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Paul Merrell

Justice Department Lawyers Who Engage in Misconduct Sometimes Escape Discipline, Watchd... - 0 views

www.pogo.org/...metimes-escape-discipline.html

corruption DoJ oversight discipline

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Within a year of being disciplined for violating professional standards, some Justice Department attorneys have been promoted or given financial rewards for good performance, a government watchdog agency reported Thursday. In addition, when the Justice Department determines that its lawyers should be disciplined for misconduct, it has not ensured that the discipline is actually carried out, the Government Accountability (GAO) said. The GAO concluded that the Justice Department could do more to hold federal prosecutors and other employees accountable for misconduct.
  • The GAO study was conducted at the behest of Congress and follows the collapse of major federal prosecutions as a result of prosecutorial violations. In 2009, for example, the conviction of former then-Senator Ted Stevens (R-Ala.) unraveled because prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that would have helped Stevens’ defense. In 2013, based on prosecutorial violations, a federal judge in Louisiana overturned convictions of five New Orleans police officers alleged to have shot unarmed civilians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the GAO noted. The GAO report adds to the picture. The agency, an investigative arm of Congress, found instances in which prescribed disciplinary actions had not been implemented.  “DOJ does not have a mechanism in place to ensure that component management actually implements discipline once it has been imposed,” the report said. The GAO also found that some attorneys who had been cited for misconduct also received performance-based rewards such as $2,000 in cash or 22 hours of time off from work.
Joseph Skues

Yes, Islam condones wife beatings - 0 views

www.calgaryherald.com/...story.html

islam condones yes

shared by Joseph Skues on 23 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Joseph Skues on 23 Jan 11
     
    "Recently, Marvin Levant (Dec. 28), Steve Harris (Dec. 30), Syed Soharwardy (Jan. 2), and Riazuddin Ahmed (Jan. 5) debated Islam through the forum of the Herald's letters to the editor. The issue of wife beating and gender inequality in Islam has become convoluted and highly controversial as many Muslims try to sugar-coat the ugly truths and others try to shed some light on the issue. Soharwardy's statement that "Beating one's wife is not only wrong, it is criminal and completely un-Islamic" is incorrect. The Qur'an says that "men are in charge of women because Allah has made one of them (men) to excel the other (women), thus man's superiority over women . . . good women are the obedient ones . . . admonish the rebellious women and banish them, and scourge them (whip them severely to inflict pain) (4:34) . . . smote them (hit or strike with the hand or with a weapon causing pain, beat them . . . (4:62)". Islam does not recognize gender equality. For example, polygamy is accepted in Islam, but polyandry is not. A woman's testimony is considered half as worthy as a man's in court; a son inherits twice as much as a daughter does. Muslim men may marry Muslim, Jewish or Christian women, but Muslim women can marry only Muslim men. In short, sharia law leads to the inhuman treatment of Muslim women by their husbands and others, especially in South Asia and the Middle East. Higher education is emphasized more for sons than for daughters; in cultural honour killings, almost always women are the target for murder. Under sharia, divorced Muslim women get custody of their sons under eight years of age and daughters until puberty, and then the fathers take the children away. Sharia enabled one of the worst fundamentalists, the vile and ruthless military dictator, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, to put more than 15,000 rape victims in jail because they could not comply with the absurd Islamic condition requiring them to have numerous male witnesses of their victimization. They were char
Gary Edwards

American Thinker: Obama's Ides-of-March Moment is Near - 0 views

www.americanthinker.com/...s_idesofmarch_moment_is_n.html

obammunism bernake carter volker

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Feb 10 - Cached
  • If Bernanke stops QE, he fulfills his role as an independent central banker. Presumably, that action stops the decline in the dollar and reduces the risk of future inflation. It was the course that Paul Volcker chose in the late 1970s. Volcker's action was bold, highly controversial, and highly criticized. Volcker's action had the support of President Reagan, who was willing to face short-term unpopularity to fix the economy. Bernanke's task is harder than Volcker's. Volcker stopped the economy dead in its tracks. If Bernanke ends QE, he will stop both the economy and the federal government dead in their tracks.Without QE, the government will be unable to honor its obligations. Non-payment of Social Security or Medicare or federal payroll or welfare checks or retirement checks, or military payroll, etc., etc., would show up almost immediately. That would jeopardize foreign (and domestic) purchases of additional federal debt, exacerbating the problem. Bernanke's second option enables the government to continue operating irresponsibly until market forces eventually stop the profligate behavior. Market discipline would likely be imposed in the form of a collapse of the dollar or raging inflation (or both). Under either scenario, the Obama presidency is destroyed.
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Feb 10
     
    Incredible must read for all Americans. excerpt: By the end of March, Barack Obama's administration will face its destiny, its Brutus a pawn of the fates. In Jimmy Carter's presidency, the Wall Street Journal editorialized about "Ratcheting to Ruin." The title derived from the fact that each cycle high in unemployment was higher than previous ones, and each cycle high in inflation was also. "Stagflation" was the neologism coined to describe what up until then was believed to be impossible in the Keynesian world. This period ushered in a new era in both politics and economics. Carter was replaced by Reagan, and Keynes was replaced by Friedman. Thirty years later, Keynes is back in vogue, Obama has ascended to the White House, and times are reminiscent of the Carter era. The economy is awful. Fear and dissatisfaction prevail. Politicians are held in contempt. There is one major difference -- Carter did not face an "ides of March" event. ..... The problem is bigger than the numbers above might suggest. Budget forecasts show that the problem increases over time. In addition, 40% of existing debt matures in the next year. That means $2.8 trillion of debt has to be refinanced. The Treasury must sell on average $90 billion of debt a week! In five weeks, we need to sell $450 billion. That is equal to the largest full-year deficit in history, at least until Obama's first year. There are no plans to curb spending or cut deficits. President Obama just increased the debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion. To outsiders, we appear like a banana republic with ICBMs. Does anyone seriously believe that funding based on "the kindness of strangers" is workable much longer? ..... If Bernanke stops QE, he fulfills his role as an independent central banker. Presumably, that action stops the decline in the dollar and reduces the risk of future inflation. It was the course that Paul Volcker chose in the late 1970s. Volcker's action was bold, highly controversial, and highly criticized. Vol
Paul Merrell

