There's no excusing what happened at Fort Hood. None. The United States Army has filed charges against the survivor who opened fire in the Soldier Readiness Center, killing 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian, and wounding 30 more persons.

Major Hasan, 39, an Army psychiatrist, is accused of opening fire with two handguns in a Soldier Medical Readiness Center, where troops receive medical attention before being deployed or after returning from overseas.

Of the 13 people who were killed last Thursday, 4 were officers, 8 were enlisted soldiers and one was a civilian. Major Hasan was eventually subdued by civilian police.

The 13 charges against Major Hasan are “initial charges,” said the Army spokesman, Chris Grey, “and additional charges may be preferred in the future, subject to the ongoing criminal investigation.”
“It is important to remember that the preferral of charges is the first step in the court-martial process,” Mr. Grey said, “and that a charge is merely an accusation. The accused is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.”

Col. John P. Galligan, a retired Army officer who is representing Major Hasan, has questioned whether the suspect will be able to get a fair trial at Fort Hood.

For now, Mr. Grey added, “Major Hasan is currently under pretrial restriction while receiving medical care.”

Major Hasan is reported to be in stable condition in an Army Hospital in San Antonio, where he is recovering from four gunshot wounds.

Now comes the Times with a follow-on to the initial stories suggesting that the hero civilian first credited with stopping this madman was merely another shooting victim. I don't know whether that is true or not; ballistics and evidence will tell the story. Either way, I think her partner, whose shooting was credited on the day of the incident with finally bringing down Hasan, deserves positive feedback and respect.

It's looking like Napolean Nicolas Sarkozy Bonaparte wants to get his nation back in on the empire game:

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy opened France’s first military facilities in the Gulf on Tuesday, deepening the government’s alliance with the United Arab Emirates and highlighting its shifting foreign policy priorities.

Mr. Sarkozy attended a ceremony to open French naval, air and army facilities in Abu Dhabi. The bases are the first permanent French military installations to be built outside of French territory since the process of decolonization began more than half a century ago.

Interesting times:

(TPM link)

So, as far as I can tell, Rep. Jane Harman [D-Ca] was conspiring with the Israelis to drop some spy charges in exchange for some lobbying on her behalf, and Alberto Gonzales had an NSA warrantless wiretap™ (wait for it) on her phone and overheard the deal.

In exchange for not investigating, Gonzales asked her to attack the NYT's exposé on (wait for it) NSA warrantless wiretapping. The one she had personally requested be held back until before after the 2004 election (Department of With Democrats Like These, anyone?)

And so she goes free, although the Israelis didn't get her that committee chair she wanted in the first place.

One has to wonder just how much dirt Hoover Gonzales and Rove had on everyone in Washington, and more importantly, how many other favors they blackmailed out of people. And it certainly explains some of those bizarre, neo-Maoist ritual apologies.

It's Heeeere:

LONDON (AFP) – Israel's military is preparing so it could launch major aerial attacks on Iranian nuclear sites if ordered to by the new government, a British newspaper said on Saturday, quoting Israeli defence and intelligence sources.

"Israel wants to know that if its forces were given the green light, they could strike at Iran in a matter of days, even hours," an unnamed senior defence official told The Times.

"They are making preparations on every level for this eventuality. The message to Iran is that the threat is not just words."

Gates Pushes for Radical Overhaul of Pentagon Arsenal

After his party placed an impressive third in the elections for Israel's 18th Knesset, last month, it appears that Israel's most popular racist, bigot, and all around bad-guy, Avigdor Lieberman, will become Israel's next Foreign Minister:

JERUSALEM — An Israeli politician who based his election campaign on baiting the country's Arab minority, drawing accusations that he is a racist demagogue, now seems likely to become the Jewish state's top diplomat.

It looks like the Pentagon is continuing on its all-out offensive to keep the Guantanamo Bay prison camp open by trying to put cosmetic touches on a prison set up on inherently unconstitutional grounds: indefinite seizure and gaining intelligence by torture.

WASHINGTON, (AFP) – A Pentagon report has found conditions at the controversial Guantanamo prison in line with the Geneva Conventions, but called for the isolation of some inmates to be eased by allowing them more social contact and recreation.

I hope that everyone realizes that the Pentagonian Establishment is very much in the midst, and not at the start of, trying to push back at Obama's promise to close Gitmo, and the left's push for this thing to close since we've known of its existence.

