the information revolution transforming power?

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Is the information revolution transforming power?

By: Joseph S. Nye

Feb 7th 2013
1 Comment

Joseph S. Nye, professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, discusses how the information revolution is transforming the nature of power

The second anniversary of the “Arab Spring” in Egypt was marked by riots in Tahrir Square that made many observers fear that their optimistic projections in 2011 had been dashed. Part of the problem is that expectations had been distorted by a metaphor that described events in short-run terms. If, instead of “Arab Spring,” we had spoken of “Arab revolutions,” we might have had more realistic expectations. Revolutions unfold over decades, not seasons or years.

Consider the French Revolution, which began in 1789. Who would have predicted that within a decade, an obscure Corsican soldier would lead French armies to the banks of the Nile, or that the Napoleonic Wars would disrupt Europe until 1815?

If we think of the Arab revolutions, there are many surprises yet to come. So far, most Arab monarchies have had enough legitimacy, money, and force to survive the waves of popular revolt that have brought down secular republican autocrats like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, but we are only two years into the revolutionary process.

Beneath the Arab political revolutions lies a deeper and longer process of radical change that is sometimes called the information revolution. We cannot yet fully grasp its implications, but it is fundamentally transforming the nature of power in the twenty-first century, in which all states exist in an environment that even the most powerful authorities cannot control as they did in the past.

Governments have always worried about the flow and control of information, and our age is hardly the first to be strongly affected by dramatic changes in information technology. Gutenberg’s printing press was important to the origins of the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing wars in Europe. Today, however, a much larger part of the population, both within and among countries, has access to the power that comes from information.

The current global revolution is based on rapid technological advances that have dramatically decreased the cost of creating, finding, and transmitting information. Computing power doubled roughly every 18 months for 30 years, and, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, it cost one-thousandth of what it did in the early 1970’s. If the price of automobiles had fallen as quickly as the price of semiconductors, a car today would cost $5.

As recently as the 1980’s, phone calls over copper wire could carry only one page of information per second; today, a thin strand of optical fiber can transmit 90,000 volumes in a second. In 1980, a gigabyte of data storage occupied a room; now, 200 gigabytes of storage fits in your shirt pocket.

Even more crucial has been the enormous drop in the cost of transmitting information, which reduces barriers to entry. As computing power has become cheaper and computers have shrunk to the size of smart phones and other portable devices, the decentralizing effects have been dramatic. Power over information is much more widely distributed today than even a few decades ago.

As a result, world politics is no longer the sole province of governments. Individuals and private organizations – including WikiLeaks, multinational corporations, NGOs, terrorists, or spontaneous social movements – have been empowered to play a direct role.

The spread of information means that informal networks are undercutting the monopoly of traditional bureaucracy, with all governments less able to control their agendas. Political leaders enjoy fewer degrees of freedom before they must respond to events, and must then communicate not only with other governments, but with civil society as well.

But it would be a mistake to “over-learn” the lessons that the Arab revolutions have taught about information, technology, and power. While the information revolution could, in principle, reduce large states’ power and increase that of small states and non-state actors, politics and power are more complex than such technological determinism implies.

In the middle of the twentieth century, people feared that computers and new means of communications would create the kind of central governmental control dramatized in George Orwell’s 1984. And, indeed, authoritarian governments in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have used the new technologies to try to control information. Ironically for cyber-utopians, the electronic trails created by social networks like Twitter and Facebook sometimes make the job of the secret police easier.

After its initial embarrassment by Twitter in 2009, the Iranian government was able to suppress the country’s “green” movement in 2010. Similarly, while the “great firewall of China” is far from perfect, the government has managed thus far to cope, even as the Internet has burgeoned in the country.

In other words, some aspects of the information revolution help the small, but some help the already large and powerful. Size still matters. While a hacker and a government can both create information and exploit the Internet, it matters for many purposes that large governments can deploy tens of thousands of trained people and have access to vast computing power to crack codes or intrude into other organizations.

Likewise, while it is now cheap to disseminate existing information, the collection and production of newinformation often requires major investment, and, in many competitive situations, new information matters most. Intelligence collection is a good example, and the elaborate Stuxnet worm that disabled Iranian nuclear centrifuges seems to have been a government creation.

