Saturday, November 06, 2010

War is hell

You can't judge a war by the atrocities committed fighting it.

By Jonathan Zimmerman
Los Angeles Times
November 3, 2010

Most Americans regard World War II as a "just war" because the United States helped stem the vicious tide of global fascism. But during that war, American soldiers dismembered Japanese corpses and collected their body parts as souvenirs.

A contradiction? Not really. You can commit war crimes on behalf of a just war just as easily as an unjust one.

But you wouldn't know that by reading comments about five U.S. soldiers accused of civilian murders this year in Afghanistan.

According to news reports, the soldiers also cut off fingers from corpses and posed in photographs with them. When the Army announced in October that it would court-martial one of the soldiers, Spc. Jeremy Morlock, reaction from antiwar activists was quick and predictable: The war was a mistake all along, and our military crimes prove it.

Meanwhile, Army officials moved to keep photographs of the atrocities out of the public eye. If the photos go viral, officials say, people around the world will turn against America's struggle in Afghanistan.

Just like the antiwar crowd, ironically, the Army is assuming that war crimes will become a metaphor for the war itself.

They're both wrong. The soldiers' alleged acts are horrible, of course, and the military should prosecute the charges to the fullest. But these crimes don't speak to the larger purpose and validity of the war in Afghanistan, any more than American atrocities during WW II reflected on the justice of our campaign against the Japanese.

Let's leave aside the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the U.S. justified as a way to prevent further carnage. On the battlefield, American soldiers routinely killed Japanese civilians and mutilated Japanese bodies. Yes, our enemies committed all kinds of atrocities during the war. But so did we.

Americans collected bones, scalps and skulls from the Japanese dead or near-dead. None of this was a secret either. In 1944, Life magazine published a full-page photograph of an attractive young woman posing with a Japanese skull. " Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her," the caption declared.

But skulls were difficult to carry and — especially — to prepare: Soldiers first had to remove the flesh from the severed head, either by boiling the head or by leaving it out for ants to eat. So they preferred to collect ears, which were tidy and small.

"The other night Stanley emptied his pockets of 'souvenirs' — eleven ears from dead Japs," read a 1943 article in a Marine newspaper. "It was not disgusting, as it would be from the civilian point of view."

Actually, most civilians seemed fine with the practice. That same year, a Baltimore newspaper reported that a local mother had asked authorities to allow her son to send her an ear he had cut off a Japanese soldier. She wanted to nail it to her door, she said, so everyone could see it.

Most of all, some American servicemen collected gold teeth. One Marine boasted of collecting 17 teeth, the last from a Japanese soldier who was still moving his hands. Another Marine slit a wounded Japanese's cheeks open and carved out his teeth with a knife while the victim thrashed on the ground.

Although some Americans did object to these atrocities at the time, it would be much later before WW II veterans expressed regret for them. In a 1981 memoir, American biologist E.B. Sledge recalled watching American soldiers cut off a hand from a dead Japanese, urinate into the mouth of another corpse and shoot an old woman who was "just an old gook," as one of Sledge's comrades told him. "The fierce struggle for survival eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all," Sledge wrote.

Significantly, though, Sledge continued to believe in the larger purpose of the war. The Japanese had attacked the United States and conquered much of East Asia, and they had to be stopped. Some U.S. military men had committed monstrous acts, to be sure, but America's larger military cause remained just.

Is the cause in Afghanistan also just? I really don't know. But here's what I do know: The alleged crimes committed by Morlock and his platoon don't speak to the answer. Atrocities happen in almost every war, just and unjust alike. So it's far too simple — and a bit dishonest — to claim that the crimes of this war make the war itself criminal.

But it's also dishonest for military officials to keep hiding the photographs of the atrocities, which should be released as soon as possible. If the war is just, it remains so regardless of what these soldiers did; and if it isn't, we should pull up stakes and come home.

The photos will also remind us how far we've come since WW II, as a people and as a nation. Back then, most Americans accepted or even celebrated wartime mutilations; today, we're mortified by them. But we shouldn't let the atrocities color our overall view of the war, no matter how hard it is to look at them. That's the easy way out.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."

EGYPT: Will independents challenge Hosni Mubarak's party stalwarts again?

Michele Dunne in Washington and Amr Hamzawy in Beirut and Cairo
Los Angeles Times
November 5, 2010 | 12:57 pm

Photo: A plainclothes policeman pushes down a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood opposition group during a scuffle in Fayoum, about 62 miles from Cairo, on Nov. 3. Police detained some of the candidates nominated by the Muslim Brotherhood members as they tried to nominate them for the upcoming parliamentary elections.Credit: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Among the intriguing scenes ahead of Egypt’s Nov. 28 parliamentary elections have been the throngs of would-be candidates vying for nominations from the ruling National Democratic Party, or NDP. More than 3,000 members have reportedly expressed interest in the 444 seats open to both genders, a ratio of more than 6 to 1. The 64 women’s seats are even more hotly contested, with some 1,000 women reportedly applying — 15 for every seat.

Carnegie logo While these numbers are no doubt encouraging to the NDP, the party still faces a major challenge: how to avoid a repeat of the 2000 and 2005 elections, when hundreds of its members ran against NDP candidates — and won — as independents. Although those members later returned to the NDP, their willingness to split from the party initially led to doubts about its strength, a situation NDP leaders do not want to repeat.

NDP candidates this year seem to be applying in such large numbers for personal and political reasons, as well as procedural ones.

On a personal level, parliamentary membership conveys significant prestige and presents an opportunity to make contacts that might be useful in business or professional advancement. If a potential member of parliament is interested in obtaining services or other benefits for his or her constituents, membership in the ruling party (as opposed to the opposition) also offers advantages.

On a functional level, the process initiated by Organizational Affairs Secretary Ahmad Ezz to build a broad network of support for Gamal Mubarak has likely created the impression that new opportunities for advancement exist within the party.

Even with new procedures, however, it is unclear whether the party can move beyond the embarrassment of the 2000 and 2005 elections, when it was beaten by its own renegade members and forced to integrate them back into the party to achieve the desired two-thirds parliamentary majority. In 2000, only 145 NDP candidates won seats, compared with the 166 members who quit the party to run as independents, defeated the NDP candidates, and then rejoined. In 2005, 170 NDP candidates won compared with 218 independents, all of whom rejoined the party.

The issue of independent candidates has many implications for the NDP. First, it indicates a serious failure of cohesion and discipline within the party. Second, it suggests that either the NDP leadership does not really know who is electable or, perhaps more accurately, that electability is not a major consideration in candidate selection and that loyalty to a certain faction within the party might be much more important. Third, the phenomenon of independents further damages the party’s image in the eyes of many Egyptians and adds to widespread doubts about the party.

After the 2005 election, the party sought to change the country’s election laws to make it harder for independent candidates to run in elections, or at least to reduce the number of seats available to independent candidates. But NDP members elected as independents made clear they would not support the measure in parliament — probably because they had little faith that NDP leaders would nominate them in future elections. Thus, an initiative by the NDP to strengthen political parties failed because of weakness within the party itself.

This month’s parliamentary elections — both the outcome of competition between NDP candidates and independents, and the leadership’s handling of renegade members afterward — will show how much the NDP has progressed since 2005, if at all, toward becoming more like a political party than a patronage distribution network.

-- Michele Dunne in Washington and Amr Hamzawy in Beirut and Cairo

Abducted in Egypt

The Washington Post
Saturday, November 6, 2010; A12

LAST APRIL, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak disregarded appeals from the Obama administration and violated his own public promises by renewing the "emergency law" that for decades has allowed security forces to prevent public demonstrations, break up political meetings, close media outlets and arrest opposition activists without charge. When the administration protested, Egyptian officials assured it that the law henceforth would be applied only in terrorism and drug cases. The White House cited that pledge in a recent summary of its human rights accomplishments.

Now, with a parliamentary election approaching, the regime's political repression has grown more rather than less severe. Hundreds of political activists from the banned Muslim Brotherhood party have been arrested; critical television talk shows and newspaper columns have been canceled; student leaders have been rounded up. In a number of recent cases, peaceful political activists, including those supporting secular democratic movements, have been "disappeared": abducted and held for days by the secret police and sometimes beaten or tortured, before being released on roads outside Cairo.

As he pledged, Mr. Mubarak has done all this without use of the emergency law. Instead the regime has begun acting entirely outside the rule of law. The young activists who have been beaten or kidnapped have no recourse; there is no case to contest, and they are unable even to identify those who assault them.

This slide by Egypt toward the police-state methods usually associated with Syria or Sudan is a problem for the United States as well as for Egyptians. Mr. Mubarak is 82 and ailing; by rejecting political liberalization and choosing deeper repression, he is paving the way for even worse developments once he dies and the struggle to succeed him begins. Mr. Mubarak's successors will need to acquire political legitimacy; if they cannnot do so through democracy they probably will resort to nationalism and anti-Americanism.

Fortunately there are signs that the White House is at last waking up to its Egypt problem. This week a number of senior officials met with an ad hoc group of foreign policy experts who have been trying to call attention to the need for a change in U.S. policy. Some good ideas were discussed, such as a strong presidential statement about the conduct of the elections or the dispatch of a special envoy to Cairo. A new U.S. ambassador committed to political change, rather than apologizing for the regime, would help. What's most important is to make clear to Mr. Mubarak that the administration expects some immediate, even if incremental, changes. An end to the beating and abduction of peaceful activists would be a good place to start.

