"Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."
Zbigniew Brzezinski

Obama Camp Pulls Issue Pages From Transition Site
By Michael Falcone
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/obama-campaign-pulls-issue...
Keen observers have noticed that the issues pages of the official Obama-Biden transition Web site, change.gov, recently went missing and were replaced by a general statement of priorities.
A spokesman for the Obama transition team, Nick Shapiro, who has been fielding inquiries about the disappearance, said that they are “retooling” the site, but did not elaborate further.
When it went live last week, the transition Web site included a detailed agenda section with pages for “Revitalizing the Economy,” “Ending the War in Iraq” and “Providing Health Care for All,” among others. Now, those pages are nowhere to be found.
Instead, clicking on the site’s “Agenda” tab leads to the following statement: The Obama Administration has a comprehensive and detailed agenda to carry out its policies. The principal priorities of the Obama Administration include: a plan to revive the economy, to fix our health care, education, and social security systems, to define a clear path to energy independence, to end the war in Iraq responsibly and finish our mission in Afghanistan, and to work with our allies to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, among many other domestic and foreign policy objective ...The scrubbing of the site, which the Obama transition team says is only temporary, has not escaped the notice of observant political bloggers who moved swiftly to archive the original pages. And on the Web site TechPresident, which covers the intersection of politics and the Internet, Michael Whitney asks: “Is this the first blow to Obama’s pledge of government transparency, or something else?”

Ex-CIA Officials Tied to Rendition Program and Faulty Iraq Intel Tapped to Head Obama's Intelligence Transition Team
http://i2.democracynow.org/2008/11/17/obama_taps_ex_cia_officials_tied
John Brennan and Jami Miscik, both former intelligence officials under George Tenet, are leading Barack Obama’s review of intelligence agencies and helping make recommendations to the new administration. Brennan has supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, and Miscik was involved with the politicized intelligence alleging weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the war on Iraq. http://www.legitgov.org/

Obama advisers: Harsh interrogators will walk
Stephen C. Webster
Even as President-elect Obama vowed "to regain America's moral stature in the world" during Sunday's 60 Minutes appearance, two of his senior advisers confessed there is no intent to pursue those in the Bush administration who engaged in torture...
The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, citing a report by Mark Ambinder that Obama is close to appointing John Brennon, who served under former CIA Director George Tenet, decried the impending and crucial decision as, "change we cannot believe in.""Appointing Brennan to the CIA does not mean change from Bush," he wrote. "That was absolutely a critical part of Obama's message. With Brennan, we get the taint of a Bush and two-facedness of a Clinton. We need to say goodbye to all that, not perpetuate its double-speak." Tenet was director of the agency when it was admitted that several prisoners were subjected to waterboarding: a form of torture that simulates the experience of drowning.
"[Obama believes] torture not be allowed in any form or fashion in any part of the federal government, and he would make sure that was the case," said Brennan to CQ Politics. "Whether the Army field manual is comprehensive enough to cover all those tactics and techniques, that’s something I think he’d look to his national security advisers for."
Blogger Glenn Greenwald is skeptical too. "Brennan has been and continues to be an extremely important adviser for Obama on intelligence issues," he wrote. "His views on past administration conduct are, in many important instances, clearly disturbing and bear watching." http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Obama_admin_wont_prosecure_Bush_war_1117.h...

Kissinger backs Clinton for top US cabinet job
Financial Times
Henry Kissinger, the former senior US statesman, yesterday gave his firm backing to Hillary Clinton as the next US Secretary of State in the forthcoming Democratic administration.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s India meeting, Mr Kissinger said ”I believe it would be an outstanding appointment,” if Barack Obama, the president-elect, chose Senator Clinton for the foreign affairs portfolio.

Hillary Clinton Secretary of State
In 2005 Hillary Clinton stood in Palestine and praised the apartheid wall that the government of Israel was building with large amounts of U.S. aid in furtherance of the Zionist goal of destroying one of the world’s peoples -- the Palestinians http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21264.htm

Freedom Rider: Obama and Lieberman: Two of a Kind
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
"McCain considered choosing Lieberman as a running mate instead of Sarah Palin."
Connecticut's Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman is an unrepentant proponent of United States government terror... He believes in America's war of terror, and in the "special relationship" with Israel.... He was enthusiastically in favor of the occupation of Iraq, advocating for war even before George W. Bush became president. Lieberman is the most vocal cheer leader for war against Iran, telling shameful lies about that nation in hopes of seeing the United States and Israel carry out a military attack. ... Barack Obama knows better than anyone. When he entered the Senate as a freshman in 2005 he chose Joseph Lieberman as his mentor. The following year Obama endorsed Lieberman when he faced his primary challenge. It seemed incongruous for a politician thought of as a progressive to support the most conservative Democrat in the Senate.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&...

President-elect Obama, McCain vow to work closely
“At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent challenges of our time.”http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081117.wobama_mccain1117/BNStory/International/home?cid=al_gam_mostview

This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House
By Jeremy Scahill
November 20, 2008 "AlterNet"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21279.htm
... Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.
Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled... Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama's foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama's transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:

-- His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;

-- An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;

-- His labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization;"

-- His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. interests;

-- His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem "must remain undivided" -- a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe;

-- His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;

-- His refusal to "rule out" using Blackwater and other armed private forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.

Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team. While the verdict is still out on a few people, many members of his inner foreign policy circle -- including some who have received or are bound to receive Cabinet posts -- supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. A few have worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, whose radical agenda was adopted by the Bush/Cheney administration. And most have proven track records of supporting or implementing militaristic, offensive U.S. foreign policy. "After a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington's Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little 'change you can believe in,'" notes veteran journalist Robert Parry, the former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the stories in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

As news breaks and speculation abounds about cabinet appointments, here are 20 people to watch as Obama builds the team who will shape U.S. foreign policy for at least four years:

Joe Biden
There was no stronger sign that Obama's foreign policy would follow the hawkish tradition of the Democratic foreign policy establishment than his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Much has been written on Biden's tenure as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq stands out. Biden is not just one more Democratic lawmaker who now calls his vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq "mistaken;" Biden was actually an important facilitator of the war.
In the summer of 2002, when the United States was "debating" a potential attack on Iraq, Biden presided over hearings whose ostensible purpose was to weigh all existing options. But instead of calling on experts whose testimony could challenge the case for war -- Iraq's alleged WMD possession and its supposed ties to al-Qaida -- Biden's hearings treated the invasion as a foregone conclusion. His refusal to call on two individuals in particular ensured that testimony that could have proven invaluable to an actual debate was never heard: Former Chief United Nations Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran diplomat and the former head of the U.N.'s Iraq program.
Both men say they made it clear to Biden's office that they were ready and willing to testify; Ritter knew more about the dismantling of Iraq's WMD program than perhaps any other U.S. citizen and would have been in prime position to debunk the misinformation and outright lies being peddled by the White House. Meanwhile, von Sponeck had just returned from Iraq, where he had observed Ansar al Islam rebels in the north of Iraq -- the so-called al-Qaida connection -- and could have testified that, rather than colluding with Saddam's regime, they were in a battle against it. Moreover, he would have pointed out that they were operating in the U.S.-enforced safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan. "Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam," von Sponeck wrote in an Op-Ed published shortly before the July 2002 hearings. "The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest."
With both men barred from testifying, rather than eliciting an array of informed opinions, Biden's committee whitewashed Bush's lies and helped lead the country to war. Biden himself promoted the administration's false claims that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, declaring on the Senate floor, "[Saddam Hussein] possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons."
With the war underway, Biden was then the genius who passionately promoted the ridiculous plan to partition Iraq into three areas based on religion and ethnicity, attempting to Balkanize one of the strongest Arab states in the world. "He's a part of the old Democratic establishment," says retired Army Col. Ann Wright, the State Department diplomat who reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2002. Biden, she says, has "had a long history with foreign affairs, [but] it's not the type of foreign affairs that I want."

Rahm Emanuel
Obama's appointment of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff is a clear sign that Clinton-era neoliberal hawks will be well-represented at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. A former senior Clinton advisor, Emanuel is a hard-line supporter of Israel's "targeted assassination" policy and actually volunteered to work with the Israeli Army during the 1991 Gulf War. He is close to the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and was the only member of the Illinois Democratic delegation in the Congress to vote for the invasion of Iraq. Unlike many of his colleagues, Emanuel still defends his vote. As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel promoted the campaigns of 22 candidates, only one of who supported a swift withdrawal from Iraq, and denied crucial Party funding to anti-war candidates. "As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we will have a position," he said in December 2005. As Philip Giraldi recently pointed out on Antiwar.com, Emanuel "advocates increasing the size of the U.S. Army by 100,000 soldiers and creating a domestic spying organization like Britain's MI5. More recently, he has supported mandatory paramilitary national service for all Americans between the ages of 18 and 25." While Obama has at times been critical of Clinton-era free trade agreements, Emanuel was one of the key people in the Clinton White House who brokered the successful passage of NAFTA.

Hillary Rodham Clinton
For all the buzz and speculation about the possibility that Sen. Clinton may be named Secretary of State, most media coverage has focused on her rivalry with Obama during the primary, along with the prospect of her husband having to face the intense personal, financial and political vetting process required to secure a job in the new administration. But the question of how Clinton would lead the operations at Foggy Bottom calls for scrutiny of her positions vis-a-vis Obama's stated foreign-policy goals.
Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband's economic and military war against Iraq throughout the 1990s, including the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which ultimately laid the path for President George W. Bush's invasion. Later, as a U.S. senator, she not only voted to authorize the war, but aided the Bush administration's propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the invasion. "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program," Clinton said when rising to support the measure in October 2002. "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction."
"The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons has been stocking up on Clintonites," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote. "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary -- who voted to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence assessment -- in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world riven by that war?"
Beyond Iraq, Clinton shocked many and sparked official protests by Tehran at the United Nations when asked during the presidential campaign what she would do as president if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," she declared. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."
Clinton has not shied away from supporting offensive foreign policy tactics in the past. Recalling her husband's weighing the decision of whether to attack Yugoslavia, she said in 1999, "I urged him to bomb. … You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?"

Madeleine Albright
While Obama's house is flush with Clintonian officials like former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary William Perry, Director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning Greg Craig (who was officially named Obama's White House Counsel) and Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, perhaps most influential is Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State and U.N. ambassador. Albright recently served as a proxy for Obama, representing him at the G-20 summit earlier this month. Whether or not she is awarded an official role in the administration, Albright will be a major force in shaping Obama's foreign policy.
"It will take time to convince skeptics that the promotion of democracy is not a mask for imperialism or a recipe for the kind of chaos we have seen in the Persian Gulf," Albright recently wrote. "And it will take time to establish the right identity for America in a world that has grown suspicious of all who claim a monopoly on virtue and that has become reluctant to follow the lead of any one country."
Albright should know. She was one of the key architects in the dismantling of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. In the lead-up to the 1999 "Kosovo war," she oversaw the U.S. attempt to coerce the Yugoslav government to deny its own sovereignty in return for not being bombed. Albright demanded that the Yugoslav government sign a document that would have been unacceptable to any sovereign nation. Known as the Rambouillet Accord, it included a provision that would have guaranteed U.S. and NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout" all of Yugoslavia -- not just Kosovo -- while also seeking to immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, investigation or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]." Moreover, it would have granted the occupiers "the use of airports, roads, rails and ports without payment." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan years later, the Rambouillet Accord mandated that the economy of Kosovo "shall function in accordance with free-market principles."
When Yugoslavia refused to sign the document, Albright and others in the Clinton administration unleashed the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, which targeted civilian infrastructure. (Prior to the attack, Albright said the U.S. government felt "the Serbs need a little bombing.") She and the Clinton administration also supported the rise to power in Kosovo of a terrorist mafia that carried out its own ethnic-cleansing campaign against the province's minorities.
Perhaps Albright's most notorious moment came with her enthusiastic support of the economic war against the civilian population of Iraq. When confronted by Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” that the sanctions were responsible for the deaths of "a half-million children … more children than died in Hiroshima," Albright responded, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." (While defending the policy, Albright later called her choice of words "a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong.")

Richard Holbrooke
Like Albright, Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, Holbrooke's most recent government post was as President Clinton's ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for the Carter Administration.
According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski [another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide."
Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)
Like many in Obama's foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN, where he presented the administration's fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a "blot" on his reputation), Holbrooke said: "It was a masterful job of diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and we have a legitimate right to take action."

