Analysis: Assad caught red-handed may now go for revenge

From Debka

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April 25, 2008, 1:23 PM (GMT+02:00)

Ready for nuclear fuel rods as per North Korean model

US and Israel intelligence experts upgrade the chances of president Bashar Assad retaliating for the Israeli attack, which irreparably damaged the secret nuclear North Korea built for him in eastern Syria – now that the episode is out in the open. DEBKAfile quotes those experts as recalling Saddam Hussein’s burning ambition to hit Israel’s nuclear site at Dimona after Israeli jets smashed Iraq’s French built nuclear reactor in 1981.

Assad will find it hard to avoid avenging his humiliation Thursday, April 24, when America’s top intelligence officials briefing congressional committees laid bare detail after detail of Syria’s nuclear program. They all agreed that it was incumbent on the United States to take further steps against Iran as well as Syria to avert any more developments which endanger the world.

The briefing brought out key data hidden from the public in the eight months since the Israeli raid.

1. It confirmed DEBKAfile’s October 2007 report that North Korean personnel had built a reactor for the production of plutonium in a remote part of Syria.

2. Israel managed to plant a mole or moles inside the reactor compound capable of producing professional photos from inside the reactor. US lawmakers where shown, for instances, images of a concrete floor with rows of holes ready for the nuclear fuel rods to power the plant.

Assad must have been irked beyond endurance when his most coveted secrets and security were shown to the world as having been blown wide open, when the regime he heads depends for its survival on a battery of secret police and undercover agencies with eyes and ears everywhere.

3. The Israeli raid demonstrated too that Syria’s military establishment has been penetrated as fatally as his clandestine agencies.

4. The congressional briefing will have done more to mar the relations of trust between Tehran and Damascus than any diplomatic or military action. Cracks are inevitable in their strategic pact. It will be hard for Iran to continue to pose as the No. 1 Middle East power after Syria, its foremost ally and military mainstay, exposed its extreme vulnerability.

5. Tehran’s precise role in the Syrian nuclear program is not known, but it was obvious to the American lawmakers listening to the intelligence briefing that Syria would not have built a nuclear reactor with Iran’s knowledge and consent, and that the Syrian plant was designed to be an integral part of Iran’s own nuclear program.

Iran will no doubt have inferred from the disclosures about the Israeli attack on the Syrian reactor and its painful fallout for the Assad regime that its own projects may be subjected to the same fate.

It is a matter of record now that Israel is the only country in the world to have ever destroyed two nuclear reactors in successful go-it-alone, intelligence-backed military operations.

How to rescue our degenerated Democracy

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be working on building a legislative package that will save our democratic process.

There are a number or things that need to be done.

1. Restore the “fairness” doctrine to broadcast mediums including the cable channels. A license to broadcast is a license to print money. This creates an obligation on the part of the licensees to serve the public trust.

1. Creation of “The Political Channel” paid for entirely by taxpayers and required to be carried on all cable networks, satellite providers and simulcast to the internet. This channel will carry for FREE adds for political candidates up to half an hour for major candidates. Local candidates will all have their FREE time as well.

1. Outlaw any political advertising on commercial television. If we can stop them from selling cigarettes we can stop them from force feeding distorted political adds to the masses. The only ones who will lose from this are the broadcasters who take in billions selling lies to the American public every 4 years. Plenty of countries have rules similar to this. It works fine by forcing the commercial TV to provide free time. I prefer the idea of the “Political Channel” because I don’t believe people should be forced to watch any political adds.

1. Since something like 80% of a campaign’s cost is in TV adds, there will be much less pressure on politicians to raise money all the time instead of doing their jobs.

5.Put our anti-trust laws into effect. Undo the disastrous conglomeration of all media into a few hands by requiring the breakup of the big ones. Anti-trust laws are there not only to encourage competition but to prevent monopolies. There can be no more dangerous monopolies than on those that affect the electorate. This includes all media. Print, TV, Cable, whatever.