Statement by the President on Afghanistan | whitehouse.gov - 0 views

www.whitehouse.gov/...tatement-president-afghanistan

war & peace Afghanistan American-Foreign-Policy Obama broken-campaign-promises

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • THE PRESIDENT:  Good morning.  Last December -- more than 13 years after our nation was attacked by al Qaeda on 9/11 -- America’s combat mission in Afghanistan came to a responsible end.  That milestone was achieved thanks to the courage and the skill of our military, our intelligence, and civilian personnel.  They served there with extraordinary skill and valor, and it’s worth remembering especially the more than 2,200 American patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan.
  • Following consultations with my entire national security team, as well as our international partners and members of Congress, President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah, I’m therefore announcing the following steps, which I am convinced offer the best possibility for lasting progress in Afghanistan. First, I’ve decided to maintain our current posture of 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of next year, 2016.  Their mission will not change.  Our troops will continue to pursue those two narrow tasks that I outlined earlier -- training Afghan forces and going after al Qaeda.  But maintaining our current posture through most of next year, rather than a more rapid drawdown, will allow us to sustain our efforts to train and assist Afghan forces as they grow stronger -- not only during this fighting season, but into the next one. Second, I have decided that instead of going down to a normal embassy presence in Kabul by the end of 2016, we will maintain 5,500 troops at a small number of bases, including at Bagram, Jalalabad in the east, and Kandahar in the south.  
  • Third, we will work with allies and partners to align the steps I am announcing today with their own presence in Afghanistan after 2016.  In Afghanistan, we are part of a 42-nation coalition, and our NATO allies and partners can continue to play an indispensable role in helping Afghanistan strengthen its security forces, including respect for human rights.    And finally, because governance and development remain the foundation for stability and progress in Afghanistan, we will continue to support President Ghani and the national unity government as they pursue critical reforms.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 15
     
    Political cowardice by the U.S. Psychopath in Chief who lacks the military discipline to order a retreat when a battle cannot be won. Better that our troops and Afghans continue to die and be maimed than to let it be said that Mr. Obama lost the war in Afghanistan. So he kicks the can down the road to the next President.
Gary Edwards

Review & Outlook: Palin's Dollar, Zoellick's Gold - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3514904575602231815453378.html

gold gold-currency financial-collapse banksters Federal-Reserve Sara-Palin Zoellick

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Nov 10
     
    a new global monetary regime to reduce currency turmoil and spur growth: "This new system is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and a renminbi that moves toward internalization and then an open capital account," he wrote, in an echo of what we've been saying for some time. And here's Mr. Zoellick's sound-money kicker: "The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values. Although textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today." Mr. Zoellick's last observation will not be news to investors, who have traded gold up to $1,400 an ounce, its highest level in real terms since the 1970s, as a hedge against the risk of future inflation. However, his point will shock many of the world's financial policy makers, who still think of gold as a barbarous relic rather than as an important price signal. Lest they faint in the halls of the International Monetary Fund, we don't think Mr. Zoellick is calling for a return to a full-fledged gold standard. His nonetheless useful point is that a system of global monetary cooperation needs a North Star to judge when it is running off course. The Bretton Woods accord used gold as such a reference until the U.S. failed to heed its discipline in the late 1960s and in 1971 revoked the pledge to sell other central banks gold at $35 an ounce.
Gary Edwards

Warren Buffett Explains How The Bailout Is Crushing Healthy Companies - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/shing-healthy-companies-2009-3

financial-crisis warren-buffett socialism banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Mar 09
     
    ".....There's a lot of talk about how the bailouts are creating moral hazard and rewarding bad behavior. But those are pretty abstract ideas, the kind of things people wonder whether or not we can afford to worry about while the economy is tanking. Sure we'll pay a long run price  for screwing up the market's discipline but in the long run we're all dead. So forget "moral hazard" and just look at Warren Buffett's description of what is happening to his home construction business, Clayton Homes. Clayton, which makes pre-fab homes, also has a lending business. Surprisingly, Clayton hasn't been crushed by the markets because it maintained high lending standards and doesn't have a balance sheet overflowing with defaulting loans..." And the solution is? Buffett is/was a successful capitalist. Yet he fully supported a socialist takeover of the government. Obama's campaign rhetoric was that of a hard core socialist declaring war on constitutional capitalism. And there was Buffett, standing at Obama's side, arguing that all capitalist should be supporting the systemic change Obama socialism promised to deliver. And now Buffett's complaining? What is it about socialism that attracted Buffett in the first place? Did he really think the socialists he worked to elect would pour tax payer debt money into the capitalists hands, and let the markets go their merry way? The socialist seeks to control the means of production, limit the rights of property ownership, and redistribute the wealth created by capitalist. Socialism does not have a wealth creation model. Redistribution of wealth and control over the means of production is something Buffett supported with both his money and his personal assurances to constitutional capitalist everywhere. Yet here we are. Exactly where Buffetts advice and pleas intended us to be. And now he's complaining? Buffett didn't like the belief in big government programs, big government spending and crisis interventionism of Bush's compasionat
Gary Edwards

Here's The Problem With This Market Crash... - 1 views

www.businessinsider.com/-with-this-market-crash-2011-8

Banksters national-debt-Ceiling dollar-destruction financial-collapse banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Aug 11
     
