Link to source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18131

A truism perhaps, but before resorting to brute force and open repression to halt the "barbarians at the gates," that would be us, the masters of declining empires (and the chattering classes who polish their boots) regale us with tales of "democracy on the march," "hope" and other banalities before the mailed fist comes crashing down.

Putting it another way, as the late, great Situationist malcontent, Guy Debord did decades ago in his relentless call for revolt, The Society of the Spectacle:

"The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender 'lonely crowds.' With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions."

And when those "presuppositions" reproduce ever-more wretched clichés promulgated by true believers or rank opportunists, take your pick, market "democracy," the "freedom to choose" (the length of one's chains), or even quaint notions of national "sovereignty" (a sure fire way to get, and keep, the masses at each others' throats!) we're left with a fraud, a gigantic swindle, a "postmodern" refinement of tried and true methods that would do Orwell proud!

Ponder Debord's rigorous theorem and substitute "cell phone" and "GPS" for "automobile," and "Internet" for "television" and you're soon left with the nauseating sense that the old "infobahn" isn't all its cracked up to be. As a seamless means for effecting control on the other hand, of our thoughts, our actions, even our whereabouts; well, that's another story entirely!

In this light, a new report published by Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2010 National Rankings, delivers the goods and rips away the veil from the smirking visage of well-heeled corporate crooks and media apologists of America's burgeoning police state.

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/lawfare-projects-anti-democratic-agenda.html

Its web site (thelawfareproject.org) calls Lawfare:

"The use of the law as a weapon of war."

Fact Check

Provided they contradict no others, laws are sacrosanct, especially fundamental international ones like the UN Charter, Four Geneva Conventions, their Common Article 3, the Rome Statute, Nuremberg Tribunal and judgment, Genocide Convention, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and many others - ones Israel and America are sworn to uphold but consistently violate with impunity.

Lawfare Project (LP) claim: "The abuse of the law and legal systems (is used) for strategic or military ends."

Fact Check

International law is clear and unequivocal. The UN Charter explains under what conditions violence and coercion by one state against another are justified. Article 2(3) and Article 33(1) require peaceful settlement of international disputes. Article 2(4) prohibits force or its threatened use, and Article 51 allows the "right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member....until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security."

Link to source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/nyc1-m16.shtml

When one considers the state of filmmaking, and art in general, one’s first response is, or ought to be, in my view, a profound sense of dissatisfaction. The spectator, or reader, or viewer, currently experiences a troubling lack of depth, texture, and social and psychological complexity. In short, there is an absence of the world, largely.

Certainly the world that great numbers of people know and experience on a daily basis: the world of work, or lack of work, the vast and complicated series of everyday social relationships, the startling changes in life in recent decades, the enormous inequalities and iniquities, the slipping into the social abyss of so many, the struggle to keep one’s head above water that characterizes the lives of tens of millions in this country, billions worldwide… and the emotional conditions, the drama, tragedy and comedy associated with all that.

Telling the truth is difficult, as George Eliot and Tolstoy both noted, but contemporary art and film, in our view, are failing badly in telling important truths, the truths that are vital to people.

No doubt there is a great deal of ideological and political, and even moral, confusion in this country—we aren’t mesmerized by that and struggle to overcome it on a daily basis—but one must say that the failure of film and novels and plays, in the first place, to hold up a mirror to the country adequately in recent decades, to expose American society’s crimes and injustices, to show the population its own shortcomings, is a factor in the confusion.

We’ve made the point before: the Russian novelists of the 19th century, by their combined efforts, contributed to the discrediting of official society and its eventual downfall. What should we say in this regard, by and large, about contemporary American filmmakers and writers? Have they exerted themselves, made enormous sacrifices in the struggle to clarify and demystify reality, the nature of American society itself? Have they helped the population understand its predicament? The answer is obvious, I think.

Representing the world more fully and richly is not a matter of mere surface details, or of passive recording. When we speak about “the presence of the world” in art, we mean its real presence, which includes centrally its social and historical character. As the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities) commented, creative effort involves not mere description, but an interpretation of life.

