The Real Face of Obama’s “Good War”

australia.to | Dec 14, 2009

by Bill Van Auken

“WSWS” — Reports that mercenaries employed by the notorious Blackwater-Xe military contracting firm participated in CIA assassinations in Iraq and Afghanistan have further exposed the real character of so-called “good war” that is being escalated by the Obama administration.

Citing former employees of the firm and US intelligence agents, the New York Times reported Friday that Blackwater gunmen, ostensibly contracted as security guards, “participated in some of the CIA’s most sensitive activities—clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees.”

These “snatch and grab” operations—many of them involving killings of individuals suspected of participating in the resistance to US occupation—“occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater employees playing central roles,” the Times reports.

Both the Times and the Washington Post quoted unnamed intelligence officials and ex-Blackwater operatives as asserting that the involvement of the company’s mercenaries in assassinations and abductions was not planned. Rather, they claimed, it was a matter of the division of labor between CIA operatives and private guards supposedly hired for the purpose of protecting them becoming “blurred.”

According to the Times, the Blackwater guards “were supposed to only provide perimeter security during raids, leaving it up to CIA officers and Special Operations military personnel to capture or kill suspected insurgents.” The newspaper added, “But in the chaos of operations, the roles of Blackwater, CIA and military personnel sometimes merged.”

The pretense that armed Blackwater contractors, most of them former US Special Operations troops themselves, would be used merely as security guards for CIA personnel is absurd on its face. Whatever justification was given for the contract, the “skill set” that Blackwater offered was precisely that of highly trained assassins.

A spokesman for Blackwater-Xe responded to the press reports by insisting that there was never any contract for the firm to participate in raids with CIA or Special Forces troops “in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.” He added: “Any allegation to the contrary by any news organization would be false.”

The absence of a contract spelling out Blackwater’s role in assassination missions is hardly surprising, given that the mercenary outfit’s chief attraction for the CIA is precisely its ability to act without regard to any government oversight or regard for civil or military law. As the Post put it, citing a retired intelligence officer, “For government employees, working with contractors offered ways to circumvent red tape.”

Blackwater’s role as an extra-legal extension of the Central Intelligence Agency tasked with dirty operations with which the CIA did not want its employees directly associated is more than evident.

An article published in the current (January) edition of Vanity Fair, written by Adam Ciralsky, a former CIA attorney, cites intelligence sources in reporting that Eric Prince, the multi-millionaire Republican founder-owner of Blackwater, was not merely a private contractor, but a “full-blown asset” recruited by the agency precisely for such operations.

The central role played by Blackwater in the CIA’s activities became increasingly clear as key agency officials left the CIA and took up positions in Blackwater’s management. These included J. Cofer Black, the former head of the agency’s Counter Terrorism Center, Enrique Prado, the center’s former chief of operations, and Rob Richer, formerly the second-in-command of the CIA’s clandestine service.

In Iraq, Blackwater’s employees acted with complete impunity, killing large numbers of civilians without being held to account by either the Iraqi regime or US military commanders. The scope of this violence came to public attention in September 2007, when a convoy of Blackwater operatives stopped in Baghdad’s Nisour Square and without provocation opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing 17 Iraqis.

Six of the Blackwater mercenaries have been charged by federal prosecutors with voluntary manslaughter over the killings. One of them has pled guilty and is expected to testify against the others in a trial starting in February.

Meanwhile, the company is being sued in separate civil cases brought on behalf of 70 Iraqis over killings by the firm’s employees in Iraq. Two ex-employees of Blackwater have filed affidavits in these cases charging that company head Prince may have either murdered or ordered the murders of individuals cooperating with the Justice Department’s investigation of the firm.

Friday’s report in the Times follows a series of revelations that have surfaced since last June, when CIA Director Leon Panetta briefed Congressional intelligence committees about a covert assassination program involving Blackwater, which he claimed to have only just discovered and terminated. Panetta asserted that the program had never been implemented. Until then, it had been kept secret from Congress, reportedly on the orders of former vice president Dick Cheney.

It was subsequently revealed that employees of Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services in an attempt to shed the firm’s infamous reputation, were actively involved in an ongoing assassination program on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, carried out by means of Predator drones. The Blackwater mercenaries were assembling and loading the 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles used to carry out so-called “targeted killings,” which have taken the lives of hundreds of civilians. In addition, they provided security for the drone bases and according to some reports, participated in intelligence operations that determined the targets for the attacks.

