The Empire 386

Vliegtuigongelukken kunnen soms goed uitkomen. Lees de geschiedenis.

Rove's IT Guru Warned of Sabotage Before Fatal Plane Crash; Was Set to Testify
Monday 22 December 2008
by: Amy Goodman, Democracy Now

Mike Connell, the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove, reportedly asked for protective custody from the government before he died.
Amy Goodman: A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Mike Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. He also set up the official Ohio state election website reporting the 2004 presidential election returns.
Connell was reportedly an experienced pilot. He died instantly Friday night when his private plane crashed in a residential neighborhood near Akron, Ohio.
Michael Connell was deposed one day before the election this year by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count and his access to Karl Rove's e-mail files and how they went missing.
Velvet Revolution, a non-profit investigating Connell's activities, revealed this weekend that Connell had recently said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would "throw [him] under the bus." Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to "take the fall."
Well, Mark Crispin Miller joins us now, a professor of media culture and communication at New York University, the author of several books, including Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too. Mark Crispin Miller us now in our firehouse studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
Mark Crispin Miller: It's good to be here, Amy. Thank you.
AG: Alright, well, we had you on right before the election, because that's when Mike Connell was being deposed. This news that came out of his death in a plane crash on Friday night, talk about what you understand has happened.
MCM: Well, I cannot assert with perfect confidence that this was no accident, but I will say that the circumstances are so suspicious and so convenient for Rove and the White House that I think we're obliged to investigate this thing very, very thoroughly. And that means, first of all, taking a close look at some of the stories that were immediately circulated to account for what happened, that it was bad weather. That was the line they used when Wellstone's plane went down. There had been bad weather, but it had passed two hours before. And this comes from a woman at the airport information desk in Akron. We're told that his plane was running out of gas, which is a little bit odd for a highly experienced pilot like Connell, but apparently, when the plane went down, there was an explosion, a fireball that actually charred and pocked some of the house fronts in the neighborhood. People can go online and see the footage that news crews took. But beyond the, you know, dubiousness of the official story, we have to take a close look at - and a serious look at all the charges that Connell was set to make.
AG: Now, he had asked the Attorney General Mukasey for protective custody, because of threats to him and his wife?
MCM: He reported threats to his lawyer, Cliff Arnebeck, and Arnebeck - also, Velvet Revolution heard from tipsters, as well, tipsters who also claimed that Connell's life was at risk. Stephen Spoonamore, the whistleblower who was the first - who was the one to name Connell in the first place, also had an ear to the inside. He's also very connected. And all these people were saying Rove is making threats, the White House is very worried about this case.
Having heard all this, Arnebeck contacted Mukasey, he contacted Nancy Rogers, who is the Ohio Attorney General, and he wrote a letter to the court, telling all of them that "This man should be in protective custody. He is an important witness in a RICO case. Please do something to look after him." And they didn't respond to this.
AG: So, explain what this case is all about and exactly what Mike Connell has been doing over these last years. What does it mean to be Karl Rove's IT guru?
MCM: Well, the lawyers in the case refer to him as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, by which they mean that he seems to have been present at the scene of every dubious election of the last eight years. We're talking about Florida in 2000. We're talking about Ohio in 2004. We're talking about Alabama in 2002. He seems to have been involved in the theft of Don Siegelman's re-election for governor. There's some evidence that links him with the Saxby Chambliss-Max Cleland Senate race in Georgia in 2002. To be Karl Rove's IT guru seems to have meant basically setting it up so that votes could be electronically shaved to the disadvantage of the Democrats and the advantage of Republicans.'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/122408J

Steven Dale Green 2

'ENCOUNTERING STEVEN GREEN
"I came over here because I wanted to kill people."
By Andrew TilghmanS
unday, July 30, 2006; Page B01

"I came over here
because I wantedto kill people."
Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.' "
He shrugged.
"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "
At the time, the soldier's matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like him -- mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the exceptions who wasn't afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.
But the private was Steven D. Green.

