Stephen Zunes - Iraq: Remembering Those Responsible

The formal withdrawal of US troops from Iraq this month has led to a whole series of retrospectives on the invasion and the eight and a half years of occupation that followed as well as a host of unanswered questions, including - given the tens of thousands of Americans and others on the US government payroll, many of whom are armed, who are remaining in Iraq - just how total the withdrawal might actually be.  

In any case, of critical importance at this juncture is that we not allow the narratives on the war to understate its tragic consequences or those responsible for the war - both Republicans and Democrats -to escape their responsibility.

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in the deaths of up to half a million Iraqis, the vast majority of whom are civilians, leaving over 600,000 orphans. More than 1.3 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and nearly twice that many have fled into exile. 

http://www.truth-out.org/iraq-remember-those-responsible/1325433300

Dr. Paul L. Williams - Isn't this a crock that should be corrected NOW!!

Written by Dr. Paul L. Williams

"In my own life in my own small way, I have tried to give back to this country that has given me so much," she said. "See, that's why I left a job at a big law firm for a career in public service, "...Michelle Obama

No, Michele Obama does not get paid to serve as the First Lady and she doesn't perform any official duties. But this hasn't deterred her from hiring an unprecedented number of staffers to cater to her every whim and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession.

Just think,  Mary Lincoln was taken to task for purchasing China for the White House during the Civil War. And Mamie Eisenhower had to shell out the salary for her personal secretary from her husband's salary.

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Tom Coburn - Releases New Report on Wasteful Government Spending in 2011: "Wastebook 2011"

Dec 20 2011

http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/6946d43b-bccf-4579-990e-15a763532b40.html

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) today released a new oversight report, “Wastebook 2011” that highlights over $6.5 billion in examples of some of the most egregious ways your taxpayer dollars were wasted. This report details 100 of the countless unnecessary, duplicative and low-priority projects spread throughout the federal government.

“Video games, robot dragons, Christmas trees, and magic museums. This is not a Christmas wish list, these are just some of the ways the federal government spent your tax dollars. Over the past 12 months, politicians argued, debated and lamented about how to reign in the federal government’s out of control spending. All the while, Washington was on a shopping binge, spending money we do not have on things we do not absolutely need. Instead of cutting wasteful spending, nearly $2.5 billion was added each day in 2011 to our national debt, which now exceeds $15 trillion,” Dr. Coburn said.

“Congress cannot even agree on a plan to pay for the costs of extending jobless benefits to the millions of Americans who are still out of work. Yet, thousands of millionaires are receiving unemployment benefits and billions of dollars of improper payments of unemployment insurance are being made to individuals with jobs and others who do not qualify. And remember those infamous bridges to nowhere in Alaska that became symbols of government waste years ago? The bridges were never built, yet the federal government still spent more than a million dollars just this year to pay for staff to promote one of the bridges.”

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Mitchell J. Rabin - Can & Will America Get Behind a 3rd Party Candidate in 2012?

Join Mitchell every week on Mondays at 6pm(ET) for his show, "A Better World."

When the U.S. government was established, there was no provision in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights stating, or even suggesting that there should be just two political parties controlling political office on local, state or federal levels. In fact, for most of U.S. history, there were numerous parties andparty-switching was fairly frequent. Now it's nearly non-existent.

The idea that there are only two parties and that loyalty to one's party is seemingly more sacred than Congress' commitment to their vow of upholding the Constitution and serving the People of the Land. No one likes to use the word treason, but, isn't this some form of it? If a Party's platform undermines the health and well-being of the government and the People at large, no matter their party, well, what do we call this, business-as-usual? Life without integrity or heart?

Why should two parties dominate our Body Politic when our People are so diverse and the parties don't begin to represent every citizen's view? The only change they seem to come up with over time is to become more and more like one another.

While I am no fan of the Democrats, the Republicans seem, like a fraternity just short of the special handshakes. They put their party's importance above the interests of the nation, and this is patently in violation of their oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the U.S. This violation should have legal consequences besides the obvious moral decay and emotional immaturity, sad as it is to say, that it expresses.

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Ben Adler - Three Myths About Ron Paul

THE NATION - December 27, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/blog/165350/three-myths-about-ron-paul?rel=emailNation

In the Republican presidential primary, everyone but Rick Santorum seems destined to have his or her moment. Now is Ron Paul’s. Paul is polling well in Iowa and respectably in New Hampshire. Sharp attack ads against Newt Gingrich helped the media remember he is still running and deflated Gingrich’s balloon. 

