Rex Regnant Sed Non Gubernat

Iran's Nuclear "Threat"

By JUAN COLE

08/25/06 "Counterpunch" -- -- Here is what the professionals are saying about the Republican-dominated Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy report on Iran that slams US intelligence professionals for poor intelligence on Iran: The report demonstrates that these Republicans have poor intelligence . . . on Iran. What follows is summaries of things I've seen from other experts but I can't identify them without permission..

First of all, former CIA professionals Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski point out that the Republicans have a lot of damn gall. It was high members of this Republican administration who leaked to the Iranians and the whole world the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative who spent her professional career combatting the proliferation of WMD and was, at the time she was betrayed by Traitor Rove and his merry band, working on Iran. Had it not been for these Republican figures, none of whom has yet been punished in any way for endangering US national security, we might know more about Iran.

It is being said that the staffer who headed the report is Frederick Fleitz, who was a special assistant to John Bolton when Bolton was undersecretary of state for proliferation issues. Fleitz was sent to the unemployment line when Condi wisely exiled Bolton to the United Nations, where there is a long history of ill-tempered despots who like to bang their shoes on the podium. So this report is the long arm of Bolton popping up in Congress. It is Neoconservative propaganda.

I repeat what I have said before, which is that John Bolton is just an ill-tempered lawyer who has no special expertise in nuclear issues or in Iran, and aside from an ability to scare the bejesus out of young gofers who bring him coffee and to thunderously denounce on cue any world leader on whom he is sicced, he has no particular qualifications for his job.

Nor do the Republican congressmen know anything special about Iran's nuclear energy program. They certainly know much less than the CIA agents who work on it full time, some of whom know Persian and have actually done . . . intelligence work.

We are beset by instant experts on contemporary Iran, like the medievalist Bernard Lewis, who wrongly predicted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would attack Israel on August 22, based on Lewis's weird interpretation of his alleged millenarian beliefs. Once the Neoconservatives went so far as actually to make fun of reality in the hearing of a reporter, their game was up.

Pete Hoekstra, who is the chair of this committee, has a long history of saying things that are disconnected from reality. Like when he made a big deal about some old shells with mustard gas found in Iraq left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, and claimed that these were the fabled and long-sought Iraqi WMD over which 2600 of our service people are six feet under and another 8000 in wheelchairs.

Nope.

Bolton at one point was exercised about an imaginary Cuban biological weapons program, which even his own staffers wouldn't support him on, and at one point he was alleging that Iranian mullahs were sneaking into Havana to help with it.

This congressional report is full of the same sort of wild fantasies.
On page 9, the report alleges that "Iran is currently enriching uranium to weapons grade using a 164-machine centrifuge cascade at this facility in Natanz."

This is an outright lie. Enriching to weapons grade would require at least 80% enrichment. Iran claims . . . 2.5 per cent. See how that isn't the same thing? See how you can't blow up anything with 2.5 percent?

The claim is not only flat wrong, but it is misleading in another way. You need 16,000 centrifuges, hooked up so that they cascade, to make enough enriched uranium for a bomb in any realistic time fame, even if you know how to get the 80 percent! Iran has . . . 164. See how that isn't the same?

The report cites the International Atomic Energy Agency only when it is critical of Iran. It does not tell us what the IAEA actually has found.
By the way, here is what IAEA head Mohamed Elbaradei said in early March, 2003, about Iraq:

'After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence
or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.'

At the same time, Republicans like Donald Rumsfeld were saying he knew exactly where Iraq's WMD was!

Elbaradei was right then, and Fleitz was wrong. Can't get fooled again.
And here is what the IAEA said about Iran just last January:

"Iran has continued to facilitate access under its Safeguards Agreement as
requested by the Agency, and to act as if the Additional Protocol is in force,
including by providing in a timely manner the requisite declarations and access
to locations."

Last April Elbaradei complained about the hype around Iran's nuclear research, and said that there is no imminent threat from Iran.

The only thing that the IAEA knows for sure is that Iran has a peaceful nuclear energy research program. Such a program is not the same as a weapons program, and it is perfectly legal under the Nonproliferation Treaty, which Iran, unlike Israel, has actually signed.

The report allegedly vastly exaggerates the range of Iran's missiles and also exaggerates the number of its longer-range ones, and seems to think that Iran already has the Shahab-4, which it does not. It also doesn't seem to realize that Iran can't send missiles on other countries without receiving them back. Israel has more and longer-range missiles than Iran, and can quickly equip them with real nuclear warheads, not the imaginary variety in Fleitz's fevered brain.