Link to source: http://www.greens.org/s-r/42/42-06.html

US militarism has to be considered under three headings: First, the US military is the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the world. Second, the US economy, the largest national consumer of fossil fuel in the world, has shown that its primary mode of maintaining a supply of fossil fuel for itself is through military action (assault, intervention, occupation of other oil producing nations). Third, the US military operates in the interest of a corporate economy of which it (the military) is the foremost sector in the US.

US military control of the global economy has shifted political definitions to the point where, at both the national and international levels, the corporations have become the primary citizenry, relegating humans to a second-class citizenship where their existence as humans has been reduced to a structural and political irrelevance. Ultimately, as the largest user of fossil fuel in the world, the US military must increase both itself and its petroleum use in order to guarantee that it will have increased access to fossil fuel for itself and the corporations whose interests and its own are interwoven.

Link to source: http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/beyond-voting.htm

THE LIMITS OF ELECTORAL POLITICS

Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of “government”:

(1) Unrestricted freedom
(2) Direct democracy
(3) Delegate democracy
(4) Representative democracy
(5) Overt minority dictatorship

The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token
democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .

In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected officials. The candidates’ stated policies are limited to a few vague generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their actual decisions on hundreds of issues — apart from the feeble threat of changing one’s vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival politician. Representatives are dependent on the wealthy for bribes and campaign contributions; they are subordinate to the owners of the mass media, who decide which issues get the publicity; and they are almost as ignorant and powerless as the general public regarding many important matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers in “democratic” regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don’t even know who they are. . . .

Link to source:  http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/americas-secret-prisons.html

On January 28 in TomDispatch.com, Anand Gopal headlined, "Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the 'Black Jail,' and the Dogs of War in Afghanistan," recounting unreported US media stories about killings, abductions, detentions, interrogations, and torture in "a series of prisons on US military bases around the country." Bagram prison, for example, is "a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior," including brutalizing torture and cold-blooded murder.

Even worse is the "Black Jail," a facility consisting of individual windowless concrete cells with bright 24-hour lighting, described by one former detainee as "the most dangerous and fearful place" in which prisoners endure appalling treatment.

The pattern is predictable. US/NATO convoys are attacked or reports of Taliban forces are received. Americans respond accordingly, rounding up suspects, mostly innocent civilians, and detaining them for interrogations, torture, abuse and degrading treatment - not just in Afghanistan but in secret black sites globally, according to a January 26 UN Human Rights Council (HRC) report detailing practices engaged in by various countries including America, by far the world's worst offender in its war on terror - one waged against humanity for unchallengeable power and total global dominance.

Besides Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, HRC said the CIA runs scores of offshore secret prisons in over 66 countries worldwide for dissidents and alleged terrorists - in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, India, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ethopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Poland, Romania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Thailand, Diego Garcia, and elsewhere.

Link to source: http://www.consciousbeingalliance.com/2010/03/the-rwanda-hit-list/

My experience with the Great Lakes region of Africa began in 1991. While traveling in southern Uganda I was witness to the shooting of an unarmed man by unknown assailants believed to be rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Front. Since then I have worked tirelessly to uncover the truth about the war in the Dem. Republic of Congo (DRC) and 'genocide' in Rwanda.

I began researching and reporting on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Rwanda in 1995; I began reporting on events in Zaire (DRC) in 1996. In 2000 at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania I explored the case of Major Bernard Ntuyahaga, ex-Forces Armée Rwandaise (ex-FAR), a celebrated Hutu 'genocide ringleader, who I personally met there.

Of course, I presumed the man guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide, prior to any trial, according to the prevailing climate of institutionalized suspicion and assumptions of guilt against all Hutu people, and certainly against all officials of the former government under President Juvenal Habyarimana. Major Ntuyahaga committed genocide. We all knew it. Why bother with a trial?

Link to source:  http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/peace-process-hypocrisy-stillborn-from.html

Journalist Henry Siegman titled his August 2007 London Review of Books article, "The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam," calling it likely "the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history." 

This writer omits most likely calling it the no-peace peace process, stillborn from inception, while Haaretz writer Gideon Levy, on March 7, 2010, wrote "There has never been an Israeli peace camp," saying "let's call the child by its real name: The Israeli peace camp is still an unborn baby," the mother yet to become pregnant given decades of Israeli-Washington rejectionism.

