From Tom Dispatch
By Michael Schwartz

Every week or so, the Department of Defense conducts a video-conference press briefing for reporters in Washington, featuring an on-the-ground officer in Iraq. On November 15th, that briefing was with Col. Jeffrey Bannister, commander of the Second Brigade of the Second Infantry Division. He was chosen because of his unit’s successful application of surge tactics in three mainly Shia districts in eastern Baghdad. He had, among other things, set up several outposts in these districts offering a 24-hour American military presence; he had also made generous use of transportable concrete walls meant to separate and partition neighborhoods, and had established numerous checkpoints to prevent unauthorized entry or exit from these communities.

As Col. Bannister summed up the situation:

“We have been effective, and we’ve seen violence significantly reduced as our Iraqi security forces have taken a larger role in all aspects of operations, and we are starting to see harmony between Sunni and Shi’a alike.”

The briefing seemed uneventful — very much a reflection of the ongoing mood of the moment among American commanders in Iraq — and received no significant media coverage. However, there was news lurking in an answer Col. Bannister gave to a question from AP reporter Pauline Jelinek (about arming volunteer local citizens to patrol their neighborhoods), even if it passed unnoticed. The colonel made a remarkable reference to an unexplained “five-year plan” that, he indicated, was guiding his actions. Here was his answer in full:

“I mean, right now we’re focused just on security augmentation [by the volunteers] and growing them to be Iraqi police because that is where the gap is that we’re trying to help fill capacity for in the Iraqi security forces. The army and the national police, I mean, they’re fine. The Iraqi police is — you know, the five-year plan has — you know, it’s doubling in size. … [We expect to have] 4,000 Iraqi police on our side over the five-year plan.

“So that’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re helping on security now, growing them into IP [Iraqi police]…. They’ll have 650 slots that I fill in March, and over the five-year period we’ll grow up to another 2,500 or 3,500.

Read more Long Haul

From The Asia Times
By Sami Moubayed

Sometimes, frequently nowadays, one doubts the wisdom of decision-makers in Washington. The case was clear, for example, with Syria and Palestine. When President George W Bush comes out to praise political prisoners in Damascus, he completely ruins their credibility in the Syrian Street, projecting them as stooges for the United States. When he embraces Mahmud Abbas of Palestine, the same impression is made on ordinary Palestinians who immediately write off their president as a puppet for Washington, making it difficult for him – if not impossible – to discuss peace with Israel.

The situation now applies to Iraq as well.

For four years, the Americans have been pushing for a security breakthrough in Iraq. The White House has been desperate for a “success story” to sell on Iraq to the American public. Chances seemed slim earlier this summer as an increasing number of Iraqi politicians walked out on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. By October, his government had lost legitimacy, since it no longer included Sunnis from the Iraqi Accordance Front or Shi’ites from the Sadrist bloc.

The Americans held on to Maliki, fearing a vacuum if he left. So desperate was the US administration that it began funding and arming Sunni tribesmen in Iraq to combat al-Qaeda. This caused uproar in the Iraqi street, particularly among Iraqi Shi’ites, who claimed that the Sunnis would train their guns on both the Americans and the Shi’ites the minute they were finished fighting al-Qaeda.

Read more Setback

From Campus Progress
By Justin Elliott

For the past few years, Matt Taibbi has delivered something invaluable to Rolling Stone’s one-million-plus subscribers: political reporting that brilliantly explains, exposes, and entertains. A roving national reporter who writes from a left-libertarian perspective, Taibbi has also called a lot of people a lot of nasty names. Ken Lay was “your typically unremarkable mealy-executive type, the kind of person you would expect to be eaten first in any lifeboat situation,” while Christopher Hitchens is “a man who has had his intellectual face lifted so many times, he can’t close his eyes without opening his mouth.” One of Taibbi’s columns was titled simply, “Eat me, Joe Biden.”

Taibbi’s new book, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire, collects his work during George W. Bush’s administration, including pieces on Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Congress, the Lieberman-Lamont race, and the Lynndie England and Michael Jackson trials. What gives this latest collection—his past two were Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season and The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia—staying power is not Taibbi’s near-acrobatic talent as a takedown artist or his occasional undercover stunt, though those things do make his work great fun to read. Rather, it’s the solid research and reporting that informs everything he writes.

Taibbi spoke with Campus Progress last week about the war, stalking Thomas Friedman, and Jack Abramoff’s College Republican days.

Campus Progress: The most affecting piece in your new book is about Cindy Sheehan’s campout in Crawford back in 2005. Your article had a hopeful tone, and for a lot of people on the antiwar side of things, that was a hopeful moment. Two years later the war’s still going strong. What happened?

Matt Taibbi: The antiwar movement is always going to have a disadvantage in our modern political arena because we have an antagonistic commercial media that’s going to be inclined to not pay a whole lot of attention. They’re going to be inclined to paint it in a negative or ambiguous light if they can. What happened with Cindy Sheehan—it started out as this movement that had a really clear and unambiguous and simple, emotionally powerful message that was connected to this woman who had really lost a son overseas. And it morphed into something that was different. I hate to criticize antiwar protestors or people who showed up and gave their time to this whole thing—but one of the things that happens there is that you have Cindy Sheehan alone to start with, and then within like three days you have the Cuban Five and the Free Mumia people and every circus act of the protest crowd that came to plant their flag.