    Obama and the Federal reserve are out of bullets......... The only thing that will work is Cut, Cap and Balance - the TEA Party Patriot formula that passed the House during the run up to the Natioanl Debt Limit SCAM, only to be immediately tabled and discarded by the ruling elites in the Bankster, Democrat and Repubican establishment.  With 69% of the taxpaying public in support of the Balanced Budget Amendment, one would have thought the ruling elites would have shown a bit more respect for Cut, Cap & Balance.  What we got however was anything but.   In this article Long time liberal - big government - let me into the elite ruling class advocate Henry Blodgett looks into the chasm, wondering how to pull back from the brink impending disaster. excerpt:  there are also several very important differences between this market crash and the ones a few years ago: ........... The Fed has fired most of its bullets (interest rates are already at zero) ............. Our budget deficit is already out of control, and Congress has had it with "stimulus" ............... The public has had it with bailouts That means the government's ability to do anything about this market crash is severely limited. Yes, we'll almost certainly have a "QE3." And maybe that will prop things up a bit. But it won't fix the fundamental problems clogging the economy, just as QE1 and QE2 didn't permanently fix anything. (The only thing that will fix our economy is debt-reduction, discipline, and time.)............
Gary Edwards

Billionaire Howard Marks On The Debt Ceiling And The Inevitable Decline In Relative US ... - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/o-the-rest-of-the-world-2011-7

financial-collapse national-debt dollar-collapse

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Jul 11
     
     the underlying issue is that the U.S. has borrowed too much, and now has a higher debt to GDP ratio than it has ever -- and because the U.S. will inevitably borrow even MORE because 1. everyone believes that lower taxes and stimulus are needed to stimulate growth and 2. if we don't, growth in the U.S. will depress -- the reality is that our lifestyle (individuals and the government spending what they don't have) is unsustainable. He says: "In addition to balancing the budget and growing the economy, I think we have to accept that the coming decades are likely to see U.S. standards of living decline relative to the rest of the world. Unless our goods offer a better cost/benefit bargain, there's no reason why American workers should continue to enjoy the same lifestyle advantage over workers in other countries. I just don't expect to hear many politicians own up to this reality on the stump." His other big points: ..... "The dollar can no longer be the reserve currency" without unflinching adherence to the associated responsibilities. ..... The debt ceiling "solution" is unlikely to represent much fundamental progress; for the most part it'll just kick the can down the road because politicians are too concerned about getting re-elected to compromise....... "We have no choice but to raise the debt ceiling and keep borrowing in the short-term."....... "Washington's spending has recently been higher as a percentage of the nation's economic output than at any time since World War II. But by the same measure, Washington's revenues are the lowest in more than 60 years." ..... When asked about conservatives' insistence on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, President Obama replied, "We don't need a constitutional amendment to do that [balance the budget]; what we need to do is to do our jobs." But clearly we do need some enforced discipline, because the years in which we haven't run a deficit have been by far the exception of late, n
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Gary Edwards

Two Very Depressing Charts for President Obama, Two Very Encouraging Charts for America... - 0 views

www.cato.org/...ging-charts-americas-taxpayers

Federal-Budget Federal-Spending Obama-Spending

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Dec 14
     
    "What's really remarkable is that we've seen the biggest drop in the burden of government spending since the end of World War II. Heck, the fiscal restraint over the past five years has resulted in a bigger drop in the relative size of government in America than what Switzerland achieved over the past ten years thanks to the "debt brake." At this point, some readers may be wondering who or what deserves credit for this positive development. I'll offer a couple of explanations. The first two points are about why we shouldn't overstate what's actually happened. 1. The good news is somewhat exaggerated because we had a huge spike in federal spending in 2009. To use an analogy, it's easy to lose some weight if you first go on a big eating binge for a couple of years. 2. Some of the fiscal discipline is illusory because certain revenues that flow to the Treasury, such as TARP repayments from banks, actually count as negative spending. I explained this phenomenon when measuring which Presidents have been the biggest spenders. But there also are some real reasons why we've seen genuine spending restraint. 3. The "Tea Party" election of 2010 resulted in a GOP-controlled House that was somewhat sincere about controlling federal outlays. 4. The spending caps adopted as part of the debt limit fight in 2011 have curtailed spending increases as part of the appropriations process. 5. In the biggest fiscal loss President Obama has suffered, we got a sequester that reduced the growth of federal spending. 6. Many states have refused to expand Medicaid, notwithstanding the lure of temporary free money from Uncle Sam. 7. Government shutdown fights may be messy, but they tend to produce a greater amount of fiscal restraint. And there are surely other reasons to list, including the long-overdue end of seemingly permanent unemployment benefits and falling defense outlays as forces are withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. The bottom line is that the past
Paul Merrell

Are US Academics Who Cite WikiLeaks Blackballed? - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...212806

