The insult after the injury: the baby Clinton wedding

by Paul Craig Roberts Global Research, July 31, 2010 It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding.  But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.  When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000.  This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000. The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000. Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity.  According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000.  According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon. Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding. The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them. Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office? How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving? These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked. While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio. The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”  Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders. The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008. US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released. Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps. The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive. The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain. And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.

Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Paul Craig Roberts

Behind the scenes in the former Uncle Sam's "backyard"

From Feral Scholar by Stan Goff:

It’s been a while since I knuckled down on a piece of research and writing, but I was asked by Neotropica - and English language online journal from Costa Rica - to write something on coups d’etat. It will be done this month,ojala!, but it’s forced me to look in greater detail at the region.


I chose the Honduran coup of last year, because it’s the most recent, but also because the US press has totally (an intentionally) ignored the mountain of evidence that the US State Department was up to its neck in this one.


As usual with my own process, this has led me into about 100 different sidelines in the research, a couple of major starts and stops each day, and a dozen or so different outlines. Trying to tame information is never easy, eh? This has refamiliarized me, however, with the main thrusts of US foreign policy in the region and how the balance of forces has shaped up in the “US backyard.” Today, I’m linking Mark Weisbrot’s article on the Venezuela-Colombia dustup, which I’m sure is a bit of US agitation against Venezuela, even as the US had deployed a naval flotilla here in Costa Rica to menace the Nicaraguans… who are moving forward with some partnerships with Venezuela.


Venezuela, of course, reversed a US-sponsored coup in 2002, and has accelerated its oil diplomacy in the region to expand an FTAA-alternative trade agreement called ALBA. Honduran President Zelaya’s decision to join ALBA had a great deal to do with the decision by the US and the Honduran oligarchy to have him removed. Since Venezuela itself has proven too hard a target, the US pursuing a “weakest lamb in the flock” approach, with Honduras first, and - I suspect - Nicaragua next. Venezuela has effectively broken the decades-long US embargo against Cuba - which is the worst sin of all for many Cold War, Reagan-era veterans, like John Negroponte, Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams, Robert Carmona-Borjas, Adolfo Franco, Hugo Llorens, Roger Noriega, and many many more. John McCain’s IRI is in there, too. All these guys are back in play, with fingerprints all over Honduras.
Negroponte, btw, is on Sec State Clinton’s payroll as an advisor, and has been so since before the Honduras coup.


Lots of complexities, like for example, Brazil’s reluctance to move away from neoliberal policies has much to do with the fact that Brazil owns a substantial chunk of US sovereign debt, obliging it to protect the dollar.


The loss of a US military base in Ecuador has been a big setback for the US, and Colombia is effectively a US aircraft carrier. Its latest accusations about Venezuela harboring terrorists is a campaign made-in-the-USA. For whatever reason, the Obama-Clinton foreign policy team is as much a one-trick pony as his financial team, and so the covert ops game is is back in force in Latin America.


If this succeeds as a thread, I hope we can minimize left-sectarian arguments about whether Hugo Chavez is a true enough revolutionary. You can go somewhere else for these kinds of tedious and arcane discussions.
Far more interested in hard information and new developments in the ALBA War, as I’ve come to think of it. Facts welcome.


Here’s MW’s article:

In March I wrote about the Obama administration’s contribution to the election campaign under way in Venezuela, where voters will choose a new national assembly in September. I predicted that certain things would happen before September, among them some new “discoveries” that Venezuela supports terrorism. Venezuela has had 13 elections or referenda since Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998, and in the run-up to most of them, Washington has usually done something to influence the political and media climate.

FULL
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Related: South of the Border – Interview with Oliver Stone

Red Pepper | July 28, 2010

Oliver Stone’s new documentary ‘South of the Border’ chronicles the emergence of progressive governments in Latin America’s, their quest for social and political transformation and their growing independence from Washington. Roberto Navarrete interviews Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali (one of the film’s scriptwriters) to find out some background

[Michael Hudson] From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital

Latest essay by Michael Hudson (July 30, 2010), highly recommended:


As published in Critique, based on a presentation given at the China Academy of Sciences, School of Marxist Studies in Beijing in November 2009, and at the Left Forum in New York City, March 20, 2010.


Classical economists developed the labor theory of value to isolate economic rent, which they defined as the excess of market price and income over the socially necessary cost of production (value ultimately reducible to the cost of labor). A free market was one free of such “unearned” income – a market in which prices reflected actual necessary costs of production or, in the case of public services and basic infrastructure, would be subsidized in order to make economies more competitive. Most reformers accordingly urged – and expected – land, monopolies and banking privileges to be nationalized, or at least to have their free-lunch income taxed away.