Dennis Ross
Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross was one of the primary authors of Obama's aforementioned speech before AIPAC this summer. He cut his teeth working under famed neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the 1970s and worked closely with the Project for the New American Century. Ross has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has fanned the flames for a more hostile stance toward Iran. As the lead U.S. negotiator between Israel and numerous Arab nations under Clinton, Ross' team acted, in the words of one U.S. official who worked under him, as "Israel's lawyer."
"The 'no surprises' policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking," wrote U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller in 2005. "If we couldn't put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel." After the Clinton White House, Ross worked for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hawkish pro-Israel think tank, and for FOX News, where he repeatedly pressed for war against Iraq.

Martin Indyk
Founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Indyk spent years working for AIPAC and served as Clinton's ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, while also playing a major role in developing U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran. In addition to his work for the U.S. government, he has worked for the Israeli government and with PNAC. "Barack Obama has painted himself into a corner by appealing to the most hard-line, pro-Israel elements in this country," Ali Abunimah, founder of ElectronicInifada.net, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, describing Indyk and Dennis Ross as "two of the most pro-Israel officials from the Clinton era, who are totally distrusted by Palestinians and others across the Middle East, because they're seen as lifelong advocates for Israeli positions."

Anthony Lake
Clinton's former National Security Advisor was an early supporter of Obama and one of the few top Clintonites to initially back the president-elect. Lake began his foreign policy work in the U.S. Foreign Service during Vietnam, working with Henry Kissinger on the "September Group," a secret team tasked with developing a military strategy to deliver a "savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam."
Decades later, after working for various administrations, Lake "was the main force behind the U.S. invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years," according to veteran journalist Allan Nairn, whose groundbreaking reporting revealed U.S. support for Haitian death squads in the 1990s. "They brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians, and set the stage for the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti." Clinton nominated Lake as CIA Director, but he failed to win Senate confirmation.

Lee Hamilton
Hamilton is a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was co-chairman of both the Iraq Study Group and 9/11 Commission. Robert Parry, who has covered Hamilton's career extensively, recently ran a piece on Consortium News that characterized him this way: "Whenever the Republicans have a touchy national-security scandal to put to rest, their favorite Democratic investigator is Lee Hamilton. … Hamilton's carefully honed skill for balancing truth against political comity has elevated him to the status of a Washington Wise Man."

Susan Rice
Former Assistant Secretary of Sate Susan Rice, who served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council, is a potential candidate for the post of ambassador to the U.N. or as a deputy national security advisor. She, too, promoted the myth that Saddam had WMDs. "It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat," she said in 2002. "It's clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on." (After the invasion, discussing Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs, she said, "I don't think many informed people doubted that.")
Rice has also been a passionate advocate for a U.S. military attack against Sudan over the Darfur crisis. In an op-ed co-authored with Anthony Lake, she wrote, "The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing."

John Brennan
A longtime CIA official and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Brennan is one of the coordinators of Obama's intelligence transition team and a top contender for either CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence. He was also recently described by Glenn Greenwald as "an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity." While claiming to oppose waterboarding, labeling it "inconsistent with American values" and "something that should be prohibited," Brennan has simultaneously praised the results achieved by "enhanced interrogation" techniques. "There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hard-core terrorists," Brennan said in a 2007 interview. "It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the death of 3,000 innocents."
Brennan has described the CIA's extraordinary rendition program -- the government-run kidnap-and-torture program enacted under Clinton -- as an absolutely vital tool. "I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in," he said in a December 2005 interview. "And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives."
Brennan is currently the head of Analysis Corporation, a private intelligence company that was recently implicated in the breach of Obama and Sen. John McCain's passport records. He is also the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade association of private intelligence contractors who have dramatically increased their role in sensitive U.S. national security operations. (Current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is former chairman of the INSA.)

Jami Miscik
Miscik, who works alongside Brennan on Obama's transitional team, was the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. She was one of the key officials responsible for sidelining intel that contradicted the official line on WMD, while promoting intel that backed it up.
"When the administration insisted on an intelligence assessment of Saddam Hussein's relationship to al-Qaida, Miscik blocked the skeptics (who were later vindicated) within the CIA's Mideast analytical directorate and instructed the less-skeptical counterterrorism analysts to 'stretch to the maximum the evidence you had,' " journalist Spencer Ackerman recently wrote in the Washington Independent. "It's hard to think of a more egregious case of sacrificing sound intelligence analysis in order to accommodate the strategic fantasies of an administration. … The idea that Miscik is helping staff Obama's top intelligence picks is most certainly not change we can believe in." What's more, she went on to a lucrative post as the Global Head of Sovereign Risk for the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

John Kerry and Bill Richardson
Both Sen. Kerry and Gov. Richardson have been identified as possible contenders for Secretary of State. While neither is likely to be as hawkish as Hillary Clinton, both have taken pro-war positions. Kerry promoted the WMD lie and voted to invade Iraq. "Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try?" Kerry asked on the Senate floor in October 2002. "According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons … Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents."
Richardson, whose Iraq plan during his 2008 presidential campaign was more progressive and far-reaching than Obama's, served as Bill Clinton's ambassador to the UN. In this capacity, he supported Clinton's December 1998 bombing of Baghdad and the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. "We think this man is a threat to the international community, and he threatens a lot of the neighbors in his region and future generations there with anthrax and VX," Richardson told an interviewer in February 1998.
While Clinton's Secretary of Energy, Richardson publicly named Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a target in an espionage investigation. Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. Lee was later cleared of those charges and won a settlement against the U.S. government.

Robert Gates
Washington consensus is that Obama will likely keep Robert Gates, George W. Bush's Defense Secretary, as his own Secretary of Defense. While Gates has occasionally proved to be a stark contrast to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he would hardly represent a break from the policies of the Bush administration. Quite the opposite; according to the Washington Post, in the interest of a "smooth transition," Gates "has ordered hundreds of political appointees at the Pentagon canvassed to see whether they wish to stay on in the new administration, has streamlined policy briefings and has set up suites for President-elect Barack Obama's transition team just down the hall from his own E-ring office." The Post reports that Gates could stay on for a brief period and then be replaced by Richard Danzig, who was Clinton's Secretary of the Navy. Other names currently being tossed around are Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (a critic of the Iraq occupation) and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who served alongside Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Ivo H. Daalder
Daalder was National Security Council Director for European Affairs under President Clinton. Like other Obama advisors, he has worked with the Project for the New American Century and signed a 2005 letter from PNAC to Congressional leaders, calling for an increase in U.S. ground troops in Iraq and beyond.

Sarah Sewall
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance during the Clinton administration, Sewall served as a top advisor to Obama during the campaign and is almost certain to be selected for a post in his administration. In 2007, Sewall worked with the U.S. military and Army Gen. David Petraeus, writing the introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. She was criticized for this collaboration by Tom Hayden, who wrote, "the Petraeus plan draws intellectual legitimacy from Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, whose director, Sarah Sewall, proudly embraces an 'unprecedented collaboration [as] a human rights center partnered with the armed forces.'”"Humanitarians often avoid wading into the conduct of war for fear of becoming complicit in its purpose," she wrote in the introduction. "'The field manual requires engagement precisely from those who fear that its words lack meaning."

Michele Flournoy
Flournoy and former Clinton Deputy Defense Secretary John White are co-heading Obama's defense transition team. Flournoy was a senior Clinton appointee at the Pentagon. She currently runs the Center for a New American Security, a center-right think-tank. There is speculation that Obama could eventually name her as the first woman to serve as defense secretary. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: "While at CNAS, Flournoy helped to write a report that called for reducing the open-ended American military commitment in Iraq and replacing it with a policy of 'conditional engagement' there. Significantly, the paper rejected the idea of withdrawing troops according to the sort of a fixed timeline that Obama espoused during the presidential campaign. Obama has in recent weeks signaled that he was willing to shelve the idea, bringing him more in line with Flournoy's thinking." Flournoy has also worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.

Wendy Sherman and Tom Donilon
Currently employed at Madeline Albright's consulting firm, the Albright Group, Sherman worked under Albright at the State Department, coordinating U.S. policy on North Korea. She is now coordinating the State Department transition team for Obama. Tom Donilon, her co-coordinator, was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff at the State Department under Clinton. Interestingly, Sherman and Donilon both have ties to Fannie Mae that didn't make it onto their official bios on Obama's change.gov website. "Donilon was Fannie's general counsel and executive vice president for law and policy from 1999 until the spring of 2005, a period during which the company was rocked by accounting problems," reports the Wall Street Journal.

***
While many of the figures at the center of Obama's foreign policy team are well-known, two of its most important members have never held national elected office or a high-profile government position. While they cannot be characterized as Clinton-era hawks, it will be important to watch Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, co-coordinators of the Obama foreign policy team. From 2000 to 2005, McDonough served as foreign policy advisor to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and worked extensively on the use-of-force authorizations for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which Daschle supported. From 1996 to 1999, McDonough was a professional staff member of the House International Relations Committee during the debate over the bombing of Yugoslavia. More recently, he was at the Center for American Progress working under John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff and the current head of the Obama transition.

Mark Lippert is a close personal friend of Obama's. He has worked for Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. He is a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve and spent a year in Iraq working intelligence for the Navy SEALs. "According to those who've worked closely with Lippert," Robert Dreyfuss recently wrote in The Nation, "he is a conservative, cautious centrist who often pulled Obama to the right on Iraq, Iran and the Middle East and who has been a consistent advocate for increased military spending. 'Even before Obama announced for the presidency, Lippert wanted Obama to be seen as tough on Iran,' says a lobbyist who's worked the Iran issue on Capitol Hill, 'He's clearly more hawkish than the senator.' "

Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to bring change to Washington. "I don't want to just end the war," he said early this year. "I want to end the mindset that got us into war." That is going to be very difficult if Obama employs a foreign policy team that was central to creating that mindset, before and during the presidency of George W. Bush.
"Twenty-three senators and 133 House members who voted against the war -- and countless other notable individuals who spoke out against it and the dubious claims leading to war -- are apparently not even being considered for these crucial positions," observes Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Obama's "Intelligence Policy to Stay Largely Intact"
By Tom Burghardt
Mon, 17 Nov 2008
http://www.inteldaily.com/?c=126&a=8751
According to The Wall Street Journal, (Siobhan Gorman, "Intelligence Policy to Stay Largely Intact," The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2008) "President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies... Citing Obama's carefully-crafted public relations blitz on the campaign trail opposing illegal spying, the Journal reports: "Yet he ... voted for a White House-backed law to expand eavesdropping powers for the National Security Agency. Mr. Obama said he opposed providing legal immunity to telecommunications companies that aided warrantless surveillance, but ultimately voted for the bill, which included an immunity provision."
The new president could take a similar approach to revising the rules for CIA interrogations, said one current government official familiar with the transition. Upon review, Mr. Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight. The "current government official" cited by the Journal fails to specify precisely what it means to "keep the road open" when it comes to torturing prisoners of war in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Pentagon Wants $581 Billion From Obama – War Costs Not Included
By Noah Shachtman
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/pentagon-wants.html
...While the federal government hemorrhages [our]money, and everyone from Goldman Sachs to General Motors to the city of Philadelphia is looking for more Washington cash, the Defense Department is getting ready to ask for its biggest budget yet. The Pentagon is telling the Obama transition team it wants $581 billion for the next fiscal year, an increase of $67 billion. And that doesn't even count cost for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...[except] $12 billion to pay for a few "predictable war costs," that's less than operations in Afghanistan and Iraq cost every month.
The cash request "includes $524 billion in spending authority approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget this spring... as well as $57 billion in additional needs the Office of the Secretary of Defense identified over the summer," reports Inside Defense. ... President Bush inherited a Pentagon budget that was a mere $302 billion.

