Moderate Observer

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz to Obama: “Your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout.”

Sohail — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:44:41 +0000

Noam Chomsky on American goal in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Sohail — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:57:43 +0000

Prof. Noam Chomsky on American goal in Afghanistan and Pakistan

This is part of an interview filed for SAMAA on October 1st, 2009. We had asked Prof. Noam Chomsky of MIT University to help us understand America’s interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Franken refuses more time to Lieberman, McCain stunned

Sohail — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:07:51 +0000

Keith Olbermann Responds To Made-Up Base Closing Story

Sohail — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:37:58 +0000

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Responds To Made-Up Base Closing Story – 12/17/09

Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret Raids by the C.I.A.

Sohail — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:00:20 +0000

WASHINGTON — Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some C.I.A. flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

The secret missions illuminate a far deeper relationship between the spy agency and the private security company than government officials had acknowledged. Blackwater’s partnership with the C.I.A. has been enormously profitable for the North Carolina-based company, and became even closer after several top agency officials joined Blackwater.

“It became a very brotherly relationship,” said one former top C.I.A. officer. “There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.”

George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, would not comment on Blackwater’s ties to the agency. But he said the C.I.A. employs contractors to “enhance the skills of our own work force, just as American law permits.”

“Contractors give you flexibility in shaping and managing your talent mix — especially in the short term — but the accountability’s still yours,” he said.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Blackwater, said Thursday that it was never under contract to participate in clandestine raids with the C.I.A. or with Special Operations personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.

Blackwater’s role in the secret operations raises concerns about the extent to which private security companies, hired for defensive guard duty, have joined in offensive military and intelligence operations.

Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, said in an interview that “the use of contractors in intelligence and paramilitary operations is a scandal waiting to be examined.” While he declined to comment on specific operations, Mr. Holt said that the use of contractors in such operations “got way out of hand.” He added, “It’s been very troubling to a lot of people.”

Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, has come under intense criticism for what Iraqis have described as reckless conduct by its security guards, and the company lost its lucrative State Department contract to provide diplomatic security for the United States Embassy in Baghdad earlier this year after a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.

Blackwater’s ties to the C.I.A. have emerged in recent months, beginning with disclosures in The New York Times that the agency had hired the company as part of a program to assassinate leaders of Al Qaeda and to assist in the C.I.A.’s Predator drone program in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, recently initiated an internal review examining all Blackwater contracts with the agency to ensure that the company was performing no missions that were “operational in nature,” according to one government official.

Five former Blackwater employees and four current and former American intelligence officials interviewed for this article would speak only on condition of anonymity because Blackwater’s activities for the agency were secret and former employees feared repercussions from the company. The Blackwater employees said they participated in the raids or had direct knowledge of them.

Along with the former officials, they provided few details about the targets of the raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, although they said that many of the Iraq raids were directed against members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. To corroborate the claims of the company’s involvement, a former Blackwater security guard provided photographs to The Times that he said he took during the raids. They showed detainees and armed men whom he and a former company official identified as Blackwater employees. The former intelligence officials said that Blackwater’s work with the C.I.A. in Iraq and Afghanistan had grown out of its early contracts with the spy agency to provide security for the C.I.A. stations in both countries.

In the spring of 2002, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, offered to help the spy agency guard its makeshift Afghan station in the Ariana Hotel in Kabul. Not long after Mr. Prince signed the security contract with Alvin B. Krongard, then the C.I.A.’s third-ranking official, dozens of Blackwater personnel — many of them former members of units of the Navy Seals or Army Delta Force — were sent to provide perimeter security for the C.I.A. station.

But the company’s role soon changed as Blackwater operatives began accompanying C.I.A. case officers on missions, according to former employees and intelligence officials.

Continue reading: NEW YORK TIMES

Charlie Rose – Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Sohail — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:09:21 +0000

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey

Europe’s call to religious intolerance

Sohail — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:02:26 +0000

Mona Eltahawy | Egyptian-born writer and lecturer

My question for Switzerland and other European countries enthralled by the right wing: When did Saudi Arabia become your role model?

Even before 57.5 percent of Swiss voters cast ballots on Sunday to ban the building of minarets by Muslims, it was obvious that Switzerland’s image of itself as a land of tolerance was as full of holes as its cheese. When the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) came to power in 2007, it used a poster showing a white sheep kicking black sheep off the country’s flag. This was no reference to black sheep as rebels — the right wing doesn’t do cute — but to skin color and foreigners. Posters the SVP displayed before Sunday’s referendum showed women covered from head to toe in black, standing in front of phallic-looking minarets. Such racism preceded and fed into the bigotry that fueled the referendum.

Predictably, the election results sparked cries of “Islamophobia,” but the situation for Switzerland’s 400,000 Muslims is not (yet) dire. The four existing minarets were not affected by the vote, and there are still 150 mosques or prayer rooms in which to worship.