Governments and large states still have more resources than information-empowered private actors, but the stage on which they play is more crowded. How will the ensuing drama unfold? Who will win, and who will lose?

It will take decades, not a single season, to answer such questions. As events in Egypt and elsewhere have shown, we are only just beginning to comprehend the effects of the information revolution on power in this century.

The opinions expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily those of the World Economic Forum. Published in collaboration with Project Syndicate.

Author: Joseph S. Nye is a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the author of The Future of Power.

Image: A woman uses her smart phone while waiting to cross the street in New York City REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Ayn Rand: Queen of the Universe

(Photo: Alex / Flickr)Thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness and billionaire empowerment rules the world. It’s a remarkable achievement for an ideology that was pushed to the fringes for most of her life, and ridiculed on national television in a notorious interview with Mike Wallace.
But, it’s happened. And today, the United States and other independent governments around the world are crumbling while Ayn Rand’s billionaires are taking over.
With each new so-called Free Trade agreement – especially the very secretive Trans Pacific Partnership, which has less to do with trade and more to do with a new law of global governance for transnational corporations – Ayn Rand’s reviled “state” (or what we would call our democracy, the United States of America) is losing its power to billionaires and transnational corporations.
Ayn Rand hated governments and democracy. She considered them systems of mob rule. She grew up in Russia, and as a child watched the Bolsheviks confiscate her father’s pharmacy during the Russian Revolution. Likely suffering from PTSD from that incident, Ayn Rand devoted her future writings to evil government, including the "evil" of its functions like taxation, regulation, and providing social services to the poor and sick.
She divided the world into makers and takers (or what she called “looters”).
On one side are the billionaires and the industrialists. People like Dagny Taggert, a railroad tycoon, and Hank Rearden, a steel magnate. Both were fictional characters in her book Atlas Shrugged, but both have real-world counterparts in the form of the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, and Sheldon Adelson. According to Rand, they are the “Atlases” holding up the world.
So, in Atlas Shrugged, when the billionaires, tired of paying taxes and complying with government regulation, go on strike, Ayn Rand writes that the American economy promptly collapsed.
On the other side are the “looters,” or everyone else who isn’t as rich or privileged, or who believed in a democratic government to provide basic services, empower labor unions, and regulate the economy. They are the leeches on society according to Rand (and according to Mitt Romney with his 47% comments). And, as she told Mike Wallace in in 1959, they do not even “deserve love.”
To our Founding Fathers, looking out for the general welfare of the population was an explicit role of the government, one of its most important and the reason this nation was created when we separated from Britian.
But to Ayn Rand, a government that taxed billionaires to help pay for healthcare and education for impoverished children was not just unwise economically, it was also immoral.
Nature abhors a vacuum – both in the wild and in politics.  So, when people, organized in the form of a government, are removed from power, then money organized in the form of corporations and billionaires moves into the vacuum to take power – which is exactly what’s happening today, worldwide.
In the thirty years after her death, the United States crept closer and closer to Ayn Rand’s utopia. Reagan dramatically slashed taxes on the rich and went after labor unions. Clinton deregulated financial markets for the rich, ended welfare as we know it, and committed our nation to one globalist corporate free trade agreement after another.
And, under Bush and Obama, we’ve seen the rapid privatization of our commons, the further erosion of social safety nets, and more losses of national sovereignty with more so-called free trade agreements.
In Europe, we’re seeing sovereign governments neutered by Conservative technocrats. According to Ayn Rand, the rich can never be asked to sacrifice. So instead, it’s working people across the Eurozone who have to pay for the bad investments that the banksters made in the run-up to the global financial collapse.
As we saw in Greece in 2011 with the deposing of Prime Minister George Papandreou, and all across the state of Michigan over the last few years with financial managers laws, when democratic governments are unwilling to do the bidding of the rich, they're immediately replaced by corporate lackeys who will.
The Taggerts and the Reardens are holding the reins of government today.
Which explains why Corporate America paid an average tax rate of just 12% in 2011 – the lowest rate in 40 years. It explains why 400 billionaires in America now own more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined. And it explains why fewer impoverished Americans are getting less federal assistance than at any time in the last half-century.
Ayn Rand envisioned a world without governments – a world where the super-rich are free to do as they wish.
We tried that during the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th Century – before Ayn Rand was alive. If she'd watched the ruthlessness of the Robber Barons like she did the Bolsheviks, she may have reached different conclusions.
She may have realized that American Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower were right when they made sure that wealth was more evenly distributed and the Billionaire Class was held in check.
Or she may have come to understand that corporations and billionaires owe their wealth to the state and not the other way around. Without favorable patent and copyright laws, a court system, an educated workforce, and an infrastructure to move goods about the country, then no one would be able to get rich in America.  We'd be like the Libertarian paradise of Somalia.
As Harry Moser, the founder of the Reshoring Initiative,argued in The Economist, “Corporations are not created by the shareholders or the management. Rather they are created by the state. They are granted important privileges by the state (limited liability, eternal life, etc). They are granted these privileges because the state expects them to do something beneficial for the society that makes the grant. They may well provide benefits to other societies, but their main purpose is to provide benefits to the societies (not to the shareholders, not to management, but to the societies) that create them.”
Sadly, this understanding of how democratic republics work - and why - has been lost this generation.
And Ayn Rand’s disciples are making sure the next generation never finds it again.
Idaho State Senator John Goedde, who chairs that state Senate’s Education Committee, introduced a bill this week that would require all students to read Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” before they can graduate. Goedde explained that the book made his son a Republican and that it “certainly gives one a sense of personal responsibility.”
Between stupidity like this, and the re-birth of Ayn Rand through corporate-funded think tanks and Hollywood movies, the Billionaire Class wants to make sure the next generation buys into a toxic ideology that’s quite literally destroying the world as we know it.
They don’t want the 21st Century to be “America’s Century.” They want it to be the “Billionaire’s Century.” And if they succeed, then the middle class in America - and through most of the developed world - will go extinct.