There have been at least 65 such aerial assassination strikes in Pakistan since August 2008, with a reported death toll of over 625 people. Some estimates put the number killed at over 1,000, many of them women and children. Most of these attacks have taken place since the Obama administration took office.

In addition to the more than 30,000 additional US troops being sent into Afghanistan, Obama has authorized the CIA to dramatically escalate the drone attacks. US officials have also warned the Pakistani government that these attacks are to be extended beyond the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan into Baluchistan, and potentially against the crowded city of Quetta, where Afghan Taliban leaders have reportedly taken refuge.

It is far from clear, based on the Times report, to what extent Blackwater’s role in targeted assassinations, both from the air and on the ground, is continuing. Since 2001, the firm has netted over $1.5 billion in government contracts, providing armed mercenaries for the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon.

One thing is certain, assassinations of the kind involving Blackwater mercenaries are going to be carried out on a far greater scale as part of Obama’s escalation of the US war in Afghanistan.

These plans were hinted at by Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. “There’s no question you’ve got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable,” Petraeus told the senators. “And we are intending to do that.”

The general continued, “In fact, we actually will be increasing our counterterrorist component of the overall strategy.” He said that additional “national mission force elements” will be arriving in Afghanistan by next spring.

The “elements” cited by Petraeus include Special Operations units like the Army’s classified Delta Force, as well as CIA hit squads and, in all probability, mercenary forces like those fielded by Blackwater.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, tapped by Obama to direct the Afghan war, was previously the head of the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command, which consists of such special forces troops and assassination squads. Petraeus said that McChrystal could brief members of the Senate committee on this element of the Obama surge in a closed session.

It is noteworthy that the controversy in the major media is centered on whether the use of Blackwater mercenaries to hunt down and murder individuals suspected of opposing the US occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan represented an illegitimate use of private contractors in carrying out a core government function.

The murders themselves are not an issue. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order barring the CIA from directly carrying out assassinations or contracting them out to others. The decision followed a wave of public outrage over a series of revelations of CIA assassination plots around the globe that earned the agency the epithet “Murder, Inc.”

In 2001, President George W. Bush overturned Ford’s ruling, issuing his own intelligence finding that such restrictions no longer applied in the “global war on terrorism.” The Democrats offered no objections, and the media has treated it entirely as a matter of course, while blacking out any serious reporting on the resulting carnage and victims.

As with every other essential question, President Barack Obama has adopted Bush’s policy. “Targeted assassinations,” extraordinary rendition, the use of mercenaries, all of the sordid crimes carried out under the Bush administration continue. These brutal methods are about to be unleashed with redoubled force against the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan as Obama oversees new war crimes.

Robert Mugabe’s supporters ‘used rape as a weapon’ in election

President Robert Mugabe’s supporters have been accused of using rape as a political weapon against the opposition during the election in Zimbabwe last year  Photo: REUTERS

President Robert Mugabe’s supporters have been accused of using rape as a political weapon against the opposition during the election in Zimbabwe last year.

Telegraph | Dec 10, 2009

By Sebastien Berger

A report by an American charity documents 380 politically motivated rapes committed by 241 individuals across all of Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces.

Aids-Free World, which is led by the former United Nations envoy on Aids, Stephen Lewis, said that those behind the attacks on supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change had even set up central facilities where several women could be gang-raped simultaneously.

Campaigners painted a harrowing picture based on interviews with 72 survivors and witnesses. The perpetrators allegedly included members of the Zanu-PF youth militia, and so-called “war veterans” loyal to Mr Mugabe.

In some cases women were held at Zanu-PF supporters’ bases and were violated in the same room as others, the report said.

“The room was large, with many other women MDC members and Zanu-PF men inside,” a woman from Harare told campaigners. “All three of them were rough when they raped me. Around the room there were other men raping other girls. All the men in that room were either raping or waiting to rape women.”

At least nine of the women interviewed believe they were infected with HIV when they were raped. A 23-year-old in Masvingo said her attackers told her: “You say [MDC leader Morgan] Tsvangirai is good. We want you to know that Tsvangirai is not good. We want to give you diseases and see if Tsvangirai will take care of your children.”

In other cases family members, even young girls, were also targeted. A woman from the capital said: “When the tenth man finished raping me they said they were going to rape my daughter. I cried out but I could not even stand up at this time.

“After they finished with me, they raped my daughter when I was there and I couldn’t do anything to stop them. My daughter was five years old.”