In keeping with his materialist view of history, Marx expected banking to be subordinated to the needs of industrial capitalism. Equity investment – followed by public ownership of the means of production under socialism – seemed likely to replace the interest-extracting “usury capital” inherited from antiquity and feudal times: debts mounting up at compound interest in excess of the means to pay, culminating in crises marked by bank runs and property foreclosures.
But as matters have turned out, the rentier interests mounted a Counter-Enlightenment to undermine the reforms that promised to liberate society from special privilege.


Instead of promoting capital investment in an alliance with industry and government, financial planners have sponsored a travesty of free markets. Realizing that income not taxed is free to be capitalized, bought and sold on credit, and paid out as interest, bankers have formed an alliance between finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) to free land rent and monopoly rent (as well as debt-leveraged “capital” gains) from taxation.


The result is that today’s economy is burdened with property and financial claims that Marx and other critics deemed “fictitious” – a proliferation of financial overhead in the form of interest and dividends, fees and commissions, exorbitant management salaries, bonuses and stock options, and “capital” gains (mainly debt-leveraged land-price gains). And to cap matters, new financial modes of exploiting labor have been innovated, headed by pension-fund capitalism and privatization of Social Security. As economic planning has passed from government to the financial sector, the alternative to public price regulation and progressive taxation is debt peonage.


Read all here

A Greek City Just Defaulted On $275 Million Of Debt -- Can The State Be Far Behind?

From The Business Insider: 

Since Athens agreed to budget cuts approaching 11% of GDP, local governments have seen a sharp decline in funding. Yesterday, the cut-off caused the city of Piraeus to announce a stop payment on $275 million of debt.
Mayor Panagiotis Fasoulas demanded immediate payment of three years of owed funding or his city would abandon its own debt.
Kathimerini:

Addressing a press conference, Fasoulas requested a meeting with government officials to find a solution that will allow the municipality to make good on its obligations - to citizens, employees and creditors. The mayor did not rule out the possibility of strike action - without determining what form this would take - to demand the monthly disbursement of some 1.6 million euros.

Piraeus City Hall currently owes some 210 million euros in debts amassed over the past 20 years. Over the past three years, the government has withheld state grants from Piraeus municipal authorities. Fasoulas yesterday described the government's stance as «provocative,» noting that a total of 44 million euros had been spent on paying off municipal debts during his three years as mayor, while only 12 million euros had been spent during the eight years that his predecessor, Christos Agrapidis, had held the post. Fasoulas said his municipality was not seeking privileged treatment but wanted to renegotiate the payment of its debts, paying larger installments at a lower interest rate.

Needless to say, Athens doesn't have the money for a bailout. So what happens if when Piraeus defaults --Elliniko won't be far behind -- and great swaths of local government abandon their debts. And then...

See who gets screwed in a Greece default >>>

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Related: France Tries to Reduce Debt by Increasing Debt

What is unravelling is not the mystery of the BIS gold swaps, as claimed by the FT, but..

By Adrian Douglas - from G.A.T.A.
Friday, July 30, 2010


Yesterday the Financial Times published an article headlined "BIS Gold Swaps Mystery Is Unravelled" in an attempt to clarify the recently discovered gold swaps undertaken by the Bank for International Settlements with European commercial banks:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3e659ed0-9b39-11df-baaf-00144feab49a.html


I recently published my interpretation of these gold swaps and concluded that they were most likely a secret bailout of one or more bullion banks that do not have enough physical gold to meet burgeoning demand:
http://www.gata.org/node/8803


Lawyers always tell their clients to shut up and not speak to the press because the more they say without proper legal consultation, the more likely they are to incriminate themselves. One has to wonder why lawyers at the BIS didn't offer similar advice to the spokespeople at the BIS, because they have opened their mouths and inserted both feet.
The FT reports that "Jaime Caruana, head of the BIS, told the FT the swaps were 'regular commercial activities' for the bank."


The FT also reports that "'the client approached us with the idea of buying some gold with the option to sell it back,' said one European banker, referring to the BIS."
So we are led to believe that the BIS just casually called up some commercial banks and proposed a "regular commercial" activity of a 346-tonne gold swap.
The only problem with this story is that this is the biggest gold swap in history. It was anything but a "regular commercial activity."
The FT tries to palm off the biggest gold swap in history as just a matter of the BIS earning a little return on $14 billion.


