Re: US strike options on TSP

[Agnimitra]

^^^ ramana ji, I think that was satire, or a joke of some sort. April Fool's Day is round the corner.

[devesh]

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/tory- ... s-new.html

Joel Kotkin: Progessives, preservation & prosperity

Conservatives often fret that Barack Obama is leading the nation toward socialism. In my mind, that's an insult to socialism, which, in theory, at least, seeks to uplift the lower classes through greater prosperity. In contrast, the current administration and its core of wealthy supporters are more reminiscent of British Tories, the longtime defenders of hereditary privilege, a hierarchical social order and slow-paced economic change.

The notion that the "progressives" are, in fact, closeted Royalists has been trotted out by a handful of Obama admirers, such as Andrew Sullivan, who calls the president "the conservative reformist of my dreams." Essentially, Sullivan argues, Obama has been a "Tory president," with more in common with, say, an aristocratic toff like British Prime Minister David Cameron than a traditional left-liberal reformer.

The fundamental conservativism underlying the modern "progressive" marks the central thesis of an upcoming book by historian Fred Siegel, appropriately titled "Revolt Against the Masses." Siegel traces the roots of the new-fashioned Toryism to the cultural wars of the 1960s, when the fury of the "Left," once centered on the corporate elites, shifted increasingly to the middle class, which was widely blamed for everything from a culture of conformity to racism and support for the Vietnam War.

POLITICAL CARTOONS

Tory progressivism's most-unifying theme, Siegel notes, includes the preservation and conservation of the landed order enjoyed by the British ultrawealthy and upper-middle classes. In the 19th century, Siegel notes, Tory Radicals, like William Wordsworth, William Morris and John Ruskin, objected to the ecological devastation of modern capitalism and sought to preserve the glories of the British countryside.

They also opposed the "leveling" effects of a market economy that sometimes allowed the less-educated, less well-bred to supplant the old aristocracies, with their supposedly more enlightened tastes. "Strong supporters of centralized monarchical power, this aristocratic sensibility also saw itself as the defender of the poor – in their place," writes Siegel. "Its enemies were the middle classes and the aesthetic ugliness they associated with the industrial economy borne of bourgeois energies."

Today, this Tory tradition lives on in contemporary Britain, where industry remains widely disparaged and land use tightly controlled. There is no more strident defender of preserving the space of the landed gentry than the leading Tory mouthpiece, The Daily Telegraph. All efforts are made to restrict the expansion of suburbs and new towns, all the better to preserve the British countryside for the better enjoyment of the gentry.

As a result, Britain now suffers some of the world's highest housing prices – even in the economically devastated north of the country. Unable to afford decent accommodations, notes author James Heartfield, some British families have been forced to live in old restrooms, garden sheds, even abandoned double-decker buses.

Until recent decades, such an "enlightened" conservatism has been rare in America, with its strong tradition of upward mobility and vast landscape for development. As early as the 1950s, however, intellectuals, architects, planners and aesthetes have railed against the banality of suburbanizing, and democratizing, America, but the real turn towards gentry progressivism took place with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s.

Rightfully alarmed by the deterioration of the environment at that time, early green activists made contributions to a remarkable cleanup of the nation's air and water, something that widely benefited millions of Americans. But the movement also fell ever more prone to all manner of hysterias; at the first Earth Day, in 1970, some scientists predicted that, by the 1980s, people would not be able to walk outside without a helmet. Then followed a series of jeremiads about "limits of growth" associated with the depletion of critical minerals, "peak oil" and, finally, the call for radical steps to address climate change.

All these causes, sometimes based on fact or somewhat overheated extrapolation, gradually diverted American progressives from their historic interest in economic growth and social mobility to a primary focus on environmental purity, whatever the social or economic cost. Their Tory-like policies have helped stunt economic growth, particularly in the blue-collar industrial and construction sectors, promoting, albeit unintentionally, ever-narrowing opportunity for all but a few Americans.

Despite its opportunistic use of populist rhetoric, the Obama administration has presided over widespread economic distress – with the average household now earning considerably less than it did four years ago. This trend has worsened during the current "recovery," even as the Federal Reserve's policies have generated record profits for corporate and Wall Street grandees.

It has been a particular boon time for a new rising class of oligarchs from Silicon Valley, which has embraced Obama with money and technical expertise. Not surprisingly, the ultra-affluent coastal areas have become primary supporters of the administration, which in November won eight of the nation's 10 wealthiest counties, many of them handily.

The growing gaps between the "1 percent" and everyone else have been particularly marked in those regions under the most complete progressive control. The Holy Places of urbanism, such as New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., also suffer some of the worst income inequality.

In these regions, the so-called "creative class" is courted by politicians, developers and corporate big-wigs. Meanwhile their putative political allies, in places like Oakland and parts of New York's the outer boroughs, experience seemingly irrepressible permanent unemployment and, increasingly, rising crime. Perhaps the most outrageous example of the dual nature of the new progressive economy, notes Walter Russell Mead, can be seen in Detroit, where a shrinking, debt-ridden and dysfunctional city that fails its largely poor residents has generated $474 million since 2005 for well-connected Wall Street bond issuers.

Under the progressive Tory regime, the best that can be offered the middle class is an outbound ticket to less-Tory-dominated, albeit often less culturally "enlightened" places, such as Texas, the Southeast or Utah. There, manufacturing, energy and agricultural industries still anchor much of the economy. Despite their expressions of concern for the lower orders, gentry progressives don't see much hope for the recovery of blue-collar manufacturing or construction jobs, at least not in their bailiwicks. Instead they suggest that the hoi polloi seek their future in what the British used to call "service," that is, as caregivers, haircutters, dog walkers, waiters and toenail painters for their more-highly educated betters.

Such kindness, however, is no replacement for the kind of broad-based economic growth that historically has promoted self-sufficiency and upward mobility, both in California and elsewhere. Due in large part to the new progressive policies, this is now increasingly out of reach for many in the middle class, as well as the increasingly Latino working classes. Indeed, a recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California reveals that class stratification in the state has expanded far faster than the national average.

"We have created a regulatory framework that is reducing employment prospects in the very sectors that huge shares of our population need if they are to reach the middle class," notes economist John Husing. A onetime Democratic activist, Husing laments how, in progressive California, green energy policies have driven up electricity costs to twice as high as those in competitor states, such as Utah, Texas and Washington, and considerably above those of neighboring Arizona and Nevada. These and other regulatory policies, he suggests, are largely responsible for the Golden State missing out on the country's manufacturing rebound, losing jobs, while others, not only Texas but also in the Great Lakes, have expanded jobs in this sector.

Similarly, Draconian land-use regulations have not only kept housing prices, particularly on the coasts, unnecessarily high, but slowed a potential rebound in the construction sector, traditionally a source of higher-wage employment for less-than-highly educated workers. So, while Google workers are pampered and celebrated by the progressive regime, California suffers high unemployment and a continued exodus of working-class and middle-class families.

Sadly, there currently is no strong counterweight to the new Tory ascendency. Until traditional social democrats awake to realities, or the GOP acknowledges the painful reality of class, America will continue to lurch towards the very Tory model that our forefathers had the wisdom to reject throughout most of our history.

[abhishek_sharma]

Steve Coll predicts indictments of White House leakers

[member_19686]

Obituaries and Proselytization

We recently lost a beloved family elder. He lived out his life within the structures of meaning and ritual provided by the Hindu tradition. These guided his commitment to work, his devotion to family, and his sense of justice. The beginning and the end of his life were marked by traditional Hindu ceremonies. He was a paragon of fidelity and a repository of rich life experiences that he shared passionately in stories with receptive grandchildren.

In spite of changes and differences in geographical practice, the Hindu tradition is still domestic centered. For most of us, the home is the focus of religious life and worship and the location for the performance of those profound rituals that mark the life-stages: birth, marriage, and death. Since funeral ceremonies are performed at home, it is customary, in Hindu obituaries, to mention the address, identify the funeral ritual as Hindu and specify the place of cremation.

We received many cards, notes and letters of sympathy in the days following the funeral ceremony. There were several, however, from persons whose names and addresses we did not recognize. Each one was structured in a similar way. The writer opened with words of sympathy, making mention of many personal details from the obituary. This was followed by Biblical texts about the way to eternal life and reunion with loved ones. The letters spoke of punishment for unbelievers but also of the promise of salvation from effects of sin "through the ransom sacrifice of ...Jesus Christ." The letters included published Christian literature. We quickly realized that these Christian letter-writers searched newspaper obituaries with the aim of identifying families belonging to other religious traditions with the aim of proselytization. We learned also that this was not unusual and that Hindus experiencing death in their families regularly received such invitations to convert. Hindus that I spoke with shrugged it off, brushing it aside as something that one should expect from Christians. While unhappy, they seemed resigned, treating it as one of those unwelcome features of life in a religiously diverse society that one learns to accept and tolerate. "This is what Christians do," said several of them.

The response of my fellow Hindus troubled me, just as much as the letters that we received. Although it is true that this is what some Christians do, it is important that we see how unusual this is from the perspective of other religions. Most of the practitioners of the world's religions do not read daily obituaries to identify potential converts! As a Hindu, I am familiar with the religious motive of sharing one's tradition and I welcome opportunities to learn about and from other traditions. At the same time, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways, times, and contexts for sharing. Sharing in the Hindu tradition occurred, and still does, in response to a request for religious teaching made by a student to a teacher. It was felt that religious teaching was best shared in a dialogical relationship of mutual listening, questioning and receptivity. Some Christians, like these letter writers, assume a religious need in the other for Christianity and make no effort to understand the religious life of the other. They conclude wrongly that traditions other than Christianity have no good resources and insights for helping their practitioners understand and cope with the loss of a loved one and they appeal to fear of punishment as a basis for religious commitment. They are driven by their need to convert the other and not by the need of the other for conversion. Christians will understand better our discomfort by taking our places and imagining themselves as recipients of invitations, from Hindus, to convert in the midst of grief for a loved one.

What troubled me also about this effort to proselytize is the undisguised attempt to exploit what they saw as an occasion of emotional vulnerability resulting from our grief. Such exploitation is not dissimilar to proselytization in circumstances of poverty or in situations of natural disaster that we witnessed, for example, on the occasion of the Asian tsunami. Grief-evangelism, as I choose to describe what we experienced, is similar to aid-evangelism and both need to be vigorously repudiated by people of all religions. It conveys the impression that a tradition cannot make a case for its validity without allurements, the exploitation of material or emotional vulnerability and theological threats. Hindus find it difficult to comprehend this compulsion to utilize occasions of human need for the purpose of evangelization. The Hindu tradition values service, but idealizes that service which is rendered without expectation of receiving anything in return. This includes the expectation that the recipient may convert to the religion of the donor. Such service is referred to, in Sanskrit, as nishkama karma (action without expectation of reward). There is a lot of Christian humanitarian work, both past and present, which is not linked to conversion, but this commendable expression of Christian values is made suspect by those who use works of charity as incentives to win converts. Such methods are, in fact, denounced, in a series of recommendations on Christian witness issued by the World Council of Churches, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the World Evangelical Alliance (Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World: Recommendations for Conduct). Meaningful faith is not awakened and nurtured by exploiting others in times of vulnerability and need.

