Kat's Catches

By John Ballard and Kat, our awesome researcher.
Links and headlines.
Too many to blog but too important or interesting to miss.

 

Killing Reconciliation: Military Raids, Backing of Corrupt Government Undermining Stated U.S. Goals in Afghanistan

Democracy Now, with video & transcript.

The Obama administration says it is backing a strategy of reconciliation with the Taliban. But just back from Afghanistan, unembedded investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley say night raids by US Special Operations are killing the reconciliation the administration claims to support.

 

Insurgency vs. Counter-Insurgency - Salem-News.Com  posted Oct. 26th
Related news was in the Denver Post Sunday: When Obama pulls a few troops out of Afghanistan next year, they're going to be replaced by even more independent contractors.

FBI Documents on Senator Paul Wellstone Raise Questions about His Death 8 Years Ago

Minnesota Public Radio has obtained the FBI record of the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who died in a plane crash eight years ago this week. The records show the FBI first tracked Wellstone in 1970 after he was arrested at an anti-Vietnam War protest. The records might also raise new questions about the plane crash that killed Wellstone, his wife, his daughter and three staffers. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the crash was caused by pilot error, but the FBI documents reveal for the first time that specific criminal leads were pursued by investigators.

Majority of independent voters say Dem leadership is more left wing than they are This from The Hill is a week old but worth revisiting.

Democrats acknowledge the campaign to portray Pelosi and Reid as liberal extremists is having an impact on how they are viewed but argue that those perceptions will not ultimately influence votes.

�The Republicans have made them sort of national figures in their advertising campaign and have done an enormous amount of advertising about them,� said Mike Lux, a Democratic strategist and veteran of the Clinton White House. �Considering that�s the only thing that voters hear about Reid and Pelosi, I�m not surprised.�

Tea party's wide publicity belies its limited scope  In other words the movement may be a mile across but is only a few feet deep. As Steve pointed out a couple weeks ago these people and their supporters are in for a rude awakening after the election.

...a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

The results come from a months-long effort by The Post to contact every tea party group in the nation, an unprecedented attempt to understand the network of individuals and organizations at the heart of the nascent movement.

TSeventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general.

   Fastest street Porsche -- 911 GT2 RS -- sold out $329000 
Scratch another hot toy off your list for Santa: The $329000 Porsche 911 GT2 RS -- the fastest, most powerful and most expensive street Porsche ever -- is sold out.

US economy shows 2% growth 
Economy grew faster in third quarter, but Federal Reserve expected to pump in more money next week

Dean Baker: 2% is not a good news story
Think the US economy's 2% growth is a good news story? Think again: it has to be 2.5% just to stop joblessness rising.

=>US economic growth: what the analysts say

=>UK boardroom pay soars 55% in a year

Iraq war logs: 'The US was part of the Wolf Brigade operation against us'
Ugly particulars from the Wikileaks document dump.

During the foreboding months of 2005, one police unit struck more fear into Iraqis than the entire occupying US army. They were known as the Wolf Brigade.

Brutal even by Iraqi standards, their soldiers and officers seemingly answered to no one. They were seen as indiscriminate and predatory. The unit's reputation had been known Iraq-wide and results of their numerous raids are still bogged down in Iraq's legal system.

But the full range of their abuses and close co-operation with the US army remained in the shadows until the WikiLeaks disclosures showcased them in stark detail.

Study shows how media in peaceful countries 'over report' violence
Research into global broadcasting media reveals disproportionate reporting of conflict - and much too little that will lead to peace

Nothing friendly about it: Orwell's Ministry of Peace would envy the US military's use of newspeak?
Saptarshi Ray: Should we allow generals and politicians to hide behind phrases such as 'friendly fire'?

BP and Halliburton knew of Gulf oil well cement flaws
US investigator says cement mixture failed three out of four tests carried out before explosion

Assange is 'force-feeding truth to a world that has no stomach for it'
Forty years on from the Pentagon Papers, why are the Wikileaks revelations being treated so differently?

MI6: Open secrets
Editorial: Sixteen years after MI6 came out of the closet, Britain is still feeling its way towards an appropriate new normality on such matters

Protest works. Just look at the proof
Inspirational essay by Britain's Johann Hari for protesters who may feel dispirited. As I read I wondered ifthe impact of the Tea Party insurgency might cause otherwise sensible elected representatives to make stupid decisions in the name of doing the people's bidding. A chilling thought.

...let�s look at a group of protesters who thought they had failed. The protests within the United States against the Vietnam War couldn�t prevent it killing three million Vietnamese and 80,000 Americans. But even in the years it was �failing�, it was achieving more than the protestors could possibly have known. In 1966, the specialists at the Pentagon went to US President Lyndon Johnson � a thug prone to threatening to �crush� entire elected governments � with a plan to end the Vietnam War: nuke the country. They �proved�, using their computer modeling, that a nuclear attack would �save lives.�

It was a plan that might well have appealed to him. But Johnson pointed out the window, towards the hoardes of protesters, and said: �I have one more problem for your computer. Will you feed into it how long it will take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President?� He knew that there would be a cost � in protest and democratic revolt � that made that cruelty too great. In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard Nixon � and we now know from the declassified documents that the biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldn�t do it. Those protesters went home from those protests believing they had failed � but they had succeeded in preventing a nuclear war. They thought they were impotent, just as so many of us do � but they really had power beyond their dreams to stop a nightmare.