Folks, we are being set up again!

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute. This article is extracted from Juan Cole's website. 

Something’s coming and it ain’t gonna be pretty. Most of us have an inner sense of a pending calamity, be it political, economic, military aggression, social chaos or just Nature cleaning house. Given the interconnectedness of our world, all of the above may be the correct answer.

The writing has been on the wall since before most of us began to read. It could be next week, next month, next year, or we may somehow continue on in this uncertain world for another generation. But the world as we know it, is as precariously positioned for imminent collapse as ever it has been.

As dim as these times may seem, sunset and darkness are only the promise of a new sunrise.

Turmoil at the top

The neocons of the U.S. oiligarchy are hell-bent on implementing the next phase of their "Project-for-a-New-American-Century (PNAC) agenda by invading Iran under pretended purposes. They risk a nuclear confrontation in their quest to control more Middle-East sand and what lies beneath it.

By the time you read this, Iran will have become a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a joint venture of the Russians and the Chinese, along with other Central Asian countries. This now five-year-old emerging oiligarchy is providing serious opposition to the U.S. empire’s "full spectrum dominance." The globalist bullies in Washington may have met their match, as these "communist" empires and their smaller neighbors unite to pursue capitalism with a vengeance.

Poke the dragon

Even after more than 50 years of a failed UN police action which still divides Korea, North Korea, reportedly already in possession of nukes, prods the U.S. dragon by planning to test launch an ICBM, potentially capable of reaching American soil. Apparently, the only thing saving North Korea from imminent invasion is lack of oil.

Shedding our skin

Borders are what define a nation. They are the skin of the national organism. NAFTA and GATT have dissolved our nation’s borders, destroyed American enterprise, created an exodus of production infrastructure and flooded the U.S. with cheap foreign imports.

With the same borderless commerce, our excess, subsidized, industrial agriculture has flooded Mexico with cheap corn and other commodities, destroying Mexico’s agrarian economy. The many agrarian workers who failed to find a gainful existence in Mexico’s urban and industrial centers are now flocking here by the millions for any life that is better than what they now have.

Just like a biological organism, when people and products enter and leave through the normal channels, the health and immunity of the national organism is maintained. When the skin is slashed open with thousands or millions of inflicted wounds, infection is due to set in and cause the ultimate demise.

The internal insecurity state

Under the ruse that there were actually foreign terrorists who perpetrated the events of 9/11, the federal focus has been security at any cost. The cost, of course, is our rights, freedoms and yes, our security.

Our commercial and other activities are increasingly being monitored by radio frequency identification devices (RFID). These minuscule, potentially programmable, remotely readable chips can and have been installed in the products we buy and use. The UPC striped bar code will someday be obsolete. We will no longer have to unload the shopping cart to scan our items. The "reader" will tally our purchases in place.

RFID chips will likely find their way into ID and credit cards and "for other purposes."

For personal identification we have the VeriChip and other variants of the under-skin, programmable and remotely readable memory chips available for injection today. First to "benefit" will be child molesters, felons and the homeless. Then our security will only be a swipe of the hand away.

Eventually commerce will only be possible for the subdermally chipped.
Coming soon to a driver’s license office near you is the National ID card. This internal passport will include your biometric information and anything else "your" government desires to install on the federally mandated, programmable memory chip. "Your papers, er chip please."

The NSA began operations in the 1960s. By the mid ‘90s, 52,000 workers were going to "work" daily at NSA headquarters. Wiretaps are not a new or occasional event at the National Snooping Agency. They are a way of life for an army of clandestine, unelected, unaccountable "intelligence" operatives.

There is even a plan to send unmanned surveillance blimps 12 miles above the earth where they will be able to see, hear and record everything we do.

The result of fascist collusion of government and commercial interests is a rapidly expanding police state, unhindered by any sense of limitation. At some point, even the gullible flag wavers will no longer be able to maintain the delusion that they live in the land of the free. They might then muster what little bravery remains, get off of the couch, grab their pitchforks and rusty rifles, and storm the federal castle. How much more will it take?

The crack in the egg

The truth behind the events of 9/11 is beginning to hit the mainstream. The massive and growing grass roots effort of the 9/11 truth movement has become not a dismissible theory, but, well, evidence. What will happen, when enough people discover that those in the highest levels of government intentionally killed thousands at home and hundreds of thousands abroad to impose their reign of terror? When a majority learns that everything we have been told is a lie, where will we go from there?

Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, now fully cognizant of 9/11 as an inside job, is reportedly planning to bring such crimes against humanity to the World Court. Are we on the verge of something?

The unfleecing

The fact that the IRS is an unconstitutional fraud and the collection agency for the unconstitutional crime of the century, the Federal Reserve, is not news to many of us. Aaron Russo’s new film, America, From Freedom to Fascism, is scheduled for release July 28, 2006, in theaters across America.

Russo simply and clearly expresses the fact that there is not and never has been any law which obligates the American worker to pay federal income tax. His well-crafted documentary will lead almost every viewer to the inescapable conclusion that the IRS has intentionally been operating a fraud-and-theft enterprise without so much as a single law authorizing it.

Russo completes his film with an unavoidable view into America’s future if we don’t get off our butts and work to change the outcome. The otherwise indoctrinated and media-medicated Americans may just awaken from their slumber when they discover how much has been stolen from them.

$low $izzle?

The dollar is at its lowest value against other currencies since 1973. The Federal Reserve’s "dollar," which is literally loaned into existence, is devaluing just as fast as more can be loaned into existence.

"Helicopter" Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently announced Basel II, a risk management plan for fractional reserve banking, at Georgetown University. Bernanke said, "If the regulatory capital required of these organizations does not adequately reflect the risks they are actually taking, the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking system may be jeopardized."

To keep the dollar "afloat," massive and often foreign capital investment has been required. With a record-high trade deficit, rising interest rates and inflation, unpayable debts and a foreign policy that is two-clicks west of insane, historical and potential investors in the mythical dollar are fleeing the Federal Reserve’s corral like a herd of wild horses that just kicked the gate open.

China and Japan have curtailed their propping up of the dollar. The Euro is emerging as a preferred currency. Hugo Chavez has withdrawn much of Venezuela’s monies from Federal Reserve Banks and loaned it to several of his South American neighbors so they could get out from under the thumb of the International Monetary Fund usury racketeers and their resources-for-debt scheme. This is becoming a trend, as the U.S., the Federal Reserve and its facade of a "dollar" continue to wane in the eyes of the world.

Black Hole$?

The derivative market, now reportedly $100 trillion-strong, is a world of artificial investments that are derived from the promised wealth of one investment, based upon the promised wealth of another investment, based upon the promised wealth of yet another investment…where nothing real was actually invested. Just how many cards can you stack on top of each other in a virtual world?

Science has always wanted to know what a black hole is. Just keep your telescopes focused as the anti-matter of the derivatives market implodes into an instantaneous vacuum of dark space.

Abandon ship!

Porter Goss abruptly resigned as CIA director. Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card left. Press secretary Scott McClellan and Treasury secretary John Snow departed earlier.

George W. will be without a functioning mouth or morals when Michael J. Gerson steps down in a couple of weeks. Touted as the "author of nearly all of Bush’s most famous public words during the past seven years," and "the conscience of the White House," Gerson is "irreplacable."

Scooter Liddy is under indictment, with Karl Rove a near miss, so far. The real and deserving target is Dick Cheney, but no one dare touch him, since he has demonstrated he can shoot a high-powered lawyer in broad daylight without being charged.

The calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation are a repeated refrain.

Therego the oil

The thought of making amiable arrangements for our future oil supply has escaped the current administration of oiligarchs, who are much more accustomed to a policy of destroy and acquire. The Chinese on the other hand, have been diligently traveling the globe and cutting deals with those who actually own oil, in an effort to secure their energy future. The war-focused Bush clan is apparently incapable of amiable relations, which the whole world has taken notice of—there goes the oil and our energy future.

On the verge of nature

But these are the constructs of Man. Nature is another world. Those fortunate enough to live at a distance from the organized enclaves of the wingless two-leggeds may fail to notice any crisis or conflict.

Some may escape the crisis of Man and Man’s conflict, but can we really exist apart from nature? Avoid breathing for a day. Skip drinking water for a week. Abandon food for a month.

We are inextricably linked to nature. More specifically, we are confined to a globe spinning in space, 24,000 miles in circumference, covered mostly with water, which all of us and the Earth’s other species must live on. Try as we might to pretend otherwise, there is a carrying capacity for our habitat.