I am certain that many proselytizers will defend their actions by an appeal to human rights and freedom of religion. Religious freedom is certainly a fundamental human right and this includes the freedom to practice and to freely change one's faith. Freedom, however, is never an unqualified right and, if we argue for the freedom to propagate our faiths, it is important that we articulate also the content and limits of that freedom, especially in religiously diverse societies. The language of rights, in the context of proselytization, objectifies the one who is the intended recipient of conversion efforts and transforms him or her into a passive entity. It is not the language of mutuality and obligations. The fact that the other is also a person of religious commitment with a tradition of profound religious insights is ignored or does not seem to matter.

There are many good reasons for reading obituaries. Trolling for opportunities to proselytize is not among the good ones.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anantanan ... 45426.html

[Philip]

To understand the US,one must look between the layers of government and privillege to find the real sources of power and decision making.Like the British "old school tie",where the cream of British talent is recruited from their most famous schools and "Ox-Bridge",the US has its own organisations whose membership consist of the most powerful men in the land.Many of these individuals do not register in the public image but prefer to remain in the shadows ,pulling the strings.

Apart from the secretive Bilderberg Group with international membership of the world's most powerful movers and shakers,the US also has its CRF (Council for Foreign Relations-a private entity) .....

Controversy

The Council has been the subject of debates over sovereignty as well as the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. This is primarily due to the number of high-ranking government officials (along with world business leaders and prominent media figures) in its membership and the large number of aspects of American foreign policy that its members have been involved with. Echoing the most common accusation, the paleoconservative John Birch Society claims that the CFR is "Guilty of conspiring with others to build a one world government...".[20][21] Other figures like Cleon Skousen and Carroll Quigley opposed the CFR vociferously.[22]

In response to the allegations and insinuations, the CFR's website contains an FAQ section about its affairs.[23

.......and the eccentric Bohemian Grove "club".The latter is an intriguing organisation but consists of members who are the key decision makers of US policy.More on it.

Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre (1,100 ha) campground located at 20601 Bohemian Avenue, in Monte Rio, California, belonging to a private San Francisco-based men's art club known as the Bohemian Club. In mid-July each year, Bohemian Grove hosts a two-week, three-weekend encampment of some of the most powerful men in the world.[1][2]

The Club motto is "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here," which implies that outside concerns and business deals are to be left outside. When gathered in groups, Bohemians usually adhere to the injunction, though discussion of business often occurs between pairs of members.[2] Important political and business deals have been developed at the Grove.[5] The Grove is particularly famous for a Manhattan Project planning meeting that took place there in September 1942, which subsequently led to the atomic bomb. Those attending this meeting, apart from Ernest Lawrence and military officials, included the president of Harvard and representatives of Standard Oil and General Electric. Grove members take particular pride in this event and often relate the story to new attendees.[2]

There are also sleeping quarters, or "camps" scattered throughout the grove, of which it is reported there were a total of 118 as of 2007. These camps, which are frequently patrilineal, are the principal means through which high-level business and political contacts and friendships are formed.[2]

The pre-eminent camps are:[2][14]

Hill Billies (Big Business/Banking/Politics/Universities/Media/Texas Business);
Mandalay (Big Business/Defense Contractors/Politics/U.S. Presidents);
Cave Man (Think Tanks/Oil Companies/Banking/Defense Contractors/Universities/Media);
Stowaway (Rockefeller Family Members/Oil Companies/Banking/Think Tanks);
Uplifters (Corporate Executives/Big Business);
Owls Nest (U.S. Presidents/Military/Defense Contractors);
Hideaway (Foundations/Military/Defense Contractors);
Isle of Aves (Military/Defense Contractors);
Lost Angels (Banking/Defense Contractors/Media);
Silverado squatters (Big Business/Defense Contractors);
Sempervirens (California-based Corporations);
Hillside (Military—Joint Chiefs of Staff);
Idlewild (California-based Corporations)

The central spaces for recreation and entertainment are:

Grove Stage—an amphitheater with seating for 2,000 used primarily for the Grove Play production, on the last weekend of the midsummer encampment. The stage extends up the hillside, and is also home to the second largest outdoor pipe organ in the world.
Field Circle—a bowl-shaped amphitheater used for the mid-encampment "Low Jinks" musical comedy, for "Spring Jinks" in early June and for a variety of other performances.
Campfire Circle—has a campfire pit in the middle of the circle, surrounded by carved redwood log benches. Used for smaller performances in a more intimate setting.
Museum Stage—a semi-outdoor venue with a covered stage. Lectures and small ensemble performances.
Dining Circle—seating approximately 1,500 diners simultaneously.
Clubhouse—designed by Bernard Maybeck in 1903, completed in 1904 on a bluff overlooking the Russian River;[15] a multi-purpose dining, drinking and entertainment building; the site of the Manhattan Project planning meeting held in 1942.
The Owl Shrine and the Lake—an artificial lake in the middle of the grove, used for the noon-time concerts and also the venue of the Cremation of Care, that takes place on the first Saturday of the encampment. It is also the location of the 12:30 pm daily "Lakeside Talks." These significant informal talks (many on public policy issues) have been given over the years by entertainers, professors, astronauts, business leaders, cabinet officers, CIA directors, future presidents and former presidents.[16]

Quotes:

"The Bohemian club! Did you say Bohemian club? That's where all those rich Republicans go up and stand naked against redwood trees right? I've never been to the Bohemian club but you oughta go. It'd be good for you. You'd get some fresh air."—President Bill Clinton to a heckler[38]
"The Bohemian Grove, that I attend from time to time—the Easterners and the others come there—but it is the most faggy goddamn thing you could ever imagine, that San Francisco crowd that goes in there; it's just terrible! I mean I won't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco."—President Richard M. Nixon on the Watergate tapes, Bohemian Club member starting in 1953.[39][16]
"If I were to choose the speech that gave me the most pleasure and satisfaction in my political career, it would be my Lakeside Speech at the Bohemian Grove in July 1967. Because this speech traditionally was off the record it received no publicity at the time. But in many important ways it marked the first milestone on my road to the presidency."—President Richard Nixon, Memoirs (1978).[16]

PS:All quotes are from the WIK sites.

[Philip]

And now Tony B.Liar has been linked to the Bohemian Grove clique of secret movers and shakers of the US.

http://rt.com/usa/bohemian-blair-powell-guccifer-811/

Guccifer emails link Tony Blair to top-secret Bohemian Grove gathering
Get short URL
Published time: March 25, 2013

Attending the elusive Bohemian Grove retreat should be a priority for former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, News Corp executive Andrew Knight allegedly writes in an email to US Gen. Colin Powell obtained by RT.

The mysterious computer hacker known only as Guccifer has once again supplied RT with a trove of presumed personal emails in which the private correspondence between some of the world’s most influential men is put under the looking glass. The hacker’s target is once again former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and this time the discourse dives into a topic rarely discussed: the annual summer retreat at California’s Bohemian Grove.

Guccifer has previously taken credit for hacking Gen. Powell’s Facebook, compromising what are believed to be sensitive emails sent to former-President George W. Bush and even uncovering emails about last year’s Benghazi, Libya terrorist attack allegedly sent to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In the latest leaked emails sent to RT, Guccifer showcases a number of emails reportedly sent to Colin Powell’s AOL account during the last few years.

The few dozen emails forwarded to RT offer what appears on the surface to be little insight into Gen. Powell’s personal habits, but one email in particular referenced enough other well-known individuals that it couldn’t help but raise a red flag: in correspondence dated March 21, 2012, Knight asks Gen. Powell to have a few words with Mr. Blair about preparing for that year’s Bohemian Grove retreat, an annual gathering of the rich and powerful that has stayed so elusive for decades that countless documentaries and books have been written about the event — and journalists like Vanity Fair’s Alex Shoumatoff has even been arrested trying to infiltrate it.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair's press office told RT that they were not prepared to comment on the leaked emails.

According to the Sonoma County Free Press, the membership list of Bohemian Grove has included every Republican US president since 1923, as well as titans of the defense sector, banking tycoons and the CEOs of some of the largest corporations in the world. Spy Magazine linked the guest list with millionaires and billionaires from the likes of IBM and Bank of America, as well as leading politicians from Washington and abroad. And when Spy’s Philip Weiss snuck into the grove in 1989, he confirmed that attendees congregate at a shrine to an owl described as “40-foot-tall, moss-covered statue of stone and steel.”

Weiss adds that during the event’s middle weekend — the busiest session of the two-week gathering — he saw roughly 2,200 guests, all male, on the camp ground. Just last year, though, Powell was asked to ensure that Blair made it for that portion of the festivities.

“Might you be able gently/firmly to point out to Tony that you rank the Bohemia Middle Weekend in your diary before allowing any other duties to get in the way?!” writes Knight, a journalist who currently serves as a director of billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s multinational News Corp, in the latest leaked emails. “Lack of exposure suggests that Tony has not yet got his priorities straight.”

Also included in the email is a PDF attachment — unavailable to RT’s reporters — said to include a response of sorts from Mr. Blair to George Shultz, a longtime member of Washington’s elite that worked as secretary of state underneath US Pres. Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s while Gen. Powell held the position of national security advisor. In his own right, Shultz has been associated with the secretive Bohemian Grove group for decades.

In the leaked emails, Knight says to Powell, “I’m going to suggest the same to Henry,” likely implying that the journalist was determined to make sure Mr. Kissinger — who served as secretary of state under Pres. Nixon and Ford, and before that was national security advisor himself — was preparing to attend last year’s event.

Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell (AFP Photo / Jim Watson)
Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell (AFP Photo / Jim Watson)

Several sources online tie Powell, Shultz, Knight and Kissinger to Bohemian Grove, but Blair has only been long rumored to be an attendee at the annual soiree. In 2006, Blair did visit San Francisco, California — less than 100 miles away from the Grove’s gated campsite—where he dined with Shultz.

“There was speculation that Mr. Blair might even have been a guest at the male-only event, following in the footsteps of John Major and Prince Philip,” the UK’s Daily Mail reported at the time. “As it is, the Shultz party was said to have been littered with guests who had left the Grove in order to meet Mr. Blair.”