Obama NSC meets with Egypt democracy advocates

Laura Rozen
POLITICO
November 02, 2010

Top Obama National Security Council officials met Tuesday with a bipartisan group of Washington foreign policy experts who advocate that the United States push for more free and fair Egyptian elections.

The National Security Council’s top two senior Middle East officials Dennis Ross and Dan Shapiro, as well as the NSC’s top human rights and development/democracy officials Samantha Power and Gayle Smith attended the meeting on the Obama administration side, meeting attendees told POLITICO.

Representing the bipartisan Egypt working group at the NSC meeting Tuesday were its two co-founders, Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution and Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as the Project on Middle East Democracy’s Andrew Albertson, former Bush NSC Middle East and democracy official Elliott Abrams, Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski, the Center for American Progress's Brian Katulis, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Robert Satloff.

"Today National Security staff briefed the Members of the Working Group on Egypt on the Administration’s ongoing efforts to promote respect for human rights and a vibrant civil society, open political competition, and credible and transparent elections in Egypt, including the a comprehensive set of actions that support these goals in Egypt, for example with new programing and funding in support of civil society," NSC Spokesman Mike Hammer told POLITICO. "The National Security staff also noted that the Administration is continuing to press the Egyptians to open political competition and allow domestic and international monitors."

Participants who attended the meeting were reluctant to get into the substantive details of what the NSC officials discussed in the hour-long meeting. But they suggested the meeting comes in the midst of the Obama administration conducting a review of its policy on democracy in the Middle East, and a significantly stepped-up focus by senior Obama administration officials on the Egyptian democracy issue in particular.

Also discussed was the sense that while time is running out for the international community to apply meaningful pressure for Egypt to accept international elections monitors to observe its scheduled Nov. 28 parliamentary elections, such preparations might help ensure free and fair presidential elections, which are planned for next year.

“I am encouraged by the meeting, but I wish it could have taken place six months earlier,” Brookings’ Kagan told POLITICO Tuesday. “By the time we got started and get all engines rolling, we will have missed this [November parliamentary] elections. But the big game is the presidential elections and with that caveat, I am very heartened” that the administration is clearly becoming more active on the Egypt democracy issue.

"Stability in Egypt is an illusion, and we have to get on the right side of this thing," Kagan summarized his argument. The best outcome ...is that the right candidate ... is the one elected legitimately.

The Obama administration is considering its “options at a momentous time,” a second meeting attendee said on condition of anonymity Tuesday.

The critical moment for the U.S. to publicly make a statement about shortcomings in the elections is the day after the Nov. 28 polls, he continued. “If we want to encourage transparency in the transition period, it’s got to be right after elections.”

“It was a very serious discussion with a remarkable array of high level officials about how to pragmatically elevate this question of democratic governance, transparency and accountability in the bilateral U.S.-Egypt relationship,” he added.

Another meeting attendee told the Obama officials not to worry -- including from its Washington right flank -- about the prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood winning a majority of seats in the Egyptian parliament, which he thought was unlikely.

Members of the Egypt working group have held previous meetings with Power as well as with the NSC director for human rights Scott Busby and the NSC director for the Levant and North Africa Sergio Aguirre, but had not been previously granted an audience with the top two NSC Middle East hands, Ross and Shapiro.

The fact that the key NSC regional officials participated in Tuesday's meeting was interpreted by the outside foreign policy experts as a significant indicator that the Obama administration is giving more serious and high-level policy attention to the issue.

It may also be a sign as well that Ross and Shapiro basically had both time and reason to devote to the issue because the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is currently on hold, and the Obama administration is “looking for a positive agenda in the region to talk about," a participant posited. The Obama administration is also concerned, he suggested, that its previous diplomatic efforts to press Cairo in private conversations and in written statements to repeal its Emergency Law and to accept international elections monitors have been rejected or ignored.

Al-Qaeda owns up September UPS crash, cargo-bombs plot

By SreeRam Banda
International Business Times
Saturday, November 6, 2010 4:48 AM EDT

Did the White House try to silence a major terrorist attack fearing a backlash in the latest Mid-term elections? Did the Pentagon already know that operatives of Al-Qaeda brought down the UPS aircraft near Dubai in September this year? Or was it a major security and investigation lapse that Intelligence agencies failed to see the crash as a terror plot?

A communique issued on jihadist forums on Friday posed serious questions to the Obama Administration. Striking a blow to global intelligence networks, Al-Qaeda's offshoot in Yemen has claimed to have brought down a United Parcel Service aircraft near Dubai in September this year. According to SITE Intelligence Group, the terror-outfit, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), also owned up the responsibility of orchestrating the foiled bomb plot on cargo aircraft en-route to the U.S. last week.

"In a communiqué issued on jihadist forums on November 5, AQAP said that it kept quiet its activity behind the September incident, and questioned why the media did not attribute responsibility to them earlier. They rhetorically answered that it is perhaps because the Obama Administration wanted to hide the incident so as to conceal security failure before the US midterm elections," a report by the SITE stated.

The Yemen post also quoted a Jihadist website with a message, "We in the AQAP convey the good news and awaited surprise to the Muslim world that we succeeded to bring down a UPS plane on September 03, 2010 after takeoff from Dubai International Airport."

Adding further peril to the Obama administration the APAQ proudly announced, "We struck three blows to your aircraft within one year."

A UPS Boeing 747 cargo plane crashed at an air force base shortly after take-off from Dubai airport, killing two crew members on board in September. UAE officials maintained that the plane was diverted to the base after reporting trouble but then it hit a covered car park and burst into flames. Initial reports also suggested that a fire broke out in the plane just after it took off from Dubai international airport.

Last week, two packages containing explosives were also intercepted in Cargo aircraft. Saudi Arabia's intelligence apparatus alerted the officials in UK and Dubai that the packages were being shipped by air from Yemen to the United States. Security officials seized a package at the East Midlands airport, in Nottingham, on a flight from Cologne to Chicago. One of the packages was found on a United Parcel Service cargo plane and the other bomb was discovered in a parcel at a FedEx facility in Dubai.

In a recent interview to the state-run France 2 television France's interior minister stated that one of two mail bombs was defused just 17 minutes before it was to go off. The disclosure of the French minister was also contrary to the earlier remarks of the White House that the packages were intended to carry out attacks on synagogues in the United States. Analysts say that the incident could now spark a debate in U.S. media to see if the terror-plot was also being used as an election stunt.

Other's however, attribute it to a serious intelligence lapse. Speaking to the Al Jazeera, Ali Al Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, stated that AQAP's claim of bombing the UPS airliner was a surprise.

"Nobody knew it was the work of al-Qaeda until they came forward with this statement. Even the CIA and regional intelligence services didn't know this was brought on by a bomb," he told the news channel.

The communiqué by APAQ also claimed that even after the successful attack, the group decided not to publish a statement about it in a hope to repeat their success by bring down more aircraft. The message also added that the group intends to circulate the idea of parcel bombs to all Mujahedeen in the world to use them against cargo and passenger airplanes.

In Washington and rest of the country, concerns and issues now await Obama, who is currently touring Asian countries. The United Arab Emirates aviation authority is said to have launched an investigations into AQAP's claims on the September crash.

White House calls Brian Williams after he questions mail-bomb terrorist threat

NEW YORK POST
Posted: 1:07 AM, November 4, 2010

The White House called NBC's Brian Williams to complain after he hosted a discussion questioning last week's terrorist scare from bombs on cargo planes from Yemen, sources said. Terrorism expert Michael Sheehan and foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel discussed the viability of the threat on Friday's "NBC Nightly News," where Williams referred to the plot as "almost inept." We're told the White House called Williams immediately after and told him, "We would never put the president out there saying it was serious unless that was the case." NBC had no comment. The White House didn't get back to us.

Friday, November 05, 2010

Al-Qaida group takes responsibility for mail bombs

Brian Murphy And Lolita C. Baldor
Associated Press
11/5/2010

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – A Yemen-based al-Qaida group on Friday claimed responsibility for the international mail bomb plot uncovered late last week as well as the crash of a United Parcel Service cargo plane in September.

A week after authorities intercepted packages in Dubai and Britain that were bound for the U.S., al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula issued a statement taking credit for the plot and saying it would continue to strike American and Western interests. The group specifically said it would target civilian and cargo aircraft.

"We have struck three blows at your airplanes in a single year. And God willing, we will continue to strike our blows against American interests and the interests of America's allies," the group said in a message posted on a militant website.

The authenticity of Friday's claim could not be immediately verified. A U.S. intelligence official said authorities are not surprised to see this claim now.

U.S. officials have said all week that there were strong indications the plot originated with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, a terror group that has become al-Qaida's most active franchise and has increasingly carried out attacks on Western targets.

Authorities in the U.S. and the UAE have said the Sept. 3 crash of the UPS plane in Dubai shortly after takeoff was caused by an onboard fire, but investigators are taking another look at the incident following the parcel bomb plot.

A security official in the UAE familiar with the investigations into the UPS cargo plane crash in Dubai and the mail bombs plot told The Associated Press Friday that there is no change in earlier findings and that the UPS crash in September was likely caused by an onboard fire and not by an explosive device.

"There was no explosion," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under standing UAE rules on disclosing security-related information.

A UPS spokesman, Norman Black, said his company had "no independent knowledge of this claim by al-Qaida," and noted that both UAE officials and U.S. National Transportation Safety Board officials have so far ruled out the possibility of a bomb as cause in the crash.