Mr Mugabe and Zanu-PF have consistently denied responsibility for the violence that took place in Zimbabwe last year. They now share power with the MDC.

Tony Blair: WMDs or not, I’d have gone to war with Iraq just to oust Saddam

Daily Mail | Dec 12,  2009

By Liz Thomas

Confession: Tony Blair 'thought it right' to remove Saddam Hussein from power

Tony Blair has confessed he would have gone to war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein even if he had known there were no weapons of mass destruction there.

In remarks that will outrage anti-war campaigners, the former Prime Minister said he would have ‘deployed different arguments’ to justify the invasion.

His admission will fuel claims that he sent 179 British servicemen and women to their deaths on a false premise.

Mr Blair secured Parliamentary backing for the war in 2003 by insisting Saddam could deploy chemical and biological missiles in 45 minutes – a claim that proved to be untrue.

But asked in a BBC1 interview with presenter Fern Britton if he would still have proceeded to war if he had known Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, Mr Blair said: ‘I would still have thought it right to remove him.’

He went on: ‘I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.

‘I can’t really think that we would be better with him and his two sons still in charge but it is incredibly difficult.

‘I sympathise with the people who were against it for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me you know in the end I had to take the decision.’

The interview comes as the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War prepares to hear Mr Blair’s evidence in the New Year.

A string of witnesses have already testified that the Government was aware Saddam did not have WMDs and that Mr Blair was intent on backing President George W Bush’s plan to invade.

Sir Christopher Meyer, the UK’s ambassador to Washington between 2001 and 2003, told the Inquiry that the leaders had ’signed in blood’ a deal to invade Iraq at the President’s family ranch in Texas in April 2002.

Sir David Manning, Mr Blair’s foreign policy adviser at the time, also revealed that he had instructed the Army to prepare a 20,000- strong invasion force in June 2002.

And Sir John Scarlett, the spymasfeelter behind the notorious ‘dodgy dossier’ that contained the 45-minute claim, made it clear that Downing Street had strengthened the intelligence with an ‘overtly political’ foreword making the case for war.

In his interview with the BBC, Mr Blair admitted he knew many held him responsible for the deaths of troops.

Hate figure: Mr Blair’s statement will further anger anti-war protesters like above

He said: ‘[I] have got to carry it I am afraid. There is no point in going in to a situation of conflict and not understanding there is going to be a price paid.

‘Now it is important to understand that many of those who are in the armed forces, including those who have lost their loved ones in Afghanistan or Iraq, they are also very often proud of what their child has done and proud of the cause they fought in so you have got to be. [I also] know there are parents who very, very deeply angry and resentful and believe the war was not worth it.’

Mr Blair, 56, also tackled his conversion to Roman Catholicism after he left office in 2007.

He admitted that he did not convert while he was in office because there ‘would have been endless hassle’ about it.

There has never been a Catholic Prime Minister.

His former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who was also interviewed for the show, revealed that Mr Blair insisted on going to church wherever they were in the world.

He said that there were times when he had needed to discuss urgent and serious issues with the Prime Minister, but he had refused to leave the service.

Former police chief charged with using Taser on girlfriend may do time

Former cop charged with using Taser on girlfriend may do time after all

KXXV | Dec 11, 2009

by Henry Rosoff

OAKWOOD – A former Central Texas police chief accused of repeatedly using a Taser on his live-in girlfriend’s stomach and face, may get jail time after all.

The Leon County District Attorney purposed a plea deal that would have given Oly Ivy, the former chief of Oakwood, probation along with a long list probation requirements.  He was originally charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a felony.

Amanda Juarez, who Ivy allegedly attacked while the two were having a verbal argument, was upset by the original deal.

However, Juarez said she went to the Leon County Courthouse Friday and was surprised by the result of the plea hearing.

Juarez said she spoke with the judge about her objections to the deal and the judge asked for some changes.

She said the judge will consider adding up to thirty days jail time for Ivy, which with 11 days already served, could mean 19 more days in jail.  Juarez will also be allowed to make a victim impact statement prior to the finalizing of the plea deal in January.

“Catastrophic Global Warming”, Ecological Brainwashing and World Government

Global Research | Dec 10, 2009

by Olga Chetverikova

After an annual meeting of the Bilderberg Club in May 2009, the establishment of the global management system of institutions seemed to have been given a boost, repeating the plots of American apocalypitc blockbusters.