Wikileaks censorship academic

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Speaking to Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine in July 2015, Assange suggested that institutions within the international relations discipline have failed to understand the intersection between current geopolitical and technological developments. Specifically, Assange charged that the US journal International Studies Quarterly (ISQ), published by the prestigious International Studies Association (ISA), would not accept manuscripts based on WikiLeaks’ material. Professor of international politics Daniel W. Drezner hit back on July 30 in The Washington Post, arguing that there were other explanations for why the journal was not publishing WikiLeaks’ material. However, he did concede that it is possible that the “structural forces” opposing WikiLeaks were so powerful that a scholar would eschew WikiLeaks’ publications for “fear of being blackballed”. For the thousands of undergraduate to PhD students, fellows and academic researchers facing a precarious employment market, self-censorship for fear of freezing one’s career is not unlikely. One publicised incident from November 2010 concerning the office of career services at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), which according to The New York Times “grooms future diplomats”, provides the perfect illustration. That year the office sent an email to students warning them against commenting on or posting WikiLeaks’ documents on social media because “engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government”. The warning came to the office through a SIPA alumnus working at the State Department.
  • Years later, the tone of the warning continued to reverberate through the halls of one of the most reputable universities in the world. In documenting human rights abuses in June 2013 a Columbia University graduate class produced the anonymous academic paper “WikiLeaks and Iraq Body Count: the sum of parts may not add up to the whole — a comparison of two tallies of Iraqi civilian deaths”. The acknowledgements section of their report refers to the 2010 warning email and states that in light of that email it would be “unwise and perhaps unethical to acknowledge all the participating students by name”. Others participating in a peer-review process have cited additional factors curtailing their use of comprehensive and illuminating WikiLeaks publications. Former US presidential candidate for the Green Party Cynthia McKinney, for example, says that she was forced to scrub her PhD dissertation from any reference of WikiLeaks material. However Drezner, who is an ISA member and on the ISQ’s web advisory board, claims that WikiLeaks’ published diplomatic cables “are not nearly as significant as Assange believes” and that the “academic universe is indifferent to WikiLeaks”. A surprising claim, given that international human rights courts have not been indifferent to evidence derived from WikiLeaks’ published cables, including cables that show the insidious ways in which European officials attempt to conceal CIA torture in secret prisons.
  • To help address the gap in scholarly analysis of the more than 2 million US diplomatic cables and State Department records published by WikiLeaks since 2010, WikiLeaks has produced a new book, The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire, published September 7, 2015. The book brings together journalists, researchers and experts on international law and foreign policy to examine the current cables and records. The documents are extensive. They expose US efforts —  across Bush and Obama administrations — to use bribes and threats to keep the US protected from facing war crimes allegations, conveying the fading effervescence of concepts such as “international justice” or “rule of law” in the face of a superpower that clearly believes that “might makes right”. Analysts review the efforts US diplomats take to maintain ties with dictators. They examine the meaning of human rights in the context of a global “War on Terror”. Like the cables they seek to illuminate, the 18 chapters of the book touch upon most major regions of the world. Experts on US foreign policy such as Robert Naiman, Stephen Zunes and Gareth Porter examine cables that reveal US meddling in Syria, US acceptance of Israeli violations of international law, and how the US dealt with the International Atomic Energy Agency in relation to Iranian nuclear development. The book offers a user guide written by WikiLeaks’ investigations editor Sarah Harrison on how to research WikiLeaks’ cables including meta data and content.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Writing in the book’s introduction, Assange proposes that the diplomatic cables provide “the vivisection of a living empire, showing what substance flowed from which state organ and when”. Assange notes in his introduction that academic disciplines outside international relations, and where career aspirations do not go hand in hand with patronage by government institutions, have voluminous coverage of the cables. But the ISA does not accept submissions citing WikiLeaks’ material. Although ISA executive director Mark Boyer denies that the association has a formal policy against publishing WikiLeaks’ material, he says that journal editors have discussed the implications of publishing material that is legally prohibited by the US government. According to Gabriel J. Michael, author of the Yale Law School paper Who’s Afraid of WikiLeaks? Missed Opportunities in Political Science Research, the ISQ has adopted a “provisional policy” against handling manuscripts that make use of leaked documents if such use could be interpreted as mishandling “classified” material. According to an ISQ editor quoted in Michael’s paper, this policy prohibits direct quotations as well as data mining, and was developed in consultation with legal counsel. Stating that editors are currently “in an untenable position”. According to the editor, ISQ’s policy will remain in place pending broader action from the ISA, which publishes several other disciplinary journals. The ISA and ISQ concerns about handling material that the US government forbids —  which include WikiLeaks’ cables —  amount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The cables go into the heart of an empire, and reflect on matters that affect everyone.
  • Without WikiLeaks, the public would still be in the dark about the Trans-Pacific Partnership “agreement” currently being negotiated. The treaty aims to rewrite the global rules on intellectual property rights and would create spheres of trade which would be protected from judicial oversight. Such agreements have the potential to change the fabric of how states operate, and the leaked cables shed light on how states negotiate significant treaties, aiming to keep citizenship participation in politics out. Where academia bans the use of important leaked documents the public loses out.
ashkif as

5th International Meeting on Traditional & Alternative Medicine - 0 views

www.portalmarkets.com/...44378.html

international meeting alternative alternative medicine medicine

shared by ashkif as on 03 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • ashkif as on 03 Dec 18
     
    5th International Meeting on Traditional & Alternative Medicine scheduled on April 22-23, 2019 at Rome, Italy. The theme of Traditional Medicine congress is Exploring New Horizons in Traditional & Alternative Medicine. Traditional Medicine Meeting will provide a broad range of academic disciplines in natural product which will be emphasized from the discovery of natural products from natural sources through the clinical uses to attract researchers that are contributing in the field of tr...
Paul Merrell

Asia Times Online :: Digital Blackwater rules - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...WOR-03-110613.html