Barack should stress that this is the best way to guarantee a well informed public in the future. It will also save the economy billions of dollars that should be spent improving infrastructure, like internet 2, instead.

By removing the main need to raise money, maybe we can actually get the public financing system to work like it was meant to. Why should ANYONE need to spend 150 million dollars to run for office. That way, the politicians can look to their electorate rather than fat-cat corporations for guidance on their policy decisions.

Just a preview of what I hope to put together over the next few weeks. Probably the biggest stumbling block will be the 1st amendment, but my impression is that there are enough precedents out there to make these new laws stick.

Of course we’ll need Dem majorities in both houses to back Barack on this. But given the low esteem that the MSM is held in by most the public, Barack could probably make some good headway by jawboning them. I mean, look at that last debate. He’s already started in on that, but he’s doing it in a humorous fashion. Come the general election, maybe he should become a LOT more serious about it.

Make no mistake about it, if we don’t fix the media mess and the moneyed politics that expensive TV buys require, we will NEVER fix this country.

Two Nobel Prize Economists Recommend Obama

From Kos

by Overseas [Subscribe]

Fri Apr 25, 2008 at 05:50:05 AM PDT

MSNBC has two Nobel Prize economists on right now. They were asked which of the three – Obama, Clinton or McCain – would be best for the economy, and both replied Obama.

Joseph Stiglitz, who was connected to the Clinton presidency and a 2001 prize winner, said that Obama’s speech 3 weeks ago on the economy was brilliant. He also said that the deregulation of the markets during Clinton’s presidency was a mistake and the markets need to be re-regulated.

Edmund Phelps, 2006 prize winner, agreed. We need a new way of looking at the economy and Obama is the one that can do that. We do not need the thinking of the past.

What great endorsements there!

The Worst Of All Worlds For The Dems – Andrew Sulivan

The Worst Of All Worlds For The Dems

22 Apr 2008 10:39 pm

<!– –> Right now, the actual results suggest what I thought would be the worst possible result for the Democrats: a nine point win for Clinton. It doesn’t change the race’s dynamic or the math; but it will give Clinton just the tiniest sliver of an argument that she should not drop out. But what is striking in the exit polls is the polarization on three lines: gender, race and age. It was dead even with men; but a massive advantage for Clinton among women. The racial difference is obvious as well. But what really leaps out is age. Obama lost every cohort over 40; Clinton lost every cohort under 40. Race also affects the generations in turn: 67 percent of whites over 60 voted for Clinton – a massive 24 point advantage. Among the younger generation, there is much less racial polarization: under 30, whites split evenly. This is a fascinating result. It appears to me as the future struggling to overcome the past. On the process, I stick to my view that she needed double digits to have reason to stay in. Right now, she doesn’t have it. But she won’t leave. She will never leave. Ceding to someone younger is unthinkable to her. It’s a form of death for her.

But here’s what she does have: total shamelessness, and an absolute belief that she is the rightful nominee. Shamelessness: the appropriation of the message and even the words of her opponent; the portrayal of one of the most privileged and advantaged candidates in memory as an insurgent underdog; the eager embrace of the tactics – and message! – of the Rove right if it could help in any way; the picture of a candidate who saw a 20 – 25 point lead dissipate into single figures as a candidate for momentum. What sustains her is this deep, deep sense of entitlement and an absolute refusal to let the next generation take over. She will take this to the last day of the convention if necessary.

If Obama thinks he has a right to actually be nominated by the Clinton Democrats because he has won more votes, more states and more delegates, he is sadly mistaken. They will never let such a person win without a death struggle. And that is where the Democrats are now headed.