NYT 'NEW' MILITARY REQUIREMENTS FOR SAME OLD GLOBAL SUPREMACY AGENDA
Editorial
A Military for a Dangerous New World
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/opinion/16Sun1.html?th=&emc=th&pagewan...
As president, Barack Obama will face the most daunting and complicated national security challenges in more than a generation — and he will inherit a military that is critically ill-equipped for the task.Troops and equipment are so overtaxed by President Bush’s disastrous Iraq war that the Pentagon does not have enough of either for the fight in Afghanistan, the war on terror’s front line, let alone to confront the next threats.This is intolerable, especially when the Pentagon’s budget, including spending on the two wars, reached $685 billion in 2008. That is an increase of 85 percent in real dollars since 2000 and nearly equal to all of the rest of the world’s defense budgets combined. It is also the highest level in real dollars since World War II.
To protect the nation, the Obama administration will have to rebuild and significantly reshape the military. We do not minimize the difficulty of this task. Even if money were limitless, planning is extraordinarily difficult in a world with no single enemy and many dangers.

The United States and its NATO allies must be able to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan — and keep pursuing Al Qaeda forces around the world. Pentagon planners must weigh the potential threats posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, an erratic North Korea, a rising China, an assertive Russia and a raft of unstable countries like Somalia and nuclear-armed Pakistan. And they must have sufficient troops, ships and planes to reassure allies in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

The goal is a military that is large enough and mobile enough to deter enemies. There must be no more ill-founded wars of choice like the one in Iraq. The next president must be far more willing to solve problems with creative and sustained diplomacy. But this country must also be prepared to fight if needed. To build an effective military the next president must make some fundamental changes.

More ground forces: We believe the military needs the 65,000 additional Army troops and the 27,000 additional marines that Congress finally pushed President Bush into seeking. That buildup is projected to take at least two years; by the end the United States will have 759,000 active-duty ground troops.That sounds like a lot, especially with the prospect of significant withdrawals from Iraq. But it would still be about 200,000 fewer ground forces than the United States had 20 years ago, during the final stages of the cold war. Less than a third of that expanded ground force would be available for deployment at any given moment....

New skills: America still may have to fight traditional wars against hostile regimes, but future conflicts are at least as likely to involve guerrilla insurgencies wielding terror tactics or possibly weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon easily defeated Saddam Hussein’s army. It was clearly unprepared to handle the insurgency and then the fierce sectarian civil war that followed. The Army has made strides in training troops for “irregular warfare.” Gen. David Petraeus has rewritten American counterinsurgency doctrine to make protecting the civilian population and legitimizing the indigenous government central tasks for American soldiers.

The new doctrine gives as much priority to dealing with civilians in conflict zones (shaping attitudes, restoring security, minimizing casualties, restoring basic services and engaging in other “stability operations”) as to combat operations.... troops must be schooled in counterinsurgency and stability operations as well as more traditional fighting. And they must be prepared to sustain long-term operations. The military also must field more specialized units, including more trainers to help friendly countries develop their own armies to supplement or replace American troops in conflict zones. It means hiring more linguists, training more special forces, and building expertise in civil affairs and cultural awareness.

Maintain mobility: In an unpredictable world with no clear battle lines, the country must ensure its ability — so-called lift capacity — to move enormous quantities of men and matériel quickly around the world and to supply them when necessary by sea.
Except in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has reduced its number of permanent overseas bases as a way to lower America’s profile. Between 2004 and 2014, American bases abroad are expected to decline from 850 to 550. The number of troops permanently based overseas will drop to 180,000, down from 450,000 in the 1980s.

Much of the transport equipment is old and wearing out. The new administration must move forward on plans to buy 179 new planes in a fair and open competition.

China is expanding its deep-water navy, much to the anxiety of many of its neighbors. The United States should not try to block China’s re-emergence as a great power. Neither can it cede the seas. Nor can it allow any country to interfere with vital maritime lanes. America should maintain its investment in sealift, including Maritime Prepositioning Force ships that carry everything marines need for initial military operations (helicopter landing decks, food, water pumping equipment). It must also restock ships’ supplies that have been depleted for use in Iraq. One 2006 study predicted replenishment would cost $12 billion plus $5 billion for every additional year the marines stayed in Iraq. The Pentagon needs to spend more on capable, smaller coastal warcraft — the littoral combat ship deserves support — and less on blue-water fighting ships.

More rational spending: What we are calling for will be expensive. Adding 92,000 ground troops will cost more than $100 billion over the next six years, and maintaining lift capacity will cost billions more. Much of the savings from withdrawing troops from Iraq will have to be devoted to repairing and rebuilding the force.Money must be spent more wisely.... The Pentagon plans to spend $10 billion next year on an untested missile defense system in Alaska and Europe. Mr. Obama should halt deployment and devote a fraction of that budget to continued research until there is a guarantee that the system will work....
The Pentagon’s procurement system must be fixed. Dozens of the most costly weapons program are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.
Killing a weapons program, starting a new one or carrying out new doctrine — all this takes time and political leadership. President Obama will need to quickly lay out his vision of the military this country needs to keep safe and to prevail over 21st-century threats. [as if the u.s. is subject to threats, not the worldwide aggressor]

Digest commentary:
The new U.S. imperialist ruling regime will prove, again, that the U.S. strategy for global hegemony is the bipartisan U.S. agenda, not a partisan Bushneocon strategy: the geostrategic agenda requires new faces and tactics to achieve its goal. A brief survey of its electoral history demonstrates the bipartisan nature of U.S. capitalism's white supremacist "manifest destiny". It is a function of capital's basic law... "expand or die", not partisan politics. Electoral politics are a means to this end, a PR marketing tool for the deadly electoral trap.
Capital as Karl Marx analyzed in Das Kapital is a human relation. It is inherently non-partisan. U.S. capital's strategic analyses, brewed in think-tanks, NGOs, corporate foundations and universities, are strategies for U.S. global rule ... electoral politicians and policies, the functionaries. Working and oppressed peoples worldwide from whose labor power capital is extracted are capital's base ... and enemies once they understand and resist the rules of the game... "terrorists" obstructing the U.S global war of terror.
This present GWOT imperialist juggernaut is based largely on the strategic analyses and recommendations of Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) ---- now one of Obama's foreign policy consultants, backed up by an army of experienced enemies of humanity as Scahill and other democrats now acknowledge:

"Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."
Z. Brzezinski.The Grand Chessboard, 1997
July 26, 1947, U.S. imperialist wars for global capital domination officially became 'national defense'
President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20070726.html

1997: THE GRAND CHESSBOARD: American Primacy & its Geostrategic Imperatives
publisher: Basic Books / 1998-10 / Paperback / 240 Pages/ isbn-10: 0465027261 / isbn-13: 9780465027262 / Edition: Reissue
"...The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power... (p. xiii)
"... But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book. (p. xiv)

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained. (p.30)
"In that context, how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

"Two basic steps are thus required: first, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them;... second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above..." (p. 40)
"...To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." (p.40)
"Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America's status as a global power." (p.55)

"... [the Central Asian Republics] are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold." (p.124) [Emphasis added]
"The world's energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea." (p.125)
"Uzbekistan is, in fact, the prime candidate for regional leadership in Central Asia." (p.130)

"... an Islamic revival - already abetted from the outside not only by Iran but also by Saudi Arabia - is likely to become the mobilizing impulse for the increasingly pervasive new nationalisms, determined to oppose any reintegration under Russian - and hence infidel - control." (p. 133).

"For Pakistan, the primary interest is to gain Geostrategic depth through political influence in Afghanistan - and to deny to Iran the exercise of such influence in Afghanistan and Tajikistan - and to benefit eventually from any pipeline construction linking Central Asia with the Arabian Sea." (p.139)

"It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it." (p148)
"Without sustained and directed American involvement, before long the forces of global disorder could come to dominate the world scene. And the possibility of such a fragmentation is inherent in the geopolitical tensions not only of today's Eurasia but of the world more generally." (p.194)
"America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe's central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and to America's historical legacy." (p.194"With warning signs on the horizon across Europe and Asia, any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a Geostrategic design." (p.197)
"That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America's primacy..." (p. 198)
"The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role." (p. 198)

"The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been... ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."
It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization."

"In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last."

"As America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard

from 1997: A Geostrategy for Eurasia
Zbigniew Brzezinski
From Foreign Affairs, September/ October 1997
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19970901faessay3795/zbigniew-brzezinski/a-...
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs in 1977-81, is Counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Professor of Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, The Grand Chessboard.

AXIAL EURASIA
Seventy-five years ago, when the first issue of Foreign Affairs saw the light of day, the United States was a self-isolated Western hemispheric power, sporadically involved in the affairs of Europe and Asia. World War II and the ensuing Cold War compelled the United States to develop a sustained commitment to Western Europe and the Far East. America's emergence as the sole global superpower now makes an integrated and comprehensive strategy for Eurasia imperative.
Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.

Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and historical legacy.

A sustainable strategy for Eurasia must distinguish among the more immediate short-run perspective of the next five years or so, the medium term of 20 or so years, and the long run beyond that. Moreover, these phases must be viewed not as watertight compartments but as part of a continuum. In the short run, the United States should consolidate and perpetuate the prevailing geopolitical pluralism on the map of Eurasia. This strategy will put a premium on political maneuvering and diplomatic manipulation, preventing the emergence of a hostile coalition that could challenge America's primacy, not to mention the remote possibility of any one state seeking to do so. By the medium term, the foregoing should lead to the emergence of strategically compatible partners which, prompted by American leadership, might shape a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system. In the long run, the foregoing could become the global core of genuinely shared political responsibility.
In the western periphery of Eurasia, the key players will continue to be France and Germany, and America's central goal should be to continue to expand the democratic European bridgehead. In the Far East, China is likely to be increasingly pivotal, and the United States will not have a Eurasian strategy unless a Sino-American political consensus is nurtured. [...]

Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Counter_Terrorism_Evaluation_...
The Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (CPEG), created shortly after the events of September 11, 2001, by Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy
The "Group"
In the April 28, 2004, New York Times, James Risen described the "Group" as "a two-man intelligence team [that] set up shop in a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries."
Risen wrote that "Feith created his team a few weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks to study links between terrorist groups and potential state sponsors around the world. F. Michael Maloof and his colleague, David Wurmser began work in October 2001 in a 15-by-15-foot space on the third floor of the Pentagon. The pair spent their days reading raw intelligence reports, many from the Central Intelligence Agency, in the Pentagon's classified computer system." The "Group" reported weekly to Steven A. Cambone, "then Mr. Feith's principal deputy."
Maloof said that the "men culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the C.I.A. ... They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of the year, as the rubble was being cleared from the World Trade Center and United States forces were fighting in Afghanistan, the men constructed a startling new picture of global terrorism."
"Old ethnic, religious and political divides between terrorist groups were breaking down, the two men warned, posing an ominous new threat. They saw alliances among a wide range of Islamic terrorists, and theorized about a convergence of Sunni and Shiite extremist groups and secular Arab governments. Their conclusions, delivered to senior Bush administration officials, connected Iraq and Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden." [...] Also see "A Small Intelligence Cell's Connections" graphics, NYT, April 27, 2004.

OBAMA & CO. APPROVE U.S. OCCUPATION EXTENSION
the SOFA document was not widely circulated, few lawmakers or experts were able to read it — including, it seemed, President-elect Barack Obama. Mr. Obama’s transition office released a statement that did not directly address specific parts of the agreement but welcomed an extension of the legal authorization for American troops in Iraq beyond the end of the year, when the United Nations Security Council resolution covering the American-led military operation expires. “President-elect Obama believes it is critical that a status-of-forces agreement that ensures sufficient protections for our men and women in uniform is reached before the end of the year,” the transition office’s chief spokeswoman for national security, Brooke Anderson, said. “We look forward to reviewing the final text of the agreement.”... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/world/middleeast/18iraq.html?th&emc=th

"It seems like more than some people think all these bombings are from the Americans.... it seems like everyone thinks so."
Iraqis Believe Americans Bombing Them to Promote SOFA
Anwar Ali
http://baghdadbureau.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/worse/
BAGHDAD–It seems to me that things are getting worse. This week I was at the scene of a bombing, reporting a news story about three explosions in Adhamiya... people are saying that the Americans are making the bombings to make Iraqis believe that it is very important for them to stay in Iraq, that they are still needed. The Americans say that when they withdraw from Iraq violence will increase. Is that a threat? You can read it as a threat, or you can read it as an expectation. Some Iraqis take it as a threat. Some people are asking: "Are the Americans punishing us with bombings because Iraq has refused to sign the SOFA?" [Status of Forces Agreement] ...Here that is a reality, people think it. I can see it in people’s eyes when they say it to me.