Read more Taibbi

From The Nation
By Tom Engelhardt

Whoa, let’s hold those surging horses in check a moment. Violence has lessened in Iraq. That seems to be a fact of the last two months — and, for the Iraqis, a positive one, obviously. What to make of the “good news” from Iraq is another matter entirely, one made harder to assess by the chorus of self-congratulation from war supporters and Bush administration officials and allies, as well as by the heavy spin being put on events — and reported in the media, relatively uncritically.

An exception was Damien Cave of the New York Times, who had a revealing piece on a big story of recent weeks: The return of refugee Baghdadis — from among the two million or more Iraqis who had fled to Syria and elsewhere — to the capital. This has been touted as evidence of surge “success” in restoring security in Baghdad, of a genuine turn-around in the war situation. In fact, according to Cave, the trickle of returnees — lessening recently — has been heavily “massaged by politics. Returnees have essentially become a currency of progress.”

Those modest returnee numbers turn out to include anyone who crossed the Syrian border heading east, including suspected insurgents and Iraqi employees of the New York Times on their way back from visits to relatives in exile in Syria. According to a UN survey of 110 families returning, “46 percent were leaving [Syria] because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.” And that’s but one warning sign on the nature of the story under the story.

A recent Pew Research Center poll of American reporters who have been working in Iraq finds that “[n]early 90 percent of U.S. journalists in Iraq say much of Baghdad is still too dangerous to visit” and many believe that “coverage has painted too rosy a picture of the conflict.”

Read more “Good News”

From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

The New York Times had a news article about Venezuela in Thursday’s edition, but it was about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saying he would cut diplomatic ties with neighboring Colombia. There wasn’t a word about a memo from a CIA operative in Caracas to CIA Director General Michael Hayden, uncovered yesterday, outlining a plan for interfering with a Venezuelan referendum set for Dec. 2, and laying out the steps for instigating and backing a coup.

The plot, called “Operation Pliers,” and laid out in the letter to Hayden by an undercover operative named Michael Steele, who reportedly works in the US Embassy as a “regional affairs officer,” was intercepted by Venezuelan intelligence and released publicly on state TV yesterday.

In the Nov. 20-dated letter, Steele refers to an $8 million US-funded in-country propaganda campaign against Chavez and the referendum, already being implemented, which is designed to institutionalize many of Chavez’s socialist reforms and to permit him to continue to run for president beyond his current two-term limit. He proposes trying to stall the referendum, which pro-Chavez forces are expected to win handily, and failing that, to then promote a campaign to refuse to accept the results. Steele further confirms that the agency is working with international news agencies in an effort to distort reports about the referendum and the reforms. (CNN had to apologize for a “mistake” which led to the words “Who killed him?” superimposed over a photo of Chavez broadcast on CNN’s Spanish-language international broadcast in Venezuela. Was this a deliberate CIA-inspired black-op?)

Read more Coup

From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By Ramzy Baroud

“Why are those qualified to address their own affairs so widely ignored by mainstream channels in favour of intellectual middlemen who purport to have some sort of legitimacy over a range of narratives, without any convincing credentials, let alone first-hand experiences?”

What do an organic farmer from Spain, a union worker activist from Brazil, and a human rights scholar living in London have in common? They are all individuals who affect substantive change in their communities, and they are also individuals who are overlooked by the corporate media. The latter has its own lists of ‘experts’ – usually well-groomed males with little involvement in the daily struggles of the unseen and unheard multitudes of the world, yet able to influence their lives (most often detrimentally) from a well-guarded distance.

So how does the business of expertise work? Why are those qualified to address their own affairs so widely ignored by mainstream channels in favour of intellectual middlemen who purport to have some sort of legitimacy over a range of narratives, without any convincing credentials, let alone first-hand experiences?

The phenomenon precedes the advent of network television and satellite news. It is embedded in a Western tradition that was formulated around imperial conquests: for a people to be conquered, they have to be understood in a language that prioritises the interests of the colonialist over the rights of the colonized. The latter’s identity is replaced by verbal and textual reductionism. Thus Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, the Somali leader who strove for twenty years to free his people from British and Italian colonialism was termed ‘Mad Mullah’ by the British. Hassan, of course, was as ‘mad’ as Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and the vigorous leaders of numerous struggles around the world. The list of these individuals is ever expanding, as activists are written off by those in power, those whose ‘sanity’ preaches subscribing to the status quo and the inherent wisdom of the ‘system’.

Read more ‘Experts’

From The Guardian UK
By Naomi Klein

Anyone tired of lousy news from the markets should talk to Douglas Lloyd, a director of Venture Business Research, which tracks trends in venture capitalism. “I expect investment activity in this sector to remain buoyant,” he said recently. Lloyd’s bouncy mood was inspired by the money that is gushing into private security and defence companies. He added: “I also see this as a more attractive sector, as many do, than clean energy.”

Got that? If you are looking for a sure bet in a new growth market, then sell solar and buy surveillance: forget wind, buy weapons.