The San Francisco Chronicle also reported that summer that Prime Minister Blair was rumored to be attending the festivities, which have long become a topic of debate and discussion of conspiracy theorists, largely due to the sheer elusiveness of an event that attracts high-profile men of power with a strict embargo on admitting the media.

"Less than a mile from us there are millionaires, billionaires, people who control the world, control the central banks, build nuclear weapons. This is their summer playground,” Sonoma State University sociology professor Peter Phillips told RT in 2011. “We know for sure that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sat down and had conversation about who was going to run for president when and they made a deal.” The Washington Post has even reported that a planning meeting for the Manhattan Project occurred at the grove in 1942, leading eventually to the creation of the atom bomb.

Since the list of attendees is kept under lock and key, only a confirmation from Powell or Blair themselves could verify whether or not the four star general did in fact convince the prime minister to attend last year’s event.

In his email to RT, Guccifer signed with the signature, “illuminati free world.”

PS:In the link,there is a handwritten note from TB.A psycho-graphological analysis of his writing by an expert suggests that he might have latent gay tendencies! A perfect gent to be part of this exclusive tony club (oun intended!) which Pres. Richard Nixon described as " is the most faggy goddamn thing you could ever imagine, that San Francisco crowd that goes in there; it's just terrible! I mean I won't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco."

PPS:Remember Tony's former equiv. to being his chief of staff,Peter Mandelson? He is as gay as they come!

[ramana]

Kenneth D. Alford, "Allied Looting in World War II: Thefts of Art, Manuscripts, Stamps and Jewelry in Europe"
English | ISBN 10: 0786460539 | 2011 | 288 pages |

Looting has long been recognized as one of the crimes committed by the Third Reich during World War II, a crime which stripped economic wealth and artistic treasures from the populations the Nazis terrorized. This historical text reveals the shocking extent of looting by Allied forces, exploring their thievery against the Germans and others. It follows the journey of the Hungarian Crown Treasure from a muddy oil drum in Austria to Fort Knox and back to Hungary, and discusses numerous lost treasures ranging from priceless art works to rare manuscripts, including the earliest known printing by the Gutenberg press.

Any one recall the movie where Burt Lancaster plays a French Resistance leader who stops Nazi stealing of French art galleries.

A memorable line is when a Nazi screams to him "You are nothing but a lump of flesh Labische!"

Too bad there was no one to essay the role of US stealers of Occupied Europe.

[Philip]

Ramana,I posted some time ago details of how the Allies smuggled Borman out of Berlin during the last days of the Reich,because he was the "treasurer" of the Nazi loot held by Swiss banks in their secret undergound vaults in the mountains.The Swiss gave the Allies a number of the man who controlled the account.It was Borman's party no.Ian Fleming was then with British intel. and was part of the special commando team that allegedly rescued Borman.He was later made to watch his sentence in absentia at Nuremberg and then was sent to Argentina,where his remains were brought back to Berlin after his death and miraculously "discovered" afterwards.A special "double" of Borman lived in England as a diversion,in case Nazi hunters discovered his escape the "double" would then be found to be someone else and the trail would go cold.Fleming who saw the enormous loot,allegedly described it as the "treasure of empires".

The Allies did the same with the Japanese looting of Asia (Op Golden Lily-headed by Hirohito's cosuin Prince Chichibu)-far greater and more comprehensive than the Nazis who took mainly the best.The hidden sites in the Philllipines were over a hundred .Only a few have been discovered.Solid gold life size statues of the Buddha lie in underground vaults in Switzerland,with tons of gold bullion,all were in the accounts off top US leaders and generals including MacArthur .Top Japanese war criminals of the Zaibatsu (top industrialists),mafia figures,politicos and Emperor Hirohito too,were spared because of the massive loot that was paid as bribes to get them off the hook.Poor Gen.Tojo was made the patsy for the war ,Hirohito's image deliberately whitewashed,one famous staged pic showing him planting rice!

[abhishek_sharma]

Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws

While Wall Street crooks walk, thousands sit in California prisons for life over crimes as trivial as stealing socks.

[ashvin]

Kenneth D. Alford, "Allied Looting in World War II: Thefts of Art, Manuscripts, Stamps and Jewelry in Europe"
English | ISBN 10: 0786460539 | 2011 | 288 pages |

Looting has long been recognized as one of the crimes committed by the Third Reich during World War II, a crime which stripped economic wealth and artistic treasures from the populations the Nazis terrorized. This historical text reveals the shocking extent of looting by Allied forces, exploring their thievery against the Germans and others. It follows the journey of the Hungarian Crown Treasure from a muddy oil drum in Austria to Fort Knox and back to Hungary, and discusses numerous lost treasures ranging from priceless art works to rare manuscripts, including the earliest known printing by the Gutenberg press.

Any one recall the movie where Burt Lancaster plays a French Resistance leader who stops Nazi stealing of French art galleries.

The name of the movie is the "The Train" by John Frankenhiemer. Its a classic and shot in black and white.

[pentaiah]

Ashvin you beat me to that yes it's the train

Burt Lancaster is actually station superintendent who master minds it but is forced to drive he train because one of the train driver Saratoga attempt fails as he tries to block the lube line with coin of French frank the lube is suppose to keep the slider crank mechanism friction free actually it's grease

Another movie Von Aryan's express staring frank Sinatra is about POWs escaping in train

Both of them I have and are good classics to watch.

Is Paris burning is by dominque liapere and Larry Collins. The freedom at mid night guys


The Train by Rajesh Khanna and Nanda is a different story all together

Also freedom at mid night was a block buster advertisement for Tortoise mosquito coils as anti dote to machhar.

[abhishek_sharma]

Where I Left Conservatives

[abhishek_sharma]

A Weapon of Minor Destruction: How Eric Harroun, the American jihadist in Syria, was duped by the FBI into incriminating himself.

[abhishek_sharma]

A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: Occasioned by the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war

[svinayak]

http://bostonreview.net/BR35.1/bacevich.php

‘Americans misperceive the world and their role in determining its evolution’
Andrew J. Bacevich

This self-image, combining grandeur with insufferable smugness, both energizes and perverts U.S. foreign policy. It inspires American policymakers to undertake breathtakingly bold initiatives such as the Marshall Plan—Harry Truman setting out to rebuild a Europe laid prostrate by war. Yet it also inspires the likes of George W. Bush to pursue his Freedom Agenda—an expressed intent to transform the entire Islamic world, providing a rationale for open-ended “global war.”
The conviction that the United States is history’s prime mover also blinds Washington to forces that may well exercise a far greater impact on the course of events than do the actions of the United States itself.
During the Cold War, for example, U.S. policymakers viewed events through the lens of bipolarity. The world, they insisted, broke neatly into two camps divided by an iron curtain. In the 1950s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that neutrality was immoral and impermissible. Governments had to choose: you either sided with the free world (led, of course, by the United States) or you aligned yourself with the communists.

This oversimplified with-us-or-against-us mentality made it difficult, if not impossible, for Dulles and other U.S. leaders to comprehend the eruption of third-world nationalism triggered by and feeding off of the collapse of the old European empires after World War II. In Washington “non-aligned” became a synonym for “fellow traveler.” Faced with expressions of self-determination that did not fit neatly into the prevailing East-West paradigm, U.S. officials assumed the worst and acted to enforce conformity to Western—i.e., American—requirements. This misperception—that self-professed nationalists in places such as Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam were actually agents of the Kremlin—produced a penchant for U.S. intervention, both overt and covert, that yielded disastrous consequences, many of them still dogging us today.

Had U.S. officials accurately gauged the wellsprings of postcolonial nationalism, the United States might have demonstrated greater self-restraint when faced with third-world recalcitrance. The insistence that Egypt’s Nasser or Cuba’s Castro toe some line dictated from Washington turned out to be neither necessary nor productive.

Yet appreciating the new nationalism might also have offered Washington an insight into the profound internal weakness of the multinational, multiethnic Soviet Empire. Poles, Afghans, and Chinese had no interest in taking their marching orders from Moscow. Nor, as events would show, did Ukrainians, Georgians, and Kazakhs. The post-1945 Soviet Empire was as obsolete as the empires of Great Britain and France. Its collapse was a bit longer in coming, but was equally foreordained.


In the Pentagon, they call this the Long War. With his decision to escalate the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama—effectively abandoning his promise to “change the way Washington works”—has signaled his administration’s commitment to the Long War.

Yet, as with the Cold War, the Long War rests on a false premise. To divide the world into two camps today makes no more sense than it did in Dulles’s time. Rather than creating clarity, indulging in this sort of oversimplification sows confusion and encourages miscalculation. It allows Americans to avert their eyes from the gathering forces—largely beyond the control of the United States—that are actually reshaping the international order. Sending U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan sustains the pretense that we ourselves, exercising the prerogatives of global leadership, are somehow shaping that order.

Violent anti-Western jihadism—a cause that has about as much prospect of conquering the planet as Soviet-style communism—is not going to define the 21st century. Far more likely to do so is the transfer of power—first economic, then political—from the West to the East, from the Atlantic basin to the heartland of Asia. In that regard, the tens of thousands of U.S. troops shipped to Afghanistan matter less than the hundreds of billions of American dollars shipped each year to China.

Complicating this transfer of power and creating conditions from which a new era of violent conflict may emerge is the challenge of dealing with the detritus created during the age of Western dominance now ending: weapons of mass destruction; vast disparities of wealth; the depletion of essential natural resources; massive and potentially irreversible environmental devastation; and a culture ravaged by the pursuit of “freedom” defined in terms of conspicuous consumption and unbridled individual autonomy.
The Long War that President Bush began and that President Obama has now made his own provides an excuse for Americans to avoid confronting these larger matters. A policy of avoidance will not make the problems go away, of course. It will merely advance the day of reckoning that awaits.

[abhishek_sharma]

Lost in the Meritocracy: How I traded an education for a ticket to the ruling class

[abhishek_sharma]

Corera, Gordon The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service

Devlin sat in his office on 18 August 1960 encrypting one of his most important and alarmist cables: ‘EMBASSY AND STATION BELIEVE CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER GOVERNMENT … WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUALLY COMMIE OR JUST PLAYING COMMIE GAME TO ASSIST HIS SOLIDIFYING POWER – ANTI-WEST FORCES RAPIDLY INCREASING POWER – THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TO TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA.’ 62 The reference to Cuba, where a pro-American regime had fallen to Communist Fidel Castro the previous year, was designed to ring alarm bells in Washington as loudly as possible. The fear was that key strategic states were beginning to fall to nationalist, anti-Western forces, friendly to the Soviets.