Campbell Robertson, NYT, Baghdad
"It is the SOFA," he said referring to the contentious security agreement being negotiated between the Americans and Iraqis. "This is all in the interest of the Americans. We are occupied." He said American troops were seen near the bomb only 10 minutes before it went off...the Americans said there would be violence if the SOFA, which sets the conditions for the Americans’ continued presence in Iraq after the end of the year, didn’t pass. It hasn’t passed so here’s the violence.... other colleagues in the bureau... had been hearing the exact same...

V.P. JOE BIDEN
Now in control, Democrats seek unified war strategy
By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
December 01, 2006
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0105/p01s02-woiq.html
WASHINGTON – After winning back control of the House and Senate largely on the basis of opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats are ramping up to find a bipartisan way out of it.... the leading exit strategies, more troops, fewer troops, partition of Iraq, and timetables for phased or immediate withdrawal... are tied to individual sponsors... leading Democrats say that any exit strategy must be bipartisan...Democrats don't want to own a war that many believe is already beyond winning - or to be tagged with the consequences of a botched exit.
Will the country's political divide be followed by a physical one? Possibly. Sen. Joseph Biden (D) of Delaware, incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has long advocated establishing Iraq as a loose federation, consisting of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish regions, and a Baghdad that belongs to all.

scrubbed: official Obama/Biden site silent on eliminating Iraq through tripartition
Joe Biden for President plan to divide the country: Direct U.S. military commanders develop a plan to withdraw and re-deploy almost all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2007 in or near Iraq http://www.joebiden.com/newscenter/page?id=0029

"let's divide Iraq and get out" proposal by Senator Biden
Democrats Fail To Show A Clear Plan for Iraq
11/3/2006
The Democrats' most visible pseudo-plan is the half-baked "let's divide Iraq and get out" proposal tabled by Senator Biden, who harbors presidential ambitions. Helping Mr. Biden with his plan are two neoconservative hawks with Democratic leanings: a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, and a former ambassador to Croatia and author of "The End of Iraq," Peter Galbraith. Two things unite the three men: a need to make a splash with more social engineering, combined, one fears, with little knowledge of the Middle East and Iraq. [...] http://www.nysun.com/article/42821

"...Under this plan Iraq would cease to exist..."
2002 U.S. Considers Dividing Iraq Into Three Separate States After Saddam Is Gone
FORECASTS & TRENDS, Oct 1, 2002 http://www.profutures.comarticle.php/91/%20
Stratfor.com http://www.stratfor.com/ reports that one of the leading long-term strategies being considered by US war planners is to divide Iraq into three separate regions. Under this plan Iraq would cease to exist. U.S. 2002 Pre-invasion Plan to Divide Iraq Into Three Separate States After Saddam by Gary D. Halbert www.profutures.com.

AMSI to the Iraqi Soldiers: Follow Barzan
Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI)
The Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) called on employees of all state Guard to follow the example of heroic soldier (Barzan Mohammad Abdullah al Hadidi), who declined to humiliation and took revenge for his dignity. This soldier who took lives of a number of brutal warmongering U.S. soldiers and did like what any honorable Iraqi did firing on the soldiers, killing four of them and wounding three others... http://www.uruknet.de/?p=48791

'Moderate Islam' in U.S. 'Counter-Insurgency'
U.S. Detention's Iraq Imams Work for $2 Billion U.S. Private Equity Fund
by Nick Mottern and Bill Rau
http://www.truthout.org/111408J
When Iraqi imams sit down with prisoners at a US detention center in Iraq to discuss Islam, they are working for a subsidiary of Global Innovation (GI) Partners LLP, a California- and London-based private equity firm that claims to have "$2 billion in capital under management."GI Partners sells, among other things: base maintenance for US military forces in Iraq; psychiatric care in the United Kingdom; in-room television and movies for hotels; wine, movie production studios and pubs. GI Partners also manages hundreds of millions of dollars for California and Oregon public employees pension funds and, according to the GI Partners Web site, pension funds in the Netherlands and the Middle East.

The imams join the GI Partners world when they go to work for REEP Inc., the GI Partners subsidiary hired by the US military to run Islamic discussion, civics and vocational programs in its Iraq detention centers. These centers now hold about 16,600 Iraqis and are under the command of Multi-National Force - Iraq's Task Force 134 (MNF-I/TF-134). REEP, which does business under the trade name Operational Support and Services (OSS), "advises DoD (Department of Defense) personnel on all local nationals (Imams and Social Workers) who may be hired to work in TF-134 programs," according to a TF-134 spokesman...

The Islamic Discussion Program operated by REEP - IDP in military parlance - employs about 60 Iraqi imams, according to a TF-134 spokesman. In a command briefing paper, TF-134 describes the Iraqi religious leaders working in its facilities as "certified, trusted and moderate Islamic clerics" offering detainees "a broader understanding of Islam." The imams work in a "counter-insurgency" program... seems to be similar to one run by the government of Saudi Arabia, described in the November 9, 2008, New York Times as intended to "deprogram Islamic extremists." ... TF-134 says...that a number of detainees, having been taught in detention to read, often discern another, more moderate interpretation of Islam than what they have been given by resistance leaders....

REEP was founded in 1993 by Kenneth Fortune, Lawrence P. Costa and Alan G. Prince, according to its incorporation papers, apparently to provide Russian language training for Westerners [agents]headed for Russia and Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union dissolved. Both Mr. Fortune and Mr. Costa had been members of the US Special Forces. Mr. Costa went on to open Worldwide Languages Resources two years later....REEP expanded to provide training in a number of languages for private and government entities, particularly the military, and, according to the REEP/OSS Web site, offers "intelligence support operations." A REEP Inc. Web site announced in August 2008, for example: "Counter Intelligence Agents - Urgently needed. - There is a unique opportunity to serve the United States as an interrogator and Counter Intelligence Agent as part of a rebuilding effort in Iraq." (This REEP Web site has been taken down since we asked a REEP official about the ad in August, and the REEP web address now transfers visitors to a combined REEP/OSS Web site.) "OSS is military-centric," says the REEP/OSS Web site. "OSS employs many military retirees, former military and military spouses form the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Army."... A REEP official declined to give specifics on the totality of the firm's work in Iraq, saying only that it employs about 800 people there, Iraqis and Americans, whose work is concentrated in Camp Victory, which houses the MNF-I headquarters, and the Green Zone, which includes offices of the Iraqi government and the US and other embassies....[...]

The invasion and occupation of Iraq: premeditated murderous aggression
By Ghali Hassan
The U.S. plan to divide Iraq—on ethnic and religious lines—and control its wealth was prepared several years before the war. It was no secret. ...
From the big lie of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) invented in Washington and London to the big lie of Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, the alleged Al-Qaeda mastermind, resort to deception is the art of Western powers.
Despite mounting evidence that Al-Zarqawi was killed in northern Iraq at the beginning of the war, his phantom is used to justify the ongoing atrocities in Iraq. "[Al-Zarqawi's] family, in Jordan, even held a ceremony after his death," said Jawad Al-Khalessi, a Muslim Imam in Baghdad. "Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi is thus a bogyman used by the Americans, an excuse to continue the occupation. He's simply an invention by the occupiers to divide the people," added Al-Khalessi.
The alleged presence of Al-Zarqawi has two important purposes for the U.S. Occupation: it provides a way to distort the image of the legitimate Iraqi Resistance; and it allows the occupying forces to present the war of Occupation as a war against Al-Qaeda, the created enemy. Al-Qaeda has replaced Communism...
"Al-Zarqawi is nothing more than a weapon of mass deception in the hands of the US army, which enables the latter to hide its 'black propaganda' activities, used to mount the population against the [Resistance]," said Mohamed Hassan, a former Ethiopian diplomat and Middle East specialist....

We know who is waging a war of terror on the defenceless people of Iraq. It isn't Al-Qaeda or Al-Zarqawi: it is the U.S. and Britain who are terrorising the Iraqi people on a daily basis. Iraq is not the frontline of terrorism; the Iraqi people are defending themselves and their country against terrorism.
Iraqi sources argued rightly that the U.S. forces and their collaborators are behind every major sectarian killing and kidnapping in the country. The promotion of Shiite-Sunni conflict is the creation of U.S. forces. The attacks on specific religious groups, such as on Shiites, were aimed at provoking sectarian strife among Iraqis. After every large killing of civilians, the U.S. and mainstream media are deliberately blaming the Iraqi Resistance for the violence. The main aim is to distort the image of the Resistance and weaken its popular support in Iraq and abroad...
The U.S. plan to divide Iraq—on ethnic and religious lines—and control its wealth was prepared several years before the war.[...]

Ensuring salaried 'sovereignty'
Imad Khadduri, Free Iraq
""It is somewhat curious," says Mr Chalabi, "that the intelligence service of a country which is sovereign – that no one really knows who is funding it."
In fact there are very few Iraqis who do not believe they have a very clear idea of who funds Iraq's secret police. Its director is General Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, who once led a failed coup against Saddam Hussein, and was handpicked by the CIA to run the new security organisation soon after the invasion of 2003. He is believed to have been answering to them ever since. (...)
It may be surprisingly "curious" for Al-Chalabi who knows all about the cosy relationship between some of the Iraqi security forces and the US. He himself brought the 'startup team' to Iraq, posing as his own militia. These were several hundred Iraqis trained by the US in Hungary before the war. Many incidents are attributed to Chalabi's 'own militia' acting outside the law and with impunity.... For the record, and to avoid Al-Chalabi any more embarrassing curiousities, there are other Bremer appointed high government officials that have been receiving their salaries, for more than five and a half years now, directly from the Americans and the CIA and not from the Iraqi government. They are:
* The above mentioned head of the "Iraqi" National Intelligene Service - Al-Shawani (see previous posting: The Genocide Option February 05, 2007
* The head of the "Iraqi" Central Bank - Sinan Al-Shibibi
* The presidential advisor - Mowafaq Al-Rubaie
* The head of the High Judicial Council
* The head of the Elections Committee
Which other "sovereign" state can boast such paid loyalties, but a SOFA one? (well, maybe Obama'a Rahm Israel Emanuel)
abutamam.blogspot.com/2008/11/ensuring-salaried-sovereignty.html

Targeting the “US Home Audience”
by Sunil K. Sharma
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June06/Sharma08.htm
...The Bush Administration has desperately tried to portray the Iraqi resistance as being to a significant extent a tool of “foreign” jihadists like Zarqawi, rather than the inevitable and legitimate, overwhelmingly homegrown resistance to US occupation and brutality that it in fact is. As one US intelligence agent commented: “We were basically paying up to $US10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq.” “Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one.”

Indeed, as the Washington Post reported on April 11, 2006, based on military documents it obtained, the US military had conducted a “propaganda campaign to magnify the role” of Zarqawi in Iraq. “The documents explicitly list the ‘U.S. Home Audience’ as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.” The Post went on to report that, “The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” One military briefing from 2004 cited by the Post states: “Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response.” The document listed three methods to be employed in this campaign: “Media operations,” “Special Ops (626)” (referring to Task Force 626, an elite US military unit assigned primarily to hunt down senior officials in Saddam Hussein's government) and “PSYOP”, the military term for propaganda work. Another briefing states that the “The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date,” in the view of Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, now a senior planner on the Central Command staff directing operations in Iraq and the Middle East.[...]

Al-Qaeda, Eternal Covert Operation: British "Terror" Incident latest Product of "War on Terror" Propaganda
by Larry Chin
Global Research, July 5, 2007
It is a well-established and deliberately unaddressed historical fact that the CIA created "radical Islam" and Islamic "terrorism" during the Cold War. It is also a documented fact that the US, its allies, and their intelligence agencies (CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, Britain’s MI-6, etc.) have -- from the 1970s to the present day -- continued to use and guide terrorist groups, including "Al-Qaeda," as intelligence and propaganda assets. "Islamic terrorism" is a manufactured weapon of Western geostrategy, serving Anglo-American interests.
Planned covert operations and false flag operations using "terrorists" in direct and indirect military-intelligence roles are of imperial design. Such operations (exemplified by 9/11), and their predictable propaganda results ("the war on terrorism") are now routine events...