US control is diminishing, but it still thinks it owns the world

'We "stabilise" countries when we invade them and destroy them.' Photograph: Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images

This piece is adapted from Uprisings, a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire, Noam Chomsky's new book of interviews with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian's, the answers Chomsky's.

Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab spring is limited, but it's not insignificant. The western-controlled dictatorial system is being eroded. In fact, it's been being eroded for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources – the main concern of US planners – have been mostly nationalised. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.

Take the US invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it's maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You're not supposed to say this. It's considered a conspiracy theory.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism – mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn't deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was going to be very hard to reach US goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and, two, "encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments". In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.

Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, US policies remain constant, going back to the second world war. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

Declining because of economic weakness?

Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse. It has more diverse power centres. At the end of the second world war, the United States was absolutely at the peak of its power. It had half the world's wealth, and every one of its competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It had a position of unimaginable security and developed plans to essentially run the world – not unrealistically at the time.

This was called "grand area" planning?

Yes. Right after the second world war, George Kennan, head of the US state department policy planning staff, and others sketched out the details, and then they were implemented. What's happening now in the Middle East and north Africa, to an extent, and in South America substantially goes all the way back to the late 1940s. The first major successful resistance to US hegemony was in 1949. That's when an event took place that, interestingly, is called "the loss of China". It's a very interesting phrase, never challenged. There was a lot of discussion about who is responsible for the loss of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it's a very interesting phrase. You can only lose something if you own it. It was just taken for granted: we possess China – and, if they move toward independence, we've lost China. Later came concerns about "the loss of Latin America", "the loss of the Middle East", "the loss of" certain countries, all based on the premise that we own the world and anything that weakens our control is a loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.

Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in a farcical form, listen to the Republican debates, they're asking, "How do we prevent further losses?"

On the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply declined. By 1970, the world was already what was called tripolar economically, with a US-based North American industrial centre, a German-based European centre, roughly comparable in size, and a Japan-based east Asian centre, which was then the most dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the global economic order has become much more diverse. So it's harder to carry out our policies, but the underlying principles have not changed much.

Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that the United States was entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources". That goes beyond anything that George W Bush said. But it was quiet and it wasn't arrogant and abrasive, so it didn't cause much of an uproar. The belief in that entitlement continues right to the present. It's also part of the intellectual culture.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption of innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he's a suspect until proven guilty. He should be brought to trial. It's a core part of American law. You can trace it back to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying maybe we shouldn't throw out the whole basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a lot of very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones were, as usual, on the left-liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias, a well-known and highly respected left-liberal commentator, wrote an article in which he ridiculed these views. He said they were "amazingly naive" and silly. Then he explained the reason. He said: "One of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers." Of course, he didn't mean Norway. He meant the United States. So the principle on which the international system is based is that the US is entitled to use force at will. To talk about the US violating international law or something like that is amazingly naive, completely silly. Incidentally, I was the target of those remarks, and I'm happy to confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

I merely mention that to illustrate that, in the intellectual culture, even at what's called the left-liberal end of the political spectrum, the core principles haven't changed very much. But the capacity to implement them has been sharply reduced. That's why you get all this talk about American decline. Take a look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal. Its big front-page cover asks, in bold face, "Is America Over?" It's a standard complaint of those who believe they should have everything. If you believe you should have everything and anything gets away from you, it's a tragedy, and the world is collapsing. So is America over? A long time ago we "lost" China, we've lost southeast Asia, we've lost South America. Maybe we'll lose the Middle East and north African countries. Is America over? It's a kind of paranoia, but it's the paranoia of the super-rich and the super-powerful. If you don't have everything, it's a disaster.

The New York Times describes the "defining policy quandary of the Arab spring as how to square contradictory US impulses, including support for democratic change, a desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who have become a potent political force". The Times identifies three US goals. What do you make of them?

Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favour of stability. But you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to US orders. So, for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big foreign policy threat, is that it is destabilising Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By trying to expand its influence into neighbouring countries. On the other hand, we "stabilise" countries when we invade them and destroy them.

I've occasionally quoted one of my favourite illustrations of this, which is from a well-known, very good liberal foreign policy analyst, James Chace, a former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of the Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973, he said that we had to "destabilise" Chile in the interests of "stability". That's not perceived to be a contradiction – and it isn't. We had to destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain stability, meaning that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favour of stability in this technical sense.

Concern about political Islam is just like concern about any independent development. Anything that's independent you have to have concern about, because it may undermine you. In fact, it's a little paradoxical, because traditionally the United States and Britain have by and large strongly supported radical Islamic fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force to block secular nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a radical Islamic state. It has missionary zeal, is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan and funding terror. But it's the bastion of US and British policy. They've consistently supported it against the threat of secular nationalism from Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim's Iraq, among many others. But they don't like political Islam because it may become independent.

The first of the three points, our yearning for democracy, that's about on the level of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian commitment to freedom, democracy and liberty for the world. It's the kind of statement you laugh about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod politely, and maybe even with awe, when you hear it from their western counterparts.

If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That's even recognised by leading scholars, though they don't put it this way. One of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly regarded – a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan's state department and has several books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes very seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it has a funny history. The history is that every US administration is "schizophrenic". They support democracy only if it conforms to certain strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology, as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of course, there's another interpretation, but one that can't come to mind if you're a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.

Within several months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt, he was in the dock facing criminal charges and prosecution. It's inconceivable that US leaders will ever be held to account for their crimes in Iraq or beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon?

That's basically the Yglesias principle: the very foundation of the international order is that the United States has the right to use violence at will. So how can you charge anybody?

And no one else has that right?

Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and kills 1,000 people and destroys half the country, OK, that's all right. It's interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president. He didn't do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including one he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website before the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel's military actions until they had achieved their objectives, and censuring Iran and Syria because they were supporting resistance to Israel's destruction of southern Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they inherit the right. Other clients do, too.

But the rights really reside in Washington. That's what it means to own the world. It's like the air you breathe. You can't question it. The main founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticise the Vietnam war on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You already know what's coming. Other countries don't have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is "transcendent" – to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he's a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the records. He said that, when you studied the record, it looked as if the United States hadn't lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says that to criticise our transcendent purpose "is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds" – which is a good comparison. It's a deeply entrenched religious belief. It's so deep that it's going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near-hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or "hating America" – interesting concepts that don't exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they're just taken for granted.

Israel does as it pleases

Israel does as it pleases

Until now it’s worked. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Sudan and, of course, the Palestinians wiped the saliva, said it was rain and restrained themselves, because they are weak and Israel is strong.

