• @alaingresh
    Nouvelles d’Orient
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    A nuclear deal is just one deep breath away |

    Michael Axworthy |

    The Guardian

    ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/28/nuclear-deal-iran-us-courage

    Behind this is the real problem – quite simply, to do a deal with someone, anyone, or a country, you have to trust them when they say they will keep to their side of the bargain. Thirty-four years after the traumatic events of the embassy hostage crisis, relived so vividly in the recent film Argo, is a US president prepared to go to the American people and say to them that he believes the Iranians will keep to a deal? And signal it by the relaxation of sanctions that the Iranians expect as a quid pro quo?

    Some have suggested that impending presidential elections in Iran make it too delicate and too difficult for the Iranian leadership to take the reciprocal step. My view is that the nuclear question is about the central, deep interests of the Islamic republic; the team around Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, that decides such questions is long-standing and largely unaffected by the coming elections. If Khamenei and his team decide the time is right, they could do it.

    But there is a feeling that something more is necessary. A deal between Iran and the US over the nuclear question would be a historic event. The talks in Kazakhstan and elsewhere so far do not seem to have had the magic of history about them. It needs more involvement by the key politicians, and, perhaps, more involvement of the many wider security questions (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria) that both sides are preoccupied with

    #nucléaire #Iran #Etats-Unis

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  • @nidal
    Nidal CC BY
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    @wardamd
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    Lire absolument: Is the US maintaining death squads and torture militias in Afghanistan? | Glenn Greenwald
    ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/26/afghanistan-death-squads-torture-militas

    In 2010, as WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to the conduct of the US government, government defenders dismissively claimed that they revealed nothing new. Among the many documents disproving that claim were ones relating to a US policy in Iraq set forth in “Frago 242”, which ordered coalition troops not to stop or even investigate torture and other war crimes by the Iraqi forces they were training, but simply to “note” them.

    […]

    In Afghanistan on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai alleged that the US is doing something much worse: not merely standing by and watching their trained forces torture and kill, but actively and systematically participating.

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    • @wardamd
      Warda Mohamed

      “Throughout the war, the United States military and the CIA have organized and trained clandestine militias. A number still operate, and remain beyond the knowledge or control of the Afghan government.” Recall that the CIA got caught making payments for years to Karzai’s suspected drug-running brother, Ahmed, “for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar”. These are the US-controlled militias, beyond the authority of the Afghan government, on which the US intends to rely if and when it “withdraws” from that country."

      Warda Mohamed
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  • @grommeleur
    grommeleur
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    @odilon
    @fil
    @moderne
    @rezo
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    Will EDF become the Barbra Streisand of climate protest?
    ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/25/edf-west-burton-streisand-effect

    Last week the operator of the power station – EDF, largely owned by the French government – announced that it is suing these people, and four others, for £5m. It must know that, if it wins, the protesters have no hope of paying. It must know that they would lose everything they own, now and for the rest of their lives. For these and other reasons, EDF’s action looks to me like a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation – a SLAPP around the ear of democracy.

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  • @alaingresh
    Nouvelles d’Orient
    2
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    @reka
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    What the Syrian death tolls really tell us
    | Sharmine Narwani |

    guardian.co.uk
    ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/syrian-death-tolls-tell-us

    La bataille des chiffres sur les morts en Syrie, personne n’est vraiment innocent

    As if to underline the point, Libya’s new government recently announced that death tolls had been exaggerated during the 2011 Libyan civil war; that there had been around 5,000 deaths on either side – a long way from the reported tens of thousands of casualties that set the scene for Nato’s “humanitarian” intervention, or the 30-50,000 deaths claimed by opponents of this intervention.

    While physically present in Iraq, the US and British governments were unable to provide estimates of the numbers of deaths unleashed by their own invasion, yet in Syria, the same governments frequently quote detailed figures, despite lacking essential access.

    Syria’s death toll leapt from 45,000 to 60,000 earlier this year, a figure gathered by a UN-sponsored project to integrate data from seven separate lists. The new numbers are routinely cited by politicians and media as fact, and used to call for foreign intervention in the conflict.