Devlin’s cable convinced Washington that action needed to be taken. A National Security meeting at the White House began with a discussion of the ‘grave situation’ and fears were expressed that Soviet officials were now pulling Lumumba’s strings. 63 It looked as if he might be trying to force the UN out in order to allow the Soviets to intervene in force, it was said. Officials around the table predicted that Lumumba would use the Force Publique to drive all whites out, apart from Soviet technicians. According to the official note, the President stressed that the UN had to be kept in at all costs, ‘even if such action is used by the Soviets as the basis for starting a fight’. 64 Something else was said which was never written in the formal note of the meeting. At one point President Eisenhower turned to CIA Director Allen Dulles and said he wanted Lumumba ‘eliminated’. 65 The man who took the notes at the meeting could not quite believe what he had heard. There was a silence and then the meeting continued. A week later at a meeting of the so-called Special Group which co-ordinated covert action, Dulles presented a plan to bribe parliamentarians to vote out Lumumba. In response, a presidential adviser said that Eisenhower had ‘expressed extremely strong feelings on the necessity for very straightforward action in this situation and he wondered whether the plans as outlined were sufficient to accomplish this’. 66 Dulles personally cabled Devlin the next day: ‘WE CONCLUDE THAT HIS REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE AND THAT UNDER EXISTING CONDITIONS THIS WOULD BE A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION. HENCE WE WISH TO GIVE YOU WIDE AUTHORITY.’ 67

...

During the stand-off between Kasavubu and Lumumba, Mobutu went to see Devlin. The two men were extremely close. Devlin had personally wrestled a gunman to the ground who had been trying to assassinate Mobutu, pulling the pistol back to break the man’s finger. Mobutu was grateful and became a regular dinner guest at Devlin’s expansive villa with its six bathrooms and foyer the size of a hotel lobby.

‘I’m anxious to talk to you,’ Mobutu told Devlin. Mobutu understood better than Lumumba how to play the Cold War game. He knew to whisper quietly into the ear of the Soviet-obsessed CIA man exactly what he wanted to hear. ‘The Soviets are pouring into the country. You must know that, Mr Devlin?’ Devlin nodded. ‘We didn’t fight for independence to have another country re-colonize us.’ Mobutu complained that Lumumba had failed to keep the Soviet influence out of his army. 69 He said he was prepared to overthrow Lumumba if the US recognised a temporary government, which in turn would remove the Soviets.

‘And Lumumba and Kasavubu, what happens to them?’ asked Devlin.

‘They’ll both have to be neutralised.’

Devlin, knowing that he had not yet received specific authorisation but had been given wide latitude to act, held out his hand with the words: ‘I can assure you the United States government will recognise a temporary government composed of civilian technocrats.’ Devlin drove to see his Ambassador at 2 a.m. to tell him what had happened. He then cabled back to the CIA to say they could still call it all off if they disagreed with his decision to offer support. In true bureaucratic style, Devlin says he never received a reply, providing Washington with deniability for having backed the coup if something went wrong. UN liaison officers reported seeing Western military attachés visiting Mobutu ‘with bulging briefcases containing thick brown paper packets which they obligingly deposited on his table’.


...

But Lumumba was still dangerous in the eyes of the West. He had the support of a significant section of the country as well as the makings of an alternative government with a small army out in Stanleyville. That made him a threat, especially if he ever got out or if parliament was recalled. Soviet-backed African countries began to pressure Mobutu to return Lumumba to office. The Americans were unsure that Mobutu had the nerve to hold out. They worried he might have a breakdown. 77 The CIA wanted a permanent solution to the one man whom it saw as the source of all the problems. Lumumba remained ‘a grave danger as long as he was not disposed of’, said Dulles at a National Security Council meeting. 78

Five days after the coup, Devlin got a cable with the codeword ‘Prop’. It was from Richard Bissell, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans. Only four people at CIA headquarters had access to Prop messages and Devlin alone in the Congo received them. His orders were to keep the messages hidden from colleagues and give them priority over all other traffic. The cable said a senior officer whom Devlin would recognise would arrive in Leopoldville around 27 September. He would identify himself as ‘Joe from Paris’. Devlin was to carry out his instructions. 79 A week later as he left the Embassy, Devlin saw a man he recognised get up from a table at a café across the street. They got into Devlin’s car and he turned up the radio. As they drove away, the man turned to Devlin. ‘I’m Joe from Paris,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to give you instructions about a highly sensitive operation.’

The man’s real name was Sidney Gottlieb, known to some as the ‘dark sorcerer’ for his conjuring in the most sinister recesses of the CIA. With his club-foot, he was perhaps too easy to caricature as a cross between a Bond villain and Dr Strangelove, a scientist who always wanted to push further without worrying about the morality of where it all led. He masterminded the sprawling MKULTRA programme which had begun in 1953, without any oversight, to experiment on mind control using an array of medical and scientific experiments on Americans, including the use of electroshock and LSD (which Gottlieb himself claimed to have taken 200 times). 80 At least one person involved in his experiments died under suspicious circumstances and others went mad. Gottlieb was also the go-to man when it came to eliminating America’s enemies. These were busy times. He was looking at ways of removing Fidel Castro using exploding cigars and poisoned wet-suits, as well as removing the leader of the Dominican Republic. The two men in the car in Leopoldville remained quiet until they reached a safe house. Then Gottlieb said he had brought Devlin poison to kill Lumumba. 81

‘Isn’t this unusual?’ Devlin said. He had never been asked to kill anyone before. ‘Who authorised this operation?’

‘President Eisenhower,’ Gottlieb said. ‘I wasn’t there when he approved it but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.’ Had Eisenhower meant the phrase ‘elimination’ on 18 August to be an order for assassination? Later some of those present at the meeting said they were not sure that he had. But CIA chief Dulles, as well as others, believed they knew exactly what the President meant even if he had been careful not to say it too directly. Dulles had begun to put a plan into effect through his Deputy, Richard Bissell.

Devlin lit a cigarette and stared down at his shoes. ‘It’s your responsibility to carry out the operation, you alone,’ Gottlieb said ‘The details are up to you, but it’s got to be clean – nothing that can be traced back to the US government.’ There was silence. Then he pulled out a small package. ‘Take this,’ he said, handing it over. ‘With the stuff that’s in there, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated.’

There were several different poisons which had come from the US army biological warfare institution at Fort Detrick. Gottlieb had explored using rabbit fever, undulant fever, anthrax, smallpox and sleeping sickness. One poison was concealed in a tube of toothpaste and was designed to make it look as if Lumumba had died from polio. Grimly Devlin took the poisons and the accessories, including needles, rubber gloves and a mask.

Devlin always says that after accepting the poisons he threw them in the Congo River, neglecting to mention that he only did this months later when their potency had expired. In the meantime he kept them in his safe. When one officer visited Devlin, he mentioned he had a virus in the safe. ‘I knew it wasn’t for somebody to get his polio shot up to date,’ recalled the visitor later. 82

Devlin maintained that he had no intention of going ahead with this plan. ‘To me it was murder,’ he said on his deathbed. ‘I’m not a 007 guy.’ 83 He said he knew that refusing the order outright would lead to his recall and someone else being appointed who would carry out the order, destroying his career in the process. So Devlin says he decided to play it slow. He had only one agent with access to Lumumba’s living quarters, where he was effectively imprisoned, but Devlin said he was not sure the agent could get in. He looked at having another agent take refuge with Lumumba to administer the poison but that did not work. He also had conversations with Congolese contacts interested in killing Lumumba. 84

Headquarters became impatient. It offered to send out another officer to help in case Devlin was not able to devote enough time to the plans. Devlin replied that, if that were done, the officer should be supplied through the diplomatic pouch with a high-powered hunting rifle which could be kept ‘in office pending opening of hunting season’. 85 A shady stateless mercenary, willing to do anything, was provided with plastic surgery and a toupee by the CIA and sent off to the Congo to help, but he never got close to Lumumba. 86 The CIA even suggested using a ‘commando type group’ to abduct Lumumba by assaulting his residence. 87 On 19 September, Alec Douglas-Home talked to President Eisenhower. ‘Lord Home said the Soviets have lost much by their obvious efforts to disrupt matters in the Congo,’ the minutes recorded. ‘The president expressed his wish that Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles; Lord Home said regretfully that we have lost many of the techniques of old-fashioned diplomacy.’ 88 A week later Home, along with Prime Minister Macmillan, met President Eisenhower in New York. ‘Lord Home raised the question why we are not getting rid of Lumumba at the present time,’ the American note-taker recorded. ‘He stressed now is the time to get rid of Lumumba.’ 89

...

[Agnimitra]

Slime magazine:
Losing Pakistan: An Insider’s Look at How the U.S. Deals With Its Ally

One evening in June 2009, Richard Holbrooke paid a visit to Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari at the presidential palace in Islamabad.

No, no, its not what you're thinking.

“Pakistan is like AIG,” Zardari told Holbrooke, comparing his country to the U.S. insurance giant that was bailed out in 2008. “Too big to fail.” Washington, Zardari keenly recalled, had given AIG “$100 billion. You should give Pakistan the same,” Zardari said. Holbrooke smiled throughout the meeting.

Strategic advisor to GOTUS, Vali Nasr (of Iranian origin), advertized as "America's formost expert on the Middle East and Islamic affairs) seems to insist that is the way to go, even if the US doesn't like it:

Holbrooke did agree, however, with Zardari that Pakistan was important and the U.S. had a long-term interest in its stability. For the next year and a half, Holbrooke and his team pursued a policy of diplomatic engagement with Pakistan. It went beyond the traditional approach narrowly based on security concerns. The idea was to try and address Pakistan’s strategic calculus — an ambitious target that may have underestimated how far Pakistan was willing to go without changing its ways. “What Holbrooke wanted,” Nasr tells TIME in an interview, “was to engage big and try and change the course of this country and its relationship with Washington once and for all.”

But from the very start, President Barack Obama and the White House never really bought into the idea. “The White House tolerated Holbrooke’s approach for a while,” Nasr writes in the book, “but in the end decided that a policy of coercion and confrontation would better achieve our goals in Pakistan.” Washington was less interested in working with Pakistan, Nasr says, than pressuring it into compliance. That strategy, he says, has failed. And now, he warns, the U.S. risks pivoting away from the region at the cost of abandoning vital interests that remain there.

“When you look at Pakistan today,” says Nasr, “it is nuclear-armed, in near conflict with India, has a dangerous civil war with its own extremists, is now subject to one of the most brutal terrorism campaigns against its population, that is now coming apart along sectarian lines.” If the U.S. does not maintain influence in Pakistan, he says, it won’t be able to have a positive impact on the direction of the country. “Looking at it from an American perspective,” Nasr says, “we’re just going to be basically saying, ‘We’re going to sit on the sideline and look at this roller coaster go off this rail.’”