The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked.
When I met Green, I knew nothing about his background -- his troubled youth and family life, his apparent problems with drugs and alcohol, his petty criminal record. I just saw and heard a blunt-talking kid. Now that I know the charges against Green, his words take on an utterly different context for me. But when I met him then, his comments didn't seem nearly as chilling as they do now.
Maybe, in part, that's because we were talking in Mahmudiyah. If there's one place where a soldier might succumb to what the military calls "combat stress," it's this town where Green's unit was posted on the edge of the so-called Triangle of Death, for the last three years a bloody center of the Sunni-led insurgency. Mahmudiyah is a deadly patch of earth that inspires such fear, foreboding and uneasiness that my most prominent memory of the three weeks I spent there was the unrelenting knot it caused in my stomach.
I was nervous even before I arrived. Although Mahmudiyah is only a 15-minute drive from the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, I was taken there by helicopter. Military officials didn't want to risk my riding in a truck that might be hit by a roadside bomb. I'd chosen to go to Mahmudiyah because I wanted to be on the front lines of the war and among the troops fighting it.'
Lees verder: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/28/AR2006072801492.html

Bernard Madoff 2

De International Herald Tribune bericht:

'In Madoff scandal, Jews feel an acute betrayal
By Robin Pogrebin
Published: December 24, 2000

There is a teaching in the Talmud that says an individual who comes before God after death will be asked a series of questions, the first one of which is, "Were you honest in your business dealings?" But it is the Ten Commandments that have weighed most heavily on the mind of Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles in light of the sins for which Bernard Madoff stands accused.

"You shouldn't steal," Rabbi Wolpe said. "And this is theft on a global scale."
The full scope of the misdeeds to which Madoff has confessed in swindling individuals and charitable groups has yet to be calculated, and he is far from being convicted. But Jews all over the country are already sending up something of a communal cry over a cost they say goes beyond the financial to the theological and the personal.
Here is a Jew accused of cheating Jewish organizations trying to help other Jews, they say, and of betraying the trust of Jews and violating the basic tenets of Jewish law. A Jew, they say, who seemed to exemplify the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the thieving Jewish banker.
So in synagogues and community centers, on blogs and in countless conversations, many Jews are beating their chests — not out of contrition, as they do on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, but because they say Madoff has brought shame on their people in addition to financial ruin and shaken the bonds of trust that bind Jewish communities."Jews have these familial ties," Rabbi Wolpe said. "It's not solely a shared belief; it's a sense of close communal bonds, and in the same way that your family can embarrass you as no one else can, when a Jew does this, Jews feel ashamed by proxy. I'd like to believe someone raised in our community, imbued with Jewish values, would be better than this."
Among the apparent victims of Madoff were many Jewish educational institutions and charitable causes that lost fortunes in his investments; they include Yeshiva University, Hadassah, the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. The Chais Family Foundation, which worked on educational projects in Israel, was recently forced to shut down because of losses in Madoff investments. Many of Madoff's individual investors were Jewish and supported Jewish causes, apparently drawn to him precisely because of his own communal involvement and because he radiated the comfortable sense of being one of them.
"The Jewish world is not going to be the same for a while," said Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York.
Jews are also grappling with the implications of Madoff's deeds for their public image, what one rabbi referred to as the "shanda factor," using the Yiddish term for an embarrassing shame or disgrace. As Bradley Burston, a columnist for haaretz.com, the English-language Web site of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote on Dec. 17: "The anti-Semite's new Santa is Bernard Madoff. The answer to every Jew-hater's wish list. The Aryan Nation at its most delusional couldn't have come up with anything to rival this."
The Anti-Defamation League said in a statement that Madoff's arrest had prompted an outpouring of anti-Semitic comments on Web sites around the world, most repeating familiar tropes about Jews and money. Abraham Foxman, the group's national director, said that canard went back hundreds of years, but he noted that anti-Semites did not need facts to be anti-Semitic.'

