Atlantic Free Press was launched in September 2006 by Dutch-Canadian R.G.
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands and American Expatriate Chris Floyd of
Oxford, UK.
Brick Ogden, an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
Assistant Editor Canadian Chris Cook hails from Victoria, British Columbia and Senior Writer Paul William Roberts is based in Toronto - but often on the road.
The mission of AF Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. AF Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Earlier this week, the White House disclosed that it could not recover lost e-mails from emergency backup tapes for the period covering the invasion of Iraq and the U.S. failure to find Iraq’s alleged WMD.
This new gap – from March 1, 2003, to May 23, 2003 – also may have wiped out evidence of how George W. Bush and his top aides reacted to the emerging criticism from former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the White House had sold the war using false claims about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger in Africa, an investigation by The Public Record has found.
“It seems clear now that the e-mail backups are spotty and that there is no guarantee that there are backup tapes for all of [Executive Office of the President] during the period of concern, March 2003-October 2005,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of George Washington University’s National Security Archive, one of two organizations suing the White House in hopes of forcing the administration to preserve its e-mails.
“There are no tapes from earlier than May 23, 2003,” Fuchs added, referring to an apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act. “So, anything deleted from the EOP network prior to May 23, 2003 (particularly between March 2003 and May 23, 2003) is missing from the backup tapes.”
As an Obama supporter this primary season has been like enduring a year-long root canal, without Novocain.
It's been painful. It's been like watching two bullies harass, belittle, lie and push your kid around everyday at school, and not being able to do a thing about it except to try to reassure yourself that, in the end your kid will emerge a better and stronger person because of it.
Or not.
After all, the same kind of sleazy, low-brow, thuggish politics is exactly the kind of politics that got George W. Bush elected, twice. So maybe "my kid" will come out of it a better and stronger person, AND lose.
But alas, a ray of light. After tying Rev. Wright around the kid's neck like a dead chicken, Obama still won by a huge margin in North Carolina and cut Hillary's lead in Indiana down to a mere margin of error win.
Can this be the first hard evidence that Americans have wised up to political thuggery? Will voters of 2008 have become immune to Swiftboat-like smear attacks?
In the closing days of the Indiana and North Carolina races Hillary Clinton tried to transform herself from New York monied suburbanite into Huey Long in a pantsuit. She promised a chicken in every pot — in the form of a summer repeal of the federal tax on gasoline. She claimed that Obama's refusal to propose the same meaningless jesture was proof he was not "one of us" — meaning he was not a white, working class, ordinary citizen — that he was "disconnected from ordinary working Americans."
Voters responded with a resounding, "forget about it." They were more interested in hearing some straight talk — the real kind, as opposed to the same old:
"Tell-em-whatever-it-takes-to-get-their-vote-and-then-move-on," strategies of the McCain/Hillary campaigns.
Arthur Silber has the second part of his powerful "Choosing Sides" series up now: Killing Truth and Hope — The Fatal Illusion of Opposition. There is little I can add to the insight and eloquence of the piece — just go read the whole thing, and follow up on the links provided there as well.
But I would like to highlight two particular aspects of the post. First is Silber's succinct description of the "corporate-authoritarian political system" that confronts us at every turn with its soul-crushing, death-dealing power:
This system encompasses every area of our national life....The military-industrial complex — or what is now often more accurately described as the military-industrial-congressional complex — is the most significant component of these interrelationships, but there are many other parts. They encompass all major industries, and almost every minor one, as well as many of our educational and cultural institutions....
This system as it exists today consists of innumerable interrelated, constantly moving parts. Countless agencies, commissions and bureaucrats act in concert and on their own to expand their power, and that of government generally. The system has a life of its own; it is its own reason for being. It sustains itself, and it seeks more and more territory for its dominance. The exercise of power and the acquisition of still more power are not directed at the improvement of the lives of "ordinary" Americans, whoever they may be; ordinary Americans are of no interest or concern to the ruling elites, except insofar as their labor and often their lives are necessary for the maintenance of the lives of immense comfort and privilege enjoyed by the powerful. Power is not the means to some other end, although that claim is a crucial element of the extraordinarily successful propaganda so willingly swallowed by the public. Power — its exercise and maintenance, and the acquisition of still more power — is the end.