Holbrooke’s approach was ambitious. A strategic dialogue was established between the two countries. Nonmilitary aid was tripled. Washington began to reach out to civilian centers in Pakistan for the first time. “There was a discussion on energy and electricity and water and women,” says Nasr. “These were ways of laying out for Pakistan a longer road map with the U.S., and alternately trying to put on the table for Pakistan interests that would gradually wean it away from its strategic outlook and bring it in a new direction.” There would be no quick fix. It was a longer strategy aimed at slowly undoing decades of alienation and mistrust.

In the first two years, Nasr insists that there were rewards. The U.S. got more intelligence cooperation, he details in the book. “More agents, more listening posts, and even visas for the deep-cover CIA operatives who found [Osama] bin Laden.” Long-strained relations between Islamabad and Kabul improved enough for it to help U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis also finally moved against the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, in military offensives that helped the war across the border. “The Pakistanis didn’t cooperate 100%,” says Nasr. “But they did cooperate 50%.”

But the Obama Administration didn’t have the patience to stick with it. As Nasr acknowledges, there was a rival school of thought that said, “It was too difficult, too time-consuming and wouldn’t work anyway.” When Holbrooke died, their view won out. Nasr resigned from the State Department soon after.

The final message this Time Mag article wants to send out, via Vali Nasr's advice:

The CIA and the Pentagon saw the benefits of the cooperation, Nasr notes in his book. But at the same time, he writes, they applied constant pressure that “threatened to break up the relationship.” At one point, Holbrooke turned to him, shaking his head, and said: “Watch them [the CIA] ruin this relationship. And when it is ruined, they are going to say, ‘We told you, You can’t work with Pakistan!’ We never learn.”

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing from my post shown above ^^

Around midnight on 1 December, Lumumba was captured at a river crossing just before he reached friendly territory. The local UN garrison was given orders not to place him in protective custody or to get in the way of his arrest. 97 He was taken by aeroplane back to Leopoldville the next day. He emerged with his hands tied behind his back. A soldier lifted his head to show his face to the waiting cameraman, who could see blood on him. He was driven in the back of a truck through town. His hair was dishevelled and his glasses lost. The truck drove right past the UN headquarters. 98 Images of his mistreatment led to a wave of anger internationally, directed at the UN among others for failing to intervene. As the UN found in later years, maintaining a policy of neutrality and non-interference often meant becoming passive observers to tragic, sometimes violent events. 99 Although there was a sense that some in the UN had taken sides or at least were willing to play both sides, the Secretary General of the UN had told a British diplomat a few months earlier that Lumumba was ‘already clearly a Communist stooge’ and that he hoped to prevent the Soviet penetration of Africa. 100 Next Lumumba was driven to Mobutu’s house where his old friend paid his respects. He was then taken to a paratrooper camp at Thysville a hundred miles from the city. A soldier read out a statement he had written in which he said he was head of the government and then stuffed the paper into his mouth. But the dilemma remained over how to eliminate him definitively from the political scene. The US and Belgians both realised that it was better to have the Congolese do the dirty work for them now he was in their hands.

Lumumba’s powers of oratory had not deserted him and on 13 January 1961 there was a mutiny at the paratrooper camp. This led to immediate fears that Lumumba might escape again. He had to be dealt with. ‘I assumed, particularly after the Thysville mutiny, that the government would seek a permanent solution to the Lumumba problem,’ said Devlin. ‘But I was never consulted on the matter and never offered advice.’ 101 He may not have been consulted, but he was told it was going to happen by Victor Nendaka, his man who ran the Security Service, a subtle, largely semantic difference. Devlin would later write a cable to CIA headquarters outlining what would happen next but delayed sending it for reasons that remain unclear. 102 The incoming Kennedy administration in Washington was divided over whether to continue the hard line over African nationalists or to appeal to the newly independent countries. There were fears in the CIA that the new administration was going ‘soft’. Kennedy himself wondered after his election whether or not to ‘save’ Lumumba and to work with him. Devlin had cabled Washington just before the mutiny desperately trying to maintain a firm line by providing the most alarmist possible take on the situation. ‘PRESENT GOVERNMENT MAY FALL WITHIN FEW DAYS,’ Devlin said. ‘RESULT WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY BE CHAOS AND RETURN LUMUMBA TO POWER … REFUSAL TO TAKE DRASTIC STEPS AT THIS TIME WILL LEAD TO DEFEAT OF UNITED STATES POLICY IN CONGO.’ 103 The Belgians also made clear that they wanted Lumumba transferred to Katanga and delivered into the hands of his enemies. The job had to be finished quickly.

Just before dawn on 17 January, Lumumba was taken from his cell by Victor Nendaka, his former comrade and now Devlin’s man as head of the Security Service. He was brought to a plane. On board his goatee beard was torn out and he was forced to eat it. 104 A debate had been held within the Congolese Commission on how to end the instability. A collective decision was reached to send Lumumba to Elisabethville, the Katangan capital. Among those taking the decision was Damien Kandolo, a member of the College of Commissioners, Daphne Park’s man, as well as Devlin’s man Nendaka. On arrival, Lumumba was dragged out and thrown on to a jeep under watching Belgian eyes. A small Swedish detail of six UN troops at the airport also witnessed him being driven away. Lumumba was conveyed to a colonial villa, owned by a Belgian, where he was beaten again. The UN knew he had landed but did nothing to intervene. Katangan ministers, including Moise Tshombe, joined in the beatings at the villa. 105

That night he was led to a clearing in the wood. With Katangan ministers and a number of Belgians present, Lumumba was put up against a tree and executed by a firing squad (the squad included Belgians, who were either mercenaries or working for the Katangan gendarmerie). The corpses of Lumumba and two aides were hacked to pieces and plunged into a barrel of acid by two Europeans. ‘We were there two days,’ recalled one of the men years later. ‘We did things an animal wouldn’t do. And that’s why we were drunk, stone drunk.’ 106

A few days later it was announced to the world that Lumumba and two aides had escaped from custody and then been killed by villagers. A Katangan minister held a press conference at which he produced a death certificate. It read ‘died in the bush’. ‘There are those people who accuse us of assassination,’ he said. ‘I have only one response – prove it.’ 107 No one believed the story. Demonstrations erupted in many countries and Belgian embassies were attacked. The crowds may not have known the detail but they understood that Belgian complicity ran deep. Lumumba became a martyr, his death a cause célèbre around the world which Moscow adeptly exploited, even establishing its own university named after him to train and recruit African leaders of the future. ‘It was Belgian advice, Belgian orders and finally Belgian hands that killed Lumumba on that 17 January 1961,’ according to one detailed study of events. 108

Mobutu, once Lumumba’s ally and trusted friend, almost certainly knew of the killing of the comrade he had betrayed. ‘I can’t believe he wasn’t involved,’ confessed Devlin. ‘But it was just one of those questions you didn’t ask at the time.’ 109 Did the CIA know? No direct link to Larry Devlin or the CIA was ever proven, although it is clear that those who ordered the killing were close to both the CIA and MI6 in the Congo. Oddly, one disaffected CIA man claimed that during his training in 1965 another officer had described driving around with Lumumba’s body in the boot of his car. When, a decade later, the disaffected officer again encountered the man who had made the claim, that man went to the bathroom twice during dinner to spend fifteen minutes scrubbing and drying his hands, cleaning his fingernails and staring at himself in the mirror. No evidence has emerged to back up the man’s claim and the issue of who pulled the strings remains obscure. 110

Mobutu’s rise to power was complete in 1965 as he launched his final coup. Devlin was there in the background, advising him on whom to appoint. 111 ‘He had shuffled new governments like cards, finally settling on Mobutu as president,’ according to one former CIA officer. 112 Colonel Mobutu eventually mutated into Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, ‘the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’, a strange leopardskin-clad character who began to retreat from reality. He was the archetypal African ‘big man’. Again the Congolese saw nothing of their country’s wealth, as it ended up in Swiss bank accounts. 113 The Congo – or Zaire as it was renamed – was a key US ally, a base for a covert CIA war in Angola, and Mobutu was supported personally with money, guns and intelligence from Devlin’s successors. His regime received something like a billion dollars over three decades. 114 When the Cold War ended in the 1990s, Mobutu was quickly abandoned. As in so many other countries, the superpowers came to the Congo, played out their conflict and then left, leaving nothing of value behind.

[ramana]

Martin Luther King's 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail

[ramana]

"Pellets and nails",indicate a sub-continental device,made popular by the LTTE and followed by other jihadi groups.

While one grieves for the dead and wounded,why does the west give so little space and express the same outrage every time a US drone kills dozens of innocent men,women and children in a foreign field? This anti-terrorist hypocrisy only further fuels the disease.Utterances that the US will go to "the ends of the world" to find the perpetrators of this outrage is cheap rhetoric.Imagine if the same statement came from Al Q after drone attacks-what would be western reaction? We have had a 24 hr. coverage of the bombings thus far,I guess its not news when the victims are of another nation and another colour.

PS;Here is renowned journo Simon Jenkins of the Guardian writing coincidentally on similar lines.

After the bomb, mass hysteria is the Boston terrorist's greatest weapon
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... est-weapon

A Chinese proverb bids us ask what the enemy most wants us to do. Boston's bomber craves publicity, reaction and retaliation.

Simon Jenkins
The Guardian, Tuesday 16 April 2013 18.45 BST
J
I know who the real terrorists are. Some of them set off a bomb during the Boston marathon, killing three people and injuring 176. Such things happen regularly round the world. For those in the wrong place at the wrong time it is a personal catastrophe.

Such deeds are senseless murders, but they are not terrorism as such. What makes them terrorist is the outside world rushing to hand their perpetrators a megaphone. Murder is magnified a thousandfold, replayed over and again, described and analysed, sent into every home. A blast becomes a mass psychosis, impelling a terror of repetition and demands for drastic countermeasures. An act of violence that deserves no meaning is given it.

[Sandy Hook elementary school type of shootings were mass murders but not described as terrorist attacks. A terrorist attack is a cowardly "war by other means" type of political act. I don't know why Simon Jenkins fulminates? He seems to have point of view which blurs his vision.]

Today in Britain Margaret Thatcher's memorial service was being "reviewed in the light of the intelligence and security environment", as if Boston had suddenly rendered London insecure. Sunday's London Marathon was likewise "under discussion", as officials had to deny that it might be cancelled. David Cameron had to speak. Boris Johnson had to speak. Could the Boston bomber have been awarded any greater accolade?

I heard a radio reporter intone that it was "incredibly difficult to make sporting events safe and security". It is not incredibly difficult, it is impossible. But who dares say so, when the great god terror stalks the land, hand-in-hand with the BBC's World at One?