Lees verder: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/24/america/24jews.php

Charles Groenhuijsen van de Volkskrant 4

Dit schreef Charles Groenhuijsen enkele dagen geleden in de Volkskrant: 'Veel Bush-critici praten maar wat graag over dat verleden. De lobby voor een parlementaire enquête naar Nederlandse steun voor de Irak-oorlog steekt regelmatig de kop op. Zelfs Wouter Bos – de Politicus van het Jaar – begint er weer over. Zo’n onderzoek is vast leerzaam en wellicht zelfs onthullend. Maar zijn er echt geen dringender kwesties ‘hot’ in Den Haag?'
Zie: http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.com/search?q=charles+groenhuijsen
Charles, het moet nu buitengewoon teleurstellend voor je zijn om op de voorpagina van je eigen krant dit te lezen: 'Grote kans op Irak-onderzoek senaat'. Zouden er 'echt geen dringender kwestie's "hot" [zijn] in Den Haag?' Wel Charles, nu je vraag gesteld hebt, het antwoord is nee. En weet je waarom het nee is? Om de simpele reden dat het in een parlementaire democratie verwerpelijk is om de bevolking te bedriegen en om andere volkeren de dupe te laten zijn van je eigen agressie. Dat is verwerpelijk in elk systeem, maar zeker in een parlementaire democratie. Afgaande op jouw eigen woorden, zal dit voor jou een opzienbarend feit zijn. Niet voor mij en mijn mede-democraten die hierop hebben aangedrongen. Ook wij weten dat de elementaire regels van de democratie maar al te vaak worden geschonden, maar we juichen het toe dat er nu een onderzoek lijkt te komen. Voor mensen als jij die er geen bezwaar tegen hebben dat de democratie geschonden wordt, is dat een teleurstelling, maar toch, probeer ermee te leven, en hou op met het verspreiden van je eigen nonsens.
Collegiale groet,
Stan van Houcke

Het Neoliberale Geloof 304

Man Is a Cruel Animal
Monday 22 December 2008

It was Joseph Conrad I thought of when I read an article in The Nation magazine this month about white vigilante groups that rose up out of the chaos of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to terrorize and murder blacks. It was Conrad I thought of when I saw the ominous statements by authorities, such as International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warning of potential civil unrest in the United States as we funnel staggering sums of public funds upward to our bankrupt elites and leave our poor and working class destitute, hungry, without health care and locked out of their foreclosed homes. We fool ourselves into believing we are immune to the savagery and chaos of failed states. Take away the rigid social structure, let society continue to break down, and we become, like anyone else, brutes.
Conrad saw enough of the world as a sea captain to know the irredeemable corruption of humanity. The noble virtues that drove characters like Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness" into the jungle veiled abject self-interest, unchecked greed and murder. Conrad was in the Congo in the late 19th century when the Belgian monarch King Leopold, in the name of Western civilization and anti-slavery, was plundering the country. The Belgian occupation resulted in the death by disease, starvation and murder of some 10 million Congolese. Conrad understood what we did to others in the name of civilization and progress. And it is Conrad, as our society unravels internally and plows ahead in the costly, morally repugnant and self-defeating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whom we do well to heed.
This theme of our corruptibility is central to Conrad. In his short story "An Outpost of Progress" he writes of two white traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to a remote trading station in the Congo. The mission is endowed with a great moral purpose - to export European "civilization" to Africa. But the boredom and lack of constraints swiftly turn the two men, like our mercenaries and soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, into savages. They trade slaves for ivory. They get into a feud over dwindling food supplies and Kayerts shoots and kills his unarmed companion Carlier.
"They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals," Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier, "whose existence is only rendered possible through high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd; to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one's kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one's thoughts, of one's sensations - to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike."
The Managing Director of the Great Civilizing Company - for as Conrad notes "civilization" follows trade - arrives by steamer at the end of the story. He is not met at the dock by his two agents. He climbs the steep bank to the trading station with the captain and engine driver behind him. The director finds Kayerts, who, after the murder, committed suicide by hanging himself by a leather strap from a cross that marked the grave of the previous station chief. Kayerts' toes are a couple of inches above the ground. His arms hang stiffly down "... and, irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue at his Managing Director."
Conrad saw cruelty as an integral part of human nature. This cruelty arrives, however, in different forms. Stable, industrialized societies, awash in wealth and privilege, can construct internal systems that mask this cruelty, although it is nakedly displayed in their imperial outposts. We are lulled into the illusion in these zones of safety that human beings can be rational. The "war on terror," the virtuous rhetoric about saving the women in Afghanistan from the Taliban or the Iraqis from tyranny, is another in a series of long and sordid human campaigns of violence carried out in the name of a moral good.'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/122208S