As soon as the financial top had opted for a lingering crisis, global managers were instructed to work in two major ways: first, to invent a myth about the danger of swine flu pandemic (in order to take control of the national healthcare systems and reorganize the World Health Organization (WHO) into a global healthcare ministry) and impose a threat of global warming to gain control of world natural resources and introduce a unified ‘green’ tax (alongside with creation of a new sub-national managing body- an international ministry of ecology).

Both tasks aim to intimidate the population and thus substantiate any policies undertaken by international organziations. Chairman of the Board of Governors ‘British Petroluem’, Peter Suterlan, once frankly admitted that he would like to impose fear of global warming in order to increase taxes and make people revise their lifestyle.

The implementation of the first scenario suggested by the Bilderberg Club is currently underway.

After the WHO announced the A/H1N1 pandemic on July 11, 2009, a real hysteria was launched in mass media worldwide, and people were told to get prepared for the pandemic in November and undergo vaccination (in 2005 the WHO added an amendment to its Charter which says that duirng a pandemic the organization does not recommend but gives instructions and orders, and the number of vaccines should be no less than 4.6 billion). The operation reached its peak when in late September Barack Obama signed a decree to impose ‘a flu pandemic sanitary emergency’, which means that the citizens could be vaccinated against their will and kept in special quarantine zones. Amid panic, Americans and West Europeans were involved in mass immunization, which unveiled that the pandemic had been paid in order to let pharmaceutical companies thrive on it, and also as a weapon against ‘unwanted’ population (and now we all know what a swine flu vaccine is). It was also used as a so-called ‘innovative’ mechanism of handling political processes- which was so actively used in Ukraine. In view of this, the WHO gained extra powers and strengthened its status.

Now we are witnessing another show titled “The UN Copenhagen climate change conference”, currently held in the Danish capital (it will run through December 18) and aiming to work out a document to limit global emissions and replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. Thirty thousand participants, including 60 heads of states and prime mnisters, have arrived there on December,7.

The EU, being one of the major organizers of the summit, had elected its first President, who was immediately described in the media as a creature of the Bilderberg club: on November, 15, a few days before his appointment, Herman Van Rompuy met with the club`s top managers at Val Duchesse castle outside Brussels, where he spoke about the need to revise the mechanism of the EU`s financing and suggested a unified ‘green’ tax which would go directly to Brussels. The fact that the issue was covered in the media proves that members of the Bilderberg Club are no longer going to conceal that they are the real bosses in Europe.

Such confidence annoyed some of the European Parliament members. One of them, an Italian Mario Borghezio, said: “All three candidates (for the role of the EU president) often attended meeting at the Bilderberg club, and I think that they should explain whether they are honest candidates representing their native country or just members of secret groups which had been organized to discuss pressing social and other kinds of issues”. Another MP, an Englishman Nigel Farage criticized Rompuy`s appointment and called him a ‘puppet-leader’ in the hands of Barroso. He even dared to say that the EU is an authoritarian dictatorship ruled by bureaucracy which is not elected by anybody. Commenting on the Lisbon Treaty, Farage told the delegates: “It took you 8,5 years of intimidation, lying and disrespect towards democratic referendums to lobby this deal!”

Immediately after his appointment as the EU President, Van Rompuy (known in Europe as ‘master of compromising’) assured his patrons that he perfectly understood all the tasks he was facing. Speaking at a press-conference, Herman Van Rompuy said that 2009 has become the ‘first year of global management’ (he meant the G20), while the Climate Summit in Copenhagen is a next step in this direction’.

The Danish government carried out a reshuffle and appointed Lykke Friis, pro-dean at the Copenhagen University, as Climate Minister to replace Connie Hedegaard, a member of the Bilderberg Club. The latter swapped her title to First Commissioner on the EU Climate, which was introduced in October 2009 especially in order to control the reduction of CO2 emissions by 20% by the year 2020. Hedegaard is a member of numerous committees and organizations, including the Danish Atlantic Treaty Association led by Robert Gunther.

What goals are being pursued in Copenhagen this time?

Lord Christopher Monckton, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, explained: “When I read this treaty I see that the authors are talking about the establishment of ‘one world Marxist government’. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, ‘climate debt’ – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement,” Monckton warned. He then noted that the new treaty would be supported by most of the third world countries ‘as they think they will receive money for it’. And the US President will sign it without expecting two thirds of the Senate and the Congress to ratify it.