Al-Qaeda: eternal intelligence asset
The central issue of our time cannot be overemphasized: extensive historical (but ignored and covered-up) documentation establishes the fact that Al-Qaeda and Islamic "terrorism" are the creation as well as key instruments of Anglo-American military-intelligence, and Western geostrategy, managed and guided by the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, Britain’s MI-6 and MI-5

A recently declassified French intelligence report [see below for excerpt] details the extent to which "Al-Qaeda" and Osama bin Laden ran operations for the CIA. "Al-Qaeda" has also served multinational oil interests. Washington’s support and management of the "Militant Islamic Network", including "Al-Qaeda," has been continuous since the Carter administration, through the Bosnia/Kosovo/Macedonia NATO wars of the Clinton administration, and in full flower beginning with and since 9/11. "Al-Qaeda" as well as Al-Qaeda "foreign fighter hordes" propaganda is a key component of the Pentagon’s Iraq occupation and pacification program. Also see: "Who is Osama bin Laden?" and "Al-Qaeda: the database"...
The eternal cycle of real and manufactured murder and destruction since 9/11, from the false flag operations to the genocidal wars justified by "terrorism," has escalated beyond the ability of criminal governments to control and manage. It is now difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish assets of planned government covert operations from "homegrown" resistance and opposition to Anglo-America policy.
The idea of "blowback," the notion that terrorist assets have turned on their sponsors, is, however, bogus: Western intelligence has not severed its ties to "terrorists." The true "root cause" of "Islamic terrorism" remains Western manipulation and political guidance of "terror."

Al-Qaeda propaganda
As pointed out by Michel Chossudovsky in "The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview", the continuing US-led "war on terrorism" agenda rests squarely upon the perpetuation of the "Al-Qaeda" deception and the 9/11 lie, the perpetual threat of a fabricated outside enemy.
"Terrorism," from violent attacks against civilians to bogus "resistance movements" (made up of sponsored "Islamic terrorists") to pervasive propaganda and disinformation, undermines public support for all political opposition to Anglo-American foreign policy, and creates divisions within antiwar and peace movements.
More importantly, absolute control of mass populations is made possible by fear. Based on Pavlovian reactions to every new "terror" incident, the fear of "terrorists" and bone-deep racism inspired by Bush-Cheney’s manufactured 9/11 false flag operation remain tragically potent.

The eternal cycle of real and manufactured murder and destruction since 9/11, from the false flag operations to the genocidal wars justified by "terrorism," has escalated beyond the ability of criminal governments to control and manage. It is now difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish assets of planned government covert operations from "homegrown" resistance and opposition to Anglo-America policy.

The imperial hand behind "Islamic terrorism"
Who or what is truly behind "Islamic terrorism" and "terror" catastrophes? Who or what created it, and funds, manages, nurtures and wields "terror"? Whose geostrategic interests have been exclusively served by "terror"? Whose political goals have been permanently destroyed? Cui bono? The answers lead directly t0 the highest levels in Washington, London, Tel Aviv, Islamabad, etc. "Islamic terrorism" is a covert operation and a geostrategy. "Al-Qaeda" is a military-intelligence asset and a leading brand of war propaganda....

Classified French DGSE intelligence report: 1995 Al Qaeda Training Camp passed from CIA Control to Bin Laden
Global Research, May 27, 2006
Report states that the CIA and Britain's MI-6 maintained effective control of an important Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan as late as 1995, fully two years after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, an attack that was launched with the help of Sudanese intelligence officers loyal to Osama Bin Laden. The CIA and MI6 permitted control of training operations at Darunta, an "Arab Afghan" base located near the camp of Osama Bin Laden and used to manufacture explosives and chemical weapons and train in their use, to pass to the control of Ibn Cheikh, a Libyan leader of Al Qaeda....

In 1995, James Woolsey left as CIA Director and was replaced by John Deutch. Deutch's deputy was George Tenet, who had served in Bill Clinton's National Security Council....CIA intelligence analyst Michael Scheuer formed the CIA's Bin Laden Unit in 1996...
Two significant items emerge from the DGSE { Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure) report. One is the fact that the CIA and MI6 were dealing with a Libyan Al Qaeda member at the same time Libyan leader Muammar el Qaddafi had declared war on Al Qaeda. Unlike the United States, Libya issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Bin Laden on March 16, 1998. With this treasure trove of proof of U.S. (and British) support for Al Qaeda, Qaddafi had the U.S. over the barrel. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bush administration now considers Qaddafi (once branded as terrorist number one) to be a good friend.
The other item is the training of Ahmed Ressam at Darunta. Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was charged with removing classified documents from the National Archives concerning the Ressam bombing plot. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2523

The Myth of al-Qaeda in Iraq
Andrew Tilghman
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0710.tilghman.html
... After a strike, the military rushes to point the finger at al-Qaeda, even when the actual evidence remains hazy and an alternative explanation. The press blasts such dubious conclusions back to American citizens and policy makers in Washington, and the incidents get tallied and quantified in official reports, cited by the military in briefings in Baghdad. The White House then takes the reports and crafts sound bites depicting al-Qaeda as the number one threat to peace and stability in Iraq ... When the White House singles out al-Qaeda in Iraq for special attention, the bureaucracy responds by creating procedures that hunt down more evidence of the organization. The more manpower assigned to focus on the group, the more evidence is uncovered that points to it lurking in every shadow. "When you have something that is really hot, the leaders start tasking everyone to look into that," explains W. Patrick Lang, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former head of Middle East intelligence analysis for the Department of Defense. "Whoever is at the top of the pyramid says, 'Make me a briefing showing what al-Qaeda in Iraq is doing,' and then the
decision maker says, 'Aha, I knew I was right.'"
With disproportionate resources dedicated to tracking AQI, the search has become a self-reinforcing loop. The Army has a Special Operations task force solely dedicated to tracking al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Defense Intelligence Agency tracks AQI through its Iraq office and its counterterrorism office. The result is more information culled, more PowerPoint slides created, and, ultimately, more attention drawn to AQI, which amplifies its significance in the minds of military and intelligence officers. "Once people look at everything through that lens, al-Qaeda is all they see," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who also worked at the U.S. State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. "It sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."..."Sometimes it's as simple as an anonymous tip so they will go out on an operation and whoever they roll up, we call them al-Qaeda," says Alex Rossmiller. "People can get labeled al-Qaeda anywhere along in the chain of events, and it's really hard to unlabel them." Even when the military backs off explicit statements that AQI is responsible, as with the Tal Afar truck bombings, the perception that an attack is the
work of al-Qaeda is rarely corrected. The result can be baffling for the troops working on the ground, who hear the leadership characterizing the conflict in Iraq in ways that do not necessarily match what they see in the dusty and danger-laden villages. Michael Zacchea, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Reserves who was deployed to Iraq, said he was sometimes skeptical of upper-level analysis emphasizing al-Qaeda in Iraq rather than the insurgency's local roots...
The view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority of those interviewed for this article believe that the military's AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such misgivings are common, why haven't doubts pricked the public debate? The reason is that alternate views
are running up against an echo chamber of powerful players all with an interest in hyping AQI's role... The press has also been complicit in inflating the threat of AQI. Because of the danger on the ground, reporters struggle to do the kind of comprehensive field reporting that's necessary to check facts and question statements from military spokespersons and Iraqi politicians. Today, for example, U.S. reporters rarely travel independently outside central Baghdad. Few, if any, insurgents have ever given interviews to Western reporters.... Today multiple Iraqi insurgent groups target U.S. forces, with the aim of driving out the occupation. But once our troops withdraw, most Sunni resistance fighters will have no impetus to launch strikes on American soil... no one has more incentive to overstate the threat of AQI than President Bush and those in the administration who argue for keeping a substantial military presence in Iraq. Insistent talk about AQI aims to place the Iraq War in the context of the broader war on terrorism. Pointing to al- Qaeda in Iraq helps the administration leverage Americans' fears about terrorism and residual anger over the attacks of September 11.... http://www.uruknet.de/?p=36103

"...the key to domination was to divide and conquer...."
Sectarianism and the nation
Galal Nassar
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/912/op3.htm
Prioritising affiliations of ethnicity and sect destroys the people.It is important to draw a distinction between following a particular school of Islamic theology and adhering to its rites and the tendency to turn that creed into a distinct and exclusivist culture and identity with prohibitions, attitudes and barriers that keep its adherents from assimilating into wider society and embracing a more overarching culture and identity. This distinction between religious commitment and sectarianism is not arbitrary. It is fundamental to our ability to understand and appreciate the threat of sectarianism to national unity. One adds to the nation's moral and cultural assets, the other diminishes them. The different schools of Islamic jurisprudence and their philosophical production greatly stimulated and enriched Islamic thought. Conversely, the exploitation of these theological outlooks and disciplines for political ends was disastrous. In their transformation from a means for understanding the fundamentals of faith and morals to a politicised cultural identity, the different schools of Islamic thought became wedges that drove Muslims apart ... the key to domination was to divide and conquer.

PALESTINE

Barack Obama links Israel peace plan to 1967 borders deal involving the recognition of Israel by the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders
...according to sources close to America’s president-elect. The proposal gives Israel an effective veto on the return of Arab refugees expelled in 1948 while requiring it to restore the Golan Heights to Syria and allow the Palestinians to establish a state capital in east Jerusalem.... A bipartisan group of senior foreign policy advisers urged Obama to give the Arab plan top priority immediately after his election victory. They included Lee Hamilton, the former co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Democrat former national security adviser. Brzezinski will give an address tomorrow at Chatham House, the international relations think tank, in London.
Brent Scowcroft, a Republican former national security adviser, joined in the appeal. He said last week that the Middle East was the most troublesome area in the world and that an early start to the Palestinian peace process was “a way to psychologically change the mood of the region”. ..
Dennis Ross, a senior Obama adviser and former Middle East envoy, and Daniel Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel, accompanied Obama on a visit to Israel last July. They also travelled to Ramallah, where Obama questioned Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, about the prospects for the Arab plan...
Kurtzer submitted a paper to Obama on the question before this month’s presidential elections. He argued that trying to reach bilateral peace agreements between Israel and individual countries in the Middle East, was a recipe for failure as the record of Bill Clinton and George W Bush showed. In contrast, the broader Arab plan “had a lot of appeal”. A leading Democratic expert on the Middle East said: “There’s not a lot of meat on the bones yet, but it offers recognition of Israel across the Arab world.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5162537.e...

Peres to Obama: To help Israel, be a great president for the U.S.
"When Obama asked me what can he do for Israel, I told him: Be a great president of the United States. Because a president of the United States, by definition, has to fight terror, has to fight pollution, has to fight poverty, has to fight wars." The president said there was no one in the world beside the United States who was leading that struggle. "America is not the policeman of the world. America is the country that tells other people to remain free." "What the United States wants, we want as well. They want peace in the Middle East - so do we. There is no [other] candidate to make peace in Middle East but Israel.
He said he believed that there was a chance for peace, one that would probably not include Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, but which might include the majority of Arab and Muslim countries....
"[Iran] is the only country in the world today that has imperial ambitions. Actually, they want to run the Middle East," Peres said.
"We don't really want to govern another people. It is against our tradition to occupy the lands of others, or to occupy the land where other people are living, which means that we are occupying the people as well as the land." http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1038121.html

Dershowitz: I helped keep Carter silent
By Eric Fingerhut
http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2008/11/13/1000960/ders
Shalom TV's press release on the interview:
ALAN DERSHOWITZ HELPED KEEP CARTER FROM SPEAKING AT DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
Shalom TV, America's national Jewish cable network, is available in more than twenty million homes nationwide.In an interview with Shalom TV, the Harvard Law School professor says he "pushed" Barack Obama "very hard to make that decision," Dershowitz said in an interview with Shalom TV. "Barack Obama had to make a choice between his Jewish supporters and his anti-Israel supporters like Jimmy Carter, and he did not choose Jimmy Carter. And that was an embarrassment for Jimmy Carter and a show of disrespect." "It was a good decision, a wise decision, a moral decision," Dershowitz added.[...]