The FT says it has learned that the swaps, which were initiated by the BIS, came as the so-called "central banks' bank" sought to obtain a return on its huge U.S. dollar-denominated holdings. The BIS asked the commercial banks to pledge a gold swap as guarantee for the dollar deposits the banks were taking from the Basel-based institution.
And GATA has learned that the moon is made of Swiss cheese.


In central banking $14 billion is chump change. The U.S. Treasury auctions between $70 billion and $130 billion of Treasury debt very other week. Only a few weeks ago the European Central Bank created a trillion dollars out of thin air to defend the euro amid the Greek debt crisis.
There are two sides to a swap transaction, but one would have to have the IQ of a grapefruit to believe that the important part of this transaction is a piffling $14 billion and not the 346 tonnes of gold that make it the biggest gold swap in history.


But the BIS has given us another piece of information.
The FT says: "Three big banks -- HSBC, Societe Generale, and BNP Paribas -- were among more than 10 based in Europe that swapped gold with the Bank for International Settlements in a series of unusual deals that caused confusion in the gold market and left traders scratching their heads."


I had assumed in my last article that only one bullion bank was involved, but we now find that more than 10 banks were involved. The first on the list is none other than HSBC, which along with JPMorganChase holds 95 percent of all gold and precious metals derivative positions among U.S. commercial banks as reported to the U.S. Treasury Department. HSBC and JPMorganChase are also holding a massive short position in gold and silver on the New York Commodity Exchange. Further, HSBC is the custodian of the gold that is supposedly backing the exchange-traded fund GLD.


In my analysis of the BIS swaps I postulated that a bullion bank had made a swap with one or more central banks and had obtained bullion in exchange for $14 billion. I further postulated that the bullion bank made another swap with the BIS whereupon the BIS gave the bank $14 billion but the bullion bank did not hand over the gold to the BIS but instead credited the BIS with a ledger entry of gold in the BIS unallocated gold account. This would allow the bullion bank to have real gold to meet burgeoning demand while the accounts would show that the same gold had been credited to the BIS.


The FT says: "Officials said other commercial banks obtained the gold from the lending market, borrowing bullion from emerging countries' central banks."
So the tripartite nature of this shady transaction is confirmed -- central banks were a source for the real gold. But the real gold wasn't the "gold" that the BIS received as a swap for $14 billion. 


The FT explains:
"The gold used in the swaps came mainly from investors' deposit accounts at the European commercial banks. Some investors prefer to deposit their gold in so-called 'allocated accounts,' which restrict the custodian banks' ability to use the gold in their market operations by assigning them specific bullion bars. But other investors prefer cheaper 'unallocated accounts,' which give banks access to their bullion for their day-to-day operations."


But unallocated gold is not gold at all. It is not gold that has been deposited that is loaned to someone else. It is gold that has been deposited that is loaned simultaneously to many other people. I have estimated that for each ounce in their vaults the bullion banks have loaned or sold 45 ounces.


So the FT's story appears to confirm my thesis that the BIS has been credited with 346 tonnes of ledger-entry gold in the BIS unallocated gold accounts held with the bullion banks. This makes the BIS an "unsecured creditor" of the bullion banks as defined by the London Bullion Market Association's description of "unallocated account" holders.


The FT story suggests that at least 10 bullion banks needed physical gold bullion desperately. This looks like a rerun of the 1960s London Gold Pool fiasco where central banks dishoarded gold to meet massive investor demand in a futile attempt to maintain a gold price of $35 per ounce.


I have spelled out in recent articles that there is a run on the bullion banks has begun and is gaining momentum. Investors and institutions are realizing that "unallocated gold" is not gold at all but just an unsecured promise for gold. So investors and institutions are starting to demand delivery of their metal, and as there is only 1 ounce backing each 45 ounces that are claimed, the situation is turning into what will be a short squeeze of epic proportions.


The FT says: "Investors have bought physical gold in record amounts during the past two years and deposited it in commercial banks. European financial institutions are awash with bullion and some are trying to pledge gold as a guarantee."


As Jeffrey Christian of CPM Group has explained, the "physical" gold market is in fact a misnomer as that market is actually a paper market backed by only a small amount of physical gold:
http://www.cpmgroup.com/free_library1/HEDGING_AND_DERIVATIVES/Bullion_Ba...