In its statement, al-Qaida's Yemeni offshoot said that it "downed the UPS airplane but because the enemy's media did not attribute the act to us, we kept silent about the operation until we could return the ball once more.

"We have done that, this time with two explosives, one of them sent via UPS, the other via FedEx."

It said that its "advanced explosives" give it "the opportunity to detonate (planes) in the air or after they have reached their final target, and they are designed to bypass all detection devices."

Both mail bombs were hidden inside computer printers and wired to detonators that used cell-phone technology and packed powdered PETN, a potent industrial explosive.

The message also directed a warning to Saudi Arabia, which was instrumental in passing along the key tip that led to the discovery of the bombs: "These explosives were directed at Jewish Zionist temples, and you intervened to protect them with your treason. God's curse on the oppressors."

Al-Qaida's offshoot in Yemen grew strength after several key leaders escaped from a Yemeni jail in 2006. In 2009, it was further bolstered by a merger with Saudi al-Qaida militants to form al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

The group first made a stunning show of its international reach in December, when it allegedly plotted a failed Christmas Day attempt to blow up a passenger jet over the U.S. The Obama administration branded the terror group a global threat, and has dramatically stepped up its alliance with Yemen's government to uproot it.

"AQAP continues to probe for weaknesses in our ability to disrupt, detect or stop their operations," said Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican who serves on the House intelligence terrorism subcommittee.

He expressed little surprise at the claim, saying:

"They are agile and determined. So must we be."

The Yemeni Toner Cartridge Bomb Story

More Questions Than Answers

By GARY LEUPP
CounterPunch
November 5 - 7, 2010

Jeff Huber on Antiwar.com wrote Monday about the Yemeni toner cartridge bomb story: “…if there’s a single substantiated syllable in that entire narrative, I have yet to encounter it in the New York Times. In a series of articles from 29, 30, and 31 October, our newspaper of tarnished record created enough cognitive dissonance to drive the Dalai Lama to a therapist’s couch.” I think that a bit of an exaggeration, but what have the NYT and other mainstream press organs told us?

On Thursday, Oct. 28, intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia informed U.S. intelligence officials that UPS and FedEx packages carrying explosives had been mailed from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, to Chicago via two airplanes. They provided the tracking numbers. (It was later revealed that they acted on a tip from a former member of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP. He was subsequently identified by AP as Jabir al-Fayti, a Saudi national.) The UPS cargo plane stopped in Qatar, then Dubai, where local officials quickly discovered the device inside a Hewett-Packard printer. The FedEx cargo plane stopped at East Midlands Airport in England, where the other bomb was found. At 10:45 President Obama was briefed about the situation.

On Friday, cargo planes arriving in Philadelphia and Newark were searched, and in Brooklyn a UPS truck was stopped and inspected. No bombs or explosives were found. Meanwhile U.S. and Canadian fighter jets accompanied a passenger flight from the United Arab Emirates to New York, where the aircraft was searched. Nothing suspicious was found here either.

In the afternoon Obama made a statement from the White House, praising U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials and declaring, “The events of the past 24 hours underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism. The American people should be confidant that we will not waver in our resolve to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to root out violent extremism in all its forms.” He added that the packages had been mailed to “specifically two places of Jewish worship in Chicago.”

That night, according to the Chicago Tribune, the congregation of Or Chadash, a synagogue in the Edgewater neighborhood, was informed by its rabbi that “a reliable and well-placed Jewish community source” had reported that Or Chadash had been one of the targets. However, the newspaper also reported that “a source close to the investigation” had stated that the packages were addressed to synagogues in East Rogers Park and Lake View neighborhoods.

Subsequent reports suggested that a small (100 member) lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender congregation called Or Chadash, which shares the Emmanuel synagogue in Lake View, was a target rather than the Edgewater synagogue.

On Friday the NYT also reported that U.S. officials felt that “evidence is mounting” that AQAP including New Mexico-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki were involved in the plot. They said they were “operating on the assumption” that AQAP bomb-maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri had produced the bombs. (They had concluded he was also responsible for the explosives that “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed to detonate on the Northwest Airlines plane over Detroit last Christmas Day.) The argument was apparently based on the fact that the packages contained pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) such as the underwear bomber had carried. But “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid also attempted to blow up a passenger plane in December 2001 using PETN, and he had no connection to Yemen or al-Asiri. He received training in Afghanistan, which al-Asiri has apparently never visited.
John O’Brennan, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor, stated that investigators didn’t yet know how the explosives were supposed to be activated. “[T]here’s some question,” writes Huber, “not only as to whether al-Qaeda was behind the attempted airplane bombings, but as to whether any actual bombs were involved. The bomb they found in or around the plane in Dubai was similar to the package found in England, but maybe the package found in England wasn’t actually a bomb.”

On Saturday officials including Brennan praised the Saudi and Yemeni governments for their cooperation while Yemeni officials acting on a tip from U.S. officials arrested a woman suspected of delivering the packages to UPS and FedEx in Sana’a. The Department of Homeland Security dispatched a cable indicating that the packages may have been connected to the “Yemen-American Institute for Language-Computer Management” and the “American Center for Training” in Sana’a. The same day the Emmanuel synagogue rabbi told CNN that a Chicago Jewish source “well-connected to the authorities” had told him that his congregation hadn’t really been a target. (Are we then supposed to believe that the plan was to bomb the building only when the Or Chadash LGPT folks were using it?)

Meanwhile both British Home Minister Theresa May and Prime Minister David Cameron opined that the device on the plane that had arrived at the East Midlands Airport was designed to explode while the plane was flying. Brennen then stated during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday morning: “At this point we, I think, would agree with the British that it looks as though they were designed to be detonated in flight.” In other words, they weren’t targeting “two places of Jewish worship in Chicago” but cargo planes.

On Tuesday Nov. 2 Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane of the NYT reported that the packages had been addressed to “Diego Deza” and “Reynald Krak.” The former was a notorious Grand Inquisitor during the Spanish Inquisition of the sixteenth century, who tortured people accused of being secret Muslims. The latter name is a rare variant of Raynald of Chatillon, a French knight who slaughtered Muslims en route to Mecca as pilgrims during the Second Crusade in the twelfth century. (The chivalrous Muslim commander Saladin personally beheaded him as punishment.) The journalists called it a “sardonic choice” to include these “two dark inside jokes.”

But this raises the question of why AQAP would address the packages designed to explode in flight bringing down cargo planes to two Chicago synagogues under the names of two notorious enemies of Islam. Wouldn’t a package from Yemen, an unstable country intermittently targeted by U.S. drone-fired missiles, home of a group identified by U.S. officials as the greatest threat to U.S. security outside the “Af-Pak” border region, a country with only a handful of aging Jews, addressed to U.S. synagogues under the names chosen risk arousing suspicion? Wouldn’t the packages just be crying out, “Inspect me!”? If they were supposed to explode in flight anyway, wouldn’t it have made more sense to address them to some random street address under random names?

But let’s say packages were delivered to the two synagogues in Chicago, and did some damage. How would that help AQAP? Perhaps the cultural proclivity to demand “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” following the significant civilian death toll due to drone attacks might motivate this sort of response, especially given AQAP’s assumption that Jews direct U.S. foreign policy. But the organization surely knows that the powerful Israeli Lobby would suddenly press for more U.S. action in and against Yemen. Is that what it wants, to make Yemen another Afghanistan? It is possible that such a scenario fits in with a strategy of clearly pitting Islam against the west, and perhaps they figure that they could rally local support in the wake of a U.S. assault. But that is not at all clear at this point.

The involvement of al-Asiri seems taken for granted. But the underwear bomber’s device he is alleged to have designed was described by the world press as “crude,” and his effort to assassinate the Saudi counter-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in August 2009 was both crude and botched. (His suicide-bomber younger brother Abdullah, armed with three ounces of PETN in his anus---or some say, in his underwear---succeeded in blowing himself in half but only lightly injuring the prince.) Yet unnamed officials quoted in the Sunday NYT stated those on the cargo planes were “expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated.” The Christian Science Monitor reports that officials think them “a big step up from two previous international bombing attempts” involving al-Asiri. How has the 28 year old King Saud University chemistry-major dropout hiding out somewhere in East Yemen so substantially honed his bomb making skills in the last 10 months?

And what about this Jabir al-Fayti? He’d had been captured in Afghanistan by U.S. forces, held at Guantanamo to 2007, released into Saudi custody where he completed a rehabilitation program, upon release joined AQAP in Yemen, then left AQAP to gave himself up to Saudi authorities last September. They sent a private jet to Sana’a to pick him up, according to AP. You have to wonder who he’s really working for. The Saudis are known to be trying to infiltrate AQAP. The Saudis fear and detest AQAP and join with the U.S. in urging Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh, beleaguered by two regional insurgencies more important to him than the two or three hundred AQAP militants in his country, to take firmer action against the small group. Might they wish to create an incident that would encourage Obama to strike harder at Yemen?

How did the Saudis get the tracking numbers so quickly? Did al-Fayti supply them? Or the name of the woman who had sent them? Or did he know the addresses and names of the addressees?

What about the arrested woman? Hanan al-Samawi is a 22 year old engineering student at Sana’a University who enjoys Western music and reads popular Western books. Detained Saturday on “a U.S. tip” she was released the following day when Yemeni police determined that someone had stolen her identity. Perhaps the real sender will never be known. What of the two language schools in Sana’a that Homeland Security was connecting to al-Qaeda? On Monday, Nov. 1, the NYT indicated that neither institution seems to exist. There’s a U.S. State Department-run Yemen American Language Institute but its director said Monday that it never uses UPS or FedEx.