{What is the above rant for?}

Joseph Conrad's secret agent declared that the bomber's aim was not to kill but to create fear of killing. That is why the terrorist and the policeman "both come from the same basket". The terrorist's achievement would be to generate such fear that the police would be reduced to "shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public". Half his battle would be won "with the disintegration of the old morality" – by which Conrad meant liberal tolerance.


{Not true. Right after 9/11 attacks there was London Metro shooting of an innocent Brazilian immigrant. The subsequent inquiry clearly showed it was a case of mistake and the police did pay a price. The public did not approve. Joseph Conrad was writing of a hypothetical situation. We have concrete examples. In the US there was a Sikh gas station owner who was attacked. The US court system did serve justice to the attackers.}

At present terrorism draws strength from the west's adoption of extra-legal violence as a countermeasure. A democracy acting in what it regards as self-defence may differ from the mindless rage of the jihadist. But America is now taking the "war on terror" away from any specific theatre into a realm of "out of area" assassination, rendition and drone killing. As such it is easily seen as giving itself a license for random violence.

{This is his real angst. That America as leader of the West is meeting out justice from a far away without the due process. Its in a state of war and not in a criminal situation. Jihad means war. And most of the FATA villages shelter the jihadis who wage war.}

To Waziri or Yemeni villagers obliterated by a drone, the fact that they were not the "intended" victims is immaterial. They are as dead as the Boston victims. Such cruel, arm's-length "crime prevention" is precisely what Conrad's special agent sought to provoke. If America claims legitimacy in sowing terror from the air, Islamists claim likewise on the ground.

{Here Simon Jenkins draws false moral equivalence and makes everything even keel. There are known terrorists hanging out in Yemen or Waziris villages. And the contrary doesn't exist in Boston Marathon. They are runners and far removed from any idea of violence.}

This heightened sensitivity to terror is ubiquitous. Back in Britain there is not 10 minutes' peace on a Virgin train without a voice intoning that we should "look out for any suspicious objects or persons and report to the police". This is pure Big Brother, the mutualisation of suspicion. A quiet walk round Westminster or Kensington is jarred by wandering policemen toting machine guns. They may be just showing off, but showing off to what purpose? We have even come to regard it as normal.


{It is to save his sorry a**. One day, he hopefully is grateful that such droning messages alert him or others to notfy the police and stave of an untoward terrorist attack and thus save lives. In Punjab many lives were saved by alert citizens who noted abandoned baggage which contatined bombs or explosives}

Domestic security has become "national security" and left to account only to public fear. It employs millions of Americans, in a country under no existential threat. I asked a British civil servant if, at planning meetings, anyone ever suggested a particular counter-terror measure might be over the top, such as surface-to-air missiles at the Olympics. The answer was no one would dare. Richard Branson lacks the guts to stand down his scaremongerers. The Met's Bernard Hogan-Howe lacks the guts to call off his Westminster Tonton Macoute.


{After end of Cold War its only domestic security that will be paramount until great powers rise and compete. Does he want the FSU nuke threat back? Further if a terrorist uses an airborne mode of attack, Jenkins will be glad that the required weaponry was available to ward of such an attack. I guess he is too comfortable and forgot the Scotttish border raids that used to terrorize England till a few centuries ago. From the early dawn of history to date England was subject to invasion from Continental Europe.]

Nothing will stop people setting off bombs. Anarchists, republicans, jihadists and fanatics have done so since the invention of dynamite. They are best countered by quiet espionage within dissident communities. Otherwise we must accept that living and moving in a free community involves risk, especially in nations such as Britain and the US, claiming the right to tell the world how it should be run.

The Chinese proverb bids us always to ask what the enemy most wants us to do. The terrorist craves us to give him publicity, reaction and retaliation. The media is his megaphone. There is a world of difference between reporting a bombing and giving it blanket coverage. This week's media has shown no inclination to deny terror the oxygen of publicity. Asked what the significance of the Boston bomb was, the US terrorism expert Rick Nelson told the BBC: "The fact that here we are talking about it."

{Actually the best way to deal with a terrorist is to kill them dead. Eg OBL :So far no rallying, no martyrdom!}

The most sensible remark yesterday came from the White House, where President Obama refused even to use the word terrorism. Much good it did. The world cried 9/11 and that was that. After the bomb, mass hysteria is terrorism's second-best weapon. It was loaded, cocked and fired. We now wait only for some deranged idiot to bless us with his message, which we will of course broadcast to the world.

On the day before Margaret Thatcher's funeral, I recall the most courageous thing I ever saw a politician do. Within hours of escaping an assassination attempt in 1984, and with friends dying round her, she refused to let security be her master. She changed her clothes, stalked into her conference hall and made a speech that barely mentioned what had happened. Terror was in its proper place. Thatcher set an example to the pusillanimous, cowering, overprotected, risk-averse politicians of today.

PPS:Sorry Ramana,just saw your post, this piece though is quite relevant to the bombings.

I really dont know why he wrote that article. Its disjointed and at best looks like a rant on US. And this is not the right time to do it even if he is Great Grand Liberal himself.
As far as I know Obama dispatching OBL acted in the best Thacherite manner. The response in US has been quite exemplary.

[Prem]

Could the U.S. be the world's most populous country in 2100?
( Imagine US with 1 Billion People with lead in PCP)

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/201 ... ry_in_2100

he United States, currently the world's third-most populous country behind China and India, could have the largest population in the world by 2100, according to new projections by Joseph Chamie, the former director of the United Nations Population Division.There's one hitch: If the United States is to rise to first place and not fall to fourth (after being surpassed by Nigeria in 2050), it will need an eightfold increase in annual immigration -- a compelling data point to consider as the Senate takes up bipartisan legislation on immigration reform. This graph, compiled by Chamie with U.N. data, shows two different scenarios for U.S. population growth. One, in red, traces the U.S population to 2100 with current immigration rates (1.2 million immigrants annually). The other, in blue, shows how U.S. population would grow if the country increases its influx of immigrants to 10 million a yea

Chamie is hopeful that the United States can achieve high population-growth rates (even as China and India's populations plateau and begin to decrease), and thus fend off the typical problems -- aging population, dwindling workforce, shrinking economy, increasing burdens on taxpayers -- that often affect countries with low fertility rates. But he is also proposing a somewhat radical solution: Come one, come all.By "opening America's doors wide to immigrants," the demographer argues, "the issue of illegal immigration would no longer be a sensitive political matter occupying valuable time and resources of the U.S. president or Congress. Unauthorized immigrants residing in the U.S. -- 60 percent currently from Mexico -- would be granted amnesty and welcomed as new citizens. Enforcement, border patrol, legal/judicial hearings, incarceration and deportations would be negligible, saving the nation billions of dollars that could be used for rebuilding America's ailing infrastructure."Not only would this approach save resources, he argues, but it would also reinforce the U.S. commitment to family values (by reuniting separated immigrant families); greatly increase U.S. GDP, work wages, and tax revenues; enlarge the country's pool of "workers, entrepreneurs, innovators, and consumers"; and, "strengthen [America's] capacity to continue promoting democracy, freedom and development, thereby ensuring peace, stability and prosperity for every region of the world." Plus, it's hard for Americans to say no to a plan that would keep them ahead of China, right?

[Prem]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/0 ... 22255.html
Christianity As State Religion Supported By One-Third Of Americans, Poll Finds

Although the North Carolina House of Representatives killed a bill Thursday that would have paved the way for establishing an official state religion, a new national HuffPost/YouGov poll finds widespread support for doing so.The new survey finds that 34 percent of adults would favor establishing Christianity as the official state religion in their own state, while 47 percent would oppose doing so. Thirty-two percent said that they would favor a constitutional amendment making Christianity the official religion of the United States, with 52 percent saying they were opposed.

[abhishek_sharma]

For Shame: Why don't Americans care more about torture?

[abhishek_sharma]

When Our Kids Own America: America's seismic demographic shift is upending life in our suburbs, cities and our popular culture. So why are we still clinging to the same stories to make sense of these changes?

The Secret History of Guns

[Anurag]

The United States, India and Pakistan To the Brink and Back
(Brookinsg Institute)

[abhishek_sharma]

Inside America's Dirty Wars

[Bharath.Subramanyam]

http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 5#p1447955

US Government regularly interacted with Gujarat & Modi abusing NGOs - from Wikileaks

http://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05NEWDELHI7725_a.html

Scribd document showing only the Gujarat Relevant paragraphs:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/137802032/US- ... -Wikileaks


Indian NGOs: Partners and Resources
-----------------------------------

45. (SBU) We interact regularly with a cross-section of
NGOs, both religious and secular, that encourage inter-faith
dialogue, secularism, and actively counter religious
extremism of all kinds, as well as providing material comfort
to victims of hate crimes. We ensure these NGO leaders
participate in the IV program; USAID and PA ensure that they
have access to USG funding. We express our support by
visibly attending their public events. We make sure that
their information on the activities of extremists is included
in the Human Rights Report and the Religious Freedom Report.

[Philip]

Rep. Trey Gowdy: ‘Explosive’ Benghazi hearings ‘coming quickly’
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... s-coming-/

Rep. Trey Gowdy, appearing on Fox News on Saturday afternoon, promised that “explosive” congressional hearings over the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, are “coming quickly.”

“There are more Benghazi hearings coming; I think they’re going to be explosive,” Mr. Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who is a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Fox’s Uma Pemmaraju.

SPECIAL COVERAGE: Benghazi Attack Under Microscope

Mr. Gowdy wasn’t able to give out too many details, but he hinted that the public for the first time might hear from witnesses to the terror attack that left four Americans dead.

“I am bound by certain measures of confidentiality, but I would tell you that you are getting very warm,” Mr. Gowdy said when asked by Ms. Pemmaraju whether witnesses could be coming forward. “[The hearings] are coming sooner rather than later.”

He said several questions need to be answered, such as why there was a failure of security, “what happened during the siege itself and why aid was not sent,” and whether the testimony by Susan E. Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was “grossly negligent or whether it was intentionally misleading.”

Mr. Gowdy added that in a trial, “direct evidence, direct testimony by eyewitnesses is always the most compelling.”