Again, see the original for the several illuminating links provided.
I’m not saying Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s historic presidential run is toast. Finished. Down the drain. Caput. Washed up. History. A memory. In the archives. Defunct. Extinct. Artifacto. Took a hike. Sleeping with the fishes. Part of the vast past tense. Joined the choir invisible. Totally obliterated. Entering Sidekick City. Sheer finito. Thoroughly through. Down goes Frasier. Swept away by the Tahiti Express. See ya: Wouldn’t want to be ya. So long and sayonara sweetheart. Became an ex- presidential run. Experiencing fossilization. Stick a fork in her- she’s done. Game over, man. Say bye. No. No. No. That’s not what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is that it’s down to the wire but that wire is starting to unravel. She’s hanging by a thread, down to her last dime and the wheels are coming off. Its two outs, two strikes, nobody on, bottom of the ninth and she’s behind by about 142. Got her back up against the wall because an elephant is standing on the couch with the remote. Its closing time: and she don’t have to go home but she can’t stay here. The window of opportunity has slammed shut on her fingers while hanging outside onto the sill 12 stories up.
Her time clock has been punched by a mob of boxing kangaroos. Half of her team is handing her a white flag to wave and the other half is throwing in a towel on her behalf. She’s down to the last banana in the bunch and even though that one is pretty bruised up, the tarantulas won’t let her go there anyway. She’s going down for the umpteenth time in high seas.
The 2- minute warning was a minute fifty ago and its 4th and 97. The undertaker is walking this way pulling out a tape measure while whistling to the jingling of the nails in his pocket. The horse she rode in on can smell its stall and is starting to gallop. The fat lady has adjusted her horn helmet and is reaching for the throat spray. Could that be the referee looking at his watch with the whistle in his mouth and he’s starting to pucker? Why yes, it could. Not to mention the train has pulled out of the station and the conductor is waving a lantern from the railing of the caboose.
BAQUBA, May 9 (IPS) - Water supply is drying out in what was once the agriculturally rich Diyala province north of Baghdad. Baquba, the capital city of Diyala, is now running out of water both for drinking and for irrigation.
Water supply has been hit by power failures. The central pumping station has been running short of electricity supply over the last two years.
The pumping station is located between two districts in conflict — Hwaider, which is predominantly Shia, and Jupenat, mostly Sunni. For two years now, fighting between Sunnis and Shias here has led to reduced water supply.
"The Diyala river passes by the two villages before the pumping station," resident Zuhair Mahmood told IPS. "They try to change its stream to deprive the other of water for irrigating their farms. The diversions mean relatively little water can reach the station."
Often, Mahmood added, "farmers irrigate their farms by setting up pumps on the banks of the river, which further contributes to reduced supply to the station."
Some farmers have demanded that the pumping station be supplied directly from the Diyala river upstream of the conflict area.
"But this suggestion was rejected because people know that the Diyala river carries the bodies of those killed in the sectarian fighting," said Abdul-Qadir Omran, a now unemployed trader. "It is not good for drinking, and psychologically it is unacceptable."
"The question is no longer why, for the answer has become clear. However, what is the secret behind the timing of this? What is being prepared for the future stage and which coincides with US President George Bush's tour of the region? Has internal dialogue gone without return, and if it takes place, then what is its agenda? What will Hezbollah and the opposition do to face the new challenges?"
– Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassim during a just completed May 8, 2008 interview
Hezbollah sources concede that they were taken by surprise and some were shocked by the intense, incendiary bombardment of the last few days by pro-government operatives. As Hezbollah studies 'the situation' and how to respond this beautiful spring Beirut morning, there is a real danger things may rapidly spiral out of control.
Yesterday started off peacefully enough, with a strike called by the General Federation of Labor Unions (GFLU) in Lebanon represented by the General Labor Union. The strike was supported by Hezbollah to protest the Governments failure to adopt what the Union considers a living wage of $600. Currently the minimum wage in Lebanon is approximately $200 per month. The Strike continues for the second day but tensions are escalating and Beirut's airport remains closed by anti-Government demonstrators. Beirut's main roads are intermittently blocked, the streets virtually empty and the town largely locked down as sporadic violence and stone-throwing continue.