In September 2009, former IDF chief of staff and current Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs, Moshe Ya'alon, said Jews have an "unassailable right (to) settle anywhere, particularly here, (in) the land of the Bible," and earlier called the peace process a useful fiction "to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people."

In 1968, former IDF chief of staff and then defense minister, Moshe Dayan, called the West Bank occupation "permanent," and a decade later reiterated his commitment to the status quo, the same position held by all Israeli officials to the present. 

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (1983 - 1984 and 1986 - 1992) once said he wanted to drag out peace talks for a decade while vastly expanding settlements.

Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier called the peace process "a waste of time," is obstructionist on the right of return, backs continued settlement expansion, won't ever withdraw from East Jerusalem or return to 1967 borders, and, in subtle terms, wants negotiations based solely on Israeli dominance .

Given its decades of financial, military and diplomatic support, America holds the trump cards, its position consistently one-sided under Republican and Democrat administrations, and, rhetoric aside, for decades has rejected an equitable, sustainable peace. 

With its Security Council (SC) veto, it's blocked past efforts in spite of the General Assembly (GA) regularly supporting conflict resolution and Palestinian self-determination by overwhelming margins, including:

-- GA Resolution 3236 (1974) recognizing Palestinian self-determination; and

-- most recently on December 2, 2009 passing: 

"six resolutions aimed at promoting the inalienable rights of Palestinians - particularly to statehood - and permanently ending Israel's 'illegal' actions in Jerusalem and Syrian Golan." 

The votes passed by margins of 109 - 8, 112 - 9, 162 - 8, 164 - 7, 163 - 7, and 116 - 7. Those against, in one or more resolutions, included America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Panama, Ivory Coast, a few tiny Pacific islands, and, of course, Israel. 

Yet peace and Palestinian self-determination remain stillborn because Washington and Israel reject them - even though around 130 nations diplomatically recognize a Palestinian state, and the UN grants Palestine all member rights except to vote.

Further, on November 15, 1988, the Palestine National Council (PNC) proclaimed the existence of an independent Palestinian state. According to the 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order in Council, Palestinians, their children and grandchildren are automatically citizens, including those in the diaspora.

Link to source: http://www.helium.com/items/306028-corrections-corporation-of-america-cca-us-concentration-camps

Corrections Corporation of America or CCA is the largest owner of privatized correction and detention centers in the USA. With a total of 63 facilities and a capacity of 67,000 beds in 19 states CCA specializes in inmate services for the federal government. Its motto is "Excellence in Corrections".

In the summer of 2006 the T. Don Hutto Residential Center (owned by CCA) opened its doors in Taylor, Texas. T. Don Hutto was originally a privately owned state prison, converted or "remodeled" to hold illegal immigrants seeking asylum, ending the catch and release program of the past it houses about 375 prisoners, approximately 200 of which are children. Many inmates are of Hispanic origin but reportedly include large numbers of Africans, Asian and Europeans. CCA will receive 2.8 million dollars from for housing these inmates.

Link to source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18064

The Empire will stop at nothing to find mechanisms and techniques to achieve its final objective, and we cannot disregard the possibility of a military conflict in the near future. If the US places Venezuela on the “terrorist list” this year, we could be on the verge of a regional war.

Latin America has suffered constant aggressions executed by Washington during the past two hundred years. Strategies and tactics of covert and overt warfare have been applied against different nations in the region, ranging from coup d’etats, assassinations, disappearances, torture, brutal dictatorships, atrocities, political persecution, economic sabotage, psychological operations, media warfare, biological warfare, subversion, counterinsurgency, paramiliary infiltration, diplomatic terrorism, blockades, electoral intervention to military invasions. Regardless of who’s in the White House – democrat or republican – when it comes to Latin America, the Empire’s policies remain the same.

In the twenty-first century, Venezuela has been one of the principle targets of these constant aggressions. Since the April 2002 coup, there has been a dangerous escalation in attacks and destabilization attempts against the Bolivarian Revolution. Although many fell beneath the seductive smile and poetic words of Barack Obama, it’s not necessary to look beyond the past year to see the intensification of Washington’s aggressions against Venezuela. The largest military expansion in history in the region – through the US occupation of Colombia – the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet of the US Navy, as well as an increased US military presence in the Caribbean, Panama and Central America throughout the past year, can be interpreted as preparation for a conflict scenario in the region.