“Trust me when I tell you you will want to follow the hearings that are coming up,” he reiterated.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... z2RrwoPbZD

[Agnimitra]

Economic issues:
Telegraph: Barack Obama doesn’t look like a serious, well-informed president

A striking set of figures was just released today by the independent Government Accountability Institute in Washington, analysing “how much time President Obama has spent in economic meetings of any kind, Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs) and personal recreation (vacations and golf outings).” The Institute’s study covers the first 1,532 days of President Obama’s time in office, up until March 31, 2013. (hat tip: Drudge Report)

Here are the main findings of the Government Accountability Institute’s report:
• President Obama has spent 3.6 % of his total work time in economic meetings or briefings of any kind (assuming a six day, 10 hour a day workweek) throughout his presidency
• President Obama has spent a total of 474.4 hours (or 47.4 10-hour workdays) in economic meetings or briefings of any kind throughout his presidency
• In 2013, President Obama has spent 6 total hours in economic meetings of any kind
• The number of days with some sort of economic meeting have declined significantly throughout President Obama’s time in office. Throughout 2009, President Obama had 140 days with economic meetings. By 2012, the number of days with a scheduled economic meeting decreased to 29 (a 79% decrease)
• President Obama has attended a total of 645 PDBs (intelligence briefings) since taking office (42.1 % of the 1532 days we reviewed)
• Throughout his time in office, President Obama has played 115 total rounds of golf and spent 86 days on vacation, for an estimated combined total of 976 hours

[svinayak]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01 ... shock-you/

FAITH
IS CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA REALLY GOING EXTINCT? GALLUP EDITOR’S CLAIMS MAY SHOCK YOU
Jan. 10, 2013 10:25am Billy Hallowell

Photo Credit: Frank Newport
Gallup’s editor-in-chief Frank Newport has been attracting widespread attention over the past few months surrounding his intriguing assessment of the state of faith in America — and his predictions that a religiously-fruitful time may be ahead.

Part of the intrigue surrounding Newport’s research comes from his assertion that religion in the U.S. is actually much healthier than many critics allege. In an interview with TheBlaze, he spoke about Gallup’s intensive research, as presented in his new book, “God Is Alive and Well.”

Considering the rise of the “nones” — a group of religiously-unaffiliated Americans, when asked if religion in America is dying, Newport had an intriguing answer. He argues that faith in the U.S., rather than sputtering out, is actually evolving.

“Faith and religion is very much alive and well — a key point is, it’s changing,” the researcher told TheBlaze. “The way people manifest their religiosity has changed over time. That’s not unusual.”

Rather than seeing religion as on the cusp of disappearing, Newport — based on Gallup’s research into matters of faith and religion — argues that many Americans are transitioning into an “unbranded religion.” This essentially means that, increasingly, individuals classify themselves as unaligned with a denomination, yet they are still very much Christian (the majority faith culture here in the U.S.).

Even though, numerically speaking, the proportion of “nones” has grown, the researcher claims that much of the hoopla over the increase may be misplaced. The numbers of unaffiliated may, in fact, be growing as a result of a change in reporting styles.

“We have changes in the way that people respond to questions now. People feel more comfortable saying ‘I’m nothing — I was raised a Catholic and I’m not anything now,’” he noted, also offering up a caveat about the false assumption that “unaffiliated” is indicative of atheist or agnostic. “A lot of those nones still are spiritual and religious when you measure it in different ways.”

As for the “nones,” the researcher also alleged that their growth may be overstated and that the proportion, when compared year-to-year, may be leveling off.

“The level of increase in 2012 compared to 2011 is the smallest increase we’ve seen in the last five,” he noted (Gallup data released this week shows that the proportion of religiously-unaffiliated Americans has, indeed, slowed in its expansion).

[ramana]

X-post...

Return of the British in the East of Suez
Why Now? The gradual withdrawal of the American Naval assets to Pacific is bound to create a vaccuam in the Indian Ocean....Its no doubt that the waters will turn dangerous.....

No, this was part of the long term intention. The loss of competitive edge to US capitalism, forced the UK to withdraw. It tried to save itself through two pan-European wars that would extend the conflict globally in a way that it thought it could use to both extract resources from as well as keep holding on - to its extensive colonial empire.

The reason for its retreat was its reluctance to give up on the racist and religious obstinacy that underlay all its undertakings under thin veneer of "liberal democratism" (not democracy per se) - and therefore reluctance to acknowledge/reward talent or effort from "unacceptable" groups of humans. In comparison - US showed that it would be prepared to fight even its own prejudices for the sake of capitalist efficiency and expansion - as in the civil war, and acceptance of European groups that the home-island "English" would still place half-way down the racial ladder to apes - even if the initial prejudices were shared between the English colonizers of USA and insular UK.

This feudal, primitive, racist, class-supremacist, and essentially retrogressive mindset led to a contest between two sides of the English mind - the genuinely liberal and humanist [the more expansive and explorative side of the Germanic], and its insanely sadistic racist side - which overall, the anti-humanist side typically has consistently won. This in turn meant that the underlying imperialist, supremacist, racist and cynically sadist mindset is the one that runs the state machinery - and is a brake on its own full capitalist potential.

A full capitalist growth is only possible if all the previous restrictions of ideology and identity - is lost - for it gives the greatest competitive entrance of human elements into the market.

UK on the other hand never lost its feudal, and imperial, and racial foundations in the core of its state apparatus. Thus it saw the loss of its empire in WWII as a temporary compromise, and something not reversible at that stage with its remnant resources. It did not see it as the inevitable consequence of its own ideological foundations as a state. Its tactics was to ride the American juggernaut, in its own colonial empire derived capacity to do mischief, its pre-existing colonial network of subversives, agents, and dependent interests with whom they shared mutual blackmail items to ensure loyalty in perpetuity.

It would enhance and involve the US tendency to "do good" and "feel good", combined with the shared interests of the trans-Atlantic financial/industrial network - to push for interventions in parts of the world that would protect its own long-term "assets", in society and politics of the region carefully nurtured from colonial times.

But this "protection" is two fold : one is to protect its loyalists, or groups that would always look up to and somehow culturally semi-identify with UK as the "centre of the world", but the other was also to get USA to "bleed" slowly, in a subtle and unobtrusive way. US experience of the European Machiavellianism places US in a cultural dilemma - it does not understand, and distrusts "Europe", while to rest of non-European world - USA remains identified with Europe. In that sense USA has not been able to discover its unique identity and is therefore incapable of really befriending cultures that are not entirely "European". Maybe many in the US upper echelons - understand the UK's long term policy of using USA for its own feudal revival of world dominance, but they see no alternative because of their identity construction as fundamentally a British one.

This suits UK's short term vision perfectly. Looking at how its has gone since the 65 years since end of WWII, UK has consistently preserved its key geo-strategic allies, often on the shoulders of USA, and managed to weaken USA in the process - while USA thought UK was indispensable because maybe of the UK capacity to cause mischief from its pre-existing networks.

UK's target is to regain control over the sea-lanes to the IOR, and IOR itself. Whoever controls IOR is going to control the global economy of the next 200 years.

US is trying to call the extended region Indian Ocean-Pacific Rim but it doesn't have the historical knowledge and relies on short term buying of local elites with college admissions and minor preks.

[Agnimitra]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01 ... shock-you/

FAITH
IS CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA REALLY GOING EXTINCT? GALLUP EDITOR’S CLAIMS MAY SHOCK YOU
Jan. 10, 2013 10:25am Billy Hallowell

Rather than seeing religion as on the cusp of disappearing, Newport — based on Gallup’s research into matters of faith and religion — argues that many Americans are transitioning into an “unbranded religion.” This essentially means that, increasingly, individuals classify themselves as unaligned with a denomination, yet they are still very much Christian (the majority faith culture here in the U.S.).

1. They have non-denominational 'networks' rather than churches with property.
2. They don't have any set congregations or meetings, but typically "go-to" persons. E.g., Joe is the go-to person with a scholarly Bible question, Jim is a go-to person for motivation and coaching, Tracy is the go-to person to meet other Christian singles, etc.
3. They often treat the US Constitution like a smriti as sacred as the Bible.
4. Gun ownership and other things also usually go with the group.
5. Typically the "pastor" type will double up as sports coach for the young 'uns. Christianity is part of motivational therapy.
6. End of Days conspiracies, etc. are big in this group.
7. Large numbers of people wanting out of the drug-culture (a huge demographic in the US) take to religion as part of rehab and after.

[Prem Kumar]

I couldnt find a better place to post this. An old article that talks about Agent Orange's effect on Vietnamese children - 30+ years later. Brown-skinned lives aint worth shit in WASP dominated U.S foreign policy:

In Vietnam, Old Foes Take Aim at War's Toxic Legacy

[quote]Van, 5, spends her days at home, playing by herself on the concrete floor because local school officials say her appearance frightens other children. She has an oversize head and a severely deformed mouth, and her upper body is covered in a rash so severe her skin appears to have been boiled. According to Vietnamese medical authorities, she is part of a new generation of Agent Orange victims, forever scarred by the U.S.-made herbicide containing dioxin, one of the world's most toxic pollutants.[/quote]

[quote]At least one group of victims has already made a formal push for compensation, filing a lawsuit in New York against the chemical companies that produced Agent Orange, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto. In the late 1970s, U.S. veterans filed a similar case and settled out of court in 1984 for a $180 million payment. The Vietnamese case was dismissed last year, but an appeal hearing is expected next month.[/quote]

The 2nd para above says it all. Dow Chemicals probably made a neat profit from the war. Too bad, Bhopal wasnt part of a war - otherwise, they would have made an even greater profit. Monsanto - the lesser said about them, the better

[Agnimitra]

Top South Carolina Democrat Wants To Send Nikki Haley “Wherever The Hell She Came From”

A spokesman for South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley Friday fired back at the latest in a long string of attacks that seem to invoke her status as an Indian-American woman presiding over her Southern state.

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian, a trial lawyer, longtime Democratic leader, and legendary figure in local politics, reportedly told a South Carolina Democratic Party dinner that the Democratic challenger would send "Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from."

Haley was born in South Carolina. Her parents are from India.

Haley has weathered — and effectively jiu-jitsued — attacks on her ethnicity during her 2010 campaign and her governorship, first from Republicans and more recently from her Democratic foes. (One state Democratic official labeled her the "Sikh Jesus.") And voters have, if anything, rallied around her against the perceived slurs.

"Unfortunately, this seems to be a trend coming from the South Carolina Democratic Party," Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey told BuzzFeed. "Fortunately, the people of South Carolina are better than Harpootlian and his ilk, and we have faith that they will see right through their consistent attempts to play to the lowest common denominator."

[Philip]

The shame of humanity,Camp Gitmo,which Om-Baba promised to close when he was first elected...it never happened,is a diabetic sore on the world's human rights conscience.The 12st century equivalent of the Nazi concentration camps,Camp Gitmo has incarcerated large numbers of entirely innocent victims of the US's expeditionary wars "against terror".Things are so bad there that the inmates being incarcerated and tortured-as many of those freed have testified,have resorted to the last resort,hunger strikes.Like the IRA prisoners ,Bobby Sands and co.,who died protesting British barbarity,so too are the inmates at Gitmo doing,drawing global attention to the despotic and ,depraved actions of the world's so-called most powerful "democracy",which in reality is a fascist state.