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  • @grommeleur
    grommeleur

    The educational charities that do PR for the rightwing ultra-rich
    ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/charities-pr-rightwing-ultra-rich

    A small number of the funders have been exposed by researchers trawling through tax records. They include the billionaire Koch brothers (paying into the two groups through their Knowledge and Progress Fund) and the DeVos family (the billionaire owners of Amway). More significantly, we now know a little more about the recipients. Many describe themselves as free-market or conservative thinktanks.

    Among them are the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Hudson Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Mont Pelerin Society and Discovery Institute. All pose as learned societies, earnestly trying to determine the best interests of the public. The exposure of this funding reinforces the claim by David Frum, formerly a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, that such groups “increasingly function as public relations agencies”.

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  • @alaingresh
    Nouvelles d’Orient
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    @kassem
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    Et si on mettait la Tunisie à l’abri des ingérences de la France ?

    Let Tunisia build a democracy, free from French interference

    | Sami Brahem
    The Guardian
    ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/17/tunisia-needs-time-democracy-free-french

    Things came to a head after a discussion on TV about the assassination of an opposition leader, Chokri Belaid. The French interior minister, Manuel Valls, declared that Tunisia was not a model for the Arab spring because of its “Islamic fascist dictatorship” led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, which posed a threat to rights and freedoms in a country that was only a two-hour flight from France. He added that France could not condone this, and would support the secularists and modernists against the obscurantists.

    Valls’s remarks coincided with a political campaign inside the country that has taken advantage of Belaid’s assassination to call for toppling the elected government and putting in its place an unelected body. Former prime minister Beji Caid-Essebsi has even called for the dissolution of the elected national constituent assembly, on the basis that it has lost its legitimacy, so as to allow a “council of experts” to assume the role of drafting the nation’s constitution.

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  • @kassem
    Kassem CC BY-NC-SA

    The law of war does not shield the CIA and John Brennan’s drone kill list
    ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/08/law-war-cia-john-brennan-drone-kill-list

    Par Morris Davis, un officier à la retraite de l’armée étasunienne.

    La CIA, rappelle l’auteur, est coupable de crimes de guerre dans la mesure où ses opérateurs de drones tuent alors qu’ils ne portent pas d’uniforme.

    C’est exactement l’acte d’accusation qui avait été porté par les Etats-Unis contre le Canadien Omar Khadr, comme l’expliquait déjà un article de 2010 du New York Times ▻http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/us/26gitmo.html?_r=2&ref=world& (alors même que, Khadr étant un enfant au moment des faits, cette poursuite créait un précédent fustigé à l’époque par HRW)

    La pièce maîtresse de l’acte d’accusation n’est pas un acte terroriste classique – cibler des civils -, mais le fait de tuer un soldat ennemi au combat. Habituellement en temps de guerre, tuer sur le champ de bataille n’est pas passible de poursuites. Mais les Etats-Unis ont soutenu que M. Khadr ne pouvait bénéficier de cette immunité parce qu’il ne portait pas d’uniforme, entre autres exigences des lois de guerre.

    #Drones #crimes-de-guerre

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  • @nidal
    Nidal CC BY
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    Lire absolument l’oped de Glenn Greenwald sur les informations que les médias américains acceptent de cacher : US media yet again conceals newsworthy government secrets
    ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/07/saudi-arabia-drones-media-concealment

    The US media, over the last decade (at least), has repeatedly acted to conceal newsworthy information it obtains about the actions of the US government. In each instance, the self-proclaimed adversarial press corps conceals these facts at the behest of the US government, based on patently absurd claims that reporting them will harm US national security. In each instance, what this media concealment actually accomplishes is enabling the dissemination of significant government falsehoods without challenge, and permitting the continuation of government deceit and even illegality.

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  • @kassem
    Kassem CC BY-NC-SA

    Noam Chomsky: US control is diminishing, but it still thinks it owns the world. ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/04/us-control-diminishing-own-world?CMP=twt_gu

    Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, US policies remain constant, going back to the second world war. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

    #Chomsky

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  • @nidal
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    Hagel Hearing: The War Party’s Waterloo by Justin Raimondo
    ▻http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/01/31/hagel-hearing-the-war-partys-waterloo

    We have to be thankful to Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of our more theatrical solons, for dramatizing the way in which the Israel lobby intimidates members of Congress: by asking Chuck Hagel if he could name a single Senator who was so intimidated he merely underscored how thoroughly each and every one of them is cowed. The whole spectacle of this public interrogation, with its tiresomely repetitive demands for pledges of undying loyalty to Israel, brought home the truth of Hagel’s remark.