French protesters in final appeal to Sarkozy

MI6 chief admits to his 'dilemma' over torture
Kim Sengupta: Sir John Sawers describes moral dilemma over use of intelligence obtained by torture while facing threat of terrorism.

Hero of 'Hotel Rwanda' is declared enemy of the state

The man made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda and credited with saving more than 1,200 Tutsis during the 1994 genocide said yesterday that he fears for his life after the country's President made him "an enemy of the state".

Paul Rusesabagina, a former hotel manager currently living in Brussels where he says his home has been repeatedly ransacked, will be charged in Rwanda with links to a terrorist group.

�

Rwanda's chief prosecutor said this week that Mr Rusesabagina has been financing commanders in the FDLR, a rebel army across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo made up from ethnic Hutus responsible for the 1994 genocide.

Mr Rusesabagina has been one of the highest-profile critics of the government of Paul Kagame, who was re-elected earlier this year after a campaign marred by the killing of dissidents and a crackdown on opposition groups.

His Hotel Rwanda-Rusesabagina Foundation has called for a Truth and Reconciliation process in the country and warned that government oppression could lead to a fresh genocide in the Great Lakes region.

"Rwanda has become a big open prison where Kagame is the chief warden," said Mr Rusesabagina. "There is no free man in that country."

 

Bat disease threatens ecological catastrophe
Jerome Taylor: A virulent and deadly pathogen in America is exterminating a predator that is vital to farmers for controlling insect pests.
And no, this is not a Halloween story.

BPA exposure reduces semen quality: study
No summary from me. Those who should know will investigate the link without any prompting. You know who you are.

Whole world politics section: Cyber attack on charity 'directed by governments'
A human rights group that campaigns to defend the world's indigenous peoples says it has been the victim of a sophisticated and wide-ranging cyber attack. It has blamed the attack on the governments of two countries it believes may have been angered by recent campaigns.

Russia raises its price to rescue Nato from Afghan quagmire

Afghanistan: Russia steps in to help Nato

?Today's program on PRI's The World aired a feature US and Russia in joint drug bust in Afghanistan
US and Russian forces have collaborated in a joint raid on drugs labs in Afghanistan. The BBC�s Russia analyst Olexiy Solohubenko has more. No transcript is available but the snip is less than four minutes long and well produced. Could anyone have imagined a few years ago that Russia would be seriously discussed as a member of NATO? 

Pack Assange off to Guantanamo, US conservatives tell Obama
This more a commentary on how far off to the right so-called "Conservatives" have traveled than anything having to do with Assange.

...One Fox commentator went so far as to call for the WikiLeaks figurehead to be treated as a prisoner of war. Christian Whiton,a former State Department official, demanded that America seize Mr Assange and deal with him and other WikiLeaks staff as "enemy combatants". Calling for "non-judicial action" against them, he implied that they should be in Guantanamo Bay with Taliban inmates.

Nor was Whiton alone in his stance. "The government also should be waging war on the WikiLeaks web presence," an editorial in the conservative Washington Times railed this week. Other infuriated conservative commentators made similar demands on websites of such august institutions as the neoconservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Somalia: 'The most corrupt nation in the world'
Refers to the annual report of Transparency International .

The shaming of America
Robert Fisk cleans the American clock as only he can do in a tightly written screed.
The word fisking did not come into our vocabulary without meaning.

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general � the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind � to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."

Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again....

Torture, killing, children shot � and how the US tried to keep it all quiet
Yet another leaked documents summary and commentary.

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As long as I'm at it, here is a program in which Robert Fisk does what he does best. The 3Quarks Daily  lede is delightful. Their title "A Bunch of Barbarians in the Desert" reveals the insulting and breathtaking ignorance of this Jack Burkman guy. He's more embarrassing than the Teatards. At last they have sense enough -- thus far -- not to leave the country. (In fact, several have learned not to speak in public at all. But I digress...)

This video contains the most preposterous performance I have seen yet in a talk show, by the "Republican strategist" Jack Burkman. It is as offensive as it is ludicrous and laughable, and Robert Fisk and Anas al-Tikriti seem to have trouble deciding whether to get angry or break out in guffaws at the ridiculousness of it all!

 A more serious description and title appear at the You Tube link.

Iraq's recent elections were supposed to give the country a fresh start, but the political wrangling is ongoing. Inside Iraq is joined by Robert Fisk, the Independent newspaper's Middle East correspondent, Anas Altikriti, an Iraqi political analyst, and Jack Burkman, a Republican strategist, to discuss just what it is that continues to prevent Iraq from moving forward.