surveillance state digital surveillance Snowden extradition

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • But when it comes to how a 29-year old IT wizard with little formal education has been able to access a batch of ultra-sensitive secrets of the US intelligence-national security complex, that's a no-brainer; it's all about the gung-ho privatization of spying - referred to by a mountain of euphemisms of the "contractor reliance" kind. In fact the bulk of the hardware and software used by the dizzying network of 16 US intelligence agencies is privatized. A Washington Post investigation found out that US homeland security, counter-terror and spy agencies do business with over 1,900 companies. [2] An obvious consequence of this contractor tsunami - hordes of "knowledge" high-tech proletarians in taupe cubicles - is their indiscriminate access to ultra-sensitive security. A systems administrator like Snowden can have access to practically everything.
  • So then we may have a case of Hong Kong and Beijing having to reach an agreement. Yet even if they decided to extradite Snowden, he could argue in court this was "an offence of a political character". The bottom line - this could drag on for years. And it's too early to tell how Beijing would play it for maximum leverage. A "win-win" situation from a Chinese point of view would be to balance its commitment to absolute non-interference in foreign domestic affairs, its desire not to rock the fragile bilateral relation boat, but also what non-pivoting move the US government would offer in return.
  • Since 1996, before the British handover to China, an extradition treaty applies between the tiger and the wolf. [4] The US Department of Justice is already surveying its options. It's important to remember that the Hong Kong judicial system is independent from China's - according to the Deng Xiaoping-conceptualized "one country, two systems". As much as Washington may go for extraditing Snowden, he may also apply for political asylum. In both cases he may stay in Hong Kong for months, in fact years. The Hong Kong government cannot extradite anyone claiming he will be persecuted in his country of origin. And crucially, article 6 of the treaty stipulates, "a fugitive offender shall not be surrendered if the offence of which that person is accused or was convicted is an offence of a political character." Another clause stipulates that a fugitive shall not be surrendered if that implicates "the defense, foreign affairs or essential public interest or policy" of - guess who - the People's Republic of China.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • What he stressed is how they all work under a false premise; "If a surveillance program produces information of value, it legitimizes it ... In one step, we've managed to justify the operation of the Panopticon". Oh yes, make no mistake; Snowden has carefully read his Michel Foucault (he also stressed his revulsion facing "the capabilities of this architecture of oppression"). Foucault's deconstruction of the Panopticon's architecture is now a classic (see it here in an excerpt of his 1975 masterpiece Discipline and Punish). The Panopticon was the ultimate surveillance system, designed by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The Panopticon - a tower surrounded by cells, a pre-Orwellian example of "architecture of oppression" - was not originally conceived for the surveillance of a prison, but of a factory crammed with landless peasants on forced labor. Oh, but those were rudimentary proto-capitalist days. Welcome to the (savagely privatized) future, where the NSA black hole, "Digital Blackwater", lords over all as the ultimate Panopticon.
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia in Search of a New Course | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...abia-in-search-of-a-new-course

war & peace economic war Saudis oil-prices Syria

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, is experiencing serious financial problems. The ongoing plummeting of oil prices is forcing the Saudis to be more careful with money. Tens of billions of dollars invested abroad are making a return to the kingdom. In July 2015, Saudi Arabia’s authorities, for the first time in 8 years, issued governmental bonds worth $4 bn.
  • Bloomberg reports that Saudi Arabia has already withdrawn $50-70 bn, which it had previously invested worldwide through management companies. It is noteworthy that the country has been withdrawing funds for the past six months. For example, Saudi Arabia’s SAMA Foreign Holdings reached its maximum in August 2014, having amounted to $737 bn. But since then, the fund has been shrinking because oil prices have dropped more than twice in this period. Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit is forecast to reach 20%; however, reduction of expenditures still remains a sensitive topic. In the context of the continuous fall in oil prices, Riyadh has worked out a plan to gradually reduce public spending to cope with a sharp decrease in budget revenues caused by the slumping oil prices. For example, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance has issued an order prescribing all state companies to temporary stop hiring new employees and launching new projects until the end of the fiscal year. In addition, the government procurement of new cars and furniture has also been put on hold as well as the signing and approval of new lease agreements for state institutions and enterprises. The expropriation of plots of land for the purpose of the subsequent extraction of oil has also been suspended throughout the country. The Ministry of Finance has, at the same time, demanded an acceleration in the collection procedure of oil revenues.
  • “To prove that the country indeed has a sound fiscal discipline, the government has to take steps to cut expenditures in the 4th quarter. Subsequently Saudi Arabia will be compelled to find new ways to reduce expenditures and boost efficiency in order to assure there will be no budget deficit in 2016,” John Sfakianakis, Director of the Middle East Division of the Ashmore Group, said in his interview to Bloomberg. It should be pointed out in that regard that oil revenues comprise about 90% of Saudi Arabia’s budget, and the landslide of oil prices of over 40% within the last 12 months adversely affected the country’s financial standing. And, although the kingdom’s debt burden remains one of the lowest in the world (less than 2% of the GDP), the kingdom’s international assets have been consistently shrinking for the last nine months and reached a two year minimum. This situation directly influences the policy of OPEC since Saudi Arabia (which extracts almost 30% of the OPEC’s oil, positions itself as an extremely influential raw material supplier, maintains powerful military forces, and has its own global ambitions, immense resources and substantial diplomatic experience) de facto plays the role of the shadow leader of this organization. At times siding with the US, and then pursuing its own interests, the kingdom has assumed such an influential position in the international community that other countries revere its opinion, and as for the last oil crisis, Saudi Arabia is seen as its key player.
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  • And, based on the information provided by the international mass media, the Saudi leadership has split in their opinion on whether to continue funding Syria or to begin reducing their financial commitment. “Riyadh is facing a choice: to give more support to the moderate opposition or to look for a compromise,” an American expert on national security, James Farvell, wrote in The National Interest. The expert explained that if Saudis offer more support, that would trigger a confrontation with Russia, but if they side with Moscow, Russia’s regional influence might be reinforced and that might, in turn, challenge Saudi Arabia’s interests. Because of this dilemma, controversial information regarding Saudi’s decisions are appearing in the press. On the one hand, Saudi Arabia was one of the first to condemn Russia after the beginning of the Russian military operation in Syria on September 30. It accused Russia of bombing the troops of moderate opposition instead of ISIS. “These attacks resulted in the deaths of numerous innocent victims. We call for a stop it immediately,” demagogically and groundlessly said the representative of Saudi Arabia Abdallah al-Muallimi in the UN. Simultaneously 53 religious leaders signed an online appeal to support a jihad against the Syrian authorities as well as the presence of Russia and Iran in this country. They appealed to the countries of the Muslim world to render “moral, financial, military and political support to those who are called the ‘holy warriors of Syria’.” The authors of the appeal explicitly stated that if they fail, the other Sunni states in the region, and, first of all, Saudi Arabia will be the next victims.
  • With reference to a high-ranking Saudi official who wished to remain anonymous, the BBC stated that armed groups of the so-called moderate opposition would receive new, high-tech weapons, including tank destroyers. Jaish al-Fath, The Free Syrian Army and The Southern Front moderate opposition groups will also receive support. According to the source, it is quite likely that the “moderate opposition” in Syria will receive surface-to-air systems as well. Keeping in mind that Russia is carrying out air strikes across not only the facilities of ISIS, but also the above listed groups, a scenario when Saudis turn their weapon against Russian aviation is quite possible. On the other hand, a curious document, apparently a copy of the instructions issued for the embassies of Saudi Arabia in the Middle Eastern countries, has been uploaded to the Internet. The main idea of the documents is that all the diplomatic representative offices should gradually cease financial support of the armed Syrian opposition, apparently owing to the low efficiency of militants’ activities. The authenticity of the document raises certain doubts, as is always the case with such documents. However, specialists in the Arabic language concluded that the text was written by a native speaker, and that the document’s design conforms to the style adopted in Saudi Arabia. It shouldn’t be ruled out that the drying up of the source of funding, that militants used to receive from the Saudis, against the backdrop of a certain degree of success of the government troops as well as the increasing military and technical assistance to Syria on the part of Russia, have convinced many “oppositionists” to surrender and change masters. This process is expected to only accelerate in the future.
  • On Sunday, October 11, the Defense Minister, Mohammed bin Salman, visited Sochi. The search for common ground on the issues related to the situation in Syria was the main theme of the meeting held by the son of the Saudi king and Vladimir Putin. The parties also discussed the prospects of their economic cooperation. And, since Saudi Arabia is currently experiencing certain financial difficulties and is in the “clutches” of economic uncertainty, this topic was of a special interest. It was the second visit to the Russian Federation of the Saudi prince, who currently carries out sensitive missions related to the complex relations between the two countries. It should be noted that King of Saudi Arabia Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has been admitted to hospital in a critical condition and is currently being kept in the intensive care unit of the King Faisal royal hospital in Riyadh.
Paul Merrell