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John Ashcroft defends waterboarding

From Kos:

ME: First off, Mr. Ashcroft, I’d like to apologize for the rudeness of some of my fellow students. It was uncalled for–we can disagree civilly, we don’t need that. (round of applause from the audience, and Ashcroft smiles) I have here in my hand two documents. One of them, you know, is the text of the United Nations Convention against Torture, which, point of interest, says nothing about “lasting physical damage”…
ASHCROFT: (interrupting) Do you have the Senate reservations to it?
ME: No, I don’t. Do you happen to know what they are?
ASHCROFT: (angrily) I don’t have them memorized, no. I don’t have time to go around memorizing random legal facts. I just don’t want these people in the audience to go away saying, “He was wrong, she had the proof right in her hand!” Because that’s not true. It’s a lie. If you don’t have the reservations, you don’t have anything. Now, if you want to bring them another time, we can talk, but…
ME: Actually, Mr. Ashcroft, my question was about this other document. (laughter and applause) This other document is a section from the judgment of the Tokyo War Tribunal. After WWII, the Tokyo Tribunal was basically the Nuremberg Trials for Japan. Many Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture. And among the tortures listed was the “water treatment,” which we nowadays call waterboarding…
ASHCROFT: (interrupting) This is a speech, not a question. I don’t mind, but it’s not a question.
ME: It will be, sir, just give me a moment. The judgment describes this water treatment, and I quote, “the victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach.” One man, Yukio Asano, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor by the allies for waterboarding American troops to obtain information. Since Yukio Asano was trying to get information to help defend his country–exactly what you, Mr. Ashcroft, say is acceptible for Americans to do–do you believe that his sentence was unjust? (boisterous applause and shouts of “Good question!”)
ASHCROFT: (angrily) Now, listen here. You’re comparing apples and oranges, apples and oranges. We don’t do anything like what you described.
ME: I’m sorry, I was under the impression that we still use the method of putting a cloth over someone’s face and pouring water down their throat…
ASHCROFT: (interrupting, red-faced, shouting) Pouring! Pouring! Did you hear what she said? “Putting a cloth over someone’s face and pouring water on them.” That’s not what you said before! Read that again, what you said before!
ME: Sir, other reports of the time say…
ASHCROFT: (shouting) Read what you said before! (cries of “Answer her fucking question!” from the audience) Read it!
ME: (firmly) Mr. Ashcroft, please answer the question.
ASHCROFT: (shouting) Read it back!
ME: “The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach.”
ASHCROFT: (shouting) You hear that? You hear it? “Forced!” If you can’t tell the difference between forcing and pouring…does this college have an anatomy class? If you can’t tell the difference between forcing and pouring…
ME: (firmly and loudly) Mr. Ashcroft, do you believe that Yukio Asano’s sentence was unjust? Answer the question. (pause)
ASHCROFT: (more restrained) It’s not a fair question; there’s no comparison. Next question! (loud chorus of boos from the audience)

I just don’t understand….

How could Hillary do better than Barack in PA. Don’t tell me about demographics, people are people, and they are HURTING. Is racism really SO strong that it completely overrides common sense? If it isn’t racism, then is it reverse sexism? Is feminist ideology so strong that it completely blinds its adherents.

Neither of these options make much sense to me. If they reflect the reality of what happened, then I am at a complete loss as to how to respond rationally. It makes me want to pick up a picket sign and a brick, or if need be a machine gun. If Racism and Reverse Sexism are behind Barack’s defeat in PA despite his outspending her 3 to 1 for TV ads what are we to do?

We CAN’T let rigid ideology paralyze our system anymore than the bag-man system of lobbyists that has paralyzed it for the last 30 years.

I’d love to hear another theory about what went wrong in PA. I gave up on bricks when I quit SDS in the 70’s.

My son tells me not to worry, that Barack’s going to with the nomination.

Maybe. But if the ideology of Racism runs as deep nationwide as it does in PA we’re going to end up with McSame no matter what we do.

I guess that’s the downbeat version of the truth that Hillary is trying to sell to the super delegates.

God, I hope she’s wrong and that the post-racial world I live in on Daily Kos will triumph at the ballet box.