And Paul is getting some of the adoration from certain pundits that he enjoyed last time. Andrew Sullivan recently endorsed Paul for the Republican nomination. Glenn Greenwald ofSalon defends Paul against perceived slights from the media.

The liberal counter-argument tends to be that while Paul is good on foreign policy and civil liberties, he is wildly wrong on economic issues. As Patrick Caldwell of The American Prospect wrote, “While his foreign policy and defense of civil liberties might appeal to the progressive heart, Paul jumps off a cliff when it comes to the economy.” It’s certainly true that Paul’s economic views are extremist and strange. But, unfortunately, Paul isn’t a progressive on much of anything else either.

Here are three crucial myths about Paul:

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Paul Buchheit - Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It's True

Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/27-0

by Paul Buchheit 

Recent reports suggest that almost 50% of Americans are in poverty or at a "low income" level. The claim is based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that includes health care, transportation, and other essential living expenses in the poverty calculation.

The concept of "low income" is controversial. It has been defined as earnings between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, a claim which, if true, would place every American family making $50,000 or less at a near-poverty level.

Conservative organizations believe the whole 'poverty' issue is overblown. The Cato Institute blames LBJ and Obama for reversing a declining poverty rate. Forbes blames the calculations. The Heritage Foundation argues, "The average poor person, as defined by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines...In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave." The case for a growing "consumption equality" is alternately defended and denied. 

With emotions running high on both sides, we need to take a balanced look at the available data to determine how well the highest-earning family of the poorest 50% -- a family with a $50,000 income -- can survive. (The maximum individual income for the poorest 50% is about $30,000.)

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Dave Lindorff - Better than Obama: Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul

By Dave Lindorff

http://www.nationofchange.org/better-obama-why-establishment-terrified-ron-paul-1325005208

It’s fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, now that according to some mainstream polls he has become the front-running candidate in the Jan. 3 GOP caucus race in Iowa, and perhaps also in the first primary campaign in New Hampshire.

Remember, we’re talking about a guy who has been in Congress on and off for 12 terms, dating back to 1976. His views have been pretty consistent, and because he has run for president several times, also pretty well known. A practicing physician who claims to have helped in the births of over 4000 babies in his career, the 76-year-old Paul is a free-market advocate, an abortion opponent, an uncompromising defender of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, an opponent of government regulation, the Federal Reserve and the IRS, and of big government in general--especially big federal government.

What’s interesting is what he’s being attacked for: being a racist, being “anti-Israel” and being an isolationist.

The racist bit is funny. After all, if we’re honest, the whole political infrastructure of the US is riven with racism. Just check out the public schools in any urban area, where you’ll find most of the students are non-white, or check out the schools in rural parts of the southeast in areas where most of the students are black -- compare the condition of those schools and the class sizes to schools in the white neighborhoods. Check out the wildly different jobless figures for whites and for blacks. Check out the (very pale) complexion of the student bodies at just about any state university, check out the skin tones of the judges on the US Supreme Court, or for that matter, the whole federal bench. Check out the racial breakdown of the nation’s jails, and especially on the country’s many death rows, where you’ll find a wildly outsized percentage of people with black or brown skin waiting to be killed by the state.

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Victoria Collier and Ronnie Cummins - Occupy Rigged Elections: A Call for the Second American Revolution in 2012

Tuesday 27 December 2011

by: Victoria Collier and Ronnie Cummins, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-rigged-elections-call-second-american-revolution-2012/1323891807 

When candidates emerge who support the positions and demands of the 99 percent, the more certain we can be that our elections will be rigged.

A great battle is coming. The 2012 elections are our chance to turn the tide back toward real democracy, but we must begin immediately. Only by organizing for a democratic revolution now can we break the hold of corporate criminals over our elections and take real power in 2012, legitimately and nonviolently.

Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement, millions of Americans are finally shaking off the depression and torpor of the past decade, heeding the mass-consciousness call to reclaim power from corporatist forces that have hijacked our country, our planet, and our future. We may not all have taken to the streets yet, but we will. Or we'll contribute in other creative, personally liberating ways, pitching in with prison-break fervor to unblock the channels of revolutionary energy.

Despite the jeering of the corporate media, the Occupy movement is not going to fade away, burn out or be crushed like the radical movements of the 60s and 70s. The Occupy movement is going to change the world, because the world itself has arrived at a momentous crossroads where change is inevitable. Occupy is part of an unstoppable transformation - the contractions of a new world desperate to be born, based on a renewal of community, tolerance, justice and deep respect for all life. A sane, resilient world capable of withstanding the ecological, climatic and economic upheavals we can no longer avoid.