Like the famous tale of the "man in the iron mask",left to die in a French porison,so too do the inmates of Camp Gitmo see a future of hell ahead for them,as they say....""They won't try us. They won't let us live in peace, and they won't let us die in peace."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ma ... ger-strike

How Guantánamo's horror forced inmates to hunger strike
As the protest threatens to claim lives, and world revulsion grows at the prisoners' plight, Obama faces intense pressure to step in

How Guantánamo's horror forced inmates to hunger strike

As the protest threatens to claim lives, and world revulsion grows at the prisoners' plight, Obama faces intense pressure to step in
Paul Harris in New York, Tracy McVeigh and Mark Townsend
The Observer, Saturday 4 May 2013

Prisoner at Guantánamo Bay is escorted by guards
Obama has pledged to close Guantánamo Bay, but only with the support of Republicans in Congress. Photograph: Haraz Ghanbari/AP

When the military doctors force-feed Guantánamo Bay detainee Fayiz al-Kandari with a tube shoved into his stomach there are three stages to the pain.

First, there is the sensation of the tube passing near his sinuses as it is pushed through his nose and into his throat, which causes his eyes to water. Then there is an intense burning and gagging sensation as it goes down the throat. Finally, when the tube enters the stomach there is a strong urge to vomit.

The experience, described by al-Kandari to his lawyer Carlos Warner, has one final grim humiliation. Once the tube has delivered food inside him, it triggers the most painful moment of all: the return of feeling hungry. "He says that can be the worst thing," Warner said.

Al-Kandari is one of at least 100 men on hunger strike at America's controversial terrorist prison camp, isolated on the island of Cuba. Of that number, whose two-month starvation protest has created headlines around the world, 21 are being force-fed to keep them alive.

Like 85 others among the 166 detainees in the camp, al-Kandari has been cleared for release but is still being held without charge. The sheer horror of many of the men's plight – imprisoned without trial for more than a decade, in many cases, and cleared but not released – has generated a wave of revulsion around the world as the hunger strike has grown in strength.

The International Red Cross has protested at the men's treatment and conditions. A group of United Nations human rights officials has demanded an end to the force-feeding, saying it is a form of torture. "Hunger strikers should be protected from all forms of coercion, even more so when this is done through force and in some cases through physical violence," the group said in a statement last week.

Rarely in the decade since Guantánamo Bay became the site of an out-of-jurisdiction prison camp for suspected Islamist militants captured during the "war on terror" has the base been featured so prominently in the headlines. The starving protesters have driven the base's existence up the US news agenda, even forcing Barack Obama to vow to shut it down. "The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried, that is contrary to who we are. It is contrary to our interests, and needs to stop," Obama told a news conference.

There are many people who would agree with him. But it is not easy. Despite the growing pressure and despite his own stated desire to close the base, America is finding that the existence of Guantánamo and its miserable, starving protesters cannot be dealt with so easily.

Back in January 2004, an operational update by the Red Cross made an observation of the psychological impact that the concept of indefinite detention was having on the prisoners inside the camp. It revealed it had "… observed a worrying deterioration in the psychological health of a large number of them".

That was nine years ago. No wonder those still there – and still with no prospect of either release or trial – have gone on hunger strike about their fate. The Red Cross is watching the current situation closely. A source said: "The hunger strikes are a reflection of the desperation of individuals who have no clear perspective on their future. The uncertainty is what is driving this."

Yet, surprisingly, the strike did not begin specifically about such issues. Nor did it immediately involve larger numbers of detainees. Statements from prisoners passed on by their lawyers, and declassified for release by the base's military authorities, show that on 6 February there had been an intensive search of prisoners' accommodation in camp six at the base.

Inmates were ordered outside and personal items, such as letters and toothbrushes and books, were searched and sometimes confiscated. Some prisoners have maintained that their copies of the Qur'an were mishandled by the guards – an allegation strenuously denied by the military.

Whatever the exact truth, it was too much for some. Afghan detainee Obaidullah said in a statement obtained by Amnesty International: "I had not participated in hunger strikes, or organised protests in the past … but the latest actions in the camps have dehumanised me, so I have moved to take action. Eleven years of my life have been taken from me and now, by the latest actions of the authorities, they have also taken my dignity and disrespected my religion."

The hunger strike began to spread. During this time, lawyers reported that a growing number of detainees were protesting: some entirely forgoing food, some giving up nourishment to a lesser degree. The military authorities played down the problem.

In testimony to Congress in March, General John Kelly would admit only that 24 Guantánamo prisoners were on "hunger strike light" and eating "a bit, but not a lot". A handful, he confessed, were being force-fed, but they "present themselves daily, calmly, in a totally co-operative way, to be fed through a tube". Kelly even added that he suspected some of them were sneaking in snacks when they were back in their cells.

But as the headlines and also the sheer number of strikers grew, it became impossible to make light of the situation. Then on 13 April a crackdown began. In order to break the strike, guards apparently sought to enforce a policy of putting hunger strikers in individual accommodation, away from the communal parts of the camp. Some resisted and violence broke out, with the military firing so-called "non-lethal" rounds a number of times and injuring several prisoners.

Younous Chekkouri, speaking to a lawyer from the human rights charity Reprieve by phone, described how guards used teargas and "shotguns … with small [rubber] bullets" to subdue a peaceful protest after guards discovered cameras inside their cells. "Guards were scary, they were ready to use guns, use force … it was very scary," he said.

Al-Kandari also described the scene, including seeing "many" people hit by the "rubber bullets" that were used by the guards. "Everyone's hands were tied behind their back and the men were left on the floor for six hours in this position face down ... the men's clothes were soaked with pepper spray," he said in a call with his lawyer.

Now the crisis had become so bad that, amid dire warnings that someone might eventually die, a 40-strong military medical team was flown to the base at the start of last week in order to carry out the force-feedings and keep the prisoners alive.

Omar Farah, a lawyer with the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, visited several detainees last week in person at the prison, including Fahd Ghazy. He was shocked at what he saw. "Fahd looked like he had lost about a quarter of his bodyweight," he said, describing other detainees whose hands were shaking from weakness and unable to perform simple tasks like lifting a bottle of water. "I was stunned by the physical ruin that I saw," he said.

One man with more than the usual qualifications to talk about what should happen to Guantánamo is Colonel Morris Davis, the former top prosecutor at the camp's military commissions. He served there for two years, seeing charges brought against the Australian militant David Hicks and Salim Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's driver. He is proud of his time there – although he resigned in 2007 after commanders wanted to use evidence obtained via the torture technique of waterboarding.

But Davis is now an outspoken critic of the base. "As illogical as suicide seems, sitting there for the rest of their lives probably makes it look like a rational choice," he said. Davis has now launched several petitions to get the Obama administration to close the base. But he refuses to be optimistic. "I cannot believe that we are still here in 2013 talking about this," he said.

Yet talk is still all there is. Obama himself last week acknowledged that the base was a PR disaster for the United States – there are few better recruiting tools than the knowledge that so many people are being held for so long without charge. But, even as he repeated his broken 2008 campaign pledge to close the base, Obama made clear that he would seek the support of Congress to do so.

It is the president's style to seek partnership with his Republican opponents, but that is exactly the route that saw him fail to close the base in his first year of office. Many of the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, are implacably opposed to either releasing any of the prisoners or moving them to secure facilities on the US mainland.

It is something Davis cannot understand. "They say, 'We can't look after all these dangerous and crazy people'. But I can tell you, our prison system already looks after thousands of dangerous and crazy people just fine," he said. Indeed all major recent terror cases – from the Boston bombers of last month to the attempted Times Square car bomber of several years ago – have entered the US civilian justice system.

Obama could easily take concrete steps immediately and without the support of Republicans. Human rights activists and legal campaign groups have urged him to name a top official to tackle the problem. They say that he could lift the ban on sending prisoners cleared for release to Yemen – an American ally whose government is loudly insisting it would welcome them. That act alone would clear out scores of detainees from the prison, including al-Kandari. "The men are beyond talking. We have to resume transfers," said Farah.

But to do that Obama will have to take a risk and act alone – exposing himself to accusations of being soft on terrorism in the wake of the Boston attack and as midterm elections loom next year. For many observers that seems like expecting Obama to take a step too far. But, even if Obama did shut down the camp, release those cleared and bring the others to a maximum-security jail in the US, what then?

Those remaining in US custody would still be being detained indefinitely without trial – a clear violation of human rights. After all, those desperate protesting men are not refusing food to simply swap the tropical air of Cuba for a chilly cell in Illinois. They want their cases processed, not just a change of the scenery glimpsed from behind bars.

And so the hunger strikers of Guantánamo will continue to starve. It seems an almost Kafkaesque piece of tragedy, mixing bureaucracy and politics in a combination that could soon prove lethal. As Warner says al-Kandari told him: "They won't try us. They won't let us live in peace, and they won't let us die in peace."

As the protest threatens to claim lives, and world revulsion grows at the prisoners' plight, Obama faces intense pressure to step in,but will this latter-day Nazi scumbag who wants to use drones to murder US citizens do so?

[Kati]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -dark-side

[Prem Kumar]

I am not surprised. When we visited Alaska, we met a few white Americans who said they home-schooled their children because they didnt agree with what the "Government" was teaching their kids. That's code for "I believe in creationism"

"Culture warriors" - more like right-wing lunatics. I wouldnt be surprised if the home-schooling phenomenon has exploded since Obama became POTUS. The # of right-wing militias grew by something like 100-fold in the first 4 years of his presidency.

Home schools are to the U.S what Madarassas are to Pakistan

[vishvak]

Hopefully such fundamentalists are scanned and rejected by MEA before they have a chance to come over and create any fundamentalism within India.

[Kati]

About the homeschooling. Let me add a few more observations...

These homeschoolers are nothing but Christian Taliban......
It is striking that a good number of policymakers in the capital are
through these homeschooling machine. What I have gathered from
several deshi kids (who are/were in their school debate and speech
competitions) that these homeschools help their students hone the
oratory skills and push them to public speaking circuits, and eventually
into decision-making bodies. It is very subtle but effective.......
These home schoolers go through small/tiny ultra-conservative
colleges/universities dotting North carolina, South Carolina, Georgia,
Tennessee, Virginia, etc (pretty much south/southeast USA). Then
they get sucked into various lobbying firms, public relations companies,
various think-tanks in and around DC, and then some go to law schools,
and then into politics.
The whole idea is - in the days to come - these Christian talibans will
dictate terms for the rest of the world, - from India to Indonesia, based
on their fundamentalist views, and they won't hesitate to kill non-christians
to implement their own world-views....