Obama and Bush's Torture Policy
Reza Fiyouzat, Revolutionary Flowerpot Society
For any who harbor illusions of substantial 'change' with an Obama presidency, the excerpts below from an article from the Baltimore Sun should be enough for a speedy disposal of any such expectations. The article highlights some of the president-elect's transition team's personnel for 'intelligence transition process'. As you will read the resumes of key intelligence transition personnel, it should become clear that, even in an area as starkly over-the-top, in terms of the 'image' of the U.S., as the policy on torture, there shall be little if any noticeable change. I expect that any change will be one of tone alone, but substantively there will be a smooth continuation of the same old, same old... http://www.uruknet.de/?p=48888

'Israel tasked with spying on Americans'
The US entrusted Israeli intelligence services with spying on Americans after the 9/11 attacks, an intelligence journalist has revealed. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the White House launched a massive program to spy on millions of Americans, best-selling author James Bamford has claimed in his latest book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. National Security Agency (NSA) was tasked with monitoring 'billions of private hard-line, cell, and wireless telephone conversations; text, e-mail and instant Internet messages; Web-page histories, faxes, and computer hard drives'. The two largest American telecom companies AT&T and Verizon collaborated with the NSA, assisting the federal government in eavesdropping on their customers.
Bamford maintains that the bugging of the entire two networks, 'carrying billions of American communications every day', were handed to Verint and Narus, two Israeli corporations... conducting mass surveillance on both international and domestic communications 24/7'...[...].
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=75627&sectionid=3510203

TIP, the israeli project
http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/c.hsJPK0PIJpH/b.1189643/#background
TIP Fellows have the opportunity to develop what can become a long-term career building relationships with reporters and sources who are experts on the Middle East.
Since the media is the number ONE source of information on Israel this program can help reduce anti-Israel sentiment and enable people to understand Israel's current and future challenges more fully. The Israel Project Media Fellowship trains students on techniques designed to increase accurate and fair coverage of Israel and Jews in the news media. Our fellows learn about media coverage of Israel and the region, meet with top-level journalists and utilize what they learn practically in hands on writing assignments which will be published over the course of the fellowship. Media Fellows in Jerusalem and Washington will be involved in staffing and planning TIP speaking events in regions across the United States. In Israel, the Media Fellows will undertake in-depth research projects pertaining to current events in Israel and the Palestinian Authority.... Fellows build relationships with journalists (print, radio, television) based in Washington, DC and Jerusalem.
Past speakers who have addressed the TIP Media Fellows include Wolfe Blitzer of CNN, Alan Elsner of Reuters, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, Eleanor Clift of Newsweek and the McLaughlin Group, Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, Tony Blankly of the Washington Times, as well as strategic communications experts, Stan Greenberg PhD and Neil Newhouse....

AP’s Self-contradicting Settler-editors:
Staffed almost exclusively by Israeli nationals and Jewish immigrants living illegally as settlers in the Palestinian West Bank, The Associated Press’ West Jerusalem bureau is the global central hub for Israeli apologetics. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/aps-self-contradicting-settler-edi...

The Media Equation - How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power ...
There’s every reason to believe that President-elect Barack Obama will use his network of supporters not just to campaign, but to govern.
Blue State Digital consults with campaigns, non-profits and corporations to build robust, active online communities by providing and creating original technology and advising clients on strategy, such as blogging and raising money online. The four partners were nominated by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Gov. Howard Dean.
The partners of Blue State Digital - Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Clay Johnson, Joe Rospars and Ben Self - started the company immediately after working for Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004.... clients include Sen. Ted Kennedy's (D-Mass.) campaign, Gov. Tom Vilsack's (D-Iowa) PAC -- Heartland PAC, the AFL-CIO, the DNC and the Democratic Governors Association, John Kerry, AT&T, Wal-Mart Watch, Open Society Institute, America’s Voice, Communications Workers of America (CWA), Democratic National Committee, American Democracy Institute, Save Darfur Coalition, Hearst Publishing
All BSD Case Studies -- All the case studies below, in a single file. (10 pages, PDF, 672K, updated 4/29/08) http://www.bluestatedigital.com/pages/downloads/
http://www.bluestatedigital.com/2006/02/were_a_fast_50_company.html
http://www.bluestatedigital.com/pages/clients/
Our online community tools set the standard for constituent engagement and participatory content. This powerful suite of community content generation and social networking tools facilitate a range of real-time person-to-person activities, from user profiles to blogs to online forums, that will leave your site visitors with the feeling that your online community is richly alive with content and commitment, User profiles, photo galleries, and other social incentives
Joe Rospars
Founding Partner
A BSD founding partner, Joe has since January 2007 been on leave from BSD while serving as the New Media Director for Barack Obama's Presidential campaign, where he supervises a staff of technologists and strategists who continue to break records in online fundraising and grassroots mobilization.
Joe leads a team that has set a new standard for campaigns with a wide-ranging program that includes multimedia content, web and print design, text messaging, mass email, online advertising, and online organizing both on the campaign's own social network, My.BarackObama.com, and on sites like Facebook, MySpace and BlackPlanet.

Israeli Candidate Borrows a (Web) Page From Obama
In Israel, a Click Away From ‘Yes We Can’
By The New York Times
The campaign Web site of Benjamin Netanyahu, the conservative Likud leader running for prime minister of Israel, looks suspiciously like Barack Obama’s, and it’s no coincidence.
The Times’s Ethan Bronner and Noam Cohen report on the similarities between Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign Web site and the site of Barack Obama. Of the three main contenders for prime minister in February’s election, including Tzipi Livni of Kadima and Ehud Barak of Labor, Mr. Netanyahu is the most hawkish and the least interested in the focus on dialogue with adversaries that Mr. Obama made a centerpiece of his foreign policy platform. Mr. Netanyahu has said he would shut down the current negotiations with the Palestinian leadership.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/world/middleeast/15bibi.html?th&emc=th

A New Path For Israel?
John Spritzler
The problem for Israel's leaders today is that Israel's legitimacy in the eyes of the world is wearing very thin. Too many people know that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and virtual imprisonment of the people living in the Gaza Strip are inhumane and unjustifiable. There is a limit to how long such a brutal occupation can justify itself with phony claims about protecting Jews from anti-Semites. Up to now the extreme brutality of the occupation has directed public anger at the occupation itself, as opposed to the fundamental injustice of the ethnic cleansing that is the basis of Israel being a "Jewish" state. As long as public anger is deflected this way from seeing the wrongness of Israel's very existence as a "Jewish state," the Zionist project is not at great risk.... The natural extension of this is the two-state solution. What people like Olmert apparently hope to do is get the Palestinian refugees to give up on the right of return and to accept their exile to the West Bank or Gaza (and their lack of compensation for the land and other property stolen from them by the Zionists) in exchange for being ruled over by Palestinians instead of Israeli Jews...
...Dividing historic Palestine (from the River to the Sea) into a Jewish and a Palestinian state fits right in to the pattern of social control by divide-and-rule along ethnic lines that American and other elites have used in other parts of the world. The American government, for example, used NATO to break Yugoslavia up into ethnic pieces, used rainbow colored "revolutions" to break up the former Soviet Union along ethnic lines, and promoted Tibetan nationalism for decades to stir up discord within China. Britain's rulers split Ireland into Catholic and Protestant states, leading to ethnic violence known as "The Troubles." British rulers also played a key role in splitting India into a Hindu state (India) and a Muslim state (Pakistan), resulting in massive ethnic violence and a half million deaths. Vice-President-elect Joe Biden famously called for splitting Iraq into three loosely federated ethnic states, and this may indeed be one of the unstated aims of the American invasion of Iraq, since this is exactly what a former president of the powerful elite organization, the Council on Foreign Affairs, called for...The best solution for the Palestine/Israel conflict, of course, is not this divide-and-rule, but simple justice and fairness--a one-state solution in which all of Palestine, from the River to the Sea, is a single truly democratic state in which everybody is equal before the law regardless of their religion...http://www.uruknet.de/?p=48847

James Zogby and the Politics of Perception
Remi Kanazi
James Zogby isn't just an Arab American with an opinion. He is the president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a well known writer, and an esteemed leader within the Arab American community. Many non-Arab Americans highly regard his analysis and look to his articles as a resource to understand the Middle East. This is precisely why his latest article, "Rahm Emanuel and Arab Perceptions" is so disturbing. In the piece, Zogby tries to calm the fears of Arab American s about Barack Obama's first appointment, Rahm Emanuel, to White House Chief of Staff. Zogby expressed shock and dismay that his constituency, once euphoric over the election of Obama, was now sending him angry and cynical letters. Zogby described the emails and calls to his office as "troubled and troubling—because much of the reaction was based on misinformation and because of what the entire episode reveals about the larger political dynamic."... http://www.uruknet.de/?p=48879

The Real Goal of Israel’s Blockade
By Jonathan Cook
November 17, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- The latest tightening of Israel’s chokehold on Gaza – ending all supplies into the Strip for more than a week – has produced immediate and shocking consequences for Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants. The refusal to allow in fuel has forced the shutting down of Gaza’s only power station, creating a blackout that pushed Palestinians bearing candles on to the streets in protest last week. A water and sanitation crisis are expected to follow. Thursday, the United Nations announced it had run out of the food essentials it supplies to 750,000 desperately needy Gazans. “This has become a blockade against the United Nations itself,” a spokesman said. In a further blow, Israel’s large Bank Hapoalim said it would refuse all transactions with Gaza by the end of the month, effectively imposing a financial blockade on an economy dependent on the Israeli shekel. Other banks are planning to follow suit, forced into a corner by Israel’s declaration in Sept 2007 of Gaza as an “enemy entity”.

There are likely to be few witnesses to Gaza’s descent into a dark and hungry winter. In the past week, all journalists were refused access to Gaza, as were a group of senior European diplomats. Days earlier, dozens of academics and doctors due to attend a conference to assess the damage done to Gazans’ mental health were also turned back.

Israel has blamed the latest restrictions of aid and fuel to Gaza on Hamas’s violation of a five-month ceasefire by launching rockets out of the Strip. But Israel had a hand in shattering the agreement: as the world was distracted by the US presidential elections, the army invaded Gaza, killing six Palestinians and provoking the rocket fire. The humanitarian catastrophe gripping Gaza is largely unrelated to the latest tit-for-tat strikes between Hamas and Israel.
Nearly a year ago, Karen Koning AbuZayd, commissioner-general of the UN’s refugee agency, warned: “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution”. She blamed Gaza’s strangulation directly on Israel, but also cited the international community as accomplice. Together they began blocking aid in early 2006, following the election of Hamas to head the Palestinian Authority (PA). The US and Europe agreed to the measure on the principle that it would force the people of Gaza to rethink their support for Hamas. The logic was supposedly similar to the one that drove the sanctions applied to Iraq under Saddam Hussein through the 1990s: if Gaza’s civilians suffered enough, they would rise up against Hamas and install new leaders acceptable to Israel and the West.
As Ms AbuZayd said, that moment marked the beginning of the international community’s complicity in a policy of collective punishment of Gaza, despite the fact that the Fourth Geneva Convention classifies such treatment of civilians as a war crime.

The blockade has been pursued relentlessly since, even if the desired outcome has been no more achieved in Gaza than it was in Iraq. Instead, Hamas entrenched its control and cemented the Strip’s physical separation from the Fatah-dominated West Bank.
Far from reconsidering its policy, Israel’s leadership has responded by turning the screw ever tighter – to the point where Gazan society is now on the verge of collapse.
In truth, however, the growing catastrophe being unleashed on Gaza is only indirectly related to Hamas’s rise to power and the rocket attacks. Of more concern to Israel is what each of these developments represents: a refusal on the part of Gazans to abandon their resistance to Israel’s continuing occupation. Both provide Israel with a pretext for casting aside the protections offered to Gaza’s civilians under international law to make them submit.
Israel’s desire to seal off Gaza and terrorise its civilian population predates even Hamas’s election victory. It can be dated to Ariel Sharon’s disengagement of summer 2005, when Fatah’s rule of the PA was unchallenged.
An indication of the kind of isolation Mr Sharon preferred for Gaza was revealed shortly after the pull-out, in Dec 2005, when his officials first proposed cutting off electricity to the Strip. The policy was not implemented, the local media pointed out at the time, both because officials suspected the violation of international law would be rejected by other nations and because it was feared that such a move would damage Fatah’s chances of winning the elections the following month.
With the vote over, however, Israel had the excuse it needed... It recast its relationship with Gaza from one of occupation to one of hostile parties at war. A policy of collective punishment that was considered transparently illegal in late 2005 has today become Israel’s standard operating procedure.
Increasingly strident talk from officials, culminating in February in the deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai’s infamous remark about creating a “shoah”, or Holocaust, in Gaza, has been matched by Israeli measures. The military bombed Gaza’s electricity plant in June 2006, and has been incrementally cutting fuel supplies ever since.... All of these moves are designed with the same purpose in mind: persuading the world that Israel’s occupation of Gaza is over and that Israel can therefore ignore the laws of occupation and use unremitting force against Gaza.