Further, the Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights watchdog — whose chairmanship, ironically, Switzerland recently took over — has already said the ban could violate fundamental liberties, and the Swiss justice minister said the European Court of Human Rights could strike down the vote.

But the real issue here is more fundamental than whether or when Muslims can build minarets in Switzerland. Until Europe confronts long-simmering questions about how it treats immigrants — Muslims and others — the continent will continue to convulse with embarrassing right-wing eruptions that strip it of any right to preach to anyone on human rights and liberties.

Europe is an aging continent that depends on the “foreigners” its right-wing politicians love to rail about. In Switzerland, for example, it’s difficult for immigrants and even their children to get citizenship.

As a Muslim who believes in the separation of church (and mosque and synagogue) and state, I pay attention when people say they are opposed to political Islam. But to suggest, as nationalist parties in Switzerland did, that minarets are symbols of political Islam is ridiculous.

Minarets are used to issue the call to prayer, not to recruit people to Islamic political groups. If the SVP finds such prayer calls too noisy, I’d like to see it try to stifle church bells.

Raising the specter of “political Islam” or “creeping Islamicization” to frighten voters diminishes the concerns that ought to be discussed, such as an ideology’s opposition to many minority and women’s rights. And that’s where the difficult questions lie for Europe’s Muslims. They too have a right wing that breeds on fear and preaches an exclusionary and inward-looking Islam. It is the perfect foil for the non-Muslim political right wing on the continent.

Meanwhile, condemnations from the Muslim world — where some have semi-jokingly called for a boycott of Swiss chocolate — underscore the other sort of hypocrisy that must be confronted if Muslim complaints of bigotry are to be taken seriously.

The Grand Mufti of Egypt, for example, denounced the ban as an “attack on freedom of belief.” I would take him more seriously if he denounced in similar terms the difficulty Egyptian Christians face in building churches in his country. They must obtain a security permit just for renovations.

Last year, the first Catholic church — bearing no cross, no bells and no steeple — opened in Qatar, leaving Saudi Arabia the only country in the Persian Gulf that bars the building of houses of worship for non-Muslims. In Saudi Arabia, it is difficult even for Muslims who don’t adhere to the ultra-orthodox Wahhabi sect; Shiites, for example, routinely face discrimination.

Bigotry must be condemned wherever it occurs. If majority-Muslim countries want to criticize the mistreatment of Muslims living as minority communities elsewhere, they should be prepared to withstand the same level of scrutiny regarding their own mistreatment of minorities. Millions of non-Muslim migrant workers have helped build Saudi Arabia. Human rights groups have long condemned the slave-like conditions that many toil under, and the possibility of Saudi citizenship is nonexistent. Muslim nations have been unwilling to criticize this bigotry in their midst, and Europeans should keep in mind that Sunday’s ban takes them in this direction.

Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-born writer and lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues. This column appeared first in The Washington Post.

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Related: New York Times Op-Ed: Europe’s Minaret Moment

Ron Paul asks Hillary Clinton if she supports Bush Doctrine 12/02/2009

Sohail — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:51:09 +0000

Ron Paul gets a chance to ask Hillary Clinton, Gates, and Mullen if they support the Bush doctrine of “preventive war”. He gets the answer you would expect.

This is from a joint hearing on Afghanistan following Obama’s speech/announcement last night (12/01/2009).

Video shows Palestinian man hit in car attack

Sohail — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:57:11 +0000

Violence erupted in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday when a Palestinian man entered a petrol station at the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba in the occupied West Bank and stabbed two settlers.

But that was not the end of the story. According to the Israeli army, the Palestinian was then shot by a soldier, after which a car, apparently driven by a settler, ran over the wounded Palestinian, twice, with Israeli soldiers all around.

Jacky Rowland reports.

Note: Viewers may find some of the images disturbing.

Lou Dobbs: ‘Who The Hell Does The President Think He Is?’

Sohail — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 06:51:39 +0000

Inhofe: Let’s look at the big picture. We have the Copenhagen meeting coming up in the middle of December. We now have learned the president has changed his mind again and President Obama will be attending around the 9th of December. It’s my understanding that he will make the statement that he will commit ourselves to the emission standards that were in the Markey bill that passed the House of Representatives. I’m sure you’ve talked about that because that was several weeks ago. That’s a 17% reduction in CO2 by the year 2020.

Dobbs: From 2005 levels.

Inhofe: Yes, that’s correct. He can’t do that. I just had an interview with a station in Copenhagen, in Denmark –

Dobbs: [laughter]

Inhofe: — that they were all under the assumption the president could unilaterally do that. No, that’s not true. In fact, one of my good friends, a Democrat senator, Jim Webb from Virginia has sent a letter to the president and I’m quoting a sentence out of it now: “As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country.”