By  | Feb.03, 2013 | 4:08 AM | 

 6

The prevalent basic assumption in Israel is that it is allowed to do anything. It is rooted deep in its consciousness, and any criticism or even doubt is seen as heresy and treason.

Israel may fly in Lebanon’s sovereign airspace ‏(or any other Arab state’s‏) as often as it desires − that’s taken for granted. It may, of course, bombard anytime that someone foresees danger. It may invade any place, settle anywhere. It may do ‏(almost‏) anything

The “anything allowed” concept was shaped in the Israeli consciousness on the basis of several assumptions − some solid and justified; some irrelevant; some groundless. These include the Holocaust memory; our exclusive right to the land, being the chosen people; the danger to our survival; the whole world being against us; the Arabs all wanting to wipe us out.

This is how Israel assembled its own behavioral code, which ignores the world’s. What the hell, the world wants to destroy us anyway. That’s why Israel allows itself to take aggressive steps without asking itself anything − like, for example, what would it do if Arab planes had invaded Israeli airspace, even for mere intelligence-gathering flights. Not to mention what would happen if they dared bomb a convoy of “deal breaking” weapons.

Deal breaking? Military commentators recite this slogan as though it were not a lie. Its real meaning is: perpetuating Israeli supremacy. Defensive antiaircraft missiles, intended to prevent Israel from making the impudent, provocative flights above Lebanon, are doomed to destruction. We are allowed. Only Israel is permitted to have all the weapon systems − including the most horrific in the arsenal. We’re allowed because we have the power; we’re the strong ones. Just as well, but this will not be the situation forever. The Arab notebook is open and the hand is writing, even if it is not at liberty to respond at present. Vengeance day may yet come.

The only question raised in Israeli discourse is whether it’s working now. Until now it’s worked. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Sudan and, of course, the Palestinians wiped the saliva, said it was rain and restrained themselves, because they are weak and Israel is strong.

A society agitating over drafting ultra-Orthodox men isn’t even willing to try to doubt whether these bombardments, these daring hush-hush operations beyond the lines, are doing us any good. They’ve worked so far, but were they all necessary? Won’t Israel pay for them one day? Even according to foreign sources, Israel isn’t dealing with that. It’s enough that a handful of politicians and generals have decided what’s good for it, and to hell with all the troublesome questions.

Even more troublesome are the questions about the settlements. Again, Israel’s conduct is based on the assumption that, as far as West Bank settlements are concerned, anything is allowed. A committee set up by the UN − by the power of whose decision the State of Israel was established and won world recognition − published a document on Thursday castigating Israel’s policy. The committee ruled that the settlements are a violation of international law − or, in other words, a war crime.

Israel, the report’s composers established, will be susceptible to lawsuits in the International Criminal Court in The Hague and sanctions. So what? The Foreign Ministry has already called it a one-sided report. A commentator in Israel Hayom, like all Israel’s commentators, has already consigned it to “the garbage heap of history.”

“All human beings have rights, only the Jews don’t,” complained the mouthpiece of the robbed Israeli Cossack [a Hebrew idiom for a bullying villain who complains of being wronged], Dror Idar. Only the Jews don’t have rights? Amusing. Only the Israelis are allowed to do anything.

Full disclosure: I appeared before this investigation committee’s members − impressive, well-known jurists − at their request. Their committee was set up by the same council that wrote the Goldstone Report into Operation Cast Lead in Gaza − which penetrated so deeply into Israeli consciousness that the Israel Defense Forces acted differently in last November’s Operation Pillar of Defense. That report was not thrown into the garbage heap, but went into history. This settlement report, too, will resonate − at least in the outside world.

One straight line links Israel’s blatant flouting of the world’s position regarding the settlements and the mysterious bombardment in Syria, which the world has responded to silently. This arrogant line is called: Israel is allowed to do anything.

Secret Censor.