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/palestinian-dispossession-in-east.html

For Jews, Jerusalem is its historic capital. Muslims also claim it for the third holiest site in Islam, containing the 35 acre Noble Sanctuary (al-Haram al-Sharif), including the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock. 

The 1947 UN Partition Plan designated Jerusalem an international city under a UN Trusteeship Council. After Israel's 1947-48 War of Independence, it was divided between Israel and Jordan, and during Israel's 1967 Six-Day War, East Jerusalem was captured and occupied, its current status today.

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/israeli-settlement-expansions-continue.html

Currently, around 500,000 Jews reside illegally in over 120 West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements as well as dozens of outposts. Their numbers grow daily despite occasional pledges to curtail or slow them, the latest last November when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a 10 month freeze, calling it a move to "help launch meaningful negotiations to reach a historic peace agreement that would finally end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians."

Never mind Israel's history of past peace process futility because all previous efforts were more pretense than real, or as some Palestinians say - How can they negotiate in good faith without a willing partner? They've never had one and don't in Netanyahu, an extremist hard-right zealot.The same holds for a settlement freeze, just rhetoric with no substance, especially given Israel's plan to make all Jerusalem a Jewish city, according to Netanyahu. During a May 22, 2009 Jerusalem Day ceremony (commemorating the city's 1967 reunification), he declared:

"United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided."

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/brutalizing-palestinian-children.html

As an isolated incident, it would be appalling and criminal. As a regular occurrence, it's state-sponsored terrorism against defenseless children, subjected to barbarism by Israeli soldiers committing crimes against humanity to crush their will for wanting to live free on their own land - what Westerners take for granted; what Palestinians since 1948 haven't had, and since 1967, under military occupation denying their very humanity.

Nora Barrows-Friedman does heroic reporting for Pacifica Radio's KPFA Flashpoints Radio and as an activist/teacher/journalist in Occupied Palestine during regular visits. On March 8 on the Electronic Intifada, she wrote about Amir al-Mohteseb, a 10-year old Hebron child, arrested, detained, and savagely beaten after his 12-year old brother Hasan endured similar treatment a week earlier.

On March 7 at 2AM, "Israeli soldiers (broke) into (his) house, snatch(ed) Amir from his bed, threatened his parents with death by gunfire if they" interfered, took him down the stairwell, and brutally beat him causing internal abdomen bleeding, requiring overnight hospitalization. "In complete shock and distress, Amir would not open his mouth to speak for another day and a half."

Link to source: http://liberalpro.blogspot.com/2010/03/wea-are-all-accountable.html

Enough is enough. This nation has gone so far beyond the rule of law and reason that it is almost impossible to know where to start to bring in order to right all of the terrible wrongs we have perpetrated in the last fifty years. We have seen the American military machine wreck havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan. We not only occupied Iraq, but we have poisoned the soil and made the place uninhabitable because of our use of depleted uranium in our munitions. We can deny that depleted uranium is harmless, but the facts coming in about the deformed babies being born in Iraq says otherwise. We must all come to the conclusion that not only was the invasion of Iraq a crime against humanity, but turning Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia into a radioactive wasteland are even larger crimes against humanity.
We must hold not only the government of this country accountable, but the facts are that knowing what we know now, we are all accountable. You may ask where I am getting my information from. Let me share my sources with you. When you click these links, please understand that some of these sources show very explicit photographs of the effects of depleted uranium on newborns. These pictures are disturbing, but no less disturbing than turning a blind eye to what we have done to these innocents in the name of “liberating” these people.

