Category: politics

The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person. Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology. Full article.

At the present time, the predator drones operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan are “piloted” in Nevada. Men and women there use video game style consoles to kill people half a world away and then go home to eat dinner and watch baseball. The US government wants to bring this same program to Hancock Airport in Syracuse! Hancock Air Field is a local commercial airstrip for private and commercial flights, not a military base. Full article.

On Saturday, October 24, the Washington Post published an article which said in passing that the “public option” will be run by insurance companies. “The public option would effectively be just another insurance plan offered on the open market,” said the article. “It would likely be administered by a private insurance provider, charging premiums and copayments like any other policy.” To my knowledge, that is the first time any media outlet or blog, with the exception of the blog maintained by Physicians for a National Health Program, has warned the public that the “public option” will be run by private corporations, not public employees. Full article.

In spite of the storytelling by NATO and European Union security high priests, who make a comfortable living out of sending troops to third world lands and seas like Somalia and the Indian Ocean, supposedly swamped by pirates on a rampage after European fishing boats, in the real world things are the other way round. Full article.

Rachman writes: “Personally, I have been having cold feet myself and wondering whether the West should pull out of a losing battle in Afghanistan. But Rashid paints a hair-raising picture of what would happen if the US stepped away. He foresees a renewed civil war in Afghanistan, with the Afghan Taliban backed by the Pakistani army, battling it out with the forces of Karzai and the Northern Alliance, backed by Iran. Taking a step further back, the Chinese would be standing in the Afghan-Pakistani- Talib corner, while the Indians backed the other side. The Pakistanis meanwhile would find themselves suffering from the Taliban blowback, caused by the very Afghan war they were sponsoring. It doesn’t sound great. But how long is Nato prepared to stay in the ring?”

I’m glad that Rachman has been getting cold feet. He’s not alone. The picture Rashid paints is deliberately alarmist and based largely on fantasy; throwing in China is crude but designed to appeal to the revanchists. Full article.

Independently produced documentary about the abduction and illegal detention of Pakistani citizens by Pakistani intelligence agencies. Watch doc.

“how america makes its enemies disappear”
by petra bartosiewicz
harper’s magazine, november 2009

back in 2007, i was writing about the large number of people “disappeared” in pakistan under musharraf’s regime. as i talked to different anti-war and student groups, i showed them clips from the excellent documentary “missing in pakistan” by ziad zafar (u can view in full on google videos: http://vodpod.com/watch/361336-missing-in-pakistan-documentary-by-ziad-zafar-2007).

an article in harper’s magazine now exposes the details of those disappearances – how they tie into the global war on terror and how musharraf has confessed as much in his autobiography. this is not the full article (which can be found at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/11/0082719) but it’s an extremely important look into the inner workings of the war on terror. it also brings to light the nefarious collusion between the US government and the military dictatorships it has supported in pakistan.

FROM: “how america makes its enemies disappear” by petra bartosiewicz, harper’s magazine, november 2009

as the “global war on terror” enters its 9th year, under the leadership of its second commander in chief, certain ongoing assumptions have gained the force of common wisdom. one of them, as barack obama explained in a major policy speech last may, is that we have entered a “new era” that will “present new challenges to our application of the law” and require “new tools to protect the american people.” another, as obama made clear in the same speech, is that the purpose of these new tools and laws is “to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.” these positions are appealing, but fail to address what might be thought of as an underlying economic disequilibrium. the continued political appetite for a global war on terror has led to a commodification of “actionable intelligence,” which is a product, chiefly, of human prisoners like aafia siddiqui. because this war, by definition, has no physical or temporal boundaries, the demand for such intelligence has no limit. but the world contains a relatively small number of terrorists and an even smaller number of terrorist plots. our demand for intelligence far outstrips the supply of prisoners. where the united states itself has been unable to meet that demand, therefore, it has embraced a solution that is the essence of globalization. we outsource the work to countries, like pakistan, whose political circumstances allow them to produce prisoners with far greater efficiency.

what the CIA and the FBI understand as an acquisition solution, however, others see as a human rights debacle. just as thousands of political dissidents, suspected criminals, and enemies of the state were “disappeared” from latin america over the course of several decades of CIA funded dirty wars, so too have hundreds of “persons of interest” around the world begun to disappear as a consequence of the global war on terror, which in many ways has become a globalized version of those earlier, regional failures of democracy.

many individual cases are well known. binyam mohamed, an alleged conspirator in jose padilla’s now debunked “dirty bomb plot,” was arrested in karachi in 2002 and flown by the CIA to morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months. he eventually emerged into the non-covert prison system, as a detainee in guantanamo, and was released earlier this year without charge. maher arar, a canadian citizen, was arrested at NYC’s JFK airport in 2002 while on his way home from a vacation, flown by the CIA to a syrian prison, held in a coffin-size cell for nearly a year, and then released, also without charges. saud memon, a pakistani businessman rumored to own the plot of land where the wall street journal reporter daniel pearl was murdered, was arrested in 2003, held by the US at an unknown location until 2006, then ‘released” to pakistan, where in april 2007 he finally emerged, badly beaten and weighing just 80 lbs, on the doorsteps of his karachi home. he died a few weeks later.

the total number of men and women who have been kidnapped and imprisoned for US intelligence-gathering purposes is difficult to determine. apart from iraq and afghanistan, the main theaters of combat, pakistan is our primary source of publicly known detainees – researchers at seton hall university estimated in 2006 that 2/3 of the prisoners at guantanamo were arrested in pakistan or by pakistani authorities – and so it is reasonable to assume that the country is also a major supplier of ghost detainees. human rights watch has tracked enforced disappearances in pakistan since before 2001. the group’s counterterrorism director, joanne mariner, told me that the number of missing persons in the country grew “to a flood” as US counterterrorism operations peaked between 2002 and 2004. in that same 3 year period, US aid to pakistan totaled $4.7 billion, up from $9.1 million in the three years prior to the US invasion of afghanistan. correlation does not prove causation, of course, but pakistan’s former president, pervez musharraf, did claim in his 2006 memoir, “in the line of fire,” that his country had delivered 369 al qaeda suspects to the US for “millions of dollars” in bounties (a boast he neatly elides in the urdu edition).