This observation – coming from an executive who is trusted by such clients as Goldman Sachs and Marsh & McLennan – deserves particular attention in the run-up to the United Nations climate change conference, which takes place in Bali next week. There, world environment ministers are supposed to come up with the global pact that will replace the Kyoto agreement.

The Bush administration, still roadblocking firm caps on emissions, wants to let the market solve the crisis. “We’re on the threshold of dramatic technological breakthroughs,” the American president assured the world last January, adding: “We’ll leave it to the market to decide the mix of fuels that most effectively and efficiently meet this goal.”

The idea that capitalism can save us from climate catastrophe has powerful appeal. It gives politicians an excuse to subsidise corporations rather than to regulate them; and it neatly avoids a discussion about how the core market logic of endless growth landed us here in the first place.

Read more Guns

From The Dissident Voice
By Joshua Frank

At a global warming forum held in Los Angeles on November 17, Hillary Clinton touted her green credentials to a packed auditorium of concerned voters. While the senator was careful not to step on the toes of her corporate campaign contributors, Hillary did proclaim that she has a “bold, comprehensive” plan to move the United States toward energy independence.

Like with so many other issues, Hillary’s have-it-both-ways approach to tackling climate change is a feckless, hollow strategy. If the New York Senator is to capture her party’s nomination next year, you can rest assure the Big Green outfits in DC, like the Sierra Club, will tag along despite Hillary’s non-position on global warming. Simply put, one cannot be pro-war and maintain a sound environmental ethic. And Hillary Clinton is a hawk with connections.

More than any other presidential aspirant, Hillary is in the pocket of the defense industry, which has donated more cash to the Democratic contenders than the Republicans this year. At $500 or more a pop, employees of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics have handed over $52,600 to Clinton’s campaign as of mid-October. That is almost half of all the money the industry has given the Democrats total this election cycle. And surely there is more to come.

Not surprisingly Hillary has promised that she will not deflate the bulging defense budget, nor have any of the other leading Democratic candidates. Currently the military budget sits at over $532 billion per year, which is almost 4% of our total GDP. Ultimately, if Hillary is victorious in November, she will continue to fund the most polluting institution in the world: the Department of Defense (DoD).

Read more Oil Addiction

From CounterPunch
By Alan Farago

The world wide credit crisis started in the heart of America suburbia itself, and primarily through the politics of suburban development that radiated from South Florida. The story of subprime mortgage mess has not yet meshed with the campaign finance supply chain that wrapped up Florida production home builders, lawyers and lobbyists. But from the perspective of Miami and South Florida, it is clear that supply chain was managed by Jeb Bush, the former two-term governor.

Yesterday Bloomberg reported that $700 million in defaulted debt, representing sprawl (asset-backed commercial paper– the exact details have not been disclosed) has vanished from the trust funds invested by the Jeb Bush team, adding to losses that will change American politics in 2008 and beyond.

The world-wide credit crisis is too big to contain in one frame. It still has not come home to roost, how the hundreds of billions of losses reported by the world’s largest financial institutions from Hong Kong to Frankfurt to London to Beijing and Tokyo, have anything to do with politics.

But the most accurate frame to tell this story is the money trail from Jeb’s loss in 1994 governor’s race, to his victory in 1998, and subsequently, the presidential election stolen in Florida by George W. Bush in 2000. Both Jeb and W. were fully engaged in the policies of growth that spurred the hyperventilated housing boom that is now in flames. (for further detail, see eyeonmiami.blogspot.com under the archive feature, “housing crash”)

Their programs and policies were grounded by a strategy to win Republican victories in the fastest growing suburbs in the nation. Today the massive leverage that supported suburbia has deflated, bringing hard currency consequences to taxpayers and voters whether they are Republican or not.

Read more Suburbia

From The Regressive Antidote
By David Michael Green

So the surge is working, eh?

Well, maybe, though you’d be a fool to necessarily believe it, especially coming from such reliable sources as the Bush administration and the American media. It’s not like they actually ever got any single thing about this war right. Ever.

For the quality of media reporting we’ve been getting – from WMD hype to the Downing Street Memos to election theft – these guys might as well have been on a different planet. What does it tell you about the state of the media in your country when people have to rely on foreign sources to get a remotely accurate account of the news? Can you say ‘Pravda’?

And, as for the congenital liars who call themselves the government of the United States of America, when even former press officers for these clowns are now documenting their deceits, it’s pretty clear just what we’re dealing with.

Before we buy into the supposed sweetness and light of Operation Humbling Bungling, we should remember, first of all, that we are being told that the surge (really a market-friendly term for escalation) is working at the end of the bloodiest year yet for American forces in Iraq. That is somewhat, ahem, less than encouraging. Or at least it would be if we lived in a place that wasn’t a psychiatric ward of 300 million masquerading as a sovereign state. It is also quite possible that fighting in Iraq has diminished – if it indeed has – because so much ethnic cleansing has now been completed. If the Sunni residents have been driven from Shiite neighborhoods, and vice versa, there would certainly be less to fight about. That’s definitely one way to end a war, eh?

Read more Surge