The region awaits this evening's news conference, his first since July 12th 2006, the first day of the last war, during which Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is expected to give an indication of Lebanon's immediate future.
Tell me that this doesn't sound like something out of a history of Nazi tactics in World War II:
The rules [of engagement]t explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances...Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights....Of course, it's not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.
Didier, who has since been promoted to captain, said that "if that individual makes contact with you and then breaks contact of their own accord and disarms themselves while they are breaking contact, they are still an engageable target because they are not wounded, nor did they surrender." He explained, "They are only breaking contact so that they can engage coalition forces at a later time." In court, Sgt. Anthony Murphy, one of the snipers who was responsible for a questionable kill, testified that he interpreted this order about breaking contact so they can engage at a later time as: "Engage fleeing local nationals without weapons."
In other words, if an innocent, unarmed Iraqi runs away to seek safety from a suicide bombing, a missile attack or a gunfight — which any human being would instinctively do — then he is fair game to be killed by an American sniper.
The excerpt above comes from a story in Salon.com, "Killing by the Numbers," about an "elite" U.S. sniper squad that murdered a captured, unarmed civilian in cold blood. A more detailed excerpt follows below, but I'd like to deal briefly with one ancillary aspect first.
The story expands to talk more generally about the sniper program in Iraq, and is careful — overly careful — to emphasize that the snipers responsible for so many "questionable kills" are operating in very stressful conditions: sleep-deprived, sweltering in deadly heat, surrounded by potential "hostiles," at constant risk of attack. All true, of course, but it prompts this simple question: What the hell are they doing there in the first place? Why are they squatting and sweltering in "hides" in a foreign land, looking to kill people who never attacked the United States?
A major disappointment in the presidential race has been the failure of the three surviving candidates to address nuclear weapons, the greatest existential threat to planet Earth, to the human race itself, and of course, by extension to the United States of America.
The failure is extraordinary because the abolition of nuclear weapons has been raised recently and repeatedly by some of the most respected and powerful personages in the U.S. military, the federal government, and corporate America. How could a serious election virtually ignore this powerful initiative?
A January 2007 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Senator Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Defense William Perry called for a “world free of nuclear weapons” and urged the United States to lead an international effort to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles. They argued for a multilateral verifiable plan with strong enforcement mechanisms. They stated: “Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage — to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.”
Last month, in response to a question about her reaction to Iran attacking Israel with nuclear weapons, Hillary Clinton said that she would “obliterate” Iran in that eventuality. In a later interview she again threatened “massive retaliation.”
The island of Grand Cayman in the Caribbean has iguanas. Big deal right? Iguanas are all over the tropics. Sure, but Grand Cayman is the only place in the world where there are blue iguanas, not the common green variety. A source of national pride for the Cayman Islands, blue iguanas are on the endangered species list. Only an estimated 400 blue iguanas are left in the wild. To help preserve them the Botanical Gardens operates a breeding facility for these unique creatures.
Saturday night, May 3, someone broke into the Botanical Gardens and brutally killed six adult blue iguanas important to the breeding program. Two of the dead females were preparing to lay eggs.
With all the human death and suffering in the world today why is the murder of six blue iguanas relevant? In perspective it seems rather trivial. Ah… but more is revealed here than meets the eye. What was the motive and what will the reaction be?
Was this the drunken act of some sicko who decided it would be fun to stomp some iguanas? Or was this an act of vengeance at Caymanian Society? I’m just speculating here, but my guess is the latter. Somebody probably had his or her visa renewal denied and wanted to lash out.
The results in Tuesday’s twin primaries—Barack Obama by 14 percent in North Carolina and Hillary Clinton by 2 percent in Indiana—confirmed that Clinton is finished as a contender. Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate for president this fall.
Clinton, the private-schooled, Wellesley and Yale-educated millionaire lawyer from Chicago, who first tried to present herself as a White House veteran, and then, in recent weeks, as a NASCAR mom on Food Stamps, and who in Pennsylvania resorted to cheap race-baiting and red-baiting in an effort to derail her opponent, has failed. Barack Obama, another private-schooled Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer, but one who actually did have to work his way up the economic ladder, won decisively in North Carolina, even drawing a significant number of working-class white voters in a state where white voters have not traditionally voted for candidates with dark skin.