What is AQAP saying about all this? So far, nothing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t responsible; AQAP only took credit for a Sept. 25 attack on a security bus in Yemen two weeks later (on Oct. 9). But three days after the underwear bomber incident last year the group released a message claiming responsibility. A full week has gone by with no claim of responsibility by AQAP for the toner cartridge explosives.

What of the official security threat assessment? Homeland Security has pointedly avoided upping the color-coded “threat level” even as it warns of the need for greater cargo plane inspection. But the Defense Department mulls more drone attacks and the dispatch of what the Wall Street Journal recently termed “U.S. elite hunter-killer teams” controlled by the CIA on the ground in Yemen. All such measures could be justified as a prudent response to the aborted attacks. They have other uses too, such as making Obama look strong and efficient a couple days before the mid-term elections.

The incident strengthens and encourages all manner of war-mongers. The Weekly Standard’s Thomas Jocelyn manages to argue that this episode proves that U.S. torture of detainees at Guantanamo (including Yemenis, who have made up the largest group since January 2008) isn’t the “driving force behind AQAP’s terror” but rather “the terrorists’ jihadist ideology, which the Obama administration spends much of its time ignoring.” (So why worry about provoking ordinary Yemenis with drone missile attacks and the abuse of their countrymen when the underlying cause for hatred of the U.S. is Islamist “jihadism” from Afghanistan to Somalia?)

Liz Cheney, deputy secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs under the Bush/Cheney administration, appeared on Fox News to argue that al-Qaeda was probing “the weakest spot in our system” by targeting cargo planes and that “that’s why intelligence becomes so important. It’s why I believe that the steps that this president has taken, for example, threatening to prosecute intelligence officials, are so dangerous and damaging for the nation. It’s why the Wikileaks, the leaks are so damaging.”

Cognitive dissonance aside, the reportage on this episode has been fraught with contradictions, leaves many unanswered questions, and serves the interests of those bent on perpetuating and expanding wars based on lies and fear.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

Israel Claims Victory in US Midterm Elections

Did Anyone Really Think They Would Lose?

By FRANKLIN LAMB
CounterPunch
November 5 - 7, 2010

Beirut

The Republican party’s gain of 60 plus House Seats (10 seats, all held by Democrats, are still undecided at press time) and six Senate seats, is the largest Congressional increase for either party since 1948 when the Democrats gained 75 seats in the lower chamber and Harry Truman won the White House. Next January’s 112th Congress is already receiving rave advance reviews, some coming from the more than half a million Jewish settlers in more than 100 illegal colonies in occupied Palestine who are pleased to see President Obama emasculated and the sentiments expressed in his June 2008 Cairo speech long forgotten. Many are hoping he will be replaced by likes of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, or a Mike Huckabee in 2012. Danny Dayan, head of the Yesha Council, which represents Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and whose representatives are increasingly on the rampage, by word and by deed, spoke for many when he told a post election news conference that he expected the new Congress "will facilitate a more open-minded approach to Israel's needs [i.e., yet more Palestinian land] than what we've experienced over the last two years."

AIPAC, as it does after every Congressional election, offered pro forma congratulations to the winners: “It is abundantly clear that the 112th Congress will continue America’s long tradition of staunch support for a strong, safe and secure Israel and an abiding friendship between the United States and our most reliable ally in the Middle East.” No sooner had the election results been declared than key winners received what for decades has been a post election ritual, bestowed on new Members of Congress. That would be the delivery of US taxpayer subsidized invitations for all expense paid junkets to Israel. Of this year’s batch, Florida’s new Senator, Marco Rubio, who considers himself a Tea Party leader and who has been called “America’s great Right hope’ will lead the flock and arrive in Israel on this Sunday, November 7.

As Rubio and other members of Congress board planes to fly to Israel they may actually near-miss Israeli officials, including PM Netanyahu, who will be coming the opposite direction for a five day US visit to meet with his personal choice to replace Obama for US President in 2012, Hilary Clinton. Netanyahu will also talk Congressional strategy with key Israeli lobby agents. Those listed on the various passenger manifests between the US and Israel will share the common objective of making sure Israel’s interests are preserved and “remain eternally paramount” to borrow a phrase from VP Joe Biden. They will also try to assure and that the 112th Congress brooks no Obama administration unpleasantness such as increased demands for a broader freeze on Jewish settlements.

The post Congressional election euphoria has not extended to Lebanon and this region. This is because over here it is widely believed that the new Congress, with respect to Lebanon’s arch foe Israel which has committed serial aggressions against it for half a century, will pick up right where the old Congress left off without missing a beat.

Many in Lebanon view Obama’s repudiation in the polls as a sign that he will be unable to pressure Israel into concessions in stalled peace talks. They expect the Congressional drum beat for war with Iran, pressure on Syria, deference to Netanyahu-Lieberman, and interference in Lebanon’s internal affairs including the targeting of the national Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah to increase.

The morning after the US election, at the open-air Café Younnes Coffee Shop off Hamra Street, some Lebanese students were explaining to foreigners, with remarkable grasp of the electoral details, their take on the US midterm election results. One student explained that she expects the soon to be Speaker of the House, wildly pro-Israel John Boehner (R-Ohio), with Eric Cantor as Majority Leaders and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, will anchor Israel’s Congressional rule. Ros-Lehtinen, the all time Congressional record holder for all manner of anti-Arab congressional initiatives’ over the past two decades. Yesterday she called for all Members of Congress to sign her latest letter to President Obama opposing his administration’s proposed $60 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia, by the end of business on 11/6/10. Ros-Lehtinen is also expected to renew her call to cut off all aid to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. She has also expressed her intention to maintain what are essentially US sanctions against Lebanon by extending her predecessor Howard Berman’s ban on grants to the Lebanese Armed Forces until Hezbollah is disarmed to prevent it from benefiting from the military aid.

Other key committees chairmanships held by Israel loyalists are believed here to mean an even stronger choke hold on the US government starting January. One Palestinian student who used to live in Nahr al Bared Camp near Tripoli before it was destroyed in 2007, explained how Cantor has already drawn pro-Israel skeptical reaction with his proposal that American assistance to Israel be taken out of the annual foreign aid bill and be passed separately, on its own. Cantor’s thinking is that, given his party’s intention to heavily cut foreign aid, he wants Israel’s annual $ 3 billion US taxpayer gift to remain untouched even as foreign aid to other nations get slashed.

Some pro-Israel lobbyists worry that Cantor’s “going public” with his plan may result in the American public noticing how much aid Israel gets and begin to wonder why Israel’s aid is so sacrosanct. Voters might notice that Israel has received more foreign aid from the United States than any other country since World War II, according to a recent report compiled by the Congressional Research Service.

Voters may begin to learn about and perhaps even question the fact that over the years, multiple lobbying efforts have added countless perks to Israel’s special aid package such that Israel is the only recipient allowed to spend a portion of its military aid on purchases within Israel itself. Usually this kind of aid is designed for procurement of American-made weapon systems. Israel also receives its aid in the first month of the fiscal year as a deposit in an interest-bearing account. Aid to all other recipients is spread out throughout the year. The Lebanese students verdict on the 2010 US midterm election: Netanyahu and Israel won again. Obama and America lost again.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and can be contacted at fplamb@gmail.com

Guns and Balls

War Games

By LINH DINH
CounterPunch
November 5 - 7, 2010

War and team sport are parallel activities, but in today’s America, the coupling of guns and group balling has become increasingly explicit. Before a game, there’s the national anthem, which is reasonable enough, but after the last note has been butchered, jets often thunder overhead. On the field, uniformed troops march and salute. Gigantic flags undulate. In San Diego, five soldiers planted Old Glory on the pitching mound, evoking Iwojima. The Padres also dress in camouflaged outfits for some of their games.

During telecasts, cameras will zoom in on uniformed soldiers, special guests at the game, with commentators reminding us how lucky we are to be protected by such brave heroes. During the seventh inning stretch, we don’t get to sing goofily along to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” as was customary, but must now stand stiffly for “God Bless America,” a second national anthem, so to speak, with the announcer intoning our collective gratitude to the troops.

Participation in this additional patriotic ritual is not optional, apparently. In 2008, Bradford Campeau-Laurion was physically expelled from Yankees Stadium when he left his seat during “God Bless.” The man wasn’t protesting, he just needed to urinate. For this, Campeau-Laurion had his arms twisted by two security guards, then escorted, if that’s the word, from his cheapest, sky-scraping seat to ground level, then shoved through the turnstile, with this sent off from one of the goons, “Get the hell out of my country if you don’t like it.” Yes, citizens, you should emigrate immediately if you have a full bladder during one of our mass jingoistic hypnotizing sessions. A lust for mass murders is not love of country, and coerced love is no love at all. Love me, or I will shoot you. Has the United States become a universal psycho stalker? You’re either with us, or you’re against us. That’s the logics of a narcissistic bully. Since we have troops in just about every country, or just outside it, indifference is not a choice. You can’t ignore me. Love me, or I’ll shoot you!

In 2009, three teens were also kicked out of a minor league stadium for refusing to stand during “God Bless.” Rather surprisingly, 52% of respondents to an American Online poll applauded this ejection. Have we gone mad? Of course. In contemporary America, going to a baseball game means that you must erect yourself for “God Bless,” to show support for our door-kicking, civilian-harassing, finger-chopping, trigger happy, confused, cynical or sadistic troops. So what if you’re a pacifist or an atheist. So what if you have to piss.