So investors have bought a record amount of "physical gold," which is actually paper gold that they have never seen, and only about 2.3 percent of what has been sold actually exists. The bullion banks are "awash" with liabilities for the record amount of gold they are supposed to be holding. Investors are now distrusting the bullion banks and are asking for delivery, so is it surprising that the record amount of "physical gold" sales has led to a record gold swap being transacted to give the bullion banks liquidity?


The International Monetary Fund has been surreptitiously selling gold at a clip of around 15 tonnes per month since February without any official announcements and without disclosing the recipients. This is another sign that the bullion banks are in serious trouble.


When 45 ounces of gold are sold but only 1 ounce is sourced, the result is a massive suppression of the gold price. But the converse is also true: When 45 ounces of gold are demanded for every 1 ounce that is in the vault, the price explosion is beyond imagination.
What is unravelling is not the mystery of the BIS gold swaps, as claimed by the Financial Times, but the unravelling of the gold price suppression scheme itself.
-----
Adrian Douglas is a member of GATA's Board of Directors and editor of the Market Force Analysis letter (www.MarketForceAnalysis.com), which provides indications of market turning points and good times to enter, take profits, or exit a market. Subscribers receive bi-weekly bulletins on the markets of their choice.
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Related:  The Physical Buying In Asia Is Going To Destroy The Paper Shorts On Wall Street
(Reuters) — Asian investors are more likely to buy gold in the next six months than their North American and European counterparts, a global survey found.

Thousands in Gulf Suffer from Misdiagnosed Skin Lesions

Symptoms experienced by Gulf residents may be the result of exposure to chemical dispersants

July 30, 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Christina Gagnier
T: 909.576.1411

Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana—Area residents have begun to show up at clinics and hospitals with mysterious scabs and pustules covering their extremities, as reported from residents to non-profit relief organizations in the Gulf.

One thirty-three year-old woman, who wished to remain anonymous, has disclosed to Project Gulf Impact that upon seeking medical advice at a clinic, she was told she had scabies. Hours later, she was told by an area hospital that she had a staph infection. The woman was treated with a shot of penicillin and Elimite cream, a topical agent for the treatment of scabies mite infestations, and an oral antibiotic. In addition to the lesions, the woman reported aching bones, weight loss, stomach pains, inflammation in her leg and sties developing in her eyes.

Other residents have shown up at local doctors and area hospitals reporting similar symptoms. According to area residents suffering from the mysterious rash, patients feel like they are not being given the proper medical treatment. Doctors have told area patients they are suffering from scabies with no clear diagnosis and from Staphylococcus infections with no underlying cause.

Exposure to chemicals, such as those being used to break down oil in the region, like the dispersant, Corexit, may be the cause of such infections. Corexit is an agent that has been proven to break down lipid membranes, which cover and protect human skin. Human skin is composed of a thin layer of lipids and Corexit, by nature, breaks down these organized barriers into smaller individual molecules allowing the barrier to become permeable to pathogens. The skin irritation could be caused by prolonged exposure to these chemicals and could break down the ability of the body to fight off infection.

Read more 
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Related: Scientists Find Evidence That Oil And Dispersant Mix Is Making Its Way Into The Foodchain

*BREAKING* Tulane researchers indicate COREXIT now in blue crab larvae from Florida to Texas; Bio-accumulation fears 

Report: ‘Correlation’ Between US Aid and Colombian Army Killings

by Helda Martínez, Antiwar July 31, 2010

BOGOTÁ — "There are alarming links between increased reports of extrajudicial executions of civilians by the Colombian army and units that receive U.S. military financing," John Lindsay-Poland, lead author of a two-year study on the question, told IPS.

Lindsay-Poland is Research and Advocacy Director for the U.S.-based Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which presented a new report, "Military Assistance and Human Rights: Colombia, U.S. Accountability, and Global Implications," in Bogotá Thursday. 

The report, produced in conjunction with the U.S. Office on Colombia (USOC), studies the application in Colombia of the so-called Leahy Law, passed in 1996, which bans military assistance to a foreign security force unit if the U.S. State Department has credible evidence that the unit has committed gross human rights violations. 

The Leahy Law is one of the main U.S. laws designed to protect against the use of U.S. foreign aid to commit human rights abuses. 

"If the Leahy Law was fully implemented, assistance would have to be suspended to nearly all fixed army brigades and many mobile brigades in Colombia," Lindsay-Poland said. 

The report points out that most military training in Colombia is funded by the U.S. Defense Department. 

Colombia, caught up in an armed conflict for nearly five decades, is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in the world, along with Israel, Egypt and Pakistan. 