Now is the time to prepare, in this newly awakened, prerevolutionary phase, for Occupy Elections 2012. Because the closer we get to democratically taking power - when candidates emerge who support the positions and demands of the 99 percent - the more certain we can be that our elections will be rigged.

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Mark Weisbrot - A New Force in Latin America

December 27, 2011

by MARK WEISBROT

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/27/a-new-force-in-latin-america/print

Although most Americans have not heard about it, a historic step toward changing this hemisphere was taken three weeks ago.  A new organization for the region was formed, and everyone was invited except the U.S. and Canada. The new organization is called the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

There was a reason for the exclusion of the two richest countries, including the world’s largest economy. In fact there were many reasons, but they went mostly unnoticed in the major media.  The existing regional grouping, the Organization of American States (OAS), is too often controlled by the U.S. State Department, with Canada as junior partner.

In 2009, there was a big eye-opener for the rest of the hemisphere, especially those governments that thought President Obama would break with tradition and support democracy in the hemisphere.  The democratic government of Honduras was overthrown in a military coup in June of that year. Although the U.S. role in the coup itself is still unclear, there is no doubt that Washington did quite a bit to help the coup government succeed and establish itself. And one of the things that the Obama administration did was to block the OAS from taking more effective action against the coup government.

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ACLU NEWS - President Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - December 31, 2011

CONTACT: Mandy Simon, (202) 236-7031; media@dcaclu.org

WASHINGTON - President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act

(NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite

detention provision.  While President Obama issued a signing statement

saying he had "serious reservations" about the provisions, the statement

only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by

the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent

administrations.  The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version

of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final

bill.

"President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will

forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without

charge or trial into law," said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director.

"The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or

geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to

militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.  The ACLU will

fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in

Congress, or internationally."

Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention

authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in

military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be

used in the same way again. The ACLU believes that any military detention of

American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and

illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA's

detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to

people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by

the laws of war.

"We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law

even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention

authority in court," said Romero. "Any hope that the Obama administration

would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on

terror was extinguished today. Thankfully, we have three branches of

government, and the final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which has yet

to rule on the scope of detention authority. But Congress and the president

also have a role to play in cleaning up the mess they have created because

no American citizen or anyone else should live in fear of this or any future

president misusing the NDAA's detention authority."

The bill also contains provisions making it difficult to transfer suspects

out of military detention, which prompted FBI Director Robert Mueller to

testify that it could jeopardize criminal investigations.  It also restricts

the transfers of cleared detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo

Bay to foreign countries for resettlement or repatriation, making it more

difficult to close Guantanamo, as President Obama pledged to do in one of

his first acts in office.

Col. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR - A National Deficit of Reason and Integrity, Why America Can’t Afford Its Military

December 28, 2011

by Col. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/28/why-america-cant-afford-its-military/

Through the last year the defense industries and their supporters in Congress worked overtime to ensure the federal government kept the armed forces in a perpetual procurement cycle. Inside the Pentagon, the generals and admirals who lead the defense bureaucracies worked to minimize procurement costs. This was not altruistic behavior. It’s the only way to protect the armed forces’ outdated force structures from more debilitating cuts; cuts that threaten the single service way of warfare along with the bloated overhead of flag officer headquarters.

Meanwhile, public pronouncements from the office of the Secretary of Defense on cost savings initiatives or about imminent strategic disaster if defense spending is reduced fell flat. In fact, everything in 2011 related to defense, from the controversial F-35 program to the multi-billion dollar contracting fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, looked like window dressing designed to buy more time for an anachronistic, insolvent defense establishment.

It’s no secret what’s required in 2012 and beyond: an efficient and effective organization of military power for the optimum utilization of increasingly constrained resources. More specifically, a serious audit of the U.S. Department of Defense, along with a national reset where the roles of politicians, bureaucrats and four stars are recast as servants, not masters, of the national interest. Unfortunately, inside the Beltway where accountability is a dirty word, political and military leaders are free to conflate their personal and bureaucratic interests with the national interest.

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Robert Scheer - Marginalizing Ron Paul

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/marginalizing_ron_paul_20111229/

Posted on Dec 29, 2011

By Robert Scheer

It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

That last item, along with the decade-old racist comments in the newsletters Paul published, is certainly worthy of criticism. But not as an alternative to seriously engaging the substance of Paul’s current campaign—his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.

Paul is being denigrated as a presidential contender even though on the vital issues of the economy, war and peace, and civil liberties, he has made the most sense of the Republican candidates. And by what standard of logic is it “claptrap” for Paul to attempt to hold the Fed accountable for its destructive policies? That’s the giveaway reference to the raw nerve that his favorable prospects in the Iowa caucuses have exposed. Too much anti-Wall Street populism in the heartland can be a truly scary thing to the intellectual parasites residing in the belly of the beast that controls American capitalism.