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, where art thou? For those who don’t remember, this NBA player caused an uproar in 1996 by refusing to stand during the Star-Spangled Banner. A compromise was reached when he finally agreed to stand, but with his eyes closed. In our culture, athletes, particularly those participating in team sports, are not expected to voice political opinions, especially rebellious ones. Still, we want them to talk all the time. These jocks are interviewed constantly, whereas our wordsmiths and thinkers are almost never placed in front of a camera. Jocks babble so much, they’ve become even more facile with language than our politicians.

Even our foreign, just imported muscle packages can regurgitate clichés and trite observations without the slightest of efforts.

Before game 4 of this year’s World Series, two war criminals, Bush father and son, threw out the first pitch. They entered the stadium to a tremendous roar, these two who have wasted so many lives, including American ones, with the son presiding over our financial collapse. We don’t just lack a historical memory, many of us can’t even remember what happened a mere two years ago. How else to explain the affection shown to this very corrupt man who’s bankrupted us?

Wreck the economy, send troops on repeated tours so they come back insane, truncated or dead, so their children grow up without a father or mother, so their spouses divorce them, but wave the flag, pin one on your lapel, dish up jive turkey, talk nonsense in a fake drawl, and all will be forgiven. Boy, did you see that ass kicking flag? It was something North Korea would be proud of…

Ceremony done, the Bushes were seated just behind the Rangers’ dugout, at a convenient angle to the on deck circle, so we could admire them over and over again. As expected, Fox Television swooned over their presence. The commentators even noted that Barbara Bush was marking her score card. How delightful. Each strike and ball must be recorded. It’s very important. This, from a lady who couldn’t be bothered with human beings about to be slaughtered by the action of her smirking, shoe dodging son. On the eve of our 2003 invasion of Iraq, this dainty monster fretted, “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Yes, with a nightly circus of camouflaged god bless, of balls and strikes shutting out the endless carnage and shame unleashed in our name, with each botched bunt more parsed and considered than the trillions looted from our treasury, who has time to think about body bags, even if they contain your last ounce of flesh?
So much froth over a baseball game. What’s wrong with me? So who’s on First?

Who’s on Third but thinking he’s on First?

Who’s down to his last strike?

Who’s voguing on the on deck circle, although he’s just been laid off?

Who thinks he’s on TV even as he stands in a darkened and unheated apartment?

Who’s lying right there, half dead, on cardboard and not even trashed, just outside the oh-so-new, state of the art stadium?

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories and five of poems, and the recently published novel, Love Like Hate. He's tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

Midterm Election Results a Setback for Peace

by Tom Hayden
The Nation
November 5, 2010

The November election was a setback for the peace movement, not only because of the defeat of Sen. Russ Feingold but for deeper reasons.

Both parties collaborated in keeping Afghanistan out of the national election debate and media coverage - while during the period June-November alone, 274 American soldiers were killed and 2,934 were wounded on the battlefield.

(The official American toll under Obama in Afghanistan has become at least 730 deaths and 6,400 wounded; the taxpayer costs under Obama currently are $113 billion per year.)

Democratic candidates this year chose not to use Afghanistan-Iraq as an issue perhaps because they have become Obama's wars. According to the New York Times, the US even plans to orchestrate an invitation to remain in Iraq after the current 2011 deadline, but desperately wanted to keep the controversy out of the election debates.

With Republican control of the House, antiwar Democrats will have little room to hold hearings or maneuver against the wars. There were 162 House members, nearly all Democrats, who voted against funding the war or in favor of an exit strategy earlier this year, one-fourth of the House. In the Senate, Feingold authored similar legislation that obtained 18 votes, a number not likely to increase either.

The notion among some that ultra-right fiscally conservative Republicans will vote with the peace Democrats is largely a fantasy. Republicans like Karl Rove did not want to advertise their support for Obama's troop escalation this fall while they prepare to blast him for drawing down short of "victory" next July. For example, Sen. John McCain, who is planning a trip to Afghanistan, told Reuters that "this date for withdrawal that the president announced without any military advice or counsel has caused us enormous problems in our operations in Afghanistan, because our enemies are encouraged and our friends are confused over there."

McCain's comment was a huge lie, an indicator of the campaign rhetoric to come. As McCain well knows, Obama has not given a "date for withdrawal," only a date to "begin" a phase-out. Obama had months of military advice and counsel, as reported in Bob Woodward's most recent book. In fact, according to Woodward and Jonathan Alter, Obama had Petraeus's word that they would have no complaints about the July 2011 deadline. In August, however, Petraeus declared that "the president didn't send me over here to seek a graceful exit."

Obama's pledge to begin a July withdrawal may draw little or no peace movement support unless he includes a timeline and substantial numbers, and shows progress in diplomacy and talks with the Taliban. The president's situation is similar to his problems with health care when he appeared to over-promise and under-deliver, leaving his base dispirited once again. (It should be noted that Obama took the strongest exit strategy position among his internal advisers, according to Woodward, with Hillary Clinton immediately supporting whatever troop escalation Petraeus wanted.)

The next test for Obama will be whether his December review of Afghanistan policy results in only another ratification of Afghanistan status quo. Then comes another budget battle, with antiwar forces in Congress at a greater tactical disadvantage than last year. By then Obama's actual Afghan drawdown numbers will be publicly known, with Republicans, the military and most of the media opposed or skeptical.

The 2012 national election predictably will be fought over Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and the Long War favored by the Republicans and the generals, with Obama positioned as favoring gradual troop drawdowns in order to invest in his domestic agenda.

The wars will continue in any event, with increasing risks of terrorist attacks on the US, bloody quagmires on the battlefields, and the US propping up unpopular regimes in Kabul, Baghdad, Islamabad and Yemen. The wars are unwinnable and unaffordable, but no one in power dares say it.

The peace bloc - activist groups, anti-war Congress members, writers and artists, here and across the NATO - can exercise a massive drag against the war-making machine through 2012 as long as the wars remain deeply unpopular. But in the absence of political statesmanship, Petraeus need not worry, because the final stage will be anything but "graceful."

US to Step Up Military Presence Across Asia, into Indian Ocean

US Sets Eyes on Southern Defense Outposts

by Hamish McDonald
The Sydney Morning Herald
Friday, November 5, 2010

THE United States military will store equipment and supplies in Australia as part of a new regional posture to respond faster to natural disasters and other contingencies, and conduct more intensive training with Australian forces.

The two militaries will also build a new space-monitoring facility in Western Australia, as previously reported in the Herald, to extend tracking of space activity, including missiles from rogue states like North Korea and orbiting debris.

[In the closed-door talks in Government House, Melbourne, Mrs Clinton and Mr Gates will outline a stepped-up American military presence across Asia into the Indian Ocean. This will involve more frequent patrols and port-calls by US Navy ships and other units, including to Australian bases. (Photo: AFP)]In the closed-door talks in Government House, Melbourne, Mrs Clinton and Mr Gates will outline a stepped-up American military presence across Asia into the Indian Ocean. This will involve more frequent patrols and port-calls by US Navy ships and other units, including to Australian bases. (Photo: AFP)
Washington and Canberra will also step up co-operation in cyber security and warfare to counter what Defence analysts see as an ''emerging area of strategic risk'' as foreign states and individual hackers try to break into government data banks and control infrastructure systems.

The initiatives are expected to emerge from Monday's annual bilateral ministerial talks on defence and foreign affairs, involving the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, and their Australian counterparts, Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith.

In the closed-door talks in Government House, Melbourne, Mrs Clinton and Mr Gates will outline a stepped-up American military presence across Asia into the Indian Ocean. This will involve more frequent patrols and port-calls by US Navy ships and other units, including to Australian bases.

The shift reflects an ongoing ''global posture review'' designed to counter a recent trend of deploying forces directly from bases in the United States or its external territories, and maintain a more ''visible and effective'' presence in key regions.

There will be more American cruises through south-east Asia and more exercises with Australian and other regional forces, including those of Indonesia and Singapore, as well as joint aid efforts like a recent school construction effort in East Timor by US Navy engineers working from the amphibious landing ship HMAS Tobruk.

South-east Asia is seen as the nexus between the Pacific and the Indian oceans. Washington is showing greater interest in the Indian Ocean region and India itself (the US President, Barack Obama, is about to visit), as well as greater awareness of the region's strategic connection with the Pacific.

The ''pre-positioning'' of US military stores in places like Darwin and Townsville would allow faster aid in disasters and help with logistical problems in joint training. But it is likely to include large amounts of combat equipment for the typical US Marine taskforce involved in the bigger amphibious exercises.

The new space facility likely to be added to the Northwest Cape joint communications base is designed to enhance ''space situational awareness'' in the southern hemisphere, where coverage is relatively thinner than over the north.

It will track missiles, warheads, satellites and debris, and would be a passive monitoring facility rather than an advance into space warfare, which is restricted by international treaty.

But more than helping space stations and satellites dodge collisions, it will have a defence role, as threats like the North Korean ballistic missile program have made US and Australian defence agencies more concerned about the ''southern trajectory''.

Retired Justice Stevens defends plans for Islamic center

By Bill Mears
CNN Supreme Court Producer

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* John Paul Stevens says Muslims should be able to build, even near ground zero
* Experiences of World War II gave insight into need to fight prejudice, he says
* Plans for Islamic center have drawn protest from 9/11 victims' families
* Constitution protects from guilt by association, Stevens says

Washington (CNN) -- Retired Justice John Paul Stevens expressed support Thursday for a planned Islamic community center near the site of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, urging religious and ethnic tolerance.