The study reviewed data on more than 3,000 extrajudicial executions reportedly committed by the armed forces in Colombia since 2002 and lists of more than 500 military units assisted by the United States since 2000. 

"We found that for many military units, reports of extrajudicial executions increased during and after the highest levels of U.S. assistance," Lindsay-Poland said. 

The results were obtained by comparing the number of reports of such killings in the two years prior to the start of Plan Colombia — the multibillion-dollar U.S. military aid package — in 2000 with the number of killings after the launch of that counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy. 

It also found that reports of alleged killings of civilians by the army dropped when assistance was cut. 

"Whatever correlation may exist between assistance and reported killings, there are clearly other factors contributing to high levels of killings. Yet, while we could not fix the causes of increased reports of killings after increases in U.S. assistance, our findings highlight the need for a thorough investigation into the reasons for this apparent correlation," the authors say. 

"The U.S. government should respond to the questions raised by the report," Lindsay-Poland said. 

For example, "why U.S. officials neglect their duties under the Leahy Law, not only in Colombia but in countries like Pakistan, where the situation is very complex." 

The U.S. military presence in Colombia dates back to the 1940s, when leftwing guerrillas became active in the country. But it escalated to a new level in 1999 when Plan Colombia was agreed by the governments of then presidents Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001). 

Plan Colombia was complemented and extended in 2004 by Plan Patriot, signed by President Álvaro Uribe, whose term ends Aug. 7, and former president George W. Bush (2001–2009). 

The two plans have undergone radical changes since 2009, according to Lindsay-Poland, when they reached beyond the initial aims of counterinsurgency and counternarcotics, with a view towards strengthening U.S. control in the region. 

U.S. army Southern Command documents state the importance of establishing a base "with air mobility reach on the South American continent and a capacity for counter-narcotics operations until the year 2025," he said. 

Uribe offered the U.S. military the use of seven bases at strategic points in Colombia, including both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the province of Caquetá in the Amazon jungle, and the provinces of Meta, Tolima and Cundinamarca in the center of the country. 

Lindsay-Poland and other members of FOR tried to visit the Palanquero base in Cundinamarca, one of the seven, on Wednesday. But "they did not let us in," he said. "They demanded authorization from the U.S. Embassy. So what kind of autonomy are we talking about here?" 

Furthermore, the agreement for U.S. military access to the bases has not been approved by the Colombian Congress, as required by law. 

As a result, the Constitutional Court ruled the agreement unconstitutional on Jul. 22 and gave Congress one year to approve or reject it. 

If the legislature ratifies the deal, the Constitutional Court will once again study it, to determine whether or not it is in line with the constitution. 

The report presented by FOR and USOC coincided with the start of an investigation of reports of unmarked graves in the La Macarena cemetery, which is next to an army base, according to a Jul. 22 public hearing in that town in the central province of Meta, which was attended by opposition lawmakers and international observers, including European legislators. 

At the hearing, witnesses said military helicopters flew in the remains of bodies to La Macarena, 340 km south of Bogotá. Human rights groups say the bodies were those of civilians killed by the army. 

"This is happening at the end of a government marked by grave human rights violations, which have largely affected the most vulnerable groups in society, and which are reflected in the thousands of ‘false positives’, as the extrajudicial executions have been popularly known," Alberto Yepes, director of the Observatorio de Derechos Humanos (DIH — Human Rights Observatory), told IPS. 

The scandal over the so-called "false positives" — young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties in the military’s counterinsurgency campaign –broke in the press in September 2008. 

Although there are no hard statistics on the number of people killed, the report by FOR and USOC puts the number at over 3,000 in the last decade. 

A group that calls itself the Madres (mothers) of Soacha, a vast working-class suburb stretching south of Bogotá, has filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over the loss of their 16 sons in 2007 and 2008. The young men were recruited with the promise of jobs, but their bodies were found in morgues or mass graves hundreds of kilometers away. 

Yepes said the complaint filed by the Madres de Soacha "is a way to pressure the state to modify this kind of behavior." 

While activists and groups mobilize to pressure the armed forces to live up to the constitution, "the United States should assume its responsibility through better oversight, holding (authorities in Colombia) accountable and adopting corrective measures, so the money of U.S. taxpayers does not end up financing killings in Colombia," he said. 