    Of course Hagel couldn’t say that, but the ugly reality resonated in the immense silence that followed this exchange. Interestingly, Hagel didn’t back down: He said “I don’t know.” As to what motivates any particular member of Congress on any specific “dumb thing” they do – well, he couldn’t know, could he? But of course, everybody knows about the Israel lobby: and if its power and vindictiveness were ever in danger of being forgotten, then surely the battle over Hagel’s confirmation has reminded us.

    To anyone who lives outside the Washington bubble, there was something profoundly weird about the ritualistic invocations of undying loyalty to Israel, a country mentioned 135 times in the course of the hearing: Afghanistan only merited 27, while al Qaeda got 2 and Mali one. One would have thought Hagel had been nominated for Israeli Defense Minister instead of the top civilian in the Pentagon. As he faced the pro-Israel “inquisitors” – as Sen. Angus King put it – the educational value of this political drama was worth far more than all the books and articles one could possibly read.

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    • @nidal
      Nidal CC BY

      Hagel a le droit de critiquer les États-Unis, mais pas Israël :
      ▻http://mondoweiss.net/2013/01/himself-secretary-defense.html

      But the most revealing part of the spectacle was watching Hagel stand up to John McCain when McCain said he had been wrong to oppose the Iraq surge in 2007 and the Afghanistan surge in 2009— and then watching Hagel fold pathetically when Lindsey Graham asked him to condemn Israeli settlements.

      So: it was alright for Hagel to criticize the U.S. But not alright to criticize Israel.

      #wag_the_dog

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    • @kassem
      Kassem CC BY-NC-SA

      Jim Lobe: It’s All About Israel ▻http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/02/its-all-about-israel

      [Stephen] Walt cited the number of mentions of Israel and its most powerful regional foe, Iran, received in the course of Hagel’s eight-hour ordeal – 166 and 144, respectively, according to a compilation by the Internet publication, Buzzfeed.

      By comparison, he noted, the epidemic of suicides among U.S. troops – a necessary concern for any incoming Pentagon chief – was addressed only twice.

      In fact, the degree to which Israel and the threat posed to it by Iran dominated the hearing was somewhat understated by Buzzfeed. The full transcript revealed that Israel was brought up no less than 178 times, followed closely by Iran with 171 mentions.

      Those numbers compared with a grand total of five mentions of China, the central focus of the Obama administration’s much ballyhooed “pivot” from the Middle East to the Asia/Pacific; one mention (by Hagel himself) of Japan, Washington’s closest Asian ally whose territorial dispute with China has recently escalated to dangerous levels; and one mention of South Korea, Washington’s other major treaty ally in Northeast Asia.

      Similarly, NATO, Washington’s historically most important military alliance – and one with which it fought a successful air war in Libya last year and is currently fighting its 12th year in Afghanistan – warranted a total of five mentions.

      “It is extraordinary that, in an eight-hour hearing, as little attention was devoted as it was to issues such as China and NATO, which ought to be near the top of the concerns for any secretary of defence of the United States,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

      “The emphasis on Israel and Iran – which, in American politics, has become for the most part an Israel issue – demonstrates that the senators were far less concerned with the strategic questions that the secretary of defence should be focused on and much more interested in trying to defeat a nominee who has strayed from political orthodoxy, especially on issues related to Israel,” he told IPS.

      Kassem CC BY-NC-SA
    • @nidal
      Nidal CC BY

      Chuck Hagel’s Senate hearing: a discredit to all concerned | Michael Cohen
      ▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/01/chuck-hagel-senate-hearing-discredit

      This is quite frankly modern-day McCarthyism: guilt by association with those who hold differing views. It was the low point of the day in which the depths of practically every valley of squalid foreign policy discourse was plumbed. That a hearing on the fitness of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense was dominated by a discussion of a country that is not even a military ally of the United States – and which, in the just the last three months, has take actions on settlement construction that run precisely counter to US policy – offered compelling evidence of the disproportionate and unhealthy role that Israel plays in US foreign policy debates.

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