It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Fed sits at the center of the rot and bears the major responsibility for tolerating the runaway mortgage-backed securities scam that is at the core of our economic crisis. After the meltdown it was the Fed that led ultra secret machinations to bail out the banks while ignoring the plight of the their exploited customers.

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Glenn Greenwald - Vote Obama – If You Want a Centrist Republican for US President

December 27, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/27/vote-obama-centrist-republican

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles.

by Glenn Greenwald

American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.

The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.

In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.

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The Guardian/UK - United States as a Global Power: New World Disorder

Published on Thursday, December 29, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/29-1

The US is struggling with a paradox: while its military power retains global reach, its role as world leader is gradually ending

The Guardian Editorial

The time has long since past when it became fashionable to talk about a new world order. The collapse of the Soviet Union provided an opportunity to fashion one. But instead of using that opportunity to create a new security architecture in Europe, Nato expanded eastwards as the military anchor for democracy promotion. Not content to have seen off one global military competitor in the Soviet Union, the western military industrial complex and the think-tanks they funded scurried around for a worthy replacement. When 11 September happened, they thought they were in business again. For a brief moment, al-Qaida seemed to fulfil some of the characteristics of communism: it could pop up anywhere in the world; it was an existential enemy, driven ideologically and uncontainable through negotiation; and it was potentially voluminous. Neither the doctrines of the pre-emptive strike, nor attacking a foreign country abroad to ensure security at home, were new. Swap the domino theory of the Vietnam era for the crescent of crisis of the Bush and Obama eras, and you had the same formula for a foe that hopscotched across the globe.

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Rebecca Jeschke - Time for Supreme Court to Weigh in on Forced DNA Collection

Published on Thursday, December 29, 2011 by Deeplinks Blog / EFF

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/time-supreme-court-weigh-forced-dna-collection

 

by Rebecca Jeschke

Can the government force people who are arrested – but not yet convicted of a crime – to give a DNA sample without a search warrant, or does that violate the Fourth Amendment?  One arrestee is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider this important question, and this week EFF urged the court to take the case.

A federal law mandates DNA collection for those who have been arrested for felonies. The FBI analyzes the samples, and puts a profile into CODIS, a national database.  Those who aren’t eventually convicted of a crime can get their information removed if they request to do so, but data from other individuals remains indefinitely.  In this case from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, U.S. v. Mitchell, the defendant argues that the DNA collection violates his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Some judges have considered DNA profiles in the same light as fingerprints – a means of identification.  But DNA is much more than that.  It can reveal your family background, your current health, and your future propensity for disease, among other personal details.  In the future, as technology advances, scientists will be able to read even more into DNA.  Meanwhile, the government is collecting this information without warrants, and storing them in a database that’s freely accessed by state and federal law enforcement agents across the country without any need for a search warrant. The Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless searches and seizures of private information, and we think its protections apply to the DNA collection at issue here.

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Video - The Compassion of Ron Paul

Vaccine Liberation Army

RON PAUL: BRINGS TEARS TO YOUR EYES. THE COMPASSION OF DR. PAUL

http://vaccineliberationarmy.com/ron-paul-brings-tears-to-your-eyes-the-compassion-of-ron-paul/

Adele M. Stan - Major Ron Paul Supporter Favors Death Penalty for Gays

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet

Printed on December 30, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/153607/major_ron_paul_supporter_favors_death_penalty_for_gays

At first it seemed like the moment of triumph for the Ron Paul for President campaign. The Texas congressman had won the endorsement of Rev. Phillip G. Kayser, a prominent right-wing Nebraska pastor, just as momentum built toward a possible big win for Paul in next week's GOP caucuses in neighboring Iowa, where evangelicals comprise a majority of voters.

The campaign issued a press release lauding Kayser and trumpeting his endorsement, citing"the enlightening statements he makes on how Ron Paul's approach to government is consistent with Christian beliefs." Then came word of Kayser's "Christian belief" in applying the death penalty for gay male sex, and the Paulites got busy scrubbing their press release from the campaign Web site. (The text of the release and a screen shot can be seen on the Web site Outside the Beltway.)

What reporters Pema Levy and Benjy Sarlin of TPM uncovered when they scrolled through Kayser's writings on his Web site, Biblical Blueprints, were not simply the rantings of a random fringe preacher, but a "blueprint" for the philosophy of Christian Reconstructionism, which seeks to make manifest biblical law as the law of the land. That would include the death penalty not only for the practice of sex between men, but also for adultery and insubordination by children.