De Israelische Terreur 495

Voor de christenen van het Nederlands Dagblad die dit schreven: 'Hamas hoopt op uitbreken van de eerste Gazaoorlog.' Beste christenfundamentalisten, looft uw luchtgod, ga heen en zondig niet weer. Zie: http://www.nd.nl/artikelen/2008/december/23/hamas-hoopt-op-uitbreken-van-de-eerste-gazaoorlog

Oh, come all ye faithful…
Let’s crush Gaza, starve their little ones
By Stuart Littlewood

24 December 2008

Stuart Littlewood asks British, European Union and US leaders what sort of Christmas is in store for the children of Gaza while the criminals who inflict on them unspeakable hardship and torment, and who deny them their human rights, have their snouts in the Yuletide trough and enjoy a warm bed?Who is holding the governments of Britain, the EU and the US to account this Christmas for aiding and abetting the deliberate starving of 1.5 million in Gaza? Hardly anybody. Most of those in a position to do so are Friends of Israel. What of our foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, our very Christian prime minister, Gordon Brown, and our even more pious peace envoy Tony Blair – have they done anything at all to insist that Israel’s blockade is ended? The “Zionist Tendency” in Whitehall still goes unchallenged.Please tell us, Messrs Brown, Miliband and Blair: isn’t the Fourth Geneva Convention supposed to protect civilians under military occupation – no violence to life or person, no cruelty, no torture, no taking of hostages, no outrages upon personal dignity, no collective punishment, no sentencing or executions unless ordered by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees demanded by civilized peoples – all that sort of thing?And doesn’t Article 33 say that no protected person may be punished for an offence he or she did not personally commit? Aren’t collective penalties, intimidation and terrorism prohibited? Likewise reprisals against protected persons and their property?Am I right in thinking that collective punishment is actually a war crime? In World War II the Nazis practised collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages, towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. Isn't this what the Israelis and their Western collaborators are doing to Gaza?The Israeli regime doesn’t seem to have heard of the Geneva Conventions – although it has been instructed to observe them in various UN resolutions – nor even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps it needs educating.We have seen the remnants of Palestine become so fractured and shredded by the occupation that they cannot possibly be drawn together to form a cohesive, viable, independent state. Why world leaders cling to the idea of a two-state solution is therefore a mystery – unless they plan to make the Palestinian state a permanently impoverished dumping ground for dispossessed Arabs, which will remain forever crippled, subservient, totally under Israeli control and unable to prosper. Unfortunately Gaza, with its freely elected government of resistance, is an obstacle to the plan for total Israeli domination and needs to be crushed. The way to bring the Gazan population to its knees is to blast them with high-tech weaponry, wreck their infrastructure, trash their economy, threaten re-invasion, impose a starvation siege and stunt the growth of their kiddies. It’s a price worth paying, as one-time US secretary of State Madeleine Albright might have remarked, to eliminate those Hamas guys, huh? By the way, when did Hamas do us any harm?Prime Minister Brown’s thoughts right now are with the Jewish community, wishing them a happy Chanuka from Number10.gov.uk and recalling how he celebrated with them Israel’s 60th birthday, the flip-side of which is the 60th remembrance of El-Nakba, the Catastrophe in which nearly a million Palestinians were driven from their homes and lands by Israeli terrorists. Of course Brown has no festive greeting for the Gazans. And no word of cheer, either, for the Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank who are endlessly persecuted by his Israeli friends.If our thoughts are not with the children of Gaza – Muslim and Christian alike – at this season of goodwill, they ought to be. I’m told that many people packed into the ravaged Strip are having to scavenge through rubbish tips for food to survive. What sort of Christmas is in store for their little ones while the criminals who inflict on them such unspeakable hardship and torment, and who deny them their human rights, have their snouts in the Yuletide trough and enjoy a warm bed? Decent men would not let this happen. I say to friends in the West Bank and Gaza: "We have not forgotten you, but we despair of our worthless leaders."
Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit http://www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk./