And the ‘world government’, which would be empowered to interfere in other countries` economic and ecological policies, and the ‘enforcement’- these all are just mechanisms to ‘transfer resources’ which actually means reforming economies of the non-western countries with the use of progressive technologies in order to gain control these resources within that level of consumption permitted in the West that would guarantee a drop in the planet`s population.

It is no secret that the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted after the idea of global warming resulting from anthropogenic factors had been promoted among scientists. In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was prtensented as an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Protocol sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions .These amount to an average of five per cent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012. The US, being the world`s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has not ratified the Protocol. The EU (now comprising the Baltic States and the countries of Eastern Europe) took the burden of the responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8%, Japan and Canada- by 6%. The Protocol limits emission in Russia and Ukraine to a percentage increase or decrease from their 1990 levels. The developing countries, including China and India were not included in numerical limitation of the Kyoto Protocol.

However, the implementation of the Kyoto deal failed to help in resolving environmental problems but added a new commodity to the international market: quota on GHG. It turned into a pure speculation and let the financial capital grasp onto a vital energy sector in the developing countries. Due to their imperfect industrial policies, the developed states could not succeed in modernization and GHG reducing. That is why they found another means to fulfill their obligations: a developed state helps a developing one to reduce emissions and then counts the limited tons of GHG as if those were reduce on its territory. Very soon hundreds of companies and foundations joined this ‘green’ quota games hoping to thrive on it. In the long run, the international environmental market received the strongest expansion ever, and it originally there were only three purchasers: the World Bank, the governments of the Netherlands and Japan, now their number has increased sharply, and professional speculators now make up to 40% of the participants in hydrocarbon exchanges.

Having accepted the conditions, Russia later faced an ambiguous situation: the country has large stocks of free greenhouse gases but this is because in 1990s its industry was in severe crisis, and all emissions then even fell below 30%.

The international community plans to introduce new emission quotas to restrict industrial development and impose western environmental standards that require implementation of very costly projects (and these expenses will never be compensated by the sums earned on ‘green’ quotas trading). And taking into consideration that climate in Russia requires constant expenditures on energy, the country will hardly be able to restore its industrial power.

A group of developed nations have prepared a brand new document especially for the Copenhagen summit. The document says that the divison into developed and developing nations has long become outdated, while today all the states should be obliged to cut GHG emissions and provide assisstance to the poorest countries. The treaty is expected to be legally binding as well so that the states approved new rules at the governmental level. But the differences between the participants were so great that they only managed to agree on a road map plan without discussing the figures.

However, high promises of financial and investment assisstance proved to be more effective than legal mechanisms, and ahead of the summit the leading developing nations followed in the West`s footsteps and pledged GHG emissions cuts by 2020. The EU announced a 20% reduction from the 1990 level, while the US said it will reduce its emissions by 17% from the 2005 level (in accordance with a draft law approved by the House of Representatives). India claimed it wil reduce 20-25%, whiel South Korea and China announced the figures of 30% and 40-45% respectively.

Russian WWF, Greenpeace and Ecoprotection activists said ‘Russia should play the leading role at the talks. We can and should remain at the 1990 level of 30%. And then we shoud proceed with further reduction”. At the Russa-EU summit in November, Dmitry Medvedev said the country would try to reduce its GHG emissions up to 25% by 2020, and added that by 2050 Russia will be ready to cut emission by no less than 50% in comparison to the 1990 level.

This kind of unanimity hides the real differences between the participants of the summit and the gravity of environmental problems and adds fuel to the fire caused by the idea of ‘catastrophic global warming’. Recently, the Prince of Wales Charles has delivered a report in which he said that ‘nations have less than 100 months to act to save the planet from irreversible damage due to climate change.

Global management does everything to hide the real state of affairs. It ignores information and scientific research from alternative sources, especially if the threat of global warming and its anthropogenic factors are being argued (mind the recent leakage of e-mails from the University of East Anglia`s Climatic Research, the so-called ‘climate gate’).

In the past 20 years a powerful system of ecological ‘brainwashing’ has been created which serves the participants in ‘green’ business who can thus control the Earth`s natural resources. But in their attempts to keep the world`s population deluded, global speculators and their servants among politicians have long surpassed reasonable limits.

I remember an old Russian proverb: the devil is scary when you cannot see him but when you do he makes you laugh.

Memorial to victim of police shooting to be placed at south London Tube station

Police gun victim Menezes memorial for Stockwell

BBC | Dec 10, 2009

The mural will replace an improvised shrine at the station

A permanent memorial to Jean Charles de Menezes will be placed at the south London Tube station where he was shot dead by police.