Secret Censor Revealed at Guantanamo Military Commissions

Tuesday, 29 January 2013 14:59By Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - Who else is monitoring the Guantanamo military commissions proceedings?
That's the key question that came up during the second half of pretrial hearings Monday afternoon at the military commissions tribunal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of planning the 9/11 attacks.
At issue was who controls the use of a censor button inside the military courtroom which triggers a red flashing warning light, cutting the audio and video feed to media and other observers watching the proceedings through closed-circuit television in the gallery.
The military judge and a court security officer can implement the censor button. It is supposed to be used if classified information is discussed in open court.
Apparently, another person is controlling another censor button somewhere on the courtroom premises, and neither defense attorneys representing the suspects nor the judge seemed to know who was responsible for pressing it just moments after David Nevin, Mohammed's attorney, started to discuss the title of a motion pertaining to his client's detention at a CIA-operated black-site prison.
As soon as Nevin said the word "secret," the warning light, which is silent, started to flash and the sound of white noise was fed through the audio feed. Moments later, the monitors inside the gallery went black. The outage lasted three minutes. Nevin then approached the bench and engaged in a discussion with the judge. (The courtroom is visible to members of the gallery but is separated by soundproof glass; the audio feed is delayed by 40 seconds).
When court reconvened, Army Col. James Pohl, the military judge, appeared to be upset.
"The 40-second delay was initiated, but not by me," Pohl said. "I'm curious as to why."
"Who is listening to this? Who is controlling these proceedings?" Nevin asked. 
Pohl said the matters he and Nevin discussed during those two minutes in which the audio was cut off did not require use of the censor button, and since neither he nor the court security officer was responsible for triggering the disruption, he wanted to know who was.
"If some external body is turning the commission off under their own view of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation because I ... there is no classification on it, then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off," Pohl said.
Nevin and attorneys representing the other 9/11 suspects said the defense would not be able to move forward with their case until they knew who was in control of that censor button and who else was monitoring the commissions.
"I thought it was the court security officer," said Navy Cmdr. Walter Ruiz, the military commissions attorney defending Mustafa al Hawsawi. "Who else is monitoring?"
Joanna Baltes, a Justice Department attorney representing the government on secrecy issues, seemed to know why Nevin's comments were censored and who was responsible for using the censor button. However, she would only discuss the issue in a closed session.
Later Monday evening, James Connell, defense attorney for Ammar al Baluchi, explained to reporters that the government would make an audio/visual technician available as a witness Tuesday to "address how the audio feeds work."
Connell said he did not know the identity of the technician. Connell added that he "thought there was one button and it was in control of the court security officer."
In response to a question from Truthout about the nature of his remarks prior to being censored, Nevin said he simply was trying to articulate that Mohammed has "the right to be present when issues related to his detention is discussed."
"Is that too much to ask?" Nevin said. "May he [Mohammed] be present to hear those discussions? You capture him in 2003 and torture him for three and a half years and he may be put to death."
The defense motion in question pertains to the preservation of the black-site prisons in Europe where Mohammed and his co-conspirators were detained - and tortured - before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.
Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, Guantanamo's chief prosecutor, also spoke with reporters to provide insight from the government as to what transpired regarding the use of the censor button.
He suggested that Pohl and the defense attorneys are well aware of the rules that are in place governing military commissions because the judge implemented them, and that the use of the censor button in particular is outlined in a December 8, 2011, document, "Military Commissions Rules of Court," describing a court security officer's responsibilities. He also handed out a couple of pages from the Military Commissions manual, which a section describing the rules for "closure" states that "there may be other sources of authority to close the hearing ..."
"I just want you to have that framework," Martins told reporters. 
Still, Martins noted that an expert witness would be on hand Tuesday to discuss Pohl's own rules about court security.
Martins also said the portion of Nevin's comments that was censored would be restored to the hearing transcript "as soon as possible."
But by Tuesday morning, Pohl's tone dramatically changed. He said he thought about the issue overnight and decided against allowing an audio/visual expert to testify because he did not know who the "right" person would be to provide such testimony.
He noted, however, that "only the judge has the authority to close the courtroom," a comment that appeared to be directed at the individual who cut off the audio feed. 
What was made clear on Tuesday is that Pohl seems to be unware about the technology used in his courtroom. 