In my lifetime the human population of the planet has doubled and our consumptive habits have increased. Nature’s usual answer to such a crisis is mass die-off from starvation or stress-related disease.

The Pharisees ruse

The dominant philosophy/theology of our times is repetition of the Pharisees ruse: As God’s chosen ones, we hold dominion over all the creatures of the earth and every plant. This philosophy of conquest-and-extraction has finally found limits in this industrial age. We have reached the edge of dominion.

If we don’t abandon this philosophy soon, Nature and Nature’s God will show us just how we are not masters over Nature.

We are our own problem

The unfortunate truth is that all too many humans are greedy, arrogant, wasteful and destructive gluttons. Just look objectively at what we have accomplished for ourselves.

The planet’s water is being poisoned at an alarming rate. Our food supply is saturated with toxins and devoid of nutrition, beginning with the industrial depletion/chemical contamination of the soil. With chemtrails above and industrial and automotive pollution below, our atmosphere is in decay. The other species are disappearing as we materially benefit from a policy of natural plunder while our physical bodies suffer the consequences.

Our standard of living includes using one-and-a-half to five ton petro-fueled transportation devices to haul our increasingly overweight buns everywhere we go. Very long term radiation contaminants are used for power generation and war, with no permanent clean-up solutions in sight. And the rest of the world thinks they want what we have.

The divine right of dominion has been pushed to the limits of our planet’s capacity. Until we learn to work within the balance of symbiotic sustainability, and not as conquerors, we will continue to be our own worst enemy.

Brace for the splat!

by Hari Heath

A month after more than 41 million Mexicans went to the polls to elect their next president, the country is still awaiting a result. A preliminary count of polling station tally sheets put conservative Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN) ahead with a slight lead over left-populist Andres Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD).

Both candidates have claimed victory, with López Obrador and his supporters holding vigils and protests across the country and calling for a vote-by-vote recount.

That hasn't kept a consensus from emerging in the commercial media that Calderón won by a small margin in a squeaky-clean election. In a hyperbolic editorial on July 30 -- one that bordered on the ridiculous -- the Washington Post accused López Obrador, known as AMLO to his supporters, of taking "a lesson from Joseph Stalin" and launching an "anti-democracy campaign" by demanding a manual recount and urging his supporters to take to the streets in peaceful protests. Calling the vote "a success story and a model for other nations," the editors concluded that it's "difficult to overstate the irresponsibility of Mr. López Obrador's actions."

Days after the election, the New York Times irresponsibly declared candidate Calderón the winner, even though no victor had been declared under Mexican law, and just this week, in an article about López Obrador's protests, the Times reported that López Obrador had "escalated his campaign to undo official results."

But there are no "official" results and probably won't be until after Sept. 1. Under Mexican law, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) is charged with running the elections and counting the vote. But only the country's Election Tribunal, known by its Mexican nickname as the "TRIFE," has the power to declare a victor (See here for background on the TRIFE). They have until Sept. 6 to rule on the election.

It appears that the U.S. media has become so enamored with the construct of the "anti-democratic" left in Latin America -- the ubiquitous "fiery populists" (a term that has described everyone from the centrist Lula da Silva to Hugo Chávez) -- that they are incapable of fulfilling their basic mandate to inform their readers when it comes to the political landscape south of the border. It's nothing short of journalistic malpractice.

But back in the real world, a growing body of credible evidence from mainstream Mexican journalists, independent election observers and respected scholars indicates that an attempt was made to deliver the presidency to Calderón. It includes a pattern of irregularities at the polls, interference by the ruling party and some very suspicious statistical patterns in the "official" results.

The TRIFE is now sifting through 900 pages of formal complaints lodged by López Obrador. Their ruling on those challenges will indicate how well México's electoral process holds up in a closely fought and highly polarized race.

Growing evidence of irregularities and fraud
México has a history of the party in power's using its clout to tip the election in its favor, and strict laws prohibiting ruling party interference were enacted in the 1990s. Election law prevented Vicente Fox, the outgoing PAN president, from making public statements of a partisan or political nature. But he overstepped this line many times in the 2006 campaign, including dozens of speeches reinforcing candidate Felipe Calderón's basic message that López Obrador was a "danger to México." In a well-publicized speech, candidate López Obrador responded, "With all respect, Mr. President, shut up. You sound like a chattering bird." Fox continued with these speeches until election authorities and public commentators warned Fox he was violating election laws.