"American Muslims should enjoy the freedom to build their places of worship wherever permitted by local zoning laws," the retired Supreme Court jurist said at a luncheon where he was honored by the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation.

The 90-year-old said his experiences as a veteran of World War II, when the United States was fighting Japan, have given him insight over the years into the need to combat "invidious prejudice."

The proposed Islamic community center and mosque -- now officially dubbed Park 51 -- would be two blocks north of ground zero, where two aircraft hijacked by Muslim extremists crashed into the World Trade Center's twin towers, causing them to collapse. About 3,000 people died, and many city residents say the Islamic facility's location would be inappropriate because feelings from that day nine years ago remain fresh and bitter.

But Stevens said it would be unfair to infer the acts of al Qaeda terrorists as reflecting the views of all Muslims, especially those in the United States.

"Our Constitution protects every one of us from being found guilty of wrongdoing based on the conduct of our associates. Guilt by association is unfair," he said. It would be "profoundly unwise to draw inferences based on a person's membership in any association or group without first learning something about the group."

Stevens retired from the high court in late June after 35 years. He has been active giving speeches and works regularly at the Supreme Court in his chambers, which retired justices are allowed to have.

He said he understands how many people would feel about having a mosque near what has become hallowed ground. But he noted a 1994 visit to Hawaii and the Japanese tourists he encountered at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy base bombed by the Japanese, prompting the U.S. to get involved in World War II.

"Several thoughts flashed through my mind: 'Those people don't really belong here. We won the war; they lost it. We shouldn't allow them to celebrate their attack on Pearl Harbor even if it was one of their greatest victories,' " he said of his tour of the USS Arizona, sunk in the Japanese attacks and now the site of a national park. "I realized that I was drawing inferences about every member of the tourist group that did not necessarily apply to any single one of them. We should never pass judgment on barrels and barrels of apples just because one of them may be rotten.

"I suspect that many New Yorkers who lost friends or relatives as a result of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 may have reacted to the news that Muslims are planning to erect a mosque or a religious center in the neighborhood much as I reacted to the sight of the Japanese tourists on the Arizona. ... Some of those New Yorkers may have had second thoughts, just as I did at the Arizona."

Stevens served at Pearl Harbor for two and half years during the war. He noted the 10th anniversary of a memorial, erected a few blocks from the Supreme Court, honoring the sacrifice and patriotism of Japanese-Americans, many of whom were forcibly interned at remote prisoner camps during the war.

That monument "conveys the central message that visitors to the Arizona and participants in the debate about the New York mosque should heed," Stevens said. "That message tells us to beware of stereotypical conclusions about groups of people that we don't know very well."

In a speech last month in Nevada, he defended his bitter dissent in a 1989 Supreme Court case that declared flag-burning to be protected speech under the First Amendment. He said that setting it afire was just as dangerous and offensive as burning a Christian cross or desecrating a Quran.

Such symbols, whether in the name of speech or faith, are "entitled to respect."

Now that he is retired, the Chicago native presumably has discretion to talk more candidly about current events and controversial topics than when he was an active justice and deciding a range of appeals.

American Empire Produces 11 Global Winners -- Hint: They Aren't the Good Guys

By Tom Engelhardt
Tomdispatch.com
Posted on November 4, 2010

You couldn't turn on the TV news or pick up a paper during the election season without stumbling across the latest political poll and the pros explaining how to parse it, or some set of commentators, pundits, and reporters placing their bets on the election results. The media, of course, loves a political horse race and, as those 2010 midterms approached, you could easily feel like you weren't catching the news but visiting an Off-Track Betting parlor.

Fortified by rounds of new polls and all those talking heads calibrating and recalibrating prospective winners and losers, seats “leaning Democratic” and “leaning Republican,” the election season essentially became an endless handicapping session. This is how American politics is now framed -- as a months or years-long serial election for which November 2nd is a kind of hangover. Then, only weeks after the results are in, the next set of polls will be out and election 2012, the Big Show, will be on the agenda with all the regular handicappers starting to gather at all the usual places.

Doesn’t it strike you as odd, though, that this mania for handicapping remains so parochially electoral? After all, it could be applied to so many things, including the state of the world at large as seen from Washington. So consider this my one-man tip sheet on what you could think of as the global midterms, focused on prospective winners and losers, as well as those “on the cusp,” including crucial countries and key personalities.

Prospective Winners

Osama bin Laden: Who woulda thunk it? More than nine years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden and his number two compadre, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be alive, well, and living comfortably in the Pakistani borderlands with not a cave in sight, according to the best guesstimate of a “NATO official who has day-to-day responsibility for the war in Afghanistan.” With the globe’s “sole superpower” eternally on his trail -- admittedly, the Bush administration took a few years off from the “hunt” to crash and burn in Iraq -- he’s a prospective global winner just for staying alive. But before we close the books on him, he gets extra points for a singular accomplishment: with modest funds and a few thousand ragtag masked recruits, swinging on monkey bars and clambering over obstacles in “camps” in Afghanistan, he managed to lure the United States into two financially disastrous, inconclusive wars, one in its eighth year, the other in its tenth. To give credit where it’s due, he had help from the Bush administration with its dominatrix-like global fantasies. Still, it’s not often that someone can make his dreams your nightmares on such a scale.

The Taliban: Here’s another crew heading toward the winner’s circle after yet another typically fraud-wracked Afghan parliamentary election conferring even less legitimacy on President Hamid Karzai’s toothless government in Kabul. Think of the Taliban as the miracle story of the global backlands, the phoenix of extreme Islamic fundamentalist movements. After all, in November 2001, when the Taliban were swept out of Kabul, the movement couldn’t have been more thoroughly discredited. Afghans were generally sick of their harsh rule and abusive ways and, if reports can be believed, relieved, even overjoyed, to be rid of them (whatever Afghans thought about their country being invaded). But when night fell in perhaps 2005-2006, they were back, retooled and remarkably effective.

And it’s only gotten worse (or, from the Taliban point of view, better) ever since. Yes, they are now getting pounded by a heightened American bombing campaign, a Special Operations night-raids-and-assassination campaign, and pressure from newly surging U.S. forces in the southern part of the country. Nonetheless, as the Wall Street Journal reported recently, they are achieving some remarkable successes in northern Afghanistan. After all, the Taliban had always been considered a Pashtun tribal movement and while there are Pashtuns in the north, they are a distinct minority. The Journal nonetheless reports: “[T]he insurgency is now drawing ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks, and other minorities previously seen as unsympathetic to the rebel cause.”

If, more than nine years later, the Taliban -- the Taliban! -- is attracting groups that theoretically loath it, have few cultural affinities with it, and long fought or opposed it, then you know that the American campaign in Afghanistan has hit its nadir. Thanks to us and our man in Kabul, the Taliban is increasingly the fallback position, the lesser of two disasters, for Afghan nationalists. This helps explain why more than $27 billion dollars in American training funds hasn’t produced an Afghan military or police force capable of or willing to fight, while Taliban guerrillas, lacking such aid, fight fiercely anyway.

Iran (in Iraq): Remember that old witticism of the neocons of the ascendant Bush moment back in 2003: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”? Well, it’s turned out to be truer than they ever imagined. Just recently, for instance, Iraqi caretaker prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, went to Tehran to try to hammer out a deal to keep his position (see Sadr, Muqtada al-, below). It’s undeniable that Iran, a moderate-sized regional power the Bush administration expected to crush and instead found itself struggling with by proxy in Iraq for years, now has a preponderant position of influence there. Despite so many billions of dollars and American lives, not to speak of years of covert destabilization campaigns aimed at Iran, Tehran seems to have outmaneuvered Washington in Baghdad (and perhaps in Lebanon as well). Call that an on-going win against the odds.

China: Here’s the bad news when it comes to China -- a weak third quarter dropped the growth rate of its gross domestic product to 9.6%. Yep, you read that right: only 9.6% (down from 10.3% in the second quarter). For comparison, the U.S rate of growth leaped from 1.7% in the second quarter to 2.3% in the third quarter, with some experts predicting no growth or even shrinkage by year’s end. Make no mistake, China has its lurking problems, including an overheating urban real-estate market verging on bubbledom (which, post-2008, should cause any leadership to shudder) and tens of millions of peasants left in dismal poverty in the long decades when “to get rich” was “glorious.” Still, the country has managed to pass Japan for number-two-global-economic-power status, to corner a startling range of future global energy reserves so that its economy can drink deep for decades to come, and to forge a front-running position in various renewable-energy fields. Its leaders have accomplished all this thanks to economic muscle, diplomacy, and cash (think: bribes) without sending its soldiers abroad or fighting a war (or even a skirmish) overseas. They have even learned how to be thoroughly belligerent while relying only on economic power. Check out, for instance, the over-the-top way they crushed Japan in a recent stand-off over a Chinese trawler captain in Japanese custody, wielding only the threat to withhold rare earth metals (necessary to various advanced industrial processes), 95%-97% of which are, at the moment, produced by China. We’re definitely talking global winner here.