"I think you give me way too much credit as to what I know about what's happening in this courtroom from a technology standpoint," Pohl said in response to statements Martins made Tuesday morning, noting that Pohl authorized all of the courtroom audio and visual guidelines and the security measures in place pertaining to how the rules would be enforced. 
So the issue about who controls the censor button during the proceedings remains unresolved. But Baltes, the Justice Department prosecutor, offered up a hint about the identity of the invisible hand. She said Tuesday morning the "original classification authority" reviews the military commission audio feeds. The authority is likely the CIA as the issues Nevin began to discuss revolved around Mohammed's detention at CIA black site prisons. 
The confusing turn of events during the first day of a week of pretrial hearings on a series of motions in the case underscored the chaotic nature of the military commissions.
Just two days earlier, Martins had urged members of the media who traveled to Guantanamo to cover the hearings to "withhold judgment" about the process. He impressed upon the media that he is a staunch advocate of "transparency" even though certain aspects of the case, such as the treatment the prisoners endured while in CIA custody, is shrouded in secrecy and is prohibited from being discussed in open court.
Phyllis Rodriguez, a White Plains, New York, resident whose son, Gregory, 31, died on 9/11 and is attending this week's hearings, however, has already made up her mind.
"I wish it were on US soil. I wish it were in federal court," she said, referring to the 9/11 trials.
Technical Legal Issues
Mohammed, whose beard was dyed red, and two other accused al-Qaeda terrorists, Walid bin Attash and Ramzi bin al Shibh, arrived in court Monday morning dressed in their traditional white tunics and outfitted as soldiers in camouflage jacket and vests. Their ankles were shackled when they were led into the courtroom by Guantanamo guards. Al Baluchi and Hawsawi did not wear camouflage attire, nor were their ankles shackled as they were led to their seats in the back of the courtroom.
The men were engaged in the proceedings throughout the day, thumbing through thick binders of motions and other legal material.
Highly technical legal issues dominated much of the morning session. For example, in order for the defense to receive classified information from the government, the attorneys have to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) promising to protect the information. But Connell took issue with some of the language in the proposed MOU, specifically over the use of the words "agree" and "agreeing."
"If we change 'agreeing to comply' to 'acknowledging a duty to comply,' I have no problem with it," Connell said about the MOU. "And if we change that 'I agree to be bound by the terms of the order' to 'I acknowledge that I am bound by terms of the order,' that is me acquiescing in the order of the court rather than me voluntarily agreeing to the terms of the order."
The government objected, and Pohl noted that the only way the defense will receive classified information is if they agree to the conditions set forth in the MOU and sign it.
Another matter that arose in the morning session and was resolved later in the afternoon pertained to the 9/11 defendants acknowledging verbally to Pohl that they understood they had the right to appear at the hearings and the right not to appear. Pohl demanded that the defendants state to him that they understood these rights, and if they refused to engage him, they would be forced to appear at the hearings.
Speaking to the accused individually, Pohl asked each of the men if he understood his rights and if he had any questions. All of the defendants said they understood their rights, but bin Attash added, "We don't have any motivating factors that would invite us to come to the court."
"We have been dealing with our attorneys for about a year and a half and we have not been able to build any trust with them," he said through an interpreter. "Our attorneys are bound and we are bound also. There are many things that the court could do to help us, help motivate us to attend the court, but there is nothing that would motivate us to come.
"Yes, I understand my rights very well. But I want you to understand the situation that we are in. The government does not want us to hear or understand. The prosecution does not want us to hear or understand or say anything. And they don't even want our attorneys to do anything."
One of bin Attash's attorneys, Cheryl Bormann, who dresses in a black abaya that covers her body when she appears in court, told Pohl she has not been able to send her client a letter since October 2011.
"In order for me to have a conversation with Mr. bin Attash, I have to make plane arrangements 14 days in advance to come down here for a week at a time so that I can have a short conversation with Mr. bin Attash," she said. "And then when I get down here, I'm not even permitted to bring in a list of things that I need to discuss with Mr. bin Attash or any draft motions that I might want to review with Mr. bin Attash, or, in fact, provide him with information I think might be relevant to the next commission proceeding. It has probably irretrievably affected my ability to communicate with Mr. bin Attash. And when I say 'my,' I mean everybody on the defense team for Mr. bin Attash. I know you don't understand this because you don't live my life."
During a hastily arranged news conference with reporters Monday evening, Bormann said she suspects her conversations with bin Attash are being recorded by the government when she meets with him to discuss the case.
"I have no confidence it is not," she said, adding that the military commissions has fallen short in living up to its motto, "Fairness, Transparency, Justice."