So, we need to make sure — and that’s the main reason I was going to go to Copenhagen was to, if Barbara Boxer and John Kerry went there and made some kind of a commitment that we were going to do something, I wanted to make sure that countries were fully informed that we are not going to be passing legislation that will accomplish what President Obama I believe is going to tell on the 9th.

Dobbs: Senator, this begs the question if I may put it forward right now: Who the hell does this president think he is?

Inhofe: I dont know, because you can’t do that. And I think it’s certainly disingenuous to mislead countries into thinking that a president . . . You know, this is not a kingdom. He’s not able to do that.

Dobbs: Not yet!

Inhofe: And we want to be sure that people realize that he cannot do that.

The Obama Puppet

Sohail — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:14:00 +0000

The World’s Least Powerful Man – The Obama Puppet

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It didn’t take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel’s.

Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else either, if he ever intended to do so.

The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can’t do anything about it.

President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.

Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.

President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, “No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.”

And the mere president has to say, “Yes, Sir!”

Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured Americans, but he can’t override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance lobby. The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care and that the country can’t afford both the “war on terror” and “socialized medicine.”

The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by private health insurance; otherwise, we can’t afford it.

The war and insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby “getting entitlements under control.”

Continue reading: COUNTER PUNCH

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, How the Economy was Lost, will be published in January by AK Press / CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts[a]yahoo[dot]com

Jewish Nationalists Clash With Palestinians

Sohail — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:22:56 +0000

JERUSALEM — Jewish nationalists and Palestinians clashed in an East Jerusalem neighborhood on Tuesday after the Israelis took over a house by court order in a predominantly Arab area. The confrontation further strained tensions in this contested city, where competing Israeli and Palestinian claims have become a sticking point in the Obama administration’s efforts to restart peace talks.

The house at the center of Tuesday’s flare-up is located in Sheik Jarrah, a leafy district just north of the Old City, where three Palestinian families have been evicted from other houses in the last year after losing a lengthy legal battle in the High Court and lower district and magistrates courts.

A Jewish association won its claim to historical ownership of the land in question, and has plans to build a large Jewish housing complex there. The Palestinians fear that the Jewish presence in Sheik Jarrah is part of a larger project to cement Israeli control of the eastern part of the city and to push Palestinian residents out.

The latest Jewish residents to move into the area were escorted by the police and private security guards and immediately removed furniture from the property, which was built by a Palestinian family headed by Refka al-Kurd, 87.

The small, one-story structure was built about 10 years ago as an extension of the Kurds’ original home, but it was unoccupied, having been sealed by the authorities after it was determined to have been constructed without the proper permits.

“The authorities took our keys to the property because we built it without permits,” said Nabil al-Kurd, 66, who lives in the original house. “But it seems the settlers can live here without permits because they are the sons of God,” he said bitterly, referring to the Jewish newcomers.

Shmulik Ben-Ruby, the spokesman for the Jerusalem police, said his force acted in line with the court decision that determined that the property “is owned by Jews.”

Continue reading: NEW YORK TIMES

O’Reilly defends Huckabee’s pardons after police killings

Sohail — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:54:39 +0000

Huckabee apologizes for pardons after police killings
Then-Ark. governor commuted sentence of suspect in four deaths

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee on Monday accepted responsibility for commuting the prison sentence years ago of the man who allegedly killed four police officers Sunday near Tacoma, Wash., saying “it’s not something I’m happy about at this particular moment.”

The shooting deaths have renewed scrutiny of Huckabee’s pardon record. Though one of the Republican Party’s most popular figures, Huckabee has been dogged by questions over the more than 1,000 commutations and pardons he issued — more than his three predecessors combined — during his 10-year tenure.

“If I could have known nine years ago this guy was capable of something of this magnitude, obviously I would never have granted a commutation,” he told Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly on Monday night. “It’s sickening.”

“In the case of this particular individual, he was sentenced to 108 years for two crimes when he was 16. The post-prison transfer board … recommended to me as governor for his commutation, which didn’t release him, it simply cut his sentence to 47 years. That would give him parole eligibility. That was the commutation. I’m responsible for that. And it’s not something I’m happy about at this particular moment, in light of that,” Huckabee said.

In his 2008 presidential campaign, Huckabee faced similar questions over the release from prison of convicted rapist Wayne DuMond, who was convicted of another rape and a murder.

Huckabee tried then to distance himself from any role in the DuMond parole, and on Sunday he similarly pointed at “a series of failures in the criminal justice system” regarding Maurice Clemmons.

Continue reading: Washington Post

Rep. Hinchey: Bush Admin. ‘Intentionally Let bin Laden Get Away’ for Justification of Iraq War

Sohail — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:38:37 +0000

Taliban: French troops trying to bribe us

Sohail — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:48:50 +0000

The leader of the Taliban in Kabul has told Al Jazeera that French troops are trying to pay his men to stop attacking them.

Saif-Allah Jalili says he is also receiving Nato weapons that were supplied to groups who were meant to be fighting him.

David Chater reports.