Former Agent of Swedish Security Police Dictated Amnesty Sweden's Stance against Julian... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5514109

war & peace Assange Sweden extradition Amnesty-International subversion

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • In December 2010 a close collaboration between Sweden and the CIA and FBI was exposed in the international media: an intelligence collaboration between Sweden and US agencies that was kept secret from the Swedish public, and even from the Swedish Parliament. [1] The Telegraph credited WikiLeaks for exposing the deal. [2] The revelations caused far more commotion internationally than in Sweden and, in any event, no government officials were ever held accountable for it. The Washington Post reported, quoting a Swedish Parliamentary investigation: “Although the Parliamentary investigator concluded that the Swedish security police deserved ‘extremely grave criticism’ for losing control of the operation and for being ‘remarkably submissive to the American officials,’ no Swedish officials have been charged or disciplined.” [3]
  • This article explores to what extent intelligence collaboration between Swedish and US security agencies might have relevance to, or direct intervention in, the political case of Sweden vs Assange. [4]
Paul Merrell

M of A - Syria - Erdogan's Lost Bet - Trump Likely To Follow A Cautious Strategy - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org/...ollow-a-cautious-strategy.html

war & peace Syria ISIL supply-lines Turkey Erdogan U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The last Syria thread noted: South of Al-Bab the Syrian army is moving towards the Euphrates. It will cut off the Turkish forces path to Raqqa and Manbij. That move concluded. The Turkish invasion forces are now blocked from moving further south. They would have to fight the Syrian army and their Russian allies to move directly onto Raqqa. They would have to fight the Syrian-Kurdish YPG and its U.S. allies to move further east. For the first time since the start of the war the supply lines between Turkey and the Islamic State are cut off!
  • Erdogan is still hoping for U.S. support for his plans for Raqqa but I doubt that the U.S. military is willing to give up on their well regarded Kurdish proxies in exchange for an ill disciplined Turkish army in general disarray and with little fighting spirit. Erdogan removed any and all officers and NCOs that he perceived as not being 100% behind his power grab. That has now come back to haunt him. He is lacking the military means to pursue his belligerent policies.
Paul Merrell