Coming on the heels of recent revelations by a former aide that Ron Paul would not use the bathroom in a gay man's home or shake the hand of a gay supporter, and the homophobic and racist utterances attributed to him in a series of newsletters published under his name in the 1980s and '90s, news of Kayser's death-to-the-gays theology was hardly a boon to the campaign.

In one of the many pamphlets authored by Kayser, the TPM reporters unearthed this from a tract on the biblical validity of the death penalty:

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TERRA DAILY - Science taboo for Republicans seeking White House

by Staff Writers, TERRA DAILY

Washington (AFP) Dec 29, 2011

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Science_taboo_for_Republicans_seeking_White_House_999.html

Many of the Republican candidates vying for their party's nod to take on President Barack Obama, dismiss science in favor of strong evangelical faith, playing to a hardline conservative electorate.

Only one of the White House contenders, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, has come out with force to proclaim a belief in man-made climate change, as he condemned his party's hostility to science.

"To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy," he wrote in an August post on micro-blogging site Twitter.

"The minute that theRepublican Party becomes the anti-science party -- we have a huge problem," the former US ambassador to China later told ABC television's "This Week."

Other major political figures, such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have lambasted the lack of scientific faith of Republican hopefuls seeking the highest office of the world's first superpower.

"We have presidential candidates who don't believe in science. I mean, just think about it, can you imagine a company of any size in the world where the CEO said 'Oh, I don't believe in science' and that person surviving to the end of that day? Are you kidding me? It's mind-boggling!" Bloomberg told an economic forum in November.

The importance of the ultra-conservative vote, championed by a religious, anti-evolution electorate, is not lost on the contenders seeking their party's nod to face Obama in November's presidential election.

In Iowa, where caucuses kick off the months-long nominating process on Tuesday, just 21 percent of Republican voters said they believe in global warming, and 35 percent in the theory of evolution, according to a Public Policy Polling survey.

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Gareth Porter - Are Crackpot Liars Being Used to Tie Iran to 9/11?

By Gareth Porter, TruthOut.org

Printed on December 30, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/153602/are_crackpot_liars_being_used_to_tie_iran_to_9_11

Behind a mysterious December 22 Associated Press story about "finding of fact" by a District judge in Manhattan Friday that Iran assisted al Qaeda in the planning of the 9/11 attacks is a tapestry of recycled fabrications and distortions of fact from a bizarre cast of characters.

The AP story offers no indication of the nature of the evidence in the case except that former members of the 9/11 Commission and three Iranian defectors provided testimony. What it didn't say was that at least two of the Iranian defectors have long been dismissed by US intelligence as "fabricators" and that the two "expert witnesses" who were supposed to determine the credibility of those defectors' claims are both avowed advocates of crackpot conspiracy theories about Muslims and Shariah law who believe the United States is at war with Islam.

The ostensible purpose of the case brought by families of 9/11 terror attack victims was to win damages from those responsible for 9/11. Dozens of such cases involving different terrorist attacks have been brought to US courts over the years, in which "default judgments" have been made against Iran over various attacks in which Iran was allegedly involved, but there is no chance of getting any money for the families.

The only real effect of the case is to promote right-wing political myths about Iran. One of the peculiarities of such cases is that the witnesses are not subject to cross examination in court. The witnesses have every incentive, therefore to indulge in false testimony, knowing that there will be no one to challenge them.

"A Fabricator of Monumental Proportions"

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Patrick Martin - Government of the Rich, by the Rich and for the Rich

By Patrick Martin

Global Research, December 29, 2011

World Socialist Web Site - 2011-12-28

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28393

According to a study reported Tuesday, nearly half the members of the United States Congress are

millionaires. Of the 535 legislators (100 members of the Senate and 435 members of the House of Representatives), at least 250 are millionaires and the median net worth is $913,000.

 

Sixty-seven senators are millionaires and the median wealth of the body’s 100 members is $2.63 million.

 

While the Senate has long been known as a millionaires’ club, the transformation of the House is a relatively recent phenomenon. The median net worth of members of the House of Representatives, excluding home equity, has more than doubled over the last 25 years, from $280,000 in 1984 to $725,000 in 2009 in inflation-adjusted dollars. During that same period, the median net worth of an American family fell from $20,600 to $20,500.

 

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times gave front-page treatment to the data, derived from figures collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. The articles reflect nervousness in the corporate-controlled media over the degree to which the rising personal wealth of members of Congress is discrediting the institution.

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