(Inter Press Service)
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Related: Farc leader's message to Colombian government
Obama Seeks to Expand Arms Exports

Yemen On The Verge Of All Out Civil War

Israel Classifies its Past as Top Secret

By Lawrence Davidson
from Opinion Maker:


Israel is a land built on myths. It is, of course, not unique in this. Indeed in this way Israel is very much like its patron, the United States. In order to build and maintain a mythical status a nation must create a picture of itself from its very inception and pass that picture down generation upon generation. For the U.S. it is the idea that the nation is a beacon of both democracy and capitalism unto the world and what it does in terms of foreign policy, and even when at war, is always done altruistically. For Israel, the myth is that the nation is democratic and the last bastion of safety for the world’s Jews. Everything it does, even when that amounts to imperial expansion, is done defensively.


In order to maintain these myths one must control history. The story line must be taught in the schools and supported by the nation’s multiple media sources. One must raise up a population that is so well inculcated with its mythic worldview that if something occurs which contradicts it, it can be readily dismissed as an exception to the rule. In the case of the United States, two hundred years of indoctrination and a long term status as a great power has allowed its myths to survive, in the minds of its own people, the horrors of Viet Nam, Iraq and now Afghanistan. Israel is a much younger nation with only three or so generations of indoctrination under its psychological belt, so to speak. And, while it may be a regional superpower, its reputation in the Middle East is built on fear. With the rest of the world that reputation is associated with equally unstable and temporary attitudes, like Holocaust guilt. In essence, apart from the convinced Zionists, Israel’s sustaining national myths are still fragile.


A number of years ago Israel applied its law that required the government archives to be opened for public review and research following a thirty year waiting period for political affairs and fifty years for military affairs. This brought many of the government documents referring to seminal years of 1947 and 1948 into the open. The result was a serious, evidence based, revision of the founding legends of Israel. In other words, the state lost momentary control of its own history. The result undermined the nation’s mythic self-image amongst observers outside of Israel and caused significant unease within the country. So powerful was the reaction of the elites against this revised interpretation of the past that the “new historians” who brought it forth are now either teaching abroad or have, as in the case of Benny Morris, recanted.


In the interim things have only gotten worse for the Zionist defenders of the idealized Israel. Multiple invasions of Lebanon and the essentially defenseless Palestinian cities and towns, the slaughter of the innocent, the reduction of Gaza to an open air prison, the on-going confiscation of land and property in the Occupied Territories, rampant settler violence, and the repeated election of racist governments have resulted in a worldwide civil society effort to isolate Israel and induce it to reform itself in the same manner as South Africa. Except in the United States, Israel’s claim to act only in self-defense is not seen as credible and the accusation that all who disagree are anti-Semites not taken seriously. Yet outside disenchantment, as dangerous as it might be in the long run, is not nearly as threatening as the erosion of one’s domestic population’s adherence to their national myths. That adherence must be maintained at all cost otherwise the nation will metamorphose into something that no longer supports its present elites. The fate of the “new historians” has demonstrated just how determined the Israeli establishment is to prevent that sort of erosion.
That being the case, Israel’s present Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has extended for an additional twenty years the period during which government archives can remain closed.


The Haaretz article announcing this decision says that the Prime Minister acted because of “pressure from the intelligence agencies,” but Netanyahu probably did not need much convincing. The period of time for which documents will now remain classified include such events as the 1954 Lavon Affair, the 1956 Sinai invasion, and the 1967 war which saw the heinous attack on the USS Liberty and the seizure of the Golan Heights. The State Archivist, Yehoshua Freundlich told Haaretz that “some of the material was selected classified because ‘it has implications over [Israel’s] adherence to international law.’” This is probably an understatement. To add insult to injury, Haaretz reports that there is a good possibility that the government’s decision to classify much of Israel’s past as top secret will mean that “archives that had already been made public would again be hidden away.”


If you study the new historians’ revisionist history of Israel you are struck by the Machiavellian behavior of men like David Ben Gurion who made a profession of being “economical with the truth.” So devious were many of Israel early establishment figures that their political competitors, such as the neo-fascist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the terrorist Menachem Begin, appear almost refreshing in their frightful honesty. Today we have the worst of all worlds in Israel–leaders who are both terrorists and shockingly devious. Now by their own admission, today’s Zionist leaders must hide away their nation’s sins lest the entire world turn away from Israel, and perhaps even their own citizens begin to fear that their national myths cannot stand honest and objective examination.


Lawrence Davidson  is  a professor of history with  West Chester University, The USA.
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Related: Jewish Merchants of Smear and Sleaze Murder Polish historian Dariusz Ratajczak by J.P. Bellinger