As a resident of Pennsylvania, I can only express a sense of shame for the large number of white voters here who bought Clinton’s subtle racist message. North Carolina, my mother’s home state, proved to be more resistant to the Clintons’toxic campaign than my adopted state. Exit polls suggest that as more than one in five Pennsylvanians voted in the primary on the basis of race.
Now, if half of the 14 percent of the voters who were black voted for Obama for racial reasons, this still means that perhaps 14 percent of the state’s white voters, or about one in seven, voted for Hillary simply because her oppponent was black. I would argue that for a black person to vote for a black candidate because he is black is qualitatively different from a white person voting for a white candidate because the other candidate is black. First of all, blacks have not had the opportunity, ever, to vote for a candidate of their race who has a real chance at winning the nomination. It is a historic first. They are not saying they would not vote for a white candidate, and indeed, if they voted in the past, they probably did vote for white candidates, since that’s all there were on offer. It’s akin to women (and men) voting for Clinton because she is a woman. Obviously they are not saying they won’t vote for men, just that they want a chance to vote for a woman.
Mikhail Gorbachev is not a frivolous man. He was the Soviet leader who introduced the conceptual breakthrough of "mutual security" to Soviet-American relations, as well as the man who did more than any other individual to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion (See here). In my opinion, he ranks as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century (something I was able to tell him personally, when we talked in St. Petersburg, Russia in May 2006).
So, when Mr. Gorbachev says, "Every US president has to have a war," and "I sometimes have the feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world," - as was reported by the Telegraph.co.uk on May 7, 2008 — I take him seriously. More to the point, Gorbachev's assertions probably elicited widespread agreement, not only in Russia, but also across Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
For, as historian Michael Sherry has put it: "Measured by its actions rather than its self-image, the United States is a warrior nation more than any other modern power is." Lawrence R. Velvel has been blunter still: "The United States is a nation which seeks war." As evidence, Velvel adds: "Since Hitler invaded Poland, we have fought World War II, the Korean War, the Viet Nam war, secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, the first Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and the second Gulf War. We have invaded, bombed, or 'quarantined,' among other places, Panama, Grenada, Cuba, Haiti, Somalia, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Libya. We have 'declared' a world wide war on terrorists. We spend more on our military, some say, than all the rest of the world put together. "["Why We Seek War," The Long Term View Spring 2004]
Even worse, many of America's wars were unnecessary. According to historian John L. Harper: "History shows that the United States has had a strong propensity to become involved in conflicts which, though it would be misleading to call them 'wars of choice,' were unnecessary wars." In Professor Harper's interpretation, the U.S. has fought only five wars that strictly were "wars of necessity": the War of Independence, the Civil War, World War II, the initial phase of the Korean war, and the Afghanistan War (following the September 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorist attacks).
"From the Department of Justice to Guantánamo Bay: Administration Lawyers and Administration Interrogation Rules"
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
House Judiciary Committee
What does torture have in common with genocide, slavery, and wars of aggression? They are all jus cogens. That’s Latin for "higher law" or "compelling law." This means that no country can ever pass a law that allows torture. There can be no immunity from criminal liability for violation of a jus cogens prohibition.
The United States has always prohibited torture in our Constitution, laws, executive statements, judicial decisions, and treaties. When the U.S. ratifies a treaty, it becomes part of American law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, says, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture."
Whether someone is a POW or not, he must always be treated humanely; there are no gaps in the Geneva Conventions.
Our Eyes and “Dreams of Home” created by the children of Lajee Center with Rich Wiles. Lajee Center, Bethlehem, Palestine. 2007.
The pictures arrive at first in the sad multi-tones of greys, the ever-present grey concrete walls of the narrow alleys of the refugee camp, the shadows and lines on faces, the abstract shadows of wire and fence on concrete, and the loom of the Wall that separates the camp from its outlying fields. At first sombre within all that grey, the pictures reveal many levels of understanding and feeling, as if each shade has it own significance, each texture its own meaning, each face its own hopes and dreams clouded by narrow horizons.
As described in the introduction “the idea behind this project was for the young people of the Lajee to constructively and creatively respond to the environment in which they live…producing…an international voice that transcends borders and languages…that can get over the Wall…pass through checkpoints…louder than gunfire.”