one reason estimates are so inconclusive, of course, is that the business of disappearance is inherently ambiguous. missing person reports filed in pakistan rarely claim that the detained individual was picked up by the CIA or the FBI. instead, the detainee is almost always arrested by the “city police” or “civilian clothed men” or unidentified “secret agency personnel” who arrive in “unmarked vehicles.” the secretary-general of the pakistani NGO human rights commission, ibn abdur rehman, described the process. “a man is picked up at his house, brought to the police station,” he said. “the family comes with him and are told, ‘he’ll be released in an hour, go home.’ they come back in an hour and are told, ‘sorry, he’s been handed off to the intelligence people and taken to islamabad.’ after that, the individual is never heard from again. when the family tries to file a missing-person report, the police won’t take it, and no one admits to having custody of the person.” some of the disappeared pass directly to US custody and reappear months or years later at guantanamo or bagram air base. others remain captives of pakistan’s multiple intelligence agencies or are shipped to places like uzbekistan, whose torture policies are well-known. others simply vanish, their fate revealed only by clerical errors, or when they turn up dead.

most of the arrests and detentions take place under the auspices of pakistan’s inter-services intelligence (ISI) which the CIA helped expand in the 1980s largely in order to wage a proxy war against soviet forces in afghanistan (where the ISI continues to wield considerable influence). the agency has evolved into a powerful institution with its own agendas and alliances – it has long pursued ethnic separatists in the baluchistan region, for instance, where the human rights commission estimates that at least 600 individuals have disappeared – and the result is that the CIA itself often has little knowledge of the provenance or purpose of a given arrest.

Many veterans that Ruhman and her colleagues interviewed claimed that automatic U.S. Citizenship was promised to them by recruitment officers in return for service. In reality, non-citizens who serve in the military must still apply for citizenship. However, many veterans who did submit applications were left by the wayside, as their applications did not follow them once they were deployed to a combat zone. Full article.

The real problem is that the flagship of India’s miraculous ‘growth’ story has run aground. It came at a huge social and environmental cost. And now, as the rivers dry up and forests disappear, as the water table recedes and as people realise what is being done to them, the chickens are coming home to roost. All over the country, there’s unrest, there are protests by people refusing to give up their land and their access to resources, refusing to believe false promises any more. Suddenly, it’s beginning to look as though the 10 per cent growth rate and democracy are mutually incompatible. (arundhati roy). Full article.

AS MANY of you have no doubt witnessed, the word “socialism” has returned to the forefront of the American political debate. Newsweek had a front cover declaring “We Are All Socialists,” the Nation magazine had a forum on what socialism is today, and even the New York Times had a discussion on the meaning of the word.

Socialism, depending on who you’re talking to, can mean anything from the bureaucratic dictatorship of the Soviet Union, to the social reforms of Western Europe, to even, in the case of people like those in Glenn Beck’s “9/12” movement, a guttural curse word to be spat at every policy deviating slightly from the reactionary cesspool from which they emerged.

What I, an actual living socialist, will advance tonight as socialism differs fundamentally from all of these, and is the definition of socialism which stands in the revolutionary, self-emancipatory tradition of Marxism–a tradition which takes as it’s foundation that it is those who work and produce and farm and create who are responsible for all the wealth in the world, and that it is they, not an elite of the super-rich or a bureaucratic clique, that have the right and power to take and manage the world’s resources in society’s interests.

However, this idea–that people should be able to come together to democratically decide their future as a community, as a county, city, nation and ultimately species–one which seems on the surface so self-evident, is one which is completely at odds with the capitalist system under which we live today. Full article.

get out of afghanistan, use that money to pay for healthcare, don’t be afraid of big govt – if there’s no big govt, there’s going to be big corporations over which u have no control. at least u can vote for govt. watch video.

Turkey extended a regional peace drive to Iraqi Kurds when Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu met with top Kurdish officials in a landmark visit to Arbil. “It is time for Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis to rebuild the Middle East. Therefore, it is time for everyone to take brave steps,” Davuto?lu told a joint press conference with Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani late on Friday. Barzani praised Davuto?lu’s visit, saying it is even more significant now as the Middle East is passing through such a sensitive time. Full article.

“Your presence in the region is not good for peace,” a resident of the tribal areas said, referring to the U.S. military, “because it gives rise to frustration and irritation among the people of this region.” At another point he told Clinton, “Please forgive me, but I would like to say we’ve been fighting your war.” A similar point was made by Sana Bucha of Geo TV during the live broadcast interview. “It is not our war,” she told Clinton. “It is your war.” She drew a burst of applause when she added, “You had one 9/11. We are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan.” Full article.

Malalai Joya is one of Afghanistan’s leading democracy activists. In 2005, she became the youngest person ever elected to the Afghan parliament. She was suspended in 2007 for her denunciation of warlords and their cronies in government. She has just written her memoir, “A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Woman Who Dared to Speak Out.” She spoke in New York at the Northeast Socialist Conference on October 23, 2009. Watch her speech.

CNN’s heidi collins interviews malalai joya. collins is such an arrogant moron – talking down to malalai about what it’s like to be an afghan living under american occupation – she says: occupation is “your” word and many would take exception to that. the americans r there to protect afghan civilans of course. so revealing of the hubris and inanity of empire. watch the interview.