Drone Makers: If America’s wars are eternal field laboratories for new weaponry, then the grand winners of the latest round of wars are the drone makers. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the jewel in the crown of Southern California’s drone industry, now employs 10,000 workers and runs double shifts in, as W.J. Hennigan of the Los Angeles Times writes, a “fast-growing business… fueled by Pentagon spending -- at least $20 billion since 2001 -- and billions more chipped in by the CIA and Congress.” Washington has been plunking down more than $5 billion a year for its drone purchases, the development of future drone technology, and the carrying out of 24/7 robot assassination campaigns as well as a full-scale Terminator war in the Pakistani borderlands. These “precision” weapons are capable of taking out people, including civilians in the vicinity, from thousands of miles away. The drones themselves -- termed by CIA Director Leon Panetta “the only game in town” when it comes to stopping al-Qaeda -- turn out to be capable of settling nothing. For every bad guy they kill, they kill civilians as well, seeding new enemies in what is essentially a war to create future terrorists. But that hardly matters. Terminator wars are hot and the drone, as a product, is definitely a global winner. Not only are American companies starting to export the craft to allies willing to pay in global hotspots, but other countries are lining up to create drone industries of their own. Expect the friendly skies to continue to fill.

Muqtada al-Sadr: Here’s a heartwarming winner’s circle story about a highly experienced political operator, still known in the U.S. press as the “anti-American cleric,” who just couldn’t be kept down. Sadr led an armed Shiite movement of the poor in Iraq that, in 2004, actively fought U.S. forces to a draw in the old city of Najaf. He himself was hunted by the U.S. military and, at one point during the years when Washington ruled in Baghdad, warrants were even put out for his arrest in a murder case. Still, the guy survived, as did his movement, armed and then un- (or less) armed. In 2007, he packed his bags and moved to the safety of neighboring Iran to “study” and move up in Shia clerical ranks. In the most recent Iraqi elections, now seven months past, for a parliament that has yet to meet, his movement won more than 10% of the vote and with that he was declared a “kingmaker.” He has always unwaveringly called for a full American withdrawal from his country. Now, with the potential power to return Nouri al-Maliki (for whom he has no love) to the prime ministership, he is evidently insisting that Washington retain not a single future base in Iraq -- and the Obama administration is twitching with discomfort.

General Stanley McChrystal: And here’s another heartwarming winner’s circle story. Once upon a time, McChrystal was essentially the U.S. military’s assassin-in-chief. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh called an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Then, the general was appointed Afghan War commander by Barack Obama and, under the worst of circumstances, tried to implement his boss’s textbook version of counterinsurgency doctrine (see COIN and Petraeus, General David, below). He actually cut back radically on the U.S. air war in Afghanistan in an attempt to kill far less of the civilians he was supposed to “protect” and have a better shot at winning “hearts and minds.”

The result: utter frustration. The Taliban grew, Afghans remained miserably unhappy, and American troops hated his new war-fighting policy which meant they couldn’t call in air support when they wanted it. He and his circle of former Special Ops types flew to Paris to greet NATO allies (for whom, it seems, he had nothing but contempt), drank hard, and vented their feelings toward the Obama administration, all in the presence of a Rolling Stone reporter. Next thing you know, the president has canned his war commander, putting him momentarily in the loser’s circle -- and that was his good fortune. He was shown the door out of Afghanistan before the going got worse. He is now in the process of retooling himself via a teaching position at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University as a budding leadership guru and inspirational speaker. (“Few people can speak about leadership, teamwork, and international affairs with as much insight as General Stanley McChrystal...”)

If you’re a typical American of a certain age laid off in today’s bad times, the likelihood of getting a half-decent job is next to nil (and retraining isn’t going to help much either). On the other hand, if you begin high enough and, say, the president of the United States axes you, all’s well with the world.

On the Cusp

General David Petraeus: The Great Surgifier of Baghdad and the Seer of Kabul is now, it seems, in something of a rush. For one thing, his fabulous 2006-2008 surge in Iraq turns out to have been for the benefit of Iran, not Washington (see Iran in Iraq above). In addition, as members of the Sunni Awakening Movement reportedly peel off in disillusionment or disgust with the present largely Shiite government and rejoin the insurgency in significant numbers, his modest success is threatening to unravel behind him -- and so is American support for the Afghan War he now commands, according to the opinion polls.

As a result, according to Washington pundit (and Petraeus-lover) David Ignatius, he’s making a “strategic pivot” -- a decorous phrase -- in Afghanistan. Give him credit for daring -- or desperation. He may be known as the progenitor of the Army’s present counterinsurgency strategy, or COIN, the man who dusted off that failed, long discarded doctrine from the Vietnam era, made it thrillingly sexy, complete with new manual, and elevated it to a central position in Army planning for years to come, but he’s not a man to let consistency stand in his way. Seeing the need for quick signs of “progress” in Afghanistan (where the war has been going desperately badly), both for a December Obama administration policy review and to keep any U.S. troop drawdowns to a minimum in 2011, he has countermanded former war commander McChrystal’s COIN-ish attempt to radically scale back U.S. air strikes. Instead, he’s loosed the U.S. Air Force on the Taliban, opted to try to pound them with anything available, pushed for escalation in the form of “hot pursuit” across the Pakistani border, upped Special Operations "capture or kill" raids, and generally left COIN in a ditch. Think of his new tactics as BKJ for bomb-kill-jaw -- the jawing being about “peace talks” and aimed at influential sectors of the U.S. media, among others, part of a rising drumbeat of “progress” propaganda from the general’s headquarters.

Well-connected, savvy, and willing to shift tactics on a moment’s notice, Petraeus is a figure to contend with in Washington, our most political general since I don’t know when. Like Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, he may be playing a cagey hand to extend matters through 2012, when a president ready to fight on till hell freezes over could take office. He’s a man on the cusp, destined for success, but only a few hops, skips, and jumps ahead of failure.

(By the way, keep an eye on another Bush-era holdover, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, if you want to gauge what Washington thinks of the war’s “progress.” Just a month ago, he was publicly muttering about retirement early next year. He’s not a man who will want to preside over disaster in Afghanistan. If he does leave early in 2011, just assume that the war is headed for the toilet and, having supported his war commanders in their surge strategy through 2009 and 2010, he’s getting out while the going is still good and his reputation intact.)

Pakistan: Only recently 20% underwater, Pakistan is in a protracted military, intelligence, and policy dance with the U.S., the Afghans, the Taliban, India, and god knows who else so intricate that only a contortionist could appreciate it. For Washington, Pakistan is an enigma curled in a conundrum wrapped in a roti and sprinkled with hot pepper. With the Obama administration schizophrenically poised between partnership and poison -- policies of “hot pursuit” across the Pakistani border and placation, showering the Pakistani military with yet more weaponry and cutting off some units from any aid at all -- anything is possible. Armed to the teeth, clobbered by nature, beset by fundamentalist guerrillas, surrounded by potential enemies, and unraveling, democratic and ever at the edge of military rule, Pakistan is the greatest unknown of the Greater Middle East (even if it is in South Asia). If it’s on the cusp of hell, then, like it or not, Washington will be, too.

Israel: The question here is straightforward enough: Just how badly can Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and his government treat the Obama administration (and the president himself) and get away with it? Right now, the answer seems to be, as badly as it wants. After all, Washington put almost all its global diplomatic apples in one ill-woven negotiating basket, named it making progress on a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem, started talks, and then offered Israel a package of goodies of a sort that would normally only be given away deep into negotiations, if at all, for nothing more than a two-month extension of the Israeli settlement-construction freeze. The result: Israeli settlers are again building up a storm on the West Bank while the Netanyahu government plays even harder to get. If the Obama administration can’t do better than this, then at the next TomDispatch handicapping session Israel has a reasonable shot at being elevated into the winner’s circle. If Obama and his team ever get tired of being kicked around by Netanyahu & Co., especially with the U.S. midterms behind them, life could get tougher for Bibi. The real question is: Can the prime minister play out this version of the game until 2012 in hopes that Obama will lose out and a new U.S. president will be ready to give away the store?

Iran (not in Iraq): Nasty government, shaky economy beset by international sanctions, poor choices and poor planning, irritated population, enemies with malice aforethought, and an embattled peaceful nuclear program that could be headed for “breakout” capacity versus fabulous reserves of oil and natural gas and integration into the great Eurasian energy grid as well as into the energy-eager plans of China, Russia, Pakistan, and India. It’s anybody’s bet.

The Global Economy: I wouldn’t even think about handicapping this one or guessing what it might be on the cusp of. After all, Asian economies (minus Japan) are heating up, as are a number of developing ones like Brazil’s (with capital flowing to such places in problematic amounts); meanwhile, the American economy is cold as a tomb, and Europe is teetering at the edge of who knows what. If this isn’t the definition of a jerry-built Rube-Goldberg-version of a global system, what is? Put your money down if you want, but you’ll get no odds here.

Prospective Losers

Counterinsurgency Doctrine or COIN: It was Petraeus’s baby and later the belle of the military ball as well as the talk of the militarized intelligentsia at every Washington think-tank that mattered. It took the U.S. Army by storm and, when it comes to laying out the latest plans for the U.S. Army’s future fighting doctrine, it’s still counterinsurgency all the way to the horizon (and 2028). But how long does any fad last? Who remembers hula hoops, bell bottoms, or the Whiskey a Go Go? In the same way, in Afghanistan, COIN, the military doctrine of “protecting the people” in order to win “hearts and minds,” just lost out to smashing the enemy -- and whoever else happens to be around (see Petraeus, General David, above). Okay, COIN is still there, and you’ll hear the carnies in and out of the war-making tent talking a great COIN game for some time to come, but that was the case in Vietnam, too, even after B-52s were carpet-bombing the South Vietnamese countryside and CIA-sponsored teams were roaming the provinces murdering locals by the score. Hearts and minds? COIN’s a loser, and even General Petraeus now seems to know it (though he’ll never admit it).