Fronting for Paramilitaries
Holder, Chaquita and Colombia
MARIO A. MURILLO
As Barack Obama puts together his cabinet and eyes a slew of former Clinton officials for key staff positions, it is becoming ever more apparent that all those calls for change coming from progressive circles in the U.S. – and abroad - have fallen on deaf ears. Most striking, at least for the time being, is the soon to be named position of the top law enforcement official of the country.... disappointment in Obama's pick for AG should stem from the President-elect's strong words during the campaign in defense of human rights, particularly for those of workers in Colombia. On several occasions, including in the last presidential debate held at Hofstra University just three weeks before the election, the Democratic Candidate said he opposed the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement precisely on the grounds of the human rights violations carried out consistently against trade unionists in Colombia, and the ongoing impunity that has followed in most of those crimes... What is not being discussed too much, and was not even mentioned in today's New York Times report, is Holder's key role in defending Chiquita Brands International in a notorious case relating to the company's funneling money and weapons to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, AUC, the right-wing paramilitary organization on the U.S. State Department's own list of terrorist organizations.
In 2003, an Organization of American States report showed that Chiquita's subsidiary in Colombia, Banadex, had helped divert weapons and ammunition, including thousands of AK-47s, from Nicaraguan government stocks to the AUC. The AUC – very often in collaboration with units of the U.S.-trained Armed Forces - is responsible for hundreds of massacres of primarily peasants throughout the Colombian countryside, including in the banana-growing region of Urabá, where it is believed that at least 4,000 people were killed. Their systematic use of violence resulted in the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of poor Colombians, a disproportionate amount of those people being black or indigenous.
In 2004, Holder helped negotiate an agreement with the Justice Department for Chiquita that involved the fruit company's payment of "protection money" to the AUC, in direct violation of U.S. laws prohibiting this kind of transaction. In the agreement brokered by Holder, Chiquita officials pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a fine of $25 million, to be paid over a 5-year period. However, not one Chiquita official involved in the illegal transactions was forced to serve time for a crime that others have paid dearly for, mainly because they did not have the kind of legal backing that Holder's team provided. Holder continues to represent Chiquita in the civil action, which grew out of this criminal case.
This is directly connected to the Holder nomination because currently, there is a lawsuit underway from the families of 173 banana workers, who were killed by one of these paramilitary groups in Colombia. These family members do not buy into the argument, made by people like Holder and his Chiquita clients, that the company was forced to make these illegal payments to the AUC. Their claim is that Chiquita Brands International deliberately hired these armed thugs specifically to repress the rights of these workers, a tool used by other major multinationals operating in Colombian hot spots, including Coca Cola, BP, and the Drummond Corporation. http://www.counterpunch.org/murillo11192008.html

DEAR SANTA: An Embarrassment Of Laundry Lists
http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/2008/11/embarrassment-of-laundry-lists...
I've been feeling a bit embarrassed at the sudden proliferation of laundry lists in the wake of the election: open "Dear Santa" letters to our new president-elect, from people who ought to know better. It's as if they had never seen politics before. Among writers I still read without knowing why, Bob Parry has been working on one extreme, while Bob Kohler works the other. Parry has been writing in intricate detail about how, in 1993, the incoming Clinton administration refused to hold the outgoing Bush administration accountable for the crimes they committed in office. Parry urges Obama not to make the same "mistake":

Barack Obama seeks a new era of bipartisanship, but he should take heed of what happened to the last Democrat in the White House – Bill Clinton – in 1993 when he sought to appease Republicans by shelving pending investigations into Reagan-Bush-I-era wrongdoing and hoped for some reciprocity. Instead the Republicans pocketed the Democratic concessions and pressed ahead with possibly the most partisan assault ever directed against a sitting President. The war on Clinton included attacks on his past life in Arkansas, on his wife Hillary, on personnel decisions at the White House, and on key members of his administration.

And so on... and on and on ... until he reaches this conclusion:

Now ... with Barack Obama’s victory and with solid Democratic majorities again in the House and Senate – the Democrats are back to a spot very similar to where they were at the start of Bill Clinton’s presidency. They have all the power they need to initiate serious investigations into the widespread criminality of George W. Bush’s presidency, from torture and other war crimes to war profiteering and other lucrative influence peddling. But President-elect Obama is receiving nearly the identical advice that greeted Bill Clinton after his election 16 years ago: In the name of bipartisanship, let bygones be bygones.

The problem here, I must point out, is that all through the campaign, Barack Obama made it very clear that he intends to let bygones be bygones. And all through the campaign, Bob Parry supported him anyway. Parry even went so far as to write a condescending column trying to dissuade those who would vote for third-party candidates.Obama needed your vote, even if your state was safely in his column already, according to Parry, so his popular vote total would give his administration more legitimacy. Or something. The logic is stunning: Vote for a candidate who rejects your position; then once he's in office you can pressure him to support the position he's already rejected.

At the other tactical extreme, Bob Kohler has a list of lists:

The ACLU, for instance, has put forth a transition plan titled: “Ask President-elect Obama to restore the America we believe in.” On day one, it calls on the new president to stop torture, close Guantanamo, restore the rule of law for detainees and end the practice of extraordinary rendition.

Beyond this, the organization has dozens of recommendations to be accomplished during the first 100 days and first year: stop warrantless spying; implement sensible and humane policies toward immigrants, prisoners and many other groups; ban all workplace discrimination against sexual minorities by the federal government and its contractors; and much more.

Jonathan Steele, in an article in The Guardian (U.K.) on Nov. 7, headlined “Now he must declare that the war on terror is over,” wrote: “Obama’s preference for diplomacy can help to forge new, individual relationships with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Paul Krugman, in the New York Times on Nov. 7, wrote: “Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.”

My friend Kathy Kelly, a peace activist for decades, is part of a campaign called Camp Hope: Countdown to Change, which plans to maintain a presence in Obama’s Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park from Jan. 1 to Jan. 19 (Martin Luther King Day), urging him to make a number of actions, which are “early steps to more profound policy changes.”

These include: reduction and eventual withdrawal of military forces from Iraq and immediate cessation of offensive combat operations; a 90-day moratorium on all housing foreclosures; submitting the Kyoto Protocol to Congress for ratification; and taking all nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert and beginning negotiations with other leaders of nuclear weapon states to reduce and eliminate all nuclear weapons.

Jonathan Steele can write all he likes in The Guardian about how Obama must declare the War on Terror over; he can write anything at all about what Obama must do; but what does Obama say about the War on Terror?

He has already pledged allegiance to Israel, the clearest beneficiary of the War on Terror and the country that would least like to see it stopped. He has said, as in his highly praised speech in Philadelphia, that our problems in the area are caused by the "perverse and hateful ideologies of Islam". Are these the words, do they represent the thoughts, of a man who is ready to declare the War on Terror over.

President-elect Obama accepted the overall framework of a "Global War on Terror" during his presidential campaign. This "war" lies at the heart of the Bush administration's fantasy world of war that has set all-too-real expanses of the planet aflame. Its dangers were further highlighted this week by the New York Times, which revealed that secret orders in the spring of 2004 gave the U.S. military "new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States."....

We won't know the full cast of characters to come until the president-elect makes the necessary announcements or has a national security press conference with a similar line-up behind him. But it's rumored that Robert Gates, a symbol of continuity from both Bush eras, might be kept on as secretary of defense, a Republican senator like Richard Lugar of Indiana or, more interestingly, retiring Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel might be appointed to the post. Of course, many Clintonistas are sure to be in this line-up, too. In addition, among the essential cast of characters will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Michael Mullen, and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, both late Bush appointees... both interested in a military-plus approach to the Afghan and Iraq wars..... What Obama looks to have are custodians and bureaucrats of empire... not a cast of characters fit for reshaping American policy in a new world of disorder and unraveling economies, not a crew ready to break new ground and cede much old ground on this still American-garrisoned planet of ours.

The ACLU agenda for transition is lovely; but who is the ACLU to set an agenda? Where was Barack Obama when "the America we believe in" was being plundered? Ah, yes! He was in the Senate, voting for some of Bush's most atrocious "political victories"...with a president who has hinted at wanting to use them against Iran...All these questions are far too difficult, aren't they? We'd better ignore them.

In a recent sprawling piece, Tom Englehardt summarizes Obama's rejection of truth, common sense, and progress:
Winning an election with an antiwar label, Obama has promised -- kinda -- to end the American war there and bring the troops -- sorta, mostly -- home. But even after his planned 16-month withdrawal of U.S. "combat brigades," which may not be welcomed by his commanders in the field, including former Iraq commander, now Centcom Commander David Petraeus, there are still plenty of combative non-combat forces, which will be labeled "residual" and left behind to fight "al-Qaeda." Then, there are all those "advisors" still there to train Iraqi forces, the guards for the giant bases the Bush administration built in the country, the many thousands of armed private security contractors from companies like Blackwater, and of course, the 1,000 "diplomats" who are to staff the newly opened U.S. embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone, possibly the largest embassy on the planet. Hmmmm.

And while the new president turns to domestic matters, it's quite possible that significant parts of his foreign policy could be left to the oversight of Vice President Joe Biden who, in case anyone has forgotten, proposed a plan for Iraq back in 2007 so filled with imperial hubris that it still startles. In a Caesarian moment, he recommended that the U.S. -- not Iraqis -- functionally divide the country into three parts. Although he preferred to call it a "federal system," it was, for all intents and purposes, a de facto partition plan.

If Iraq remains a sorry tale of American destruction and dysfunction without, as yet, a discernable end in sight, Afghanistan may prove Iraq squared. And there, candidate Obama expressed no desire to wind the war down and withdraw American troops. Quite the opposite, during the election campaign he plunked hard for escalation, something our NATO allies are sure not to be too enthusiastic about. According to the Obama plan, many more American troops (if available, itself an open question) are to be poured into the country in what would essentially be a massive "surge strategy" by yet another occupant of the Oval Office....What to do? As Englehardt puts it, "Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart"....

It's a natural reaction -- and certainly a commonplace media reaction at the moment -- to want to give Barack Obama a "chance." Back off those critical comments, people now say. Fair's fair. Give the President-elect a little "breathing space." After all, the election is barely over, he's not even in office, he hasn't had his first 100 days, and already the criticism has begun. But those who say this don't understand Washington -- or, in the case of various media figures and pundits, perhaps understand it all too well. It's not difficult to understand:

When the telecoms wanted legal immunity for their lawbreaking activities, Barack Obama said he would try to prevent that from happening. Then he voted for a law that made it happen.
When the big banks wanted $700 billion of your money, with public opinion running 100-to-1 against the idea, Barack Obama voted for the bill that gave that money away. He needed your support then; he slapped you across the head. You voted for him anyway. Those bills were always going to pass. They didn't need his vote. He could have voted against them, as a token gesture. But he didn't. He didn't even pretend to be on your side, even though he needed your support so very much. And you gave it to him anyway.
And now ... he doesn't need you anymore. He's already made his intentions as clear as day ... and yet here you come with your Dear Santa letters full of free advice -- advice your man has already rejected. If he didn't even bother pretending to be serious when he needed your support, what makes you think he'll listen now, when he doesn't need you at all?

U.S. MILITARY PERMANENTLY DEPLOYED IN 'THE HOMELAND'
What Is NorthCom Up To?
NorthCom has been in the news lately, after the Pentagon designated to it a battle-tested fighting unit from the war on Iraq. This appears to be against the law, according to the ACLU, since the army isn’t supposed to be patrolling our own country.[digest: Northcom is now permanently deployed in U.S., 'against the Posse Comitatus law' or not!]
NorthCom and NORAD are conducting a joint exercise called “Vigilant Shield ’09.” The focus will be on “homeland defense and civil support,” a NorthCom press release states. From November 12-18, it will be testing a “synchronized response of federal, state, local and international partners in preparation for homeland defense, homeland security, and civil support missions in the United States and abroad.”
NorthCom is short for the Pentagon’s Northern Command. President Bush created it in October 2002. (The Southern Command, or SouthCom, covers Latin America. Central Command, or CentCom, covers Iraq and Afghanistan, the new AfriCom...
Vigilant Shield ’09 “will include scenarios to achieve exercise objectives within the maritime, aerospace, ballistic missile defense, cyber, consequence management, strategic communications, and counter terrorism domains,” the press release states. NorthCom’s press release also says that other participants in the exercise include the U.S. Strategic Command’s “Global Lightning 09,” which is a plan to use nuclear weapons in a surprise attack.
The Pentagon’s “Bulwark Defender 09” is also involved in the exercise, and it is a cyberspace protection outfit of the Pentagon.
Something called the “Canada Command DETERMINED DRAGON” also is participating, as is the California National Guard and California’s “Golden Guardian.”