Netanyahu and Trump: A Shared Focus on Terrorism « LobeLog - 0 views

lobelog.com/mp-a-shared-focus-on-terrorism

terrorism™-history Israel Netanyahu

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Scholars of terrorism credit a specific 1979 symposium in Jerusalem as a turning point in the U.S. and international usage of “terrorism” as we understand it today. The Jonathan Institute, founded following the death of Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan during a raid to rescue hostages from a PLO hijacking, hosted a 1979 conference in Jerusalem— and a follow up in 1984 in Washington—on “International Terrorism.” Directed by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Jonathan Institute maintained close ties to the Israeli government. Current and former Israeli officials across the political spectrum—including Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Ezer Weizman, Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres—dominated its administrative committee. Lisa Stampnitsky, in her 2013 book Disciplining Terror, discusses how the Jonathan Institute helped internationalize Israel’s use of the term to describe terrorist violence as both irrational and illegitimate in both means and ends, and as primarily targeting democracies and “the West.” Previously, she notes, terrorism referred largely to rational political violence, either state or individual, and was dealt with as an issue of criminality and law. The shift helped Israel delegitimize the political aims of certain groups, such as the Palestinian resistance to its colonization and territorial occupation. One cannot be a “freedom fighter” if one’s political aims are demonized as illegitimate or irrational. Stampnitsky argues that the shift to using terrorism to describe violence outside the law also set the stage for retaliatory strikes (such as the 1986 U.S. air strikes in Libya in response to a bombing at a Berlin disco that killed an American soldier) and eventually for the doctrine of preemptive force that has characterized the post-9/11 “War on Terror.”
  • Israel’s role in the development of a specifically anti-Muslim discourse of terrorism is deeply intertwined with the foreign policies of American politicians. As Deepa Kumar and others have pointed out, American neocons and Israel’s Likud party jointly developed a shared language around Islamic terrorism. The 1979 Jonathan Institute conference was attended by prominent American officials and political figures, including future President George H.W. Bush and representatives of the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Commentary magazine who brought the ideas, and later a follow-up conference, back to the U.S. Intended to serve as an intervention into the international discourse on terrorism, the explicit aim of the Jerusalem conference was to awaken the Western world to the problem of terrorism as defined by the conference organizers. It contributed to entrenching in the minds of American conservatives what was popularized a few years later as the “clash of civilizations,” firmly situating Israel in the category of Western democracies threatened by Soviets and Palestinians. The follow-up conference in the United States in 1984 went further by emphasizing the relationship between Islam and terror. As Netanyahu himself wrote in the book that came out of the conference: “the battle against terrorism was part of a much larger struggle, one between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism.” Then, as now, Netanyahu presented Israel as the bulwark against terrorism, a specific kind of illegitimate political violence that threatens not just Israel but all democracies and the Western world.
  • Echoes of this framing of the debate on terrorism can be found in how Western politicians, including Netanyahu and Trump, discuss the issue. Terrorism, which has no single agreed-upon definition in U.S. or international law, now serves as a moniker applied to all violence that established states deem illegitimate. Most often these days, Western democracies use “terrorism” to describe violence committed by Muslims. As journalist Glenn Greenwald writes, “In other words, any violence by Muslims against the West is inherently ‘terrorism,’ even if targeted only at soldiers at war and/or designed to resist invasion and occupation.” The term functions not as a descriptive tool but an ideological one. It doesn’t merely identify a particular kind of violence. It justifies and even requires a particular kind of forceful response by the state. Israel today presents itself as the world’s expert on counterterrorism. It maintains a profitable security industry predicated on selling expertise and technology tested in its interactions with Palestinians. American tax dollars have been funneled into this industry through U.S. military aid, over 25% of which Israel was allowed to spend domestically (the new military aid deal signed by the Obama White House will phase out this allowance over the next 10 years, sending the rest of the $3.8 billion per year to U.S. defense contractors). The United States and Israel collaborate on counterterrorism initiatives, including joint military exercises and police exchange programs. Here tactics and skills are developed and exchanged for surveillance and violent repression of protests that primarily impact Muslims and people of color in the U.S. and Palestinians and Black Jews in Israel.
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  • In this context, Trump’s framing of his anti-Muslim immigration policies as a national security priority to keep out terrorists is nothing new. What is new in this political moment is the extent to which the U.S. public is seeing straight through this discourse and rallying against discrimination and bigotry. Ahead of Trump and Netanyahu’s meeting this week, there’s an opportunity to pay attention to how these discourses have enabled Israel to justify decades of military occupation and human rights abuses with the discourse of national security and counterterrorism. As the Trump administration goes back to the drawing board to devise restrictive immigration policies that will hold up in court, Netanyahu and Israel’s example shouldn’t be far from mind.
Paul Merrell

The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation - PaulCraigRoberts.org - 0 views

www.paulcraigroberts.org/...s-whys-gold-price-manipulation

financial-collapse gold Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel banksters market-manipulation

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused by the financial crisis.
  • The Fed’s policy of monetizing one trillion dollars of bonds annually put pressure on the US dollar, the value of which declined in terms of gold. When gold hit $1,900 per ounce in 2011, the Federal Reserve realized that $2,000 per ounce could have a psychological impact that would spread into the dollar’s exchange rate with other currencies, resulting in a run on the dollar as both foreign and domestic holders sold dollars to avoid the fall in value. Once this realization hit, the manipulation of the gold price moved beyond central bank leasing of gold to bullion dealers in order to create an artificial market supply to absorb demand that otherwise would have pushed gold prices higher. The manipulation consists of the Fed using bullion banks as its agents to sell naked gold shorts in the New York Comex futures market. Short selling drives down the gold price, triggers stop-loss orders and margin calls, and scares participants out of the gold trusts. The bullion banks purchase the deserted shares and present them to the trusts for redemption in bullion. The bullion can then be sold in the London physical gold market, where the sales both ratify the lower price that short-selling achieved on the Comex floor and provide a supply of bullion to meet Asian demands for physical gold as opposed to paper claims on gold.
  • The evidence of gold price manipulation is clear. In this article we present evidence and describe the process. We conclude that ability to manipulate the gold price is disappearing as physical gold moves from New York and London to Asia, leaving the West with paper claims to gold that greatly exceed the available supply.
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Knowledge Is Crime | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...gelhardt%2C_knowledge_is_crime

security state crimes too-big-to-jail

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Seven Free Passes for the National Security State With Cartwright as a possible exception, the members of the national security state, unlike the rest of us, exist in what might be called “post-legal” America.  They know that, no matter how heinous the crime, they will not be brought to justice for it.  The list of potentially serious criminal acts for which no one has had to take responsibility in a court of law is long, and never tabulated in one place.  Consider this, then, an initial run-down on seven of the most obvious crimes and misdemeanors of this era for which no one has been held accountable.
  • *Kidnapping:
  • *The destruction of evidence of a crime:
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  • *Torture (and other abuses):
  • *Perjury before Congress:
  • *The planning of an extralegal prison system:
  • *Assassination:
  • *The killing of detainees in that extralegal system:
  • Mind you, the above seven categories don’t even take into account the sort of warrantless surveillance of Americans that should have put someone in a court of law, or the ways in which various warrior corporations overbilled or cheated the government in its war zones, or the ways private contractors “ran wild” in those same zones.  Even relatively low-level crimes by minor figures in the national security state have normally not been criminalized.  Take, for example, the private surveillance of and cyberstalking of “love interests,” or “LOVEINT,” by NSA employees using government surveillance systems.  The NSA claims that at least one employee was “disciplined” for this, but no one was taken to court.  A rare exception: a number of low level military figures in the Abu Ghraib scandal were tried for their abusive actions, convicted, and sent to jail, though no one higher than a colonel was held accountable in court for those infamously systematic and organized acts of torture and abuse. Too Big to Fail, National Security-Style
  • In Washington today, knowledge is the only crime.  That’s a political reality of the twenty-first century.  Get used to it.
Paul Merrell