Great Britain: The British lion just got a haircut and -- who could be surprised -- most of the hair that got cut was shorn from women and children, always first to disembark from the HMS Economy. One other casualty of government slashing, however, is the British defense establishment, suffering an 8% budget cut over the next four years -- which means losing lots of jets, 17,000 bodies, and even the fleet’s flagship aircraft carrier, which will be “decommissioned,” leaving the British unable to launch a plane at sea until at least 2019. As the Washington Post politely put the matter: “[T]he [government’s] moves amount to a tactical scaling down of military ambition by the one European ally consistently willing to back the United States with firepower in international conflicts.” Put more bluntly, as the British in their imperial days used native recruits to help police their colonies and fight their wars, so in recent years, the Brits have been America’s Gurkhas. No longer, however, will Britain be, militarily speaking, the mouse that roared. Despite pathetic pledges to remain at the American side in Afghanistan forever and a day, the sun is now setting on the British military, which means that the U.S. has lost its key sidekick in any future “coalition of the willing.” (Note for the Pentagon: Carpe diem. The Brits are the canary in the mine on this. Sooner or later, it will be your turn, too. By then, of course, women and children in the U.S. will already be well shorn.)

Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans: We’re talking peoples here. Afghans and Iraqis have spent these last years, if not decades, in hell. Lives ripped apart and destroyed, exiles created in vast numbers, basic services debilitated. The numbers of dead and wounded, while contested, are vast enough to stagger the imagination. Just the other day, thanks to the Wikileaks Iraq document dump, Iraq Body Count was able to identify approximately 15,000 previously unknown Iraqi civilian deaths between 2004 and 2009. As that organization’s John Sloboda commented, the new cache of 400,000 U.S. military documents from 2004-2009 shows "the relentless grind of daily killings in almost every town or village in every province." The Iraqis, like the Afghans, deserved better and yet, when it comes to misery and death, there’s still no end in sight. Both peoples were supposedly “liberated” by American invasions. Both are the true losers of the last decade and the saddest of stories, planetarily speaking. And let’s not forget the American people either, pounded in their own way. Just imagine what kind of winners they might have been if, instead of building vast, useless base complexes in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East) and fighting trillion-dollar wars, the U.S. had chosen to build almost anything at home. But why go down that road? It’s such a sorry what-if journey to nowhere (see Economy, the American, below).

Barack Obama & Company: He had the numbers (in the polls and in Congress) and the popularity in early 2009. He could have done almost anything. But first, in the key areas of foreign and economic policy, he surrounded himself with the old crew, the deadest of heads, and the stalest Washington thinking around. While this was presented as an Ivy League fest of the best and the brightest, so far their track record shows them to be politically dumb and dumber. They missed out on jobs (about as simple and basic as you can get), and took a dismal year of review to double down twice on a war from hell. Now, the president stands a reasonable chance in 2012 of turning over to a new (possibly far more dismal) administration an even more disastrous Afghan War, an unfinished Iraq crisis, a Guantanamo still unclosed, “don’t ask, don’t tell” still in place (who says the coming Congress will care to do Obama’s bidding on this one, now that he’s bypassed the courts), and a jobless nonrecovery or worse -- and that’s just to start down the path of DisObamapointment.

The American Economy: Don’t even get me started. Just kiss this one goodbye for a while.

Check back in a month. With the global (and American) midterms over and the Big Show of 2012 ahead, rest assured that our hardy gang of pollsters and pundits will soon be gearing up again. You can sort through the odds and place your next set of bets in late November.

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

The Chosen: Jewish members in the 112th U.S. Congress

November 2, 2010

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The following is a list of the 39 Jewish members -- 12 senators and 27 representatives -- who are expected to serve in the 112th U.S. Congress, which is set to convene in January:

U.S. SENATE

Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)*

Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)**

Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.)

Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

Al Franken (D-Minn.)

Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.)

Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)

Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.)

Carl Levin (D-Mich.)

Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.)

Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)**

Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)**

(Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who is projected to win his re-election bid, does not identify a religion, but notes that his mother is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor.)

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.)

Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.)

Howard Berman (D-Calif.)

Eric Cantor (R-Va.)

David Cicilline (D-R.I.)*

Stephen Cohen (D-Tenn.)

Susan Davis (D-Calif.)

Ted Deutch (D-Fla.)

Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.)

Bob Filner (D-Calif.)

Barney Frank (D-Mass.)

Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.)

Jane Harman (D-Calif.)

Steve Israel (D-N.Y.)

Sander Levin (D-Mich.)

Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.)

Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.)

Jared Polis (D-Colo.)

Steve Rothman (D-N.J.)

Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.)

Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.)

Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)

Brad Sherman (D-Calif.)

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)

Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)

Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.)

John Yarmuth (D-Ky.)

* Elected to House or Senate for the first time in 2010 midterms

** Senators who were re-elected in 2010 midterms

Okla. Voters Approve Sharia Ban

Stephanie Samuel
Christian Post Correspondent
Wed, Nov. 03, 2010 Posted: 02:12 PM EDT

With more than half of the vote, Oklahoma voters overwhelming approved a state amendment banning state judges from consulting Islamic law in deciding cases.

State Referendum Question 755, asking Oklahoma residents to amend Article 7 of the state’s constitution to forbid the state’s courts from using or even considering Sharia law when ruling in a legal proceeding, passed with 70 percent of the vote, aides said.

Former Republican state Rep. Rex Duncan, the referendum’s sponsor, praised the amendment’s adoption as a preemptive strike against what he calls “activist judges.”

Duncan believes American courts are increasingly consulting Sharia law to decide matters pertaining to the U.S. Muslim community. The newly elect district attorney calls this practice “grossly inappropriate.”

“I think the benefit of this referendum will be felt in other states drowning in liberal judges,” said Duncan.

Fordham University Law Professor Jim Cohen told ABC News that he believed the state is overstepping its bounds.

“Our federal system and our state system [are] in part governed by the concept of separation of powers. It’s far from clear that the Oklahoma legislature can restrict what a separate branch of government can consider in terms of doing its job,” he said.

He told ABC that references to Sharia law in legal matters are “rare.”

Others fear that even the slightest reliance on Islamic law may open the door for the Sharia courts and practice in America.

Paul Estabrooks, senior communication specialist of Christian persecution watchdog group Open Doors, agrees that Sharia law, once introduced, will eventually lead to human right challenges.

“It’s kind of the old adage that once the camel gets his head in the tent, it won’t be long before he’s all in there. A lot of people fear that,” he said.

Estabrooks pointed out that Sharia allows for the disproportionate treatment of women and religious persecution.

“One of the implications of Sharia law is that when someone leaves the faith of Islam, they become apostate and that’s punishable by death under Sharia law,” he stated.

Dr. Bill Wagner, author of How Islam Plans to Change the World, says Sharia, meaning path or way to the waterhole in the desert, is seen by devoted Muslims as a utopian way of life.

“Devoted Muslims feel that it is their duty to live under this system. They are allowed to live under other systems if they are in a minority. But [they] must try to institute Sharia for themselves as soon as possible,” explained Wagner.

Still, both Wagner and Estabrooks believe the amendment is premature.

“In Oklahoma there is no danger of an attempt to bring in Sharia Law for the next few years, but I feel that once the Muslims get a majority in some areas it will become a major issue,” said Wagner.

If Sharia does become a major issue, Wagner says, Christians must be prepared to take a stand.

Pro-Israel group claims election victory

Josh Rogin
Foreign Policy
Wednesday, November 3, 2010

One prominent pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington is already praising the GOP takeover of the House of Representatives as a net benefit for Israel.

"While Democrats are likely to keep control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans will take over the U.S. House of Representatives following Tuesday's elections. This is likely to have implications for Israel-related issues such as Israel's relationship with the United States and the push for sanctions against Iran," said an e-mail blasted out by The Israel Project only minutes after news stations called the turnover of House control a certainty.

"The takeover of the House by Republicans is great news for Israel and her supporters," the email quotes Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman under President George W. Bush, as saying. "The House leadership and almost every single GOP member is rock-solid behind Israel. At times like this, Israel needs friends everywhere."

But the Israel Project's e-mail then quickly turns on its head and praises Congressional Democrats in the House and Senate for their staunch support of Israel.

"The House Democratic leadership has been powerfully supportive of Israel, and Speaker Pelosi has been nothing short of passionate in her successful pursuit of biting sanctions against Iran - a key interest of the pro-Israel community," The Israel Project quotes David Harris, president and CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, as saying.

So which is it? Is The Israel Project saying that Republicans or Democrats are better for Israel?

"American voters on both sides of the aisle support Israel," Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder and president of The Israel Project, says in the e-mail.

The Israel Project identifies several key Congressional changes that could impact the Israel debate on Capitol Hill. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) will take over the House Foreign Affairs Committee from Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA). House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who the Project calls "staunchly pro-Israel," will likely be the next Speaker of the House and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) could become Majority Leader, "the highest-ranking post a Jew has ever held in Congress," the e-mail points out.

The Project also points toward Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), who could become the new head of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on terrorism, non-proliferation, and trade, and whoever will replace Barney Frank (D-MA) as head of the Finance Committee, "a key avenue for sanctions against Iran." The top three contenders for chairman are Spencer Bachus, (R-AL), Pete King (R-NY), and Royce.