This is why it is so incredibly important that the left push him harder than ever before and constantly to close this house of horrors down, as well as all of the others we know and don't know about, because he's being pushed very forcefully (more forcefully, in fact) from the right to "stay the course" on Gitmo.

Perhaps, it's because this is only the unconfirmed word of a former CIA agent (though, are these things ever confirmed?), or maybe it's a double standard, but why did the media give this story such a passing glance? Can you hear the uprorar if the script was flipped and it was Iran clandestinely trying to disrupt and sabotage the internal governmental instruments of Israel or the United States?

Israel engaged in covert war inside Iran: report

LONDON (Reuters) – Israel is involved in a covert war of sabotage inside Iran to try to delay Tehran's alleged attempts to develop a nuclear weapon, a British newspaper said on Tuesday, quoting a former CIA agent and intelligence experts.

So, I was reading this article about continued trouble between the Israelis and Hamas, and caught this near the end of the article:

Responding to Israel's concerns, U.S. Army engineers arrived at the Gaza-Egypt frontier on Sunday to set up ground-penetrating radar to detect smuggling tunnels, an Egyptian security official said.

Inside the Rafah terminal — the gateway between Egypt and Gaza — four army trucks loaded with wooden crates and drills could be seen accompanied by four U.S. Army engineers. The Egyptian officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity.

I'm with SoBe: WTF?

Talk about your security breaches: A New Zealand man bought a used MP3 player for $15 only to discover it came with 60 pages of sensitive U.S. military data:

The files Ogle found on the MP3 player contain the names and personal details of US soldiers, including some who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are no details on exactly how many personal records are contained within the documents (most of which date back to 2005), but they also have information on mission briefings and equipment deployment.

This incident is probably not the worst breach of military data in recent memory. [...] Still, Ogle's situation is a bit bizarre in that no one knows how or why this sensitive information was stored on an iPod, or how that MP3 player slipped out to a used hardware vendor. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), some of the phone numbers from the MP3 player's records still work, and the identified individuals indeed picked up on the other end.

"The more I look at it, the more I see and the less I think I should be [seeing]," Mr Ogle told ABC. He says he will hand the player over to the US Defense Department should it ever ask.

WTF? You mean, they haven't asked?

This is one of those stories that inspires me to write foily fiction. What do you think is going on here? My first guess is that someone on our team is selling data to 'the enemy.' Like, a contractor.

It seems that the war-mongering, right-winger Bebe Netanyahu, yes, that Bebe Netanyahu, Israel's former prime minister, is leading in the polls, meaning he has much more than a passing shot at getting back the seat:

JERUSALEM (AFP) – Hawkish former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the clear favourite to become Israel's next premier after February 10 elections, according to an opinion poll published on Monday.

So yeah, I'm happy about Gitmo and the lifting of the Global Gag Rule. BUT

Obama is going to continue Bush's policy of bombing Pakistan.

The Pakistan military's top spokesman called the attacks, which he said were by pilotless drones, "counterproductive," because they undercut his country's efforts to oust militants from the ungoverned tribal areas.

I mean, for anyone paying attention this shouldn't come as a shock as he told us that he would use military action against Pakistan. But he's anti-war, right? (Is this where I apologise for being prematurely correct?)



17 people were killed today, 3 of them children. Since the bombings began in August we have apparently killed 2 terrorist leaders. I guess everyone else who lives in the region is a terrorist by default since there are no numbers for how many *actual* terrorists we've killed.



Great policy. It worked so well when Clinton was bombing Iraq in the 90's, didn't it?



"We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace."

No AP content was harmed in the making of this story.

With 5 days to go, there is still plenty of time for yet another Bush fuck up and opportunity to disgrace us all.

Case in point:

"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said a telephone call he made to U.S. President George W. Bush last week forced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to abstain in a U.N. vote on the Gaza war, leaving her "shamed."

Pouring on political bravado in a speech late Monday, Olmert said he demanded to talk to Bush with only 10 minutes to spare before a U.N. Security Council vote Thursday on a resolution opposed by Israel calling for an immediate cease-fire.

LAT

For a change, the reporter actually went there and talked to real live Afghani fighters. Bottom line: there is no "victory" to be had there. At this point, I'm completely cynical about anything I hear coming from American politicians on what we're supposedly doing there. We're there to enrich energy companies, contractors and merc firms, and those political districts that benefit from profligate war spending. The exploding heroin market also plays a role. Anyone who says otherwise is bullshitting you.