The Fox administration also ran public service announcements touting government programs and services and promoting the vote. PAN saturated the television airwaves with "swift-boat" style attack ads against López Obrador, comparing him to Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and calling him a "danger to México." Election authorities eventually ordered these commercials off the air on the grounds that they were untrue and maligned the candidate's character, but critics believe they moved too slowly.

Under Mexican law, ruling party interference is a serious charge and grounds for annulling an election. In the last ten years, the same Electoral Tribunal judges that are reviewing AMLO's complaints annulled governors' races in Tabasco and Colima, based on ruling party interference. The Institutional Revolution Party (PRI), which ruled México for seven decades before the system was reformed in the 1990s, made vote buying and voter coercion into a high art form, and there is strong evidence that they were up to their old tricks in the 2006 election. With PRI governors in 17 of México's 31 states, election observers documented a significant number of examples of voters being offered money or receiving food or building materials in exchange for their PRI vote. In a country where half the citizens live in poverty and rely on different forms of government assistance, voters are often told that their public assistance is dependent on voting for the party in power. There are examples of PAN using similar practices, especially a well-documented case of funds diverted from a San Luis Potosi building program into PAN electoral races.

The Mexican electoral system has come a long way in two decades in implementing anti-fraud systems. But there are still several ways that results can be tampered with on election day. López Obrador's campaign and hundreds of independent election observers documented several hundred cases of "old fashioned" election-day fraud in making their case for a recount.

Here's how the system was supposed to work. On July 2, Mexicans voted at over 130,000 different polling stations, casting separate ballots for president, senator and federal deputy. Each political party was encouraged to have registered poll watchers at every polling station to observe the voting process and count at the end of the day. As international and Mexican election observers noted, however, problems emerged when there weren't enough independent and party observers to go around. In regions where one party was dominant, this created opportunities for vote shaving, ballot stuffing, lost ballots and other forms of fraud.

The PRD's strongest case for a recount comes from the fact that ballots in almost one-third of the country were not counted in the presence of independent observers. One analysis of IFE results found that there were 2,366 polling places where only a PAN observer was present. In these districts, Calderón beat López Obrador by a whopping 71-21 margin.

Other elements of PRD's legal challenge include documentation of several ballot boxes found in dumps in the PRD stronghold of México City. They also point to evidence such as the nonpartisan Civic Alliance's report documenting 17 polling sites in PAN-dominated Nuevo León, Michoacan and Querétaro, where the number of votes cast vastly exceeded the number of registered voters at a site.

Reports by international and domestic election observers affiliated with the Civic Alliance and Global Exchange stop short of claiming fraud in the elections. They laud the dedication of most poll workers they monitored and the preparations for the vote in most of the polling places, as well as the orderly and peaceful process overall. But the cumulative evidence is damning in such a closely contested race.

In the weeks after the election, PRD observers again sounded the alarm as sealed ballot packets were being illegally opened at IFE district offices in several PAN-dominated regions. PRD officials accused IFE officials of possibly tampering with ballots or attempting to cover up fraud in the event of a recount. The TRIFE ordered these offices to stop opening vote packets.

While the López Obrador campaign has not made major charges of "cyber fraud," there is an emerging controversy over the IFE's role in reporting who was ahead in the vote count. For the 2006 election, the IFE had developed a sophisticated system to provide preliminary results called the PREP. Relying on results being phoned in from a sample of precincts, the IFE could compile a credible picture of the vote. If the PREP showed one candidate with a clear majority, the system would have allowed Mexicans to go to sleep on election night knowing who their next president would be. But because of the razor close results, the PREP proved to be an inadequate measure.

Now research is emerging to suggest that the PREP results were cooked to create the appearance of a Calderón victory. Physicist Jorge López at the University of Texas, El Paso, conducted a statistical analysis of the PREP results and found that, as the results came in, the differential between the candidates' totals remained almost constant. One would expect that, as results from each party's geographic strongholds were counted, the gap between their totals would rise and would fall. In such a tight election, one would even expect the lead to change back and forth as the count progressed. None of that happened. The results of a third candidate, Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), fluctuated as expected.

He also noted that there was very little deviation between the actual results as they came in and the average results; in a normal, natural distribution, one would expect significant differences between the two (it should look something like a squashed bell-shaped curve). Dr. López concluded the pattern was "a clear indication that the data was manufactured by an algorithm and does not stand a chance at passing as data originated at the actual voting."