California’s involvement appears to center around planning for a catastrophic earthquake. “Under the leadership of Governor Schwarzenegger and direction of his Office of Homeland Security, the nation’s largest state sponsored emergency exercise will take place November 13-18,” a press release from the governor’s office states. “Golden Guardian 2008 tests California’s capability to respond and recover during a major catastrophic earthquake. The Golden Guardian 2008 full-scale exercise scenario focuses on a simulated, catastrophic 7.8 magnitude earthquake along the southern portion of the San Andreas Fault.”
Vigilant Shield ’08. Last year’s exercise included “the simulated detonation of three nuclear dispersal devices.” The fact sheet stressed the need to support a “civilian-led response” and to “exercise defense support of civil authorities,” including involvement in “critical infrastructure protection events” and coordinating “Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection activities.”[...]
http://www.progressive.org/mag/wx111208.html

Operation Sentinel: The High-Tech Police State Takes Shape
By Tom Burghardt
http://www.inteldaily.com/print.php?a=7929
(The Intelligence Daily) -- Operation Sentinel, a new program unveiled by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), would encircle Manhattan with thousands of surveillance cameras that photograph every car or truck entering and exiting the city across its network of bridges and tunnels. Information captured by this intrusive project would be stored in a huge database ...
("NYCLU: NYPD Plan to Track Millions of Law-Abiding People is an Assault on Privacy Rights," New York Civil Liberties Union, August 12, 2008)

...a high-tech surveillance system under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called "Combat Zones That See" (CTS)....was predicated on the notion that once thousands of digital CCTV networks were installed across occupied or "homeland" cities, CTS would provide occupying troops--or police--with "motion-pattern analysis across whole city scales." Based on complex algorithms linked to the numeric recognition of license plate numbers and scanned-in human profiles, CTS would furnish troops--or cops--real-time, "situational awareness" of the "battlespace." Despite repeated attempts by NYCLU to obtain information on Operation Sentinel, NYPD and DHS have refused to provide any information about their mega-surveillance system. While all traces of CTS disappeared from DARPA's website...
("City Would Photograph Every Vehicle Entering Manhattan and Sniff Out Radiation," The New York Times, August 12, 2008)...
The department currently deploys portable radiation vehicles known as TRACS, or Tactical Radiation Acquisition and Characterization System, which the Times claims can detect radiological agents such as cesium and cobalt, and differentiate "between dangerous ones and ones used in products like smoke detectors or medical devices.... another system under development, the "Advanced Spectroscopic Portal" or ASP, allegedly a more "advanced" system than those currently used, failed, as do today's systems, to differentiate between the components of a radiological dirty bomb and natural radiation emitters such as kitty litter, ceramics and bananas!...the ASP program is already tens of millions of dollars above the original estimate provided by Raytheon, other contractors and DHS.... Operation Sentinel's real purpose is to enhance an already-formidable surveillance state....

Israeli high-tech companies work for U.S.
U.S. law enforcement wiretaps authorized by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)
[Isreali] Amdocs provides billing and directory assistance for most American phone companies, Comverse Infosys handles telephone tapping equipment for US law enforcement, Odigo runs "Instant Message" systems on computers. All three are closely tied to the Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force, which is massively funded by u.s. Most firewalls on US corporate and government computer systems are provided by Israeli Checkpoint Systems. Odigo's offices near the World Trade Towers allegedly received two hour advance warning of the 911attacks...

"From the depth of our heart --  thanks to The Israeli Defense Forces"
Microsoft logo under the text with the Israeli national flag in the  background.

Microsoft CEO: "Our company almost as Israeli as American"
Microsoft's Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, on a visit to Israel, said Wednesday that Microsoft is an Israeli company almost as much as it is American.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the American software giant's new research and development center in Herzliya, Ballmer said that the proportion of Microsoft employees per capita in Israel is almost similar to that in the United States. Ballmer noted that the IT sector in Israel is very advanced, and that Tel Aviv is a lot like the Silicon Valley. He said he knows very few places around the world that offer such a variety of startup opportunities, and that his company intends to purchase more Israeli startup companies... the CEO said Microsoft is not looking to buy all of Yahoo! but is currently engaging in negotiations about other types of deals with the U.S. No. 2 search engine.
Related articles:
# Microsoft Israel creating new R&D center in Herzliya
# Yahoo! President Susan Decker takes interest in Israel
# Internet giant Yahoo! to follow rivals Google, Microsoft to Israel

timely 'information' with hi-tech new regime's plans for massive tech-'communications'
Teenagers' Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing
Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to the MacArthur Foundation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/us/20internet.html?th&emc=th

THE INTERNET INTIFADA
Benjamin Hartman: GA Magazine
http://www.creative-i.info/?p=2159
The struggle for the Holy Land may be the world’s most ancient conflict. But in one respect, at least, the weapons and the battleground could not be more cutting-edge. This is the realm of the ‘virtual intifada,’ digital combat played out in cyberspace by intensely partisan pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists-cum-hackers, or in the vernacular of the Information Age, ‘hacktivists.’ One incarnation of this online political activism has hitched its battlewagon to the stars of social networking, taking advantage of the runaway popularity of sites like Facebook and MySpace.
At the forefront of pro-Israel hacktivists are the shock troops organized as the Jewish Internet Defense Force, a group best known for its activities against anti-Israel groups on Facebook, the social networking colossus whose members may establish and join network groups based on a wide variety of interests. The JIDF made headlines in August by executing a takeover of a popular anti-Zionist Facebook group called ‘Israel is not a country! Please Facebook delete it.’
The JIDF (www.thejidf.org) describes itself as a ‘collective of activists and a non-violent protest group with over 5,000 members and supporters, which seeks in its own way to counter anti-Semitic content [that] promotes terrorism online in places including (but not limited to) Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Earth.’
Apart from its Facebook operations, which the JIDF calls only a small percentage of its activities, the group publishes online ‘guides’ detailing how users can identify sites that promote hateful content. JIDF members also edit content on Wikipedia entries and monitor YouTube and Google Earth. [...]

In Transition, Tangle of Ties to Lobbying
President-elect Barack Obama has imposed strict conflict-of-interest restrictions, but there are dozens of former lobbyists on his transition team.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15transition.html?th&emc=t...

At least one official initially involved in the transition appears to have been reassigned because of concern about his lobbying or legal work. Henry Rivera, a former Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communication Commission who was involved in planning for the agency’s transition, has dropped out of that role because he had represented clients on communications policy in the last year, the newsletter Communications Daily reported Friday. Instead, on the list that was made public on Friday, Mr. Rivera was listed on the team handling science, technology, space and the arts. The rules permit people who have lobbied in one area to join an Obama transition team in another. (With Mr. Rivera is Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of an advocacy group for Internet companies.) Representatives of the transition team declined to comment on the assignment, and Mr. Rivera did not return a phone call seeking comment.....
“While these rules disqualify many well-qualified professionals from participating in the transition as a result, they also put in place the right safeguards to prevent any potential conflicts of interest,” Ms. Cutter said.
Some appear to skirt the edges of the ban on working in areas of the transition where they have recently lobbied. Handling some Interior Department issues is Keith Harper, who lobbied earlier this year for Native American tribes. Overseeing the Consumer Products Safety Commission is Pamela Gilbert, a former executive director of the agency who as recently as two years ago lobbied for a consumer advocacy group. Within the last year she has lobbied for the company Barr Laboratories, for an investor group, and for an antitrust enforcement group.

Among the group handling the Justice Department and civil rights areas of the transition is Theodore Shaw, a litigator for an arm of the N.A.A.C.P. He has registered as a lobbyist for the group in the past, but N.A.A.C.P. officials say he has not lobbied in the past 12 months.

David J. Hayes, part of the 12-member group overseeing the transition and co-head of the team handling the areas of energy and natural resources, is the chairman of the environmental practice at the law and lobbying firm Latham & Watkins. He was personally registered as a lobbyist as recently as 2006, for clients including San Diego Gas and Electric.

Sally Katzen, another member of the supervisory group who is also on teams for the office of the president and government operations, was registered last year to lobby for the pharmaceutical company Amgen on Medicare reimbursements. Louisa Terrell, another member of the top working group, is on leave from the public policy office of the Internet company Yahoo! Tom Wheeler, another of the 12, is on leave from a firm that invests in technology companies and before 2004 lobbied for the cable television and wireless industries.

John L. White, a former Clinton official charged with overseeing the new Defense Department, is a partner in a firm that invests in defense contractors. Michael Warren, charged with overseeing Treasury, is chief operating officer of a firm that lobbies for clients including the U.S.-India Business Council.

Several of the officials have ties to Fannie Mae, the government-backed mortgage firm whose implosion this fall contributed to the financial meltdown. Thomas Donilon, overseeing the State Department, is a partner in the law and lobbying firm O’Melveny and Myers who until three years ago lobbied for Fannie Mae. Wendy R. Sherman, the other official charged with reviewing the State Department, once headed Fannie Mae’s charitable foundation.

Even Mr. Lu, the transition’s executive director charged with policing potential conflicts of interests, may have his own appearance problems. His wife, Kathryn Thomson, is a lawyer who represents corporate clients dealing with federal environmental regulations, while his older brother, Curtis Lu, is a top lawyer for Fannie Mae. (Such family connections may not be disqualifying conflicts depending on the nature of the transition job, ethics lawyers said.)

Mr. Lu has his work cut out for him in deciding which apparent conflicts may be of real concern, said Robert Walker, a Washington lawyer and former staff director of the Senate Ethics Committee. “I don’t think it is the brightest of bright lines, and there is going to be a lot of time spent thinking about just where that line is,” Mr. Walker said.

The people involved in the transition teams assigned to each federal department and agency have begun meeting with their current staff to collect information on budgets, pending issues and personnel matters. For now, the advisers assigned to each agency report back to the central 12-person working group, which coordinates the efforts.

The vast majority involved are second-tier officials of the Clinton administration, eager to help another Democrat take control of the White House. With the exception of a few academics, almost all of them spent the intervening years in the private sector, usually capitalizing on the connections and expertise they developed in the Clinton years.

For example, Sandy Berger, the Clinton national security adviser, founded Stonebridge International, a consulting and lobbying firm focused on helping clients resolve government issues here and overseas.

Mr. Berger took with him Mr. Warren, the former executive director of the president’s economic council who became chief operating officer of Stonebridge and has now become a major contributor to the transition in the pivotal areas of the Treasury Department and economic policy. Although not a registered lobbyist, Mr. Warren helped manage Stonebridge while it lobbied the government for clients including the U.S.-India Business Council within the last year as well as Dynergy International, Airbus and Conoco in earlier years. (More of Stonebridge’s business involves using government expertise and connections to help corporate clients abroad.)

Some transition officials now work at firms that do business with the agencies they are examining. John O. Brennan, a former Central Intelligence Agency official working on its transition, is president and chief executive of the Analysis Corporation, an intelligence contractor.

On the NASA review board, Lori Garver is now president of a strategic consulting company, Capital Space LLC, and previously worked for the aerospace company DFI International.

Among the transition officials charged with reviewing the Securities and Exchange Commission — likely to come under significant scrutiny amid the financial meltdown — is Mozelle Thompson, who runs a legal and policy consulting business for companies including Facebook.com. One name on the transition list comes unencumbered by potential conflicts but instead by bad luck. Jami Miscik, leading a review of American intelligence agencies, was the head of intelligence analysis at the Central Intelligence Agency during its biggest embarrassment: the botched assessments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Then she moved on to become a senior official managing risks in emerging markets for the investment bank Lehman Brothers, until its collapse this fall.