Transport for London has given the go-ahead for a mosaic of the 27-year-old Brazilian at Stockwell station.

The mosaic will replace an improvised pavement shrine of flowers, candles, pictures and newspaper articles.

Mr de Menezes was shot seven times by counter-terrorist officers on a Tube train at the station, on 22 July 2005.

The officers were hunting for would-be suicide bomber Hussain Osman on the day after the failed 21 July attacks.

Last year coroner Sir Michael Wright recorded an open verdict at the end of a multimillion-pound inquest, after a jury rejected the police account of the shooting.

‘Memory kept alive’

The family of Mr de Menezes accepted a six-figure compensation deal from the Metropolitan Police last month.

His cousin Vivian Figueiredo said she was pleased at the decision to develop the mural, designed by local artist Mary Edwards, next year.

She said: “The pain of never achieving justice for Jean’s killing continues to haunt us every day.

“But knowing his memory will be kept alive in the local community through this memorial is a tribute we could not have dreamed of.”

Obama accepts Nobel prize with ‘difficult questions’ about war and peace

AFP/Getty Images

USA Today | Dec 10, 2009

USA Today | Dec 10, 2009

By OLIVIER MORIN

President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today by asking “difficult questions” about war and peace, while acknowledging he is a first-year president and a superpower commander-in-chief who is sending more troops to Afghanistan.

“I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated,” Obama said during his acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway. “In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.”

The president devoted most of his 36-minute address to the ancient but still-present reality that conflict is sometimes necessary, even as the world seeks peace.

There are can and have been “just wars,” Obama said, but world leaders should also work for peaceful alternatives that can include tough economic sanctions, negotiating with enemies, and eliminating global poverty.

“We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace,” Obama said. “We can do that, for that is the story of human progress; that is the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.”

Obama expressed “deep gratitude and great humility” for the Nobel Peace Prize, which “speaks to out highest aspirations … For all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.”

The speech included a defense of the Afghanistan war as well as other actions necessary to confront the threat from terrorists seeking nuclear weapons. Obama also outlined his goals for a nuclear weapons-free world that takes on challenges of climate change, disease, and poverty.

Critics cited Afghanistan in calling Obama’s award premature. Protestors along the presidential motorcade route in Oslo unfurled a banner reading, “Obama You Won It Now Earn It.”

The president sprinkled his remarks with tributes to past Nobel Peace Prize winners, including American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and General-turned-Secretary of State George C. Marshall, as well as humanitarian Albert Schweitzer and South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.

“The most profound issue,” Obama said, is that he is commander-in-chief of a military still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. “And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict,” he said,”filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.”

In discussing the history of warfare through the ages, Obama said there have been such things as “just wars.” And he defended U.S. efforts “to underwrite” global security for the six decades since the end of World War II.

“Make no mistake, evil does exist in the world,” Obama, citing the Nazis and al Qaeda terrorists as example. That holds true today in a world “buckling under the weight of new threats,” including terrorists seeking nuclear weapons.

The president also the United States will act on its own if necessary. “I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation,” he said.

Yet though it may be necessary, Obama said, “war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.”

“So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths — that war is sometimes necessary, and war is at some level an expression of human feelings,” the president said.

Obama devoted much of his address to three ways in which the world can avoid the “tragic choices” of conflict, and “build a just and lasting peace.”

One is developing alternatives to punish wayward nations, including effective economic sanctions; the second is promotion of human rights, including potentially difficult diplomacy with potential enemies.

“I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation,” Obama said. “But I also know that sanctions without outreach — and condemnation without discussion — can carry forward a crippling status quo.”

As examples, Obama cited President Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to communist China; Pope John Paul II’s outreach to communist Poland; and Ronald Reagan’s dealings with the soon-to-crumble Soviet Union.

A third alternative to war is improving economic opportunity throughout the world. “True peace is not just freedom from fear,” Obama said, “but freedom from want.”

When war is necessary, the U.S. and others should abide by a code of conduct, Obama said. He drew applause when he mentioned his decision to ban torture of prisoners and to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war,” Obama said.

Obama is the fourth U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He cited one of his predecessors, Woodrow Wilson, honored in 1919 for creating the League of Nations even though the Senate rejected membership in it.

The other presidential winners were Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Jimmy Carter in 2002, more than two decades after his term in office.

Brazil police ‘kill 11,000 in six years’

Police in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have killed more than 11,000 people in the past six years, many in execution-style murders, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch.