Luis Mochan, a physicist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, did similar work. He noted that the PREP data was posted after the first 10,000 reports had been processed, and looked at whether those first 10,000 reports were consistent with the statistical trends for the rest of the day. When he plotted the data backwards, Calderón's vote total originated at zero, as is normal, but López Obrador began the day 126,000 votes in the hole.

Mochan and López both point out that the Calderón began the day building a large percentage lead -- seven points -- that decreased steadily throughout the day. The large early lead would have been handy from a psychological and political perspective, allowing Calderón to claim that he led all day long, but the results had to end in a close result given that polls conducted a week before the tally showed a statistical dead heat.

Mochan also notes gross discrepancies in the number of votes processed late in the evening: "At the end of the plot, we find intervals with more than 1,200 votes per [voting] booth. I understand that no booth was to receive more than 750 votes. Even more worrisome, some data points indicate a negative number of votes per booth."

Mochan notes that these statistical anomalies aren't definitive proof of anything. But economist James Galbraith, reviewing Mochan's data, speculated about a likely scenario that would fit the discrepancies seen that night:

Felipe Calderón started the night with an advantage in total votes, a gift from the authorities.

As the count progressed, this advantage was maintained by misreporting of the actual results. This enabled Calderón to claim that he had led through the entire process -- an argument greatly repeated but spurious in any case because it is only the final count that matters.

Toward the end of the count, further adjustments were made to support the appearance of a victory by Calderón.

Critics suggest that the IFE may have aggressively pushed to swiftly declare Calderón a victor, obviating the need for a poll-by-poll vote recount.
The U.S. media was also confused on the Wednesday after the vote when the IFE ordered all 300 district offices to review the tally sheets. It was widely reported as a "recount," when in fact very few ballots were actually counted. In some cases, such as when a tally sheet was illegible, the sealed ballot packets where opened and recounted. Almost every time that occurred, observers encountered significant errors in the vote count. In the state of México, one tally sheet recorded 88 votes for López Obrador when the recount of ballots found 188 votes. Whether it was human error or intentional vote shaving, in a tight election race, these examples gain heightened significance.

None of these reports in and of themselves constitute a smoking gun. But the questions they raise need to be answered. There is far more evidence pointing to fraud in the Mexican elections in 2006 than was made publicly available about Ukraine's contested vote in 2004. Comparing the media and political establishment's reactions to the two reveals the transparent dishonesty in backing Calderón's claim of victory; in 2004 many of the same voices that are now calling López Obrador "undemocratic" were screaming that the Ukrainian tally had to be annulled and only a new election would assure democracy in the former Soviet satellite. In both instances, the candidate who declared victory was friendly towards a powerful neighboring state; in 2004 that state was Russia, and two years later it's the United States. Forget about threatening México's fragile democratic institutions -- that makes all the difference to the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

According to the Mexican daily La Journada, over two million supporters of López Obrador gathered in México City on Sunday, July 30, the largest public demonstration in México's history. Millions of voices chanted "vote by vote, poll by poll," calling on the Electoral Tribunal to order a recount. A poll released this week found that Mexicans, by a 20-point margin (48-28), want a vote-by-vote count. López Obrador has said he will call off protests when the Tribunal agrees to a recount and will honor its final decision.

As for the charge in the U.S. media that López Obrador is undermining democracy and the rule of law by calling on his supporters to protest, we believe that the rights of peaceful assembly and free speech are important democratic tenets. Public protests have played a historic part in México's three decade-long transition to democracy.

President and PAN leader Vicente Fox called for direct action when he believed he was victimized by electoral fraud in his race for the governorship of Guanajuato in 1991. Fox called on thousands of supporters to take to the streets and block highways, and the results were eventually overturned. Asked before the 2000 presidential election if he would do the same thing if he suspected fraud, he didn't hesitate to say "we will be very alert to any irregularities, and we will submit the appropriate legal accusations that are necessary. If there is any instability [as a result of those accusations], it will be due to whatever they have done fraudulently to avoid recognizing our victory."

While Calderón has opposed a ballot-by-ballot recount, even some of his staunchest supporters have argued that the process would assure Mexicans' faith in their electoral authorities and strengthen the country's young democracy. In a race where over 64 percent of Mexicans voted against him, Calderón, if he should prove victorious, will need all the legitimacy he can muster.

As México awaits the rulings of the electoral tribunal, tensions are high. The campaign -- often dirty -- and the close results have polarized the country. Given the context, the U.S. media's water-carrying for Calderón's campaign is anything but helpful. The fact that there have been no "official" results is not open to dispute, and until AMLO's allegations have been investigated, there is no way that anyone can say who will come out ahead.


