How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

By Jonathan Cook

17 September, 2009

Nazareth: Israeli peace activists are planning to ratchet up their campaign against groups in the United States that raise money for settlers by highlighting how tax exemptions are helping to fund the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Gush Shalom, a small peace group that advocates Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, is preparing to send details to the US tax authorities questioning the charitable status of several organisations.
Adam Keller, a spokesman, said these operations’ tax-exempt status meant that “settlement expansion is effectively being subsidised out of the pockets of the US taxpayer and government”.
The campaign is designed to increase pressure on Barack Obama, the US president, to demand action from Israel on his repeated calls -- so far largely ignored -- to end settlement building. Last week, Israel announced plans to build 455 new homes in West Bank settlements and 500 apartments in East Jerusalem.
Mr Obama is expected to unveil a Middle East peace plan this month.
In a related move, Gush Shalom is encouraging Palestinians who have suffered from settler violence to file lawsuits in the United States that would redefine the settlers’ fund-raising work as support for “terrorist activity”.
The peace group has accelerated the pace of its campaign, according to a “confidential memo” it issued on July 29 that was leaked to the Israeli media, after the Israeli government heavily criticised human rights groups over the summer for receiving funds from foreign donors, particularly European governments.
In particular, the foreign ministry lambasted Breaking the Silence, a group of army veterans, for publishing testimonials from 26 Israeli combat soldiers suggesting the army committed war crimes during its assault on Gaza last winter.
Mr Keller said: “It’s the height of chutzpah for the foreign ministry to be hounding Breaking the Silence, which is doing something entirely legal and transparent, while keeping quiet about the settler organisations’ dependence on foreign income for their illegal activities.”
Gush Shalom said it was not divulging details of the organisations it will target next month to ensure an element of surprise. But Mr Keller said all of the 120 main settlements, which are illegal under international law, benefit from fundraising operations in the US.
Gush Shalom has already accused one organisation, Shuva Israel, which is registered as a charity in Austin, Texas, of channelling funds to the Shomron Liaison Office, located in the West Bank settlement of Revava, south of the Palestinian city of Nablus.
According to Shuva Israel’s website, donations are used to support several outposts close to Revava, such as El Matan, Havat Gilad and Havat Yair, which are illegal under Israeli law.
The 100 or so outposts, satellites of the main settlements, have been the settlers’ most effective method of extending their control over Palestinian territory in the West Bank. Israel has repeatedly promised the United States it will dismantle the outposts -- so far to no effect.
Shuva Israel also funds Yitzhar, a settlement that hit the headlines last year when its inhabitants rampaged through the neighbouring Palestinian village of Asira al Kibliyeh in what the prime minister at the time, Ehud Olmert, called a “pogrom”.
Referring to Shuva Israel and the Shomron Liaison Office, Mr Keller said: “From our investigations it is unclear whether these are actually two organisations with close links or two faces of the same organisation.”
David Halevy, the head of Shuva Israel, told the Jerusalem Post that donations subsidised projects in West Bank settlements and outposts such as schools, libraries, youth centres and empowerment training for women.
Mr Keller said most of the organisations were quite open about their fundraising activities, but that donations in support of the settlements almost certainly broke the terms of the US tax-exemption laws.
“On the public relations side they say they are involved in humanitarian and non-political work, but to their supporters they play up their assistance for the settlers’ nationalist and expansionist activities. This is the way we hope to catch them out.”
A recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a group of academics and former diplomats, identified several other settler organisations fund-raising in the United States.
It noted that the settlement of Sussya in the South Hebron Hills raised funds through a tax-exempt US organisation called PEF Israel Endowment Funds, registered in Manhattan. In 2007, Forbes, the business magazine, ranked PEF as one of the 200 largest charities in the US.
Other US tax-exempt charities named were the One Israel Fund, which raises money for projects in outposts, and the Hebron Fund, which raises an average of $1.5 million a year on behalf of a few hundred extremist Jewish settlers encamped in the middle of Hebron.
The One Israel Fund claims on its website to be “the largest North American charity whose efforts are dedicated solely to the citizens and communities of Yesha”, a Hebrew acronym for the West Bank.
According to the ICG report, Christian Zionist groups also raise significant sums for the settlements. One website, Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, lists dozens of youth and community projects in the settlements it funds.
An investigation last month by the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz revealed that a group called American Friends of Ateret Cohanim had received tax-exempt status by claiming to fund educational institutes in Israel. In reality, however, it had transferred $1.6m to Ateret Cohanim, an extremist settler group, which buys Palestinian land and homes in East Jerusalem, especially in the Muslim quarter of the Old City.
Gush Shalom also hopes to increase pressure on the funding of organisations by encouraging civil litigation in the United States from Palestinian victims of settler violence in a bid to characterise the attacks as “terror activity”.
Court rulings would then be sought to shut down the settlers’ US fund-raising arms on the grounds that they support terrorism, in an echo of legal action by right-wing Jewish groups in the US against Muslim charities.
Two additional campaigns are mentioned in the memo.
In the coming months the group plans to highlight the links between the settlements and such large international Zionist organisations as the Jewish National Fund and the World Zionist Organisation.
The JNF funds Canada Park, established on three Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and the WZO is widely regarded as being implicated in the establishment of the outposts. In July the WZO announced that it would spend $5.5 million this year on agricultural projects for the settlers.
Gush Shalom also suggests exposing the Israeli government’s support for US lobby groups, such as Stand With Us and the Israel Project, that are engaged in what it calls “propaganda” on behalf of the settlements.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

Boycott Israel

Published on Thursday, August 20, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Neve Gordon

Israeli newspapers this summer are filled with angry articles about the push for an international boycott of Israel. Films have been withdrawn from Israeli film festivals, Leonard Cohen is under fire around the world for his decision to perform in Tel Aviv, and Oxfam has severed ties with a celebrity spokesperson, a British actress who also endorses cosmetics produced in the occupied territories. Clearly, the campaign to use the kind of tactics that helped put an end to the practice of apartheid in South Africa is gaining many followers around the world.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis -- even peaceniks -- aren't signing on. A global boycott can't help but contain echoes of anti-Semitism. It also brings up questions of a double standard (why not boycