Report: Hasan Snapped Under Weight of Bullying, Anxiety Over Deployment
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on November 6, 2009 at 8:36 AM.

It goes without saying that the usual suspects would view the tragic events at Fort Hood as an act of terror inspired by "jihadism." A soldier, a Muslim of Palestinian descent, reportedly shouted "God is great!" before opening fire on soldiers awaiting deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.

If one is already inclined to see terrorists lurking beneath one's bed, naturally that's a neat end to the story, and supports whatever simplistic notions about Islam and terrorism one might hold.

Yesterday, as the first sketchy reports started filtering in, I thought that an organized act of political terror was about the least likely scenario to have gone down. (This didn't prevent me from thinking, 'oh, this is not going to go well' when the Major's name was released.)

And as it turns out, unless you're reading Right-wing blogs this morning, it does in fact  appear to be a case of an individual snapping under a variety of stresses.

ABC:

Fort Hood shooting suspect, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, wanted out of the Army after being constantly harassed by others in the military and was called a "camel jockey," his family said.

As Hasan was about to be deployed to Iraq, he was suffering from some of the same stresses that he was trained as an Army psychiatrist to treat.

Although the 39-year-old had just been promoted to major in May, his family says he had hired a lawyer to help him get out of the Armed Forces.

"Apparently became very disgruntled in the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan and voiced that to a lot of his colleagues," said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)...

...After the 9/11 attacks, his cousin says he was the target of constant harassment from others in the military. His tormentors called him a "camel jockey," said his cousin, Nader Hasan. He wanted out of the Army, so he paid back his military student loans and hired an attorney.

While the bullying irritated Hasan, Nader Hasan believes his upcoming deployment is what set him off. The cousin said, "My mom is his mom… and we didn't know he was being deployed until we heard it on the news today."

The whole thing is obviously an incredible tragedy. But as Mark Ames -- who wrote the book about this kind of rage-killing -- points out on the front, this was anything but an isolated incident. All kinds of people "go postal."

That this one happened to be a Muslim and a soldier with strong feelings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only gives those who were already so inclined an opportunity to use a profound tragedy to impugn an entire faith.

Who's Been Held Accountable for the Crimes of Bush's "War on Terror"? Four Italians ... Sort of
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on November 5, 2009 at 11:53 AM.

I may be wrong, but setting aside a handful of low-level prison guards convicted for brutalizing or killing detainees, I think that despite many well documented violations of both international and various countries’ domestic laws committed in the “war on terror”, the total number of people who have been prosecuted -- not counting those tried in absentia -- is now 4 (correct me in the comments if I’m overlooking something!).  

All were Italians. Two were convicted yesterday in an Italian court and sentenced to three-year terms for kidnapping a man named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr off the streets of a liberal democracy, depriving him of any semblance of due process despite its fully functional judiciary and sending him to a country that would torture him for information they believed he was holding. 

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Joe Lieberman: Swine Flu is Either with Us or the Terrorists!
Posted by Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog on November 3, 2009 at 5:42 AM.

I wish the exact quote were available, but for now we have this from Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard's blog:

... a source who was present at the scene reports: 

In the stakeout after Face the Nation, Joe Lieberman excoriated the decision to give the vaccine to GITMO terrorists and not to pregnant women.

Really, Joe? Best you can do?

Yeah, we're giving swine flu vaccine to Guantanamo prisoners.

Can't think of a reason why, Joe? I won't even bother bringing up the Geneva Conventions, or our military's long tradition of humane treatment of prisoners -- I know you don't believe in any of that crap, Joe.

Still can't come up with a reason? Here, I'll give you a big fat hint:

Who's guarding Gitmo prisoners?

Right: our troops.

I know you think the prisoners are subhuman scum, vile worms who can't be compared to decent human beings on any level whatsoever. But guess what, Joe?

Viruses don't give a crap.

A virus can easily spread from your scum to our brave youth. Vaccinating these prisoners is a way of protecting our men and women in uniform.

Hey, Joe, why do you hate the troops?

Honduras Coup Regime: 'Break-Through Accord' Was Just a PR Ploy ... Zelaya Won't Return
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise on November 2, 2009 at 6:53 AM.

Yesterday [Ed: Friday], I expressed skepticism that the so-called breakthrough agreement to end coup-induced constitutional crisis in Honduras would actually bring deposed President Mel Zelaya back to power. 

An adviser to the leader of the coup regime basically admitted to Bloomberg that the prospect of a power-sharing government is just a public relations ploy.

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya won’t be restored to office under an accord that leaves the decision on his return to lawmakers, a vice-president of the Congress said.

“Zelaya won’t be restored,” Marcia Facusse de Villeda, an adviser to acting President Roberto Micheletti, said in a phone interview today, “But just by signing this agreement we already have the recognition of the international community for the elections.” [Bloomberg]

Via Greg Grandin in the Nation.

We Don't Want Obama to Make Bush's Policies Succeed; We Want New Policies
Posted by Leslie Savan, TheNation.com on October 30, 2009 at 6:15 AM.

Even without George W. Bush's debut in Fort Worth as a motivational speaker (see Stephen Colbert swoon over the speech here), this past week has been full of reminders of 43. On Wednesday, President Obama walked out onto the North Lawn of the White House to plant a tree where, one year earlier, Bush had tried to plant a Scarlet Oak. Bush's tree "didn't take," so Obama shoveled a few symbolic spadefuls of dirt over the roots of a Linden tree, asked assembled reporters whether it looked nice, and walked back into the Oval Office.

Sometime after midnight, 44 caught a quick helicopter ride out to the Dover Air Base to stand, wind-whipped and slender, as the bodies of 18 Americans killed in Afghanistan were off-loaded from a C-17 in their flag-draped coffins. It was the first time in eight years of war that a President has greeted our returning dead. Obama flashed a neat, palm-down right-hand salute, which cameras recorded matter-of-factly, as if images of respect for the returning dead were an everyday affair.

When Glenn Beck says the Obama presidency is all about "reparations," he's insinuating that the President wants to lavish government goodies on blacks while stealing from whites. But this is how the Obama camp perceives reparations: Obama is indeed going about repairing things his predecessor bungled, it is truly an appalling mess to clean up, and they don't want to hear criticism of how he "holds the mop." Obama is doing his level best, they say, to restore the national honor, and if we give him enough time he will bring the bloom back to American policy.

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In the U.S., Veterans Come Home From War Only To See Relatives Executed By the State
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on October 27, 2009 at 1:16 PM.

Editor's note: Reginald Blanton was executed on Tuesday, Oct. 27th, pronounced dead at 6:21pm.

28-year-old Reginald Blanton is scheduled to die tonight in Texas, despite the very real possibility that he is innocent. This morning, his brother, Andre Bios, appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss his brother's impending execution.

Bios is an Iraq vet; he served in the 1991 Gulf War. Speaking to Amy Goodman and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Bios described the cruel irony of having devoted himself to supposedly defending democratic ideals on behalf of his country, only to have his brother sentenced to die at the hands of the state:

Amy Goodman: Andre, you’re about to visit your brother. Are you going to be, if in fact he is executed, one of the witnesses to the execution?

Andre Bios: Yes, I am. It was one of the things that I did not want to do, but he has been requesting over and over again for me to be there ...

And the reason why I didn’t want to witness what was getting ready to happen to my brother is because it’s like a slap in my face from my own country, you know? His constitutional rights were violated, but yet I can go overseas and fight in another country to uphold peace, liberty, for them to have, but I can’t uphold peace, liberty and equality for my own brother.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to work alongside Monique Matthews, also a veteran, and the sister of Ryan Matthews, an African American teenager who was sentenced to death in Louisiana for a crime that he didn't commit. Ryan was exonerated in 2004, but I can still remember the sense of betrayal in his sister's voice as she described the hypocrisy -- and the racism that led to his wrongful conviction.

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Honduras's 'Bloodless Coup': What You're Not Seeing on TV
Posted by Avi Lewis, Al Jazeera English on October 27, 2009 at 7:43 AM.

This video is a trailer for the Fault Lines' coverage of the coup in Honduras. Watch Part One and Part Two of the full version of Fault Lines: 100 Days of Resistance.

I arrived in Honduras one week after ousted president Manuel Zelaya returned to begin his long spell of internal exile in the Brazilian embassy. With my crew from Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English TV, I went straight from the airport to a funeral. A week later, on our last night of filming, we attended another funeral. The first was for a 24-year-old woman, the second for a 50-year-old schoolteacher, and both active in the resistance to the coup. According to their families, both were killed for it.

The coup regime in Honduras is winning. Tepid pressure from the Obama administration is making it easy for the de facto government to run out the clock until the highly compromised elections in just five weeks. Whether or not international observers bless that vote, a new government will take power in Honduras and declare the stain of the coup removed, democracy restored. Absent the kind of meaningful sanctions Washington has so far been unwilling to impose, the status quo will triumph: the backers of the coup will go unpunished.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. mainstream media is not reporting the story of what is really going on in Honduras. The de facto government and its backers invested $400,000 (that we know of) in bipartisan lobbying, and succeeded in implanting a deeply distorted narrative of events -- a nouveau cold war story starring Hugo Chávez as puppet master and Zelaya as marionette. Meanwhile, the voice of the social movement struggling to reform its country's constitution in the second poorest nation in the hemisphere has been all but ignored.

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Saudi Woman Journalist Sentenced to 60 Lashes For Working On Show That Talked About Sex
Posted by , AlterNet on October 26, 2009 at 9:30 AM.

Reuters reports:

A Saudi court sentenced a female journalist to 60 lashes in a case brought after a Lebanese television channel she worked for aired the sex confession of a Saudi man, the reporter and a lawyer said.

Rosana, 22, who did not want her full name disclosed, said a court in Jeddah convicted her on Saturday on grounds that the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. she worked for did not have proper authorization to operate in the Islamic kingdom.

The ruling follows the sentencing by the same court of Mazen Abdul-Awad to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes earlier in October after he appeared on an LBC show and talked about his sexual exploits.

The show has sparked a public outcry in the U.S. ally, one of the world's most conservative countries, where clerics have wide-ranging influence and control.

"I had nothing to do with Mazen Abdul-Jawad's show. The verdict was just because I cooperated with LBC," the female journalist told Reuters.

LBC is a popular channel in Saudi Arabia, and many Saudis tune in to its Western-style entertainment programs and talk shows.

Read more here.

New Website Tracks Your Congressional Reps' Moves On Afghanistan
Posted by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, TheNation.com on October 26, 2009 at 8:40 AM.

President Obama will soon make what could be the defining decision of his presidency. The course he chooses in Afghanistan will tell us a lot about the kind of country we will become during his administration.

We have already been fighting in Afghanistan for twice as long as we fought in World War II. In fact, the United States and its NATO partners have had more than 40,000 troops in Afghanistan since 2006 and have spent more than $300 billion on military and civilian operations. At this perilous moment, as we attempt to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the last thing we need is a "surge" of 40,000 more troops to fight on behalf of a corrupt and unpopular Afghan government.

Security in the United States and the region depend not on this misguided surge, but on commonsense counterterrorist and homeland security measures: extensive intelligence cooperation, expert police work, border control, and the surgical use of special forces to disrupt imminent attack when needed.

What is hopeful is that the majority of Americans have turned against the war.

The Nation's special issue on Afghanistan -- Obama's Fateful Choice -- published [last] week, takes on the rationale for escalation, challenges the White House to explore a broader range of options, and offers alternatives, including an exit strategy. The issue also offers ways to get involved to oppose this misguided and dangerous policy.

One new effort was launched today by five national peace advocacy groups representing hundreds of thousands of Americans -- a project called NoEscalation.org. The website tracks whether Members of Congress have taken a stand against troop escalation, and lists their phone numbers so constituents can call and ask their legislators to oppose it.

The website is created by CodePink, Just Foreign Policy, Peace Action, United for Peace and Justice, and Voters for Peace. The groups are urging Americans to report back to NoEscalation.org about their conversations with Congressional offices.

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Oil Tycoon: Our Troops Died ... We're "Entitled" to Sweet Contracts in Iraq!
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on October 23, 2009 at 10:48 AM.

After all that, it looks like the Iraqis are cutting some big deals to develop their massive oil wealth -- but with the mushy Europeans and the damn Chi-coms!

Iraq's Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani told a Washington conference on Wednesday that his government was happy with the energy auction it held earlier this year. The auction was the first chance for foreign oil firms to compete for Iraqi oil since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

BP and the Chinese oil company CNPC were the only firms to win a contract in Iraq's bid round this summer, the first chance for foreign oil firms to compete for Iraqi oil since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Seven other oil and gas fields failed to attract bidders on the terms Iraq offered.