[Heart of Empire] | The Long Shadow of a Neocon, by Andrew Cockburn | Harper's Magazine - 0 views

harpers.org/...the-long-shadow-of-a-neocon

war & peace Iraq Afghanistan neocons War-Party Khalilzad Karzai Maliki

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • As jihadists everywhere celebrate their stunning victories in Mosul and Tikrit, as well as the abject retreat of the United States from Afghanistan, we can only hope that they accord due credit to a man who was indispensable to their success. Now an obscure businessman seeking crumbs from the table as an “international consultant,” Zalmay Khalilzad was in his day an imperial envoy sent by the United States to decree the fates of Afghanistan and Iraq. His decisions, most especially his selection of puppet overseers to administer the conquered lands, were uniformly disastrous, contributing in large degree to the catastrophes of today. To be sure, many others among the neocon clique and their liberal-democrat interventionist allies deserve a place on the jihadist honor roll of useful idiots, but few contributed as much as Khalilzad, the Afghan-born former academic who selected Hamid Karzai and Nuri al-Maliki as suitable leaders for their respective countries. Initially promoted up the ranks of the national-security clerisy by Albert Wohlstetter, the dark eminence of neoconservative theology who also mentored neocon godfather Richard Perle, Khalilzad found a useful niche in such company as the only Muslim any of them knew, ready to spout their militarist nostrums at the flutter of a grant check. I myself got an early intimation of Khalilzad’s tenuous grasp on military reality in 1981, when he assured me in all seriousness that the Afghan mujahideen were enjoying great success in disabling Soviet tanks by thrusting thick carpets into their treads. During the administration of the elder Bush, he worked in the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. In 1992 he wrote the initial draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, which became an iconic neoconservative text.
  • Khalilzad’s leap out of relative obscurity came with the post-9/11 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Following the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001, an Afghan Loya Jirga assembly indicated by a clear majority that they wanted their aged king, Zahir Shah, to return from his long exile in Rome to preside over the government. This was not to the taste of presidential special envoy, and later ambassador, Khalilzad, who importuned Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi to prevent the Shah from leaving Rome as he meanwhile brusquely informed the Loya Jirga that their leader was to be Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun of modest reputation. Afghan politicians of all stripes concluded that Khalilzad had purposefully picked someone with little internal support in order to ensure that his own authority remained unchallenged. This authority he exercised by operating as supreme warlord, rewarding or threatening the lesser strongmen who had emerged in various provincial power bases with grants of aid or threats of airstrikes from the bombers and Predator drones at his command. Afghans who could foresee the inevitable consequence of this laissez-faire policy toward the universally hated warlords did their best to persuade Khalilzad to change course. One of them later related to me that he suggested that Khalilzad put “ten of them in handcuffs and ship them off to the International Court at The Hague for crimes against humanity.”
  • “I’m going to bring them in and demobilize them,” countered Khalilzad confidently. “No, Zal,” replied the Afghan sadly, “you’re going to legitimize them.” So it transpired. While Karzai presided, in his self-designed costume of furry hat and cape, over a regime of staggering corruption, large swaths of Afghanistan fell under the control of characters like Hazrat Ali, a ruffian of pliable loyalties who used American support to gain control of the eastern city of Jalalabad and installed himself, with Khalilzad’s approval, as security chief of Nangahar Province. He then began vying with fellow warlord Sher Mohammed Akhunzada for the title of world’s leading heroin trafficker (a practice both men denied engaging in) while delivering hapless victims labeled “high value targets” to the torture cells of Bagram or the oubliette of Guantánamo. In inevitable consequence, disgusted Afghans rallied to a resurgent Taliban. The rest is history.
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  • Resolutely failing upward, Khalilzad became the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2005. His signal accomplishment came in 2006, when, searching for a suitable candidate to replace Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister, he summoned Nuri al-Maliki, a relatively low-ranking Dawa Party functionary who had spent much of his adult life in exile in Damascus (with an intervening spell in Tehran), where he subsisted on the earnings of a butcher shop he’d opened. Maliki’s party activities were largely related to security, and his experiences imbued him with a generally paranoid attitude to the outside world — not the best preparation for reconciling Iraq’s disparate sects and factions. Nevertheless, Khalilzad thought Maliki was just the man to make piece with the Sunnis, crack down on Moqtada al-Sadr (whom the American government mistakenly believed to be an Iranian pawn), and stand up to the Iranians. Summoned by Khalilzad, Maliki was abruptly informed that he was to become prime minister. “Are you serious?” said the astonished erstwhile butcher. The British ambassador, William Patey, had been invited to attend the meeting but when he started to object to Maliki’s anointment, Khalilzad promptly kicked him out of the room.
  • True to form, all of Khalilzad’s presumptions about Maliki turned out to be wholly in error. So far from reconciling with Sunnis, Maliki went out of his way to alienate them, combining paranoia about the possibility of a neo-Baathist coup with an opportunistic calculation that heightened sectarian tension would bolster his support among Shia. He showed no sign of serving as the wished-for bulwark against Tehran, and, most importantly, evinced little interest in building a responsible administration. Instead, Iraqi government, never a model of probity, devolved into a midden of corruption in which every office, including those in the military, was for sale. By 2014, the going price for command of an Iraqi army division was reported to be around $1 million, payable over two years as the purchaser recouped his investment via fees levied at roadblocks and other revenue streams. Little wonder that when called on to fight the disciplined and ruthless ISIS, the Iraqi army has melted away. Meanwhile, Khalilzad’s other choice, Hamid Karzai, has overseen a reign of pillage similar in scale to Maliki’s, opening the way for a Taliban restoration and rendering futile the entire American investment in Afghanistan. Defeat is an orphan, they say, but it would be a shame if this particular parent of America’s twenty-first-century humiliations were to be totally forgotten.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 14
     
    With neocons angling again to have Iraq's Maliki replaced by Ahmed Chalibi, it's a good time to check in again on the neocon kingmaker for Southwest Asia, Zalmay Khalilzad.
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