If it doesn’t, I warn you I will work till I die for California secession. And I’ll back it up with bricks and even machine guns if I have to.

I’m not that different from the founding fathers, after all. “Live Free or Die” is hard to accept, but I’ve been there before.

And even as pathetic a human as I now am, a 54 year old man with multiple sclerosis, there comes a point where your life isn’t worth living anymore if you don’t fight for what you believe in.

Reading over what I just wrote, I realize that it sounds like a ridiculous over reaction to the PA results.

I hope that’s true with all my heart. But if Racism puts John McSame in the presidency, I don’t think it’s an overreaction at all. And I would call on all Progressives to join me in disassembling this ruined country and building something better.

Hoping for better times…

Joe

Barack’s “Secret Strategy”

I’ve been watching the Obama campaign since the beginning, and I think I finally understand his strategy that is giving him win after win after win, despite all the things he obviously has going against him.

His secret strategy may also be the simplest strategy imaginable. Just tell the truth. I mean, telling the truth is not something you need a Mark Penn to tell you how to do. You don’t need focus groups to poll to tell you what they want to hear. In fact, you don’t need anything except the intelligence and perception to see what is plain not only to you, but to anyone else who is paying attention.

While telling the truth may not “sound” revolutionary, looking back as far as the Gulf of Tonken resolution, it’s a strategy that hasn’t even been tried.

Instead, Madison avenue “experts” have been used to find out the unconscious emotional fears and desires of the electorate and then pander to them.

That’s what the anti-gay marriage issue was about, it’s what the Wright controversy was about and it’s what the flag pin nonsense is about.

Clinton actually honed the technique when running for his second term, and the Bush victories were both examples of the technique being perfected.

The way it basically works is to divert the public from political issues that make a difference in their lives, to emotional issues that have nothing to do with their lives but tug deeply at hidden fears that each of us carry around inside us.

BBC ran a four part series about how Freud’s nephew came to the US and changed the way Madison Avenue sold their products to the public. Instead of trying to fill real needs of the consumers, needs were created by making everyone feel insecure unless they bought the product. Obviously all personal hygiene products where sold that way, but the technique was extended to just about any product imaginable.

Seen a Calvin Klein add recently? Enough said. The use of Sex to sell products having absolutely nothing to do with sex is now as common as sex itself.

The final episode in the series showed how these Madison avenue psychological techniques were ported over into politics where Bill Clinton established them as the “way to get elected”.

That’s why Hillary can’t get any traction, this election. The fact of the matter is that the real issues facing the country actually OUTWEIGH the psychological fears, needs, and neuroses that the Madison Avenue approach relies on. Barack is the only one out there perceived as telling the truth as he sees it. Hillary’s old triangulation methods simply can’t work in the face of Obama’s truth telling.

Of course, this is not always the case, as the horrendous results of our electoral system have proved over the last 30 years. But it is true this year. Obama seems to understand this while his opponents continue spinning their wheels on issues that are falling worse than flat on a truly frightened electorate.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we might save our democracy from the delegitimization it has suffered from these Madison avenue techniques. This will be the subject of a later blog post.

The reason that this is so important is that even if Barack can break through the barricades of emotional bullshit being erected against him this time, it won’t necessarily insure that we won’t revert to our “bad old ways” as soon as he’s gone. But we MUST find a way to put an end to them somehow, or we can kiss everything we cherish about our system of government goodbye.

Ask yourself if there’s ANYTHING coming out of the Federal Government that you trust as being true because of it’s source?

The scariest thing to me is that that actually is beginning to sound like a rhetorical question.