The chickens of Rocky past are coming home to roost today as 1972 presidential Democratic nominee, George McGovern, defected from the Clinton camp to endorse Obama which is further proof that any analogies between Rocky Balboa and Hillary Clinton are strained. McGovern joins a chorus of those who think Clinton should walk away.
But, echoing the Bush mindset, Hillary ignores those who suggest that she do now what she must inevitably do. She has just lent her campaign another $6 milllion to stay in the race which makes $11 million out of her own pocket, but who's counting? After all, it's her business how she spends her money. The only thing that should concern us is that her decision may well come at the expense of her party's victory in November.
After watching the obsessive Democratic political contest that has plagued the airwaves for months, the only thing that is clear is that politics has become the drug of choice in Washington. What keeps the race going? Is it Clinton's tenacity, and vigor? Is it her determination? Or, is it the mainstream media that has kept Clinton's improbable campaign on life support. Indeed, the same media that prolonged what should have been a thirty second sound bite into seven days of nauseating nonstop coverage of Reverend Wright who was propped up for one reason, and one reason only, to feed the omnipresent god of ratings.
The U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) smeared the government of Switzerland as a “financier of terrorism” in early April on the basis of that country’s recent agreement to import natural gas from Iran.
Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey traveled to Iran for the signing of the agreement between the Swiss energy trading company EGL and the state-owned National Iranian Gas Export Company (NIGEC). Calmy-Rey met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on March 17.
The ADL lashed out againstSwitzerland,arguably the world’s oldestfederal republic,inpaid advertisements placed inThe New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and major Swissnewspaperson April 8.
“As the Swiss government pursues its own narrow economic interests, it is bankrolling the world's leading sponsor of terrorism,” declared the ADL’s full page ad.
“The reproaches in this advertisement do not fit the facts,”replied theSwiss foreign ministry spokesperson Lars Knuchel.
“The gas contract signed between the Swiss and Iranian companies does not violate international sanctions taken by the United Nations and the US. Numerous countries which are much bigger than Switzerland maintain trade relations with Iran,” said Knuchel.
George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make a new Fallujah in Sadr City, home to two million Shiites in Baghdad. Thousands of people are already fleeing the area before the full-scale slaughter and destruction begin. As in Fallujah, the multitudes who cannot escape will be trapped in a "free fire zone", subjected to ruthless bombardment and ground assault. Thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of innocent civilians stand in the shadow of imminent death.
The assault is part of the run-up to the coming attack on Iran — an attempt to secure the rear of that new front by destroying Iraq's Shiite nationalist forces. It is also part of an on-going effort to eliminate the strongest rival to the Shiite extremists that Bush has installed in office in Iraq, before the conquered land's fall elections.
The preliminary assault on Sadr City has already begun, of course. As the BBC notes, in the last seven weeks around 1,000 people — most of them civilians — have already been killed by the Bush-Petraeus "surge" into the area. Petraeus is frantically building high-walled ghettos in Sadr City, slicing neighborhoods in half, sundering families, destroying communities and livelihoods. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is circulating leaflets in Sadr City districts, warning the people to leave — or else.
This, you understand, is liberation. This is freedom. This is the glorious "surge" to victory. As Tacitus noted:
A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.
Nowadays, most important news gets ignored, buried or
goes under the radar by corporate-owned media,
especially when this news reveals the dark side of the
“free market” or the dark plans for more parasitic,
predator capitalism unleashed against a weakened
populace or country.
Myanmar is the modern name for a country the English
speaking empires still call Burma.
On May 2nd, US President George W. Bush ordered a new
round of sanctions on Burmese state companies to
pressure the military leadership there over human
rights abuses and to push for political change.
Few wires picked up this Act of Aggression from
Washington. Instead, the whole world watched with
wonder as Tropical Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar
on May 2nd and May 3rd.
For over a week, meteorologists knew that Myanmar
would be hit so it is either ironic or planned that
Bush would sanction Myanmar the same day it was to be
devastated.
Bush announced in his statement on May 2nd, "Today
I've issued a new executive order that instructs the
Treasury Department to freeze the assets of Burmese
state-owned companies that are major sources of funds
that prop up the junta."
The sanctions were targeted at companies and
industries that produce timber, pearls and gems.
Notice that gas and oil were not on the list of
sanctions.
George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make 