Chuck Collins is the co-author of "Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity" (New Press). He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and lives in Oaxaca, México. Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer. 

Israel and 'Moral Equivalence'

The Qana massacre reveals the true face of Israel's aggression

by Justin Raimondo

The Qanamassacre was the occasion for a full-court propaganda campaign by Israel’s amen corner, and one has to say they rose to the occasion like real pros. First, of course, they expressed remorse – then, naturally enough, they blamed it all on… Hezbollah.

How so? Well, you see, the Israelis bombed a building filled with children and old people because rockets fired at Israel "originated immediately next to it." Yet the Red Cross denied there were any Hezbollah in Qana. The Israelis keep up a constant refrain claiming Lebanon uses its own civilian population as "human shields," but the reality is quite different: Lebanese civilians flee when Hezbollah fires a fusillade, because they know the Israelis will soon be bombing the place to perdition. Aside from which, Nasrallah’s folks are a tightly knit group and security is taken seriously: a friend of mine who went into Hezbollah headquarters in southern Beirut was subjected to such a thorough search that by the time they were through with him he was bereft of his dignity as well as any desire to proceed further. Hezbollah doesn’t trust noncombatants, and for that reason keeps well away from them no matter what their religious, ethnic, or political affiliations.

Read this Ha’aretz piece and see if you can figure out how the IDF is trying to slither and slide out of this one: the building didn’t collapse immediately, there is an 8-hour gap – or maybe not – and "maybe we’ll never know what happened." Blah blah blah – in short, the Israelis are blowing a lot of smoke.

One has to wonder, however, what it is they’re smoking if they really think anyone believes their overly elaborate obfuscations. Like a squid ejecting a cloud of ink, the Israeli propaganda machine is emitting all sorts of alternate scenarios, replete with maps, aerial photos, and video, and they dispatched their Internet army to spread the rationalizations far and wide.

All to cover up a simple, irrefutable fact: it was Israeli warplanes, and not Hezbollah, that slaughtered 54 people, more than half of them young children, and the rest women and old folks.

IDF commanders and the politicians who supposedly control them don’t even have the courage of their own viciousness. After all, they have an easy out in this pronouncement of the Yesha Rabbinical Council:

"According to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy. All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians."

These aren’t fringe characters, but fairly representative of Israeli religious opinion. Pat Buchanan complains:

"If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, a ratio of 30-1, though Hezbollah is firing unguided rockets, while Israel is using precision-guided munitions."

But these guys aren’t Christians – and Israel isn’t the West, as much as they’d like us to believe they are. The principle of proportionality doesn’t apply in the Middle East or North Africa – where history and culture have conspired to produce a socio-political milieu in which a disproportionately violent response to the least provocation is required. The Israelis are deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians in order, as per the Yesha Rabbinical Council, to "exterminate the enemy" – just as Hezbollah is deliberately (albeit relatively ineptly) targeting Israeli civilians in the north.

These people not only inhabit the same lands and look the same, they also think alike: if you steal their cow, they’ll blow up your barn – with your family in it. A similarly harsh justification for inflicting death and terror on a civilian population was offered by none other than Osama bin Laden in his fatwa explaining the "Islamic" rationale behind the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center:

"It is allowed for Muslims to kill protected ones among unbelievers in the event of an attack against them in which it is not possible to differentiate the protected ones from the combatants or from the strongholds. It is permissible to kill them incidentally and unintentionally according to the saying of the Prophet. When he was asked, as in al-Bukhari, about the offspring and women of unbelievers who stayed with the unbelievers and were killed, he said, 'They are from among them.’ This indicates the permission to kill women and children because of their fathers if they can not be distinguished. In the account of Muslim he said, 'They are from their fathers.'"

Perhaps Osama graduated from the same school of moral philosophy as Alan Dershowitz, who, in defense of the Qana slaughter, wrote at the Huffington Post:

"By hiding behind their own civilians, the Islamic radicals issue a challenge to democracies: either violate your own morality by coming after us and inevitably killing some innocent civilians, or maintain your morality and leave us with a free hand to target your innocent civilians. This challenge presents democracies such as Israel with a lose-lose option and the terrorists with a win-win option."