After the 35,000 person rally in Philidelphia

Walking up Market Street toward the 30th Street train station in the midst of the impromptu Obama parade that marched along chanting OBAMA and YES WE CAN a black Nisan Mirano (I think not entirely sure of make) passed. They were turning off market onto 11th I believe. In the passenger seat was an elderly black woman in her 80s. A young man was driving who I presumed to be her son, as his hand stretch across and rested on her shoulder. Our eyes locked for second and I noticed her tears of joy. I can’t imagine what it’s like for an old black woman who’s probably seen her share of bigotry and struggle against racism and intolerance. To watch as almost 40,000 blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, and just about every other race and creed paraded by chanting the name of a black man.. A black man for president.

from Kos

Truth – Just one more opinion

The Torture Memo and The Flag in the Lapel

David Bromwich: The Huffington Post

Something sickish happened on Wednesday night.

Network news has had a long slide into the vulgar conveyance of rumor. But who, among all who witnessed on TV the drawn-out swindle of the O.J. trial and the Lewinsky scandal and the Clinton impeachment, who that marked the abject surrender of the networks to the propaganda campaign in the run-up to Iraq–who, for all these signs, could have predicted the frivolity of the questions that were asked in Wednesday’s Pennsylvania debate by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos?

In a decent society, the relish with which these men in suits trashed an occasion for civic reflection would be taken as an insult to the country. The offenders would be drummed out of their jobs–asked to vacate their “anchor” posts and to seek more appropriate work as tabloid reporters or the hosts of reality encounters. But a lesson of our time is that respectable culture now embraces the bread and circuses. The two have become one.

Early in the debate, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were asked what assurance they could offer Israelis against a nuclear-armed Iran. Both candidates made pandering replies–Senator Clinton as usual the grosser of the two by several shades of wheedling aggression. A fair answer would have been: “Your question implies that Iran is now in possession of nuclear weapons, or that it soon will be. And yet we have just been told by the National Intelligence Estimate that Iran poses no such threat. To be asking your question with such urgency, you must have a source of information that you consider superior to the National Intelligence Estimate. What is that source?”

But Clinton is anxious to hold the support she still enjoys from a body of Democrats who now threaten to switch to McCain; and Obama is concerned not to alienate the same people if he can avoid it; and so, a question was asked and answered whose apparent subject was a danger from Iran but whose actual subject was the backing of those who make the unconditional support of Israel as blind and morally specialized a test as evangelical Christians make of the outlawing of abortion.

The answers were feeble but the question was false: a lie in itself, disguised as a bold summons to plain speaking.

There were questions about the wearing of the American flags in lapels and the peril or relative safety of Hillary Clinton’s debarkation in Bosnia in 1996.

There was not one question about the release of the full text of the torture memo by Professor John Yoo, of the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. In his memo, Yoo wrote that a president can take whatever actions he thinks necessary in time of war, since war itself renders the despotic acts pursued by a president merely part of the legitimate defense of his country: so they require no check from the Congress or the courts. He was advising President Bush specifically how to navigate among statutes that might have laid torturers open to prosecution (the laws on assault for example). Yet what was in question was not Yoo’s right to walk the streets until convicted of a crime, but rather his entitlement to act as a teacher of law to young Americans–a post for which one qualification is a disposition to respect the rule of law and to honor the principle that sets no man above the law.

The story was given an added dimension a few days later when it transpired that Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, and George Tenet had for a time supervised individual interrogations of suspects from a room in the White House, calling, move by move, each stroke of torment and privation. Condoleezza Rice, according to the report from ABC News a week before the debate, was a solid supporter of the torture policy and had told the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.” Ashcroft was the only one of the company to feel that somehow they should not be doing it, that they had gone too far, that “history will not judge this kindly.” The president soon after acknowledged that he knew what was happening and approved.

