Monthly Archive for February, 2009

Mideast Envoy Mitchell to Set Up Jerusalem Office
By Manal Lutfi, Asharq Al-Awsat, 25 February 2009

Hillary Clinton will be visiting the Middle East for the first time as US Secretary of State on 2 March to participate in the international donors’ conference on the Gaza Strip that will be held in Sharm al-Sheikh. On 3 and 4 March she will visit Israel and the West Bank. George Mitchell, the US envoy to the Middle East, will precede her to the region on 27 February where he will inaugurate “a permanent office” for the United States in the city of Jerusalem that will act as a “link” between the Middle East region and Washington. A US Department of State official told Asharq Al-Awsat that the opening of a permanent office for the United States in Jerusalem aims at maintaining the contacts between Washington and all the sides in the Middle East. He added: “There are many issues in which we should be engaged. That is why we have decided to open a permanent office in Jerusalem that will be staffed by a number of US Department of State officials that have not yet been determined”. The US official, who declined to reveal his identity, added: “The aim of the office is to first affirm our commitment to the peace process and to continue our efforts regardless of whether Mitchell is in the region or not. These officials that will be selected will constitute a permanent link between the region and Washington”. On why the United States chose the city of Jerusalem as the venue for Mitchell’s office and not Amman, the Jordanian capital, or Cairo, the Egyptian capital, the US official said: “Amman is also close, but Jerusalem is in the middle of everything. The US officials can move from it to any other point, such as the West Bank.”

Obama’s Middle East hit squad is contemptible.

Why not Tel Aviv, from whence George and Hillary can move to any other point, including Jerusalem, and witness ethnic cleansing the U.S. enables. The office plan joins a growing list of failures to address Israeli transgressions that are setting an abhorrently hostile tone. But that’s the point, isn’t it.

Mazin Qumsiyeh writes:

Yesterday we had dinner with a family from the old city of Jerusalem who visited us here in Beit Sahour. They can visit us (for now), but we can’t visit them. They explained how the Israeli authorities have been increasing the pressures to empty Jerusalem of its non-Jewish residents through a myriad of regulations, laws, harassment, attempts to buy them out and far more. For example regulations make it impossible for native Palestinian to build or improve anything in their homes but Israel issues thousands of building permits for Jews in Arab East Jerusalem (annexed illegally by Israel contrary to International law). There are even neighborhoods in the old city that cannot get visitors from other parts of the city (their own relatives even) and are essentially living in prison like conditions. The Palestinians and all International and Israeli human rights groups are now frantically trying to prevent the demolition of homes that house over 1500 Palestinians in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. The Israeli authorities laid their hands on buildings in the old city and confiscated lands near the old city and built colonial settlement outposts throughout Arab East Jerusalem. These scattered colonial settlements are now being “connected” via underground tunnels under Arab owned houses or directly above ground by demolishing these houses. The rest of the occupied West Bank is also similarly effected. For an example of how Israel’s “master plans of development” are really master plans of ethnic cleansing, read this report

http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1679

(warning: this will make you angry)

By Sasan Fayazmanesh, Counterpunch, 27 February 2009

In October 2008 I presented a paper, entitled “What the Future has in Store for Iran,” at a conference on Middle East Studies. The paper, which was subsequently posted at Payvand.com , examined what the US policy toward Iran might look like if either Barack Obama or John McCain came to office. The conclusion of my essay, stated in its last two lines, was: “In the case of McCain, the war [waged against Iran] might come sooner than later. In Obama’s case, one might see a period of ‘tough’ or ‘aggressive diplomacy’ before hostilities begin.”

[Read the article]

Bronner makes a fine stenographer. An intrepid journalist would get the back story on these guard members, more than a few do not appear to be Palestinian, all loyal to U.S.-Israeli interests only.

General Dayton was due to end his three-year assignment, but Mr. Mitchell asked him to stay on for two more years and he has agreed. His decision has been greeted with something approaching jubilation in these camps, where the commanders have come to trust him and to view Washington, through him, as a true ally.

“We have been trained with American money and by General Dayton, and that means a lot to us,” said Brig. Gen. Munir al-Zoubi, commander of the 1,800-man Presidential Guard, the elite force that protects top officials and guests. “We are here to enforce law and order and to use all means to fight terrorism.”

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, E-Bulletin No. 189, 25 February 2009

1. The current economic crisis has to be understood in terms of the historical dynamics and contradictions of capitalist finance in the second half of the 20th century. Even though the spheres of capitalist finance and production are obviously intertwined (in significant ways today more than ever before), the origins of today’s US-based financial crisis are not rooted in a profitability crisis in the sphere of production, as was the case with the crisis of the 1970s, nor in the global trade imbalances that have emerged since. Although the growing significance of finance in the major capitalist economies was already strongly registered by the 1960s, it was the role finance played in resolving the economic crisis of the 1970s that explains the central place it came to occupy in the making of global capitalism. The inflation that was the main symptom of that crisis had a strong negative impact on those holding financial assets and destabilized the international role of the dollar. Under the guidance of the US Federal Reserve, financial markets used very high interest rates to drive up unemployment, defeat trade union militancy and restrict public welfare expenditures in the early 1980s – all of which had come to be seen as the source of the intractable profitability and inflation problems of the previous decade. Yet it was precisely the contradictory ways finance contributed to global capitalism’s successes in the closing decades of the 20th century that laid the foundation for the massive capitalist crisis that now closes the first decade of the 21st century.

[Read the article]

By Conn Hallinan, Berkeley Daily Planet, 18 February 2009

It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.

—Dr. Erik Fosse, Norwegian cardiologist who
worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war.

What Dr. Fosse was describing was the effects of a U.S. “focused lethality” weapon that minimalizes explosive damage to structures while inflicting catastrophic wounds on its victims. While the weapon has been used in Iraq, Gaza was the first test of the bomb in a densely populated environment.

The specific weapon—the GBU-39—is a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) and was developed by the U.S. Air Force, Boeing Corporation, and University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2000. The weapon wraps the high explosives HMX or RDX with a tungsten alloy and other metals like cobalt, nickel or iron, in a carbon fiber/epoxy container. When the bomb explodes, the container evaporates and the tungsten turns into micro-shrapnel that is extremely lethal up to about 60 feet.

[Read the report | hat tip]