But a consortium headed by Italy's ENI (ENI.MI: Quote, Profile, Research) said last week it signed a deal to develop the giant Zubair field for a remuneration fee of $2 a barrel. At Iraq's oilfield auction in June, the consortium refused to go below $4.40 a barrel.

Another consortium headed by Exxon is still in the running for one project, but that doesn't mollify hedge-fund gazillionaire -- and natural gas honcho -- T-Boone Pickens. He's none-too-happy:

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

[...]

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."

[...]

"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.

Nothing new -- In August T-Boone called on the administration to "demand" oil contracts from Iraq before considering a withdrawal ($$). But it is an unusually brazen admission that many energy bigs did in fact consider "blood-for-oil" to be a straightforward deal.

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Insane Neocon to Ron Reagan: Your Father Would Be Ashamed
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on October 23, 2009 at 9:46 AM.

Right-wing pundit Frank Gaffney was on MSNBC's "Hardball" yesterday, debating U.S. policy in Afghanistan with Ron Reagan. It didn't go well, but the heated exchange was really only part of the problem. (thanks to reader W.B. for the tip)

After Reagan rejected the neocon approach to the conflict, Gaffney made things personal. "Your father would be ashamed of you," Gaffney told Reagan. The former president's son replied, "You better watch your mouth about that, Frank."

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Obama to Karzai: Thanks for Admitting You're Crooked
Posted by John Nichols, TheNation.com on October 20, 2009 at 4:30 PM.

Barack Obama will have to do some awfully embarrassing things as president. The whole pardoning the turkey thing on the eve of Thanksgiving comes to mind. And then there's the taking John Boehner seriously thing -- an admittedly impossible task that must be undertaken as perhaps the most thankless burden of the republic.

On the scale of exceptionally embarrassing White House duties, however, few moments will rival the point on Tuesday when the president found himself hailing the commitment of accused election-fraudster Hamid Karzai to "ensuring a credible process for the Afghan people which results in a government that reflects their will."

Karzai, the imposed viceroy, er, president of Afghanistan whose supporters engaged in massive fraud in order to "win" the country's recent election, has agreed to participate in a November 7 runoff election with Abdullah Abdullah – the most resilient survivor of the Karzai team's chicanery.

Obama, who is heavily invested in the fantasy that Karzai is a legitimate leader and that the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan will somehow develop popular support there (or in the United States), knows that the Afghan president is no democrat.

But the American president must pretend that Afghanistan is a functional republic that meets internationally-accepted standards with regard to voting, counting and reporting results.

That's not the case. Independent agencies and analysts have confirmed that fraud was so widespread that it was unreasonable to claim Karzai -- or anyone else -- had one.

Karzai's association with election fraud and corruption has made it harder for U.S. officials to proceed with plans to ramp up the occupation by sending in more troops and transforming a classic military presence into a more permanent project.

So Karzai had to agree to at least go through the motions of participating in a real election.

And when he did, Obama hailed a man who stands accused of orchestrating a massive effort to thwart democracy as someone whose "constructive actions established an important precedent for Afghanistan's new democracy."

Obama's precise statement went like this: "While this election could have remained unresolved to the detriment of the country, President Karzai's constructive actions established an important precedent for Afghanistan's new democracy. The Afghan constitution and laws are strengthened by President Karzai's decision, which is in the best interests of the Afghan people."

The "yuck factor" was high.

But it got higher when Obama praised Karzai for helping to foster "such a vibrant campaign."

It is, of course, true that Obama is not the first American president to have to pretend that a local bad guy who got caught red handed was some kind of statesman.

Still, having to speak well of Karzai is a lot -- arguably too much -- to ask.

And if Obama has any sense of the region -- or of the trouble his Afghanistan initiative is in -- he had to be hoping that Karzai and his henchmen would refrain from obvious lawbreaking in the second round.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Key Figure in AIPAC Spy Scandal Interrupts Sentence to Call for Regime Change in Iran
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on October 20, 2009 at 3:15 PM.

Last week, it was John Bolton advocating -- or kinda-sorta advocating -- a nuclear first strike on Iran at a GOP-affiliated conference on "ensuring peace." This week, the ironic-crazy continues with Larry Franklin -- the former defense official who pled guilty to 3 counts of criminal conspiracy for handing classified documents to Israeli officials and representatives of AIPAC -- arguing for regime change in Iran in the prestigious pages of Foreign Policy magazine.

Franklin was working in the Pentagon's infamous Office of Special Plans under Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith at the time he was busted. He and his defenders say he was just trying to circumnavigate the DoD bureaucracy when he gave the documents to AIPAC officials -- that he thought they could get his "concerns" about what he thought was the Bush administration's soft touch on Iran to Elliot Abrams, a fellow-traveller at the National Security Council. So while prosecutors said Franklin knew that the classified info he disseminated "could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation," the AIPAC-approved party-line is that he was a victim of his ideological opponents' "criminalization" of the kind of horse-trading in tidbits of information that's routine in DC foreign policy circles.

Even if one accepts that account -- recall that he also slipped info to an Israeli official directly -- it says  quite a bit about our foreign policy establishment when a Pentagon employee would think a lobbyist for AIPAC was the best conduit he had to his superiors in the White House.

Anyway, now he takes to the pages of one of the country prestigious foreign policy journals to claim that the months of turmoil following the Iranian elections somehow vindicates his actions. "Still serving my 10-month sentence," he writes, "I take little solace in the knowledge that my concerns were justified." (Sounds dramatic, but Franklin, who faced up to 25 years behind bars, got a slap on the wrist -- 13 months in jail which were later reduced to 10 months under house arrest.)

It's also unclear why the events of recent months absolve him of his crimes. Franklin says his goal was to "shake the foundations of Iran's mullahcracy," but all parties in the disputed election support the basic structure of Iran's "mullahcracy." And if he's just saying that the tainted vote proved the regime in Tehran to be generally cruel or corrupt, it's not like it enjoyed a good reputation in DC foreign policy circles at the time anyway.

But of course, the larger point of the column is to urge us all to finally follow his advice and overthrow the damn regime already ...

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Under U.S. Pressure, Karzai To Accept Run-Off Election
Posted by , Democracy Now! on October 20, 2009 at 6:45 AM.

Under heavy pressure from the Obama administration, Afghan President Hamid Karzai appears set to concede today that he fell short of a first-round victory in the nation’s disputed presidential election. But the path to resolving the political crisis remains uncertain. Officials said Karzai was moving toward accepting the findings of a United Nations audit that stripped him of nearly a third of his votes. This leaves Karzai below the 50 percent threshold that would have allowed him to avoid a runoff and declare victory over his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah. The New York Times reports some Obama administration officials are now quietly pushing for Karzai and Abdullah to form a coalition government to avoid a runoff altogether. Earlier today Abdullah called for the formation of an interim government to shepherd the country through the winter if it’s too difficult or dangerous to organize a runoff in the coming weeks. Meanwhile the Times of London reports Afghanistan's security chiefs have been ordered to make emergency preparations for a second round of voting. United Nations spokesperson Aleem Seddique said the international community is ready to assist with the run-off.

Aleem Seddique: "Preparations are already well underway for a run-off, all the voting materials that are required to conduct a run-off are now in country, distribution will begin next week if the Independent Election Commission announces the need for a run-off, so on the part of the United Nations we are standing ready to assist the electoral authority of this country to conduct that run-off, if it's required."

Husband Joins Army So Cancer-Stricken Wife Can Get Health Care
Posted by Zaid Jilani, Think Progress on October 20, 2009 at 5:30 AM.

One of the worst tragedies of the recession has been people losing their health insurance because they lost their job. Nearly 14,000 Americans lose their insurance every day. Wisconsin father Bill Caudle was laid off from his job at a plastics company in March 2009, which resulted in his family losing their employer-subsidized health care coverage. This put the family in an especially precarious position, because Bill's wife, Michelle, was an ovarian cancer patient. After months of unsuccessfully looking for work, Caudle did the only thing he could to get his wife chemotherapy -- he joined the Army:

Bill needed a job. He needed health benefits. [...]

The Army would solve their health coverage problem. In years past he would have been too old, but in 2005 the age limit for enlistment was increased from 35 to 40, and a year later it was raised again to 42. The tradeoff would be his absence from home.

In the end, although he risked leaving Michelle to fight cancer on her own, Bill chose the Army. He signed on for a job as a signal support systems specialist, a soldier who works with communications equipment.

"Seventy percent of the reason is for the insurance," said Bill’s mother, Marguerite Hemiller. "He told me, 'I've always wanted to do something for my country and I have to help Michelle.'"

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