The New York Times is reporting that we almost helped carry out an act of war against Iran at the behest of our BFF:

WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush rejected a plea from Israel last year to help it raid Iran's main nuclear complex, opting instead to authorize a new U.S. covert action aimed at sabotaging Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, The New York Times reported.

Interesting observation by Craig Murray former British Ambassador to the Central
Asian Republic of Uzbekistan. He writes:

I watched BBC World News for a timed hour yesterday. In that time I saw:
Pro-Israeli (including US government) speakers - 17
Pro-Palestinian speakers - 2

Mentions of Hamas Rockets as reason for war - 37
Mentions of illegal Israeli settlements - 0
Mentions of Palestinians killed by Israel during "ceasefire" - 2
Mentions of Sderot - 12
Mentions Sderot used to be Palestinian - 0 Link

"I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa."
~Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Global Exchange has tons of info on what we can do, and a list of US Companies that operate there.

Money talks -- loudly. If we can't affect our government funding them, we can stop our own funding of it.

Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews --

... what did Mahatma Gandhi actually think of the idea of Israel, and of the fate of the Jews of his time?

As it turns out, M.K. Gandhi engaged in sustained conversation with Jewish intellectuals of his day—many of whom were dismayed by the great man's insistence, for example, that Jews in Germany should have willingly "offered themselves to the butcher's knife."

In this essay, Shalom Goldman sketches out the little-known background to a contemporary controversy. ...

Until 1947, the United States habitually told the truth about at least one thing. The job title of the Pentagon's highest ranking civilian was the Secretary of War. But the recent slaughter of tens of millions in the Second World War had given the Pentagon's real function a bad name. So Democrat Harry Truman rebranded the Department of War, naming it the Department of Defense. From that day, the Secretary of War became the Secretary of Defense. War plants, war expenditures and bloodthirsty war industries became more benign-sounding defense plants, the defense expenditures and the patriotic defense industry.

While I didn't expect the media to make this a story (because they really can't walk and chew gum at the same time), it's still disappointing, nonetheless. Well, it seems that we will be in "the Iraq" for at least three more years:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq's parliament on Thursday approved a security pact with the United States that paves the way for U.S. forces to withdraw by the end of 2011, taking the country a big step closer to full sovereignty.

First, I want to give a big shout out to the whole Corrente Clan! Lambert love the new look. Yes I still live. Yes I will be on the low low a little while longer. At least until the systemic anomaly known as “THE ONE” has resolved itself. It seems Justice Thomas has found cause to scrutinize the allegation that “THE ONE” may not be eligible for POTUS status.

It seems all his mom’s anthropological jet setting may have jeopardized his status as a natural born citizen of the United States of America. Now, to be sure, I can’t imagine someone running for president wouldn’t have considered this. So, of course, it must be far fetched. But, out of all the allegations hurled against “THE ONE” this one has grown some legs.

"300,000" seems like a fairly large number, no? I know there's all sorts of exciting things happening in Denver right now, but I'm not alone in viewing Pakistan as a sort of lynchpin to what happens in the Middle East/Central & South Asia. Reuters:

By Mian Saeed-ur-Rehman

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Authorities in northwest Pakistan are urgently seeking millions of dollars to help up to 300,000 people who have fled from fighting between government forces and militants.

The displaced people are one more problem for a coalition government riven by disputes and grappling with mounting militant attacks and a sagging economy.

Here is the second part of my review of Manfred Steger's The Rise of the Global Imaginary (part 1 here). In the last part of the book, Steger focuses on the sometimes conflicting ideologies derived from the global imaginaries.

Starting from the collapse of the USSR, Steger argues (correctly, I think) that the first winning ideology in the decontestation game was market globalism, the ideology that managed to decontest "globalization" in the limited sense of deregulated markets on a global scale.

To explore the tenets of market globalism, Steger reviews the writings of one of its main proponents and popularizers: Thomas Friedman. Needless to say, this is painful to read as is anything related to Thomas Friedman (hence no links), however he is indeed a central figure in the promotion of market globalism. He is also a good representative of the way this ideology was promoted by the political, economic and corporate elites in the 1990s (or the transnational capitalist class as Leslie Sklair calls this group, Friedman belongs to the ideological sub-group of the TCC).

  Read more…

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

I know Robert Fisk is controversial. But he lives and breathes the Middle East and has intimate knowledge of it. In his latest column for the Independent, he reports on the restraint that Al Jazeera has shown considering the amount of atrocities on tape it receives:

""We've trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this," Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera's deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station's headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera's reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened – in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 – but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.