Dershowitz, a well-known advocate of torture, issues a "challenge" to readers to come up with a better solution than launching a military campaign certain to involve heavy civilian casualties. The clear implication being that the IDF has no choice but to kill civilians, because Hezbollah uses its own supporters as "hostages."

This argument does not apply to Qana, however, since, as Ha’aretzreports:
"As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the Sunday air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident. It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence there of Hezbollah men at the time.

"The Israeli Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were practiced in the past. But there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike."

Let’s assume, for the moment, that Ha’aretz is wrong, and Hezbollah did launch rockets in the vicinity of Qana. Dershowitz’s argument still makes no moral sense – at least, to the Western mindset – because the Israeli response is so grotesquely disproportionate. Remember, all this death and devastation is occurring in response to a minor border incident involving a few Israeli soldiers and some trigger-happy Hezbollah fighters: similar dust-ups have occurred on our border with Mexico, and I don’t see Washington ordering air strikes on Mexico City.

The Middle Eastern "morality" that allows the Israelis to target the Beirut airport, where tourists ducked and covered, and permits Hezbollah to lob Katyusha rockets into Haifa, is given its dark voice by bin Laden:

"It is allowed for Muslims to kill protected ones among unbelievers on the condition that the protected ones have assisted in combat, whether in deed, word, mind, or any other form of assistance, according to the prophetic command. This is what happened at the time of Abu Dawud and others who were involved in the murder of Duraid Ibn al-Samma. When he was 120 years old he went out with the Hawazin tribe to advise them. They consulted him on battle procedure and he went from being a protected one to being a target because of his advice regarding the war against Islam."It is allowed for Muslims to kill protected ones among unbelievers in the event of a need to burn the strongholds or fields of the enemy so as to weaken its strength in order to conquer the stronghold or topple the state. It is permissible even if protected ones are among the victims, as the Prophet did among the Bani Nadir."

Substitute "Jews" for "Muslims," and you have something the Yesha Rabbinical Council can get behind. This thinking is exemplified by Israeli "Justice" Minister Haim Ramon, who recently opined:

"All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah."

Therefore, according to the Yesha-bin Laden doctrine, it’s okay to slaughter them: after all, there’s no such thing as an innocent civilian. They are merely "the enemy," period, and thus subject to extermination.

Israel’s amen corner in the U.S. is constantly screaming about "moral equivalence," supposedly the prime sin of the antiwar crowd. How, they ask, can you equate the Israelis, who are always careful to avoid civilian casualties, with the "terrorist" Palestinians-Lebanese-and-Arabs-in-general, who don’t give a fig whom they kill as long as the victim is Jewish?

That is utter hogwash. The Israelis, as we have seen from the first days of this bloody war, are no different than Hezbollah in their tactics or their intentions: they’re both bloody murderers, the only difference being that the Israelis are better-armed – and receive much more aid from their Western allies than Hezbollah could ever dream of getting from Syria or Iran.

Another myth exploded by Israel’s summertime slaughter: the idea that this is the only democracy in the region, and therefore must be supported by the West. As Nehemia Shtrasler, a columnist for Ha’aretz, put it:

"The Olmert-Peretz plan was to shell and demolish south Lebanon and south Beirut until the Lebanese public demanded that its government vomit Hezbollah out from its midst."

The goal of the invasion: regime change – in a country once touted by the president of the United States as a beacon of liberty and proof that his "global democratic revolution" is succeeding. Another myth blown to pieces by Israeli bombs: the neocon notion that democracies don’t make war on each other. The democratically elected government of Lebanon is being systematically destroyed by the Israeli blitz – and that, it turns out, is the whole point of this exercise in death and destruction.

The IDF is openly committing war crimes, with the full knowledge and sanction of the Americans and the Brits – and, as the rest of the world looks on in horror, it doesn’t seem to me as if they’ll stop in Lebanon. The War Party is on the warpath, and there is no political opposition at home – at least, not in the U.S. – to act as a brake on their killer instincts. If I were Syrian, I’d hightail it out of Damascus, or start building a bomb shelter.

And in Tehran, they must be holding their collective breath, straining to hear the drone of American (or Israeli) fighter jets as they glide in over the horizon…

The silence of the "liberals" empowers the neocons – and virtually ensures that this Israeli-spawned war will spread far and wide. George W. Bush and his Democratic "opponents" have teamed up, in this instance, and I seriously doubt if either Brent Scowcroft or Henry Kissinger can motivate our policymakers to reconsider and think about how – and where – this will all end.