Still another piece of the same story emerged last week when Christopher Edley, Dean of U.C. Berkeley Law School, wrote a public letter in response to demands for the firing of Yoo. A lawyer, said Edley, is not responsible for the actions taken on his advice, even actions he himself defended and urged. “No argument about what he did or didn’t facilitate, or about his special obligations as an attorney, makes his conduct morally equivalent to that of his nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, et al., or comparable to the conduct of interrogators distant in time, rank and place. Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders.” On this reasoning, only the decider and the executor of wicked acts are responsible for those acts, though the former was following legal advice and the latter following orders; a lawyer, by being a lawyer, is always exonerated; no force should persuade a law school to strip of his status a legal scholar who defines torture out of existence in order to allow the cruel and savage treatment of prisoners.

It is hard to imagine a country with an informed journalistic establishment in which a debate held shortly after all these reports appeared would not contain pertinent questions about the developments which they describe. Yet no such questions were asked by the ABC interviewers: an omission all the more strange in view of the fact that ABC News itself broke the most shocking of the stories. Very likely, in the general election, even with John McCain present and the incitement of his complex and contradictory opinions on torture, the subject will not be explored. It matters too much to be one of the things we talk about.

Some pieces of more prosaic news, also, might have caught the attention of Stephanopoulos and Gibson. On the day of the debate, the New York Times ran a page 1 story concerning an Iraqi regiment’s desertion of its post in Sadr City, under the heading “Iraqi Unit Flees Sadr City Post, Despite American’s Plea.”

The Iraqi company who abandoned their positions that Tuesday night, Michael R. Gordon wrote, did not pause to convey their intent and they did not hesitate.

They ran, or, rather, drove away–that was all. The American soldiers on the scene cursed them for their cowardice. More than one of the major newspapers before now must have had a shot at covering other such desertions; but, for whatever reason, this was the moment when an epitomizing story of a common occurrence broke through. The story can only have shaken every supporter of the Iraq war who had the heart to read it. For it showed that many Iraqis–including those we have supposed our closest allies–consider this to be an American and not an Iraqi war. They would rather save themselves than fight to save the picture of democracy that we have offered them.

In the country we used to be, a moderator of these debates would have asked:
“Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, both of you have expressed reservations about the war (one of you with some consistency), but neither has suggested that a withdrawal from Iraq ought to begin at once and be completed soon. You both seem more wary about how precipitately we may leave than about how long we can afford to stay. Do these recent desertions by Iraqi soldiers alarm you? Suppose five or ten such incidents occur in the next two months: will you reconsider the wisdom of arranging an American departure from Iraq?”

The fact that Americans in high office advised, countenanced, and ordered acts of torture which are crimes under international law, will not go away. The world sees it and wonders and is baffled by the American silence. How can Americans read these stories and not follow up but go on to the next thing?

Again, the pretense that Iran embodies an imminent danger to the United States will not excuse the U.S. in the eyes of the world if the U.S. bombs Iran unprovoked, or assists Israel in bombing Iran. And again, an honest journalistic establishment could hardly ignore the Iraqi defections from a war we say is fought for Iraqi freedom.

Yet George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson were not thinking of such things.

They did not take it that they were hired to mind that shop. When they asked about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and about Bosnia in 1996 and about the flag and the meaning of the words “cling” and “bitter,” they were doing what they believed was expected of them by their employers at ABC/Disney.

In war, it is said, the first casualty is truth. But oddly, in this war, the armed forces have done far more than the mainstream media to enlighten our understanding. Extraordinary acts of conscience, over the past several years, have come from General Taguba, General Batiste, Admiral Fallon. It is luminaries of the newsroom like those at ABC and Tim Russert at NBC, and others at the top of a once-admired profession, who have shown the most callous flippancy at a time when this country seems to be changing its character before our eyes.

This trance of banality is deplorable, but it is easy to understand. Whose interest can it serve, they must ask, to raise a fuss about the fact that American leaders appear to have committed criminal acts? It is the truth; but what is truth? We are reaching a point where the truth can be brushed aside as one more opinion.

Barack uses the “Debacle Debate” to his advantage.

This man never ceases to amaze me. If he lives, there’s no doubt in my mind that he’ll be elected and usher in a new period in our country that we’ll look back on and be proud.