Link to source: http://socialistworker.org/2010/03/10/proud-to-be-an-embarrassment

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/business-of-water-privatizing-essential.html

In her 2002 book titled, "Water Wars," noted author, social activist, and ecologist Vandana Shiva called privatizing water:

-- ecological terrorism;

-- a global water crisis;

-- along with overuse, waste and pollution, it can cause "the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth;"

-- the road to "an ecological crisis with commercial causes but no market solutions; (they) destroy the earth and aggravate inequality; the solution to an ecological crisis is ecological, and the solution for injustice is democracy;" and

-- water rights are natural and "usufructuary....water can be used but not owned;" it belongs to everyone as part of the commons as an essential "basis of all life....under customary laws, the right to water has been accepted as a natural, social fact."

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/russell-tribunal-on-palestine-barcelona.html

Launched on March 4, 2009, "The Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RTP) seeks to reaffirm the primacy of international law (to settle) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (by focusing on) the enunciation of law by authoritative bodies (and) address(ing) the failure of application of law even though it has been so clearly identified. (It begins where the International Court of Justice) stopped: highlighting the responsibilities arising from the enunciation of law, including those of the international community, which cannot continue to shirk its obligations."

RTP is separate from but inspired by the BRussell Tribunal, named after famed philosopher, mathematician, and anti-war/anti-imperialism activist Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), who warned over 50 years ago:

"Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war" and live in peace, because there's no other choice.

Established in 1967, the BRussell Tribunal investigated Vietnam war crimes, more recently Iraq war ones and Bush administration imperialism continued under Obama. RTP exposes decades of Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians, calling for an end to colonialism, occupation and apartheid and for justice, equality, and peace.

Link to source: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hayden

It's been a long winter for the peace movement. Waiting for Obama has proved fruitless. The Great Recession has strengthened Wall Street and diverted attention from the wars. The debate over healthcare still won't go away and has demoralized progressive advocates. Given a chance to exit from Afghanistan when the Karzai election proved to be stolen, President Obama escalated anyway, but also promised to "begin" exiting almost before an opposition could mobilize at home.

Representative Dennis Kucinich will step into the crosswinds this week and force the House of Representatives to wake up, pay attention, and vote up or down on the Afghanistan war. The Kucinich initiative at least will reveal where Congress stands. Whether it will energize the peace movement for upcoming March protests or beyond is unpredictable.

Kucinich, interviewed along with other members of Congress by The Nation last week, is introducing a so-called privileged resolution requiring the House to hold a three-hour debate this coming Wednesday, followed by a vote on the Afghanistan war. The vote is expected to authorize the war, but passage of Kucinich's initiative would require a withdrawal in thirty days. If the president rejected such a decision, the withdrawal would be delayed until the end of 2010, nine months from now.

"It's time to force a debate," Kucinich says. "It's not enough to slow-walk the end of the war." On Friday Kucinich had seventeen co-sponsors for his measure.

The public is angry. Why should the public pay for the bankers mistakes. Iceland blogger Halldor Sigurdsson

Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn't fall on the citizens. By a 93% to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt incurred by one of the nation’s oldest and largest banks. Covering the debt would have cost Iceland's 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.

Iceland's national referendum was the first opportunity for the people of any nation to vote directly on who pays when the financial elite fail.

As citizens voted, Iceland's Prime Minister was dismissing the importance of the vote and promising to negotiate a payment scheme obligating citizen subsidies for bad debt created by Iceland's beyond-bad bankers.

Icelanders are struggling with a collapsed economy. Businesses are failing at a startling rate, unemployment is soaring, and the prospects for the future are simply not there. Yet the British and Dutch governments demand that their swindled citizens receive compensation from beleaguered Icelanders. Where were the British and Dutch central banks and politicians while their citizens were being fleeced? Aren't the rulers of these countries aware that the failed Icelandic bank was owned by wealth investors, not the citizens?

Link to source: http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/03/targeting-israeli-apartheid.html

Reports like the Cape Town, South Africa-based Human Sciences Research Council's (HSRC) May 2009 one titled, "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid" highlight what many others understand, including former UN Special Human Rights Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, John Dugard, stating in January 2007:

"Israel is clearly in military occupation of the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories). At the same time, elements of the occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law."

Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court calls apartheid a crime, stating:

"For the purpose of this Statute, (a) 'crime against humanity' means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

The crime of apartheid" includes murder, extermination, enslavement, torture, arbitrary arrest, illegal imprisonment, denial of the right to life and liberty, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and other abusive acts imposed by one group on another.