Telegraph | Dec 9, 2009

Few of the officers have been charged in the extrajudicial killings, which are often labelled in police reports as the deaths of suspects who resisted arrest, the report said.

The 122-page declaration echoes a 2008 United Nations’ finding that police throughout Brazil were responsible for a “significant portion” of 48,000 slayings the year before.

“Extrajudicial killing of criminal suspects is not the answer to violent crime,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The residents of Rio and Sao Paulo need more effective policing, not more violence from the police.”

Isabel Figueiredo, Brazil’s coordinator-general of human rights and public safety, acknowledged that police violence is a widespread problem and “it concerns the federal government a great deal.”

Ms Figueiredo said authorities have launched a series of initiatives to confront the problem, including training police to respect human rights and the appropriate use of force, in addition to the purchase of less-lethal weapons for state police forces.

Security forces “have begun to understand that instead of solving the problem, confronting criminals with weapons leads to casualties on both sides,” she said.

Officials from the Rio and Sao Paulo police departments did not comment.

Climategate: Barack Obama’s rule by EPA decree is a coup d’etat against Congress, made in Britain

Telegraph | Dec 8, 2009

By Gerald Warner

Who needs tanks on the lawn when you have the Environmental Protection Agency? Barack Obama’s use of the EPA to pressurise the Senate to pass his climate change Nuremberg Decrees shows his dictatorial mentality. He wants to override Congress, which is hostile to his climate gobbledegook because it is representative of the American electorate, and sideline the nation’s elected Senators by ruling by decree, courtesy of the EPA. This is a coup d’état.

And what is the justification for this undemocratic action? The allegedly imminent threat from “Anthropogenic Global Warming”. There is always a supposed threat, when tyrants take the stage. The President of the United States has just reduced his moral authority to the level of any Third World dictator heading a “Government of National Emergency”. Fortunately, the world’s leading democracy, which he is trying to subvert, has guarantees of liberty so deeply embedded in its Constitution that US citizens are well placed to fight back.

In the first place, regulation can be challenged in a way that laws cannot. So the EPA’s proposed ruling on so-called “Greenhouse Gases” can be opposed extensively with litigation, to the point that the ruling might not yet be in force when Obama demits office. In the second place, the EPA is funded by Congress. So, if the Agency is being used to bypass or neuter Congress, why should legislators not play hardball and retaliate by cutting off its funding? The EPA may look formidable, but its situation is rather as if Rommel were buying the fuel for his tanks from the Allies.

But what is of compelling interest on this side of the pond is the way in which the bullets to shoot down American democracy were made in Britain. The trail is not hard to follow. When the EPA published its “Endangerment Finding” on greenhouse gases and proposed rule, back in April, almost every paragraph of the text (Federal Register, April 24, 2009, pp 18886-18910) cited as authority the IPCC’s 2007 Report, which the Agency acknowledges it “relies on most heavily”. And whence came the main input on climate change to that report?

Yes, that’s right! You’ve got it: from Phil Jones, Michael Mann and the rest of the lads at the CRU, East Anglia. From the innovative, creative “scientists” who wanted to “beat the crap” out of a climate change sceptic; who “just completed Mike’s Nature trick”; who “can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”; who deleted e-mails in the interests of science; who tried to prevent publication of dissenters’ views; who coined the historic phrase “hide the decline”.

Those jokers are the main authority for the extravagant claims in the IPCC report and, by extension, for the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding”. That is the authority that is being invoked to overturn the principles of 1776 in the United States. The Protocols of the Elders of Norwich are the justification for EPA tyranny. It is with that weighty evidence at his back that Barack Obama is going to Copenhagen to sell out American taxpayers to Third World subsidy junkies, profiteering “green” corporations and the ever entrepreneurial Al Gore. This is the steal of the millennium: forget the Great Train Robbery and the Brinks Mat caper – these hoodlums are targeting $45 trillion.

Obama hates America and, increasingly, that sentiment is being reciprocated. This is a socialist, World Government putsch. Have the American people the resolution to resist it? We shall soon know.

Is Erik Prince ‘Graymailing’ the US Government?

The Nation | Dec 4, 2009

By Jeremy Scahill

The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels–not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story’s author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of Prince’s forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself.

While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world’s most famous mercenary’s insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed. “The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges,” says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. “He absolutely would not do these things otherwise.”