Zie: http://www.redress.cc/palestine/slittlewood20081224

Sid Shniad

Sid Shniad of Canadian Independent Jewish Voice

'What Makes You Into A Jew? Fighting Within - Gilad Atzmon Interviews Sid Shniad (IJV Canada)

By Gilad Atzmon:

December 22, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" ---

Recently I have been corresponding with Sid Shniad (1), a founding member of Canadian Independent Jewish Voice (Canadian IJV) (2). Those who are familiar with my writing are well aware of the fact that I am highly critical of any form of Jewish political activism, for I consider it to be a racially orientated discourse.
Yet, as much as I am interested in elaboration on the issue, a true dialogue with Jewish political activists is pretty much impossible. Jewish political ethnic campaigners and political activists have much to lose. They are fully aware of the categorical contradiction between the aim for universal values and tribal activism. They have much incoherence and inconsistency to hide.
Sid, however, was different, though we do not agree on many things, we have managed to keep an open and fruitful dialogue. He was very helpful and addressed each issue in a very positive manner.
Gilad: Hello Sid, I will start with a very brief question. Assuming that you are a secular human being, what makes you into a Jew? And what does it mean to operate politically as a Jew?
Sid: I come from a long line of irreligious Jews. My great-grandfather was a rabbi in Poland, but since that time there has been very little religion in my family. My father was not bar mitzvahed, but he strongly identified as a Jew.
Part of his identity stemmed from his experience of anti-Semitism. As a young man, he was an excellent student at the City College of New York. He desperately wanted to be a doctor, but was kept from medical school by the existence of stringent quotas on the number of Jews who were admitted.
In addition to that, however, he (and my mother, who was also from an irreligious family) became Communists during the Great Depression. They saw this as a logical step to take in response to what they saw as a fundamentally unjust society. I always felt that they became Communists for the right reason — to work for universal social justice — and that they quit being Communists for the right reason, when they learned Khruschev's denunciations of Stalin's crimes.
For me, being raised during the McCarthy era in the United States, being Jewish and being active in the pursuit of social justice were one and the same thing.
Gilad: I am still in the dark regarding your Jewish political identity. I am now more familiar with your family background, with your father being persecuted for being a Jew and with your parents’ decision to become Communists. This is a very familiar story which I can easily empathise with, however, I would expect that the transformation into Communism and ‘universal social justice’, should have led your parents to drop their tribal affiliation. Am I on a wrong track here? I’ll rephrase the initial question:
what makes you into a Jew? And what does it mean for you to operate politically as a Jew?
Sid: There were many Jewish Communists who continued to see themselves as Jews, Gilad. I gather from your question that you see this as an inconsistency.
Gilad: You are actually correct. I may as well remind you that Lenin elaborated on the issue when he criticized the Bund in 1903. The inconsistency is obvious, as the gap between the tribal and the universal is unbridgeable.
Sid: You are not alone in this view. Both Jews and non-Jews tend to see religiosity as central to Jewishness.
Gilad: Not at all, I am fully aware of Jewishness being a coherent identity yet it is a racially orientated one. Hence, I do not grasp the pretence of claim for ‘Jewish progressive activism’ and ‘humanism’. The question to follow is how do you bridge the gap between the Tribal, secular, racially-orientated identity (i.e. Jewishness) and the universal (e.g. Communism and Humanism)?'

Lees verder: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21511.htm