There is no doubt Prince is in the legal cross-hairs: There are reportedly two separate Grand Juries investigating Blackwater on a range of serious charges, ranging from gun smuggling to extralegal killings; multiple civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings; and Congress is investigating the assassination program in which Prince and his company were central players. “Obviously, Prince does know a lot and the government has to realize that once they start prosecuting him,” says Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “In some ways, graymail is what any good defense lawyer would do. This is something that’s in your arsenal.”

Perhaps the most prominent case of graymail was by Oliver North when he and his lawyers used it to force dismissal of the most serious charges against him stemming from his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. In another case, known as Khazak-gate, a US businessman, James Giffen, allegedly paid $78 million in bribes to former Khazakh Prime Minister Nurlan Balgimbayev in an attempt to win contracts for western oil companies to develop the Tengiz oil fields in the 1990s. In 1993, he was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the largest overseas bribery case in history. After Giffen was indicted, he claimed that if he did what he was accused of, he did it in the service of US intelligence agencies. The case has been in limbo ever since.

“This is as old as the hills as a tactic and it has a long track record of being very effective against the government,” says Horton. “It’s basically a threat to the government that if you prosecute me, I’ll disclose all sorts of national security-sensitive information. The bottom line here is it’s like an act of extortion or a threat: you do X and this is what I’m going to do.” Horton said that the Vanity Fair article was Prince “essentially putting out the warning to the Department of Justice: ‘You prosecute me and all this stuff will be out on the record.’”

According to Ciralsky’s article, Prince was a “full-blown asset” of “the C.I.A.’s National Resources Division [which] recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest:

“Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince’s handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a “201 file,” which would have put him on the agency’s books as a vetted asset. It’s not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations…

Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating “hard target” countries–where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency’s designs. “I made no money whatsoever off this work,” Prince contends. He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays. “I’m painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I’m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket.”

“I think that [Prince] will use all of his information and his knowledge of these secret dealings in basically what is an extortion play: ‘You come after me, and I’ll spill the beans on everything,’” says Horton. “That’s the essence of graymail and the Department of Justice will usually get its feathers all ruffled up and they’ll say, ‘You can’t deal with the government like this. This is unfair and improper.’ But in the end, it usually works.”

In the Vanity Fair article, Prince alleges that he was outed–by whom he does not say, but the implication is that CIA Director Leon Panetta named him in a closed door hearing of the Intelligence Committee last June, and then the name was leaked by one of the attendees of that hearing. Sloan, the former federal prosecutor, said that if what Prince says in the Vanity Fair article about his role in secret CIA programs is true, he has a case that laws were broken in revealing his identity. “I’m not his fan, but he’s not wrong. For somebody to leak his identity as a CIA asset clearly merits a criminal investigation,” Sloan said. “Whether they should have ever hired Erik Prince or made him into an asset is a separate question. Assuming he really was a CIA asset, basically a spy, an undercover operative, and somebody decided to leak that, that’s not acceptable and that is a violation of the same law that leaking Valerie [Plame]’s identity was. If you can’t leak one person, you can’t leak any person, not just the people you like versus the people you don’t like.”

While much of the focus in the Vanity Fair story was on Prince’s work with the CIA, the story also confirmed that Blackwater has an ongoing relationship with the US Special Forces, helping plan missions and providing air support. As The Nation reported, Blackwater has for years been working on a classified contract with the Joint Special Operations Command in a drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, as well as planning snatch-and-grab missions and targeted assassinations. Part of what may be happening behind closed doors is that the CIA is, to an extent, cutting Blackwater and Prince off. But, as sources have told The Nation, the company remains a central player in US Special Forces operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Prince’s choice of Adam Ciralsky to tell his story is an interesting one as well. Ciralsky was a CIA lawyer who in 1997 was suspended under suspicion he was having unauthorized contacts with possible Israeli intelligence agents. Ciralsky vehemently denied the allegations, saying he was the victim of a “witch-hunt” at the Agency. In any case, there is no question that Prince would view Ciralsky through the lens of his own struggle against the CIA. “When I saw the article, the first thing that just leapt off the page was his name. I thought, ‘My god, why would he go to Adam?’” said Horton. “And then I read the article and I thought, of course he’d go to Adam. There is this legal theme being developed in the article and Adam, as a lawyer who had dealt with the CIA, fully understands that. I mean I think he fully understood he was going to do a piece that would help Prince develop his legal defense and that’s what this is. The amazing thing to me is that Vanity Fair printed it. Do the editors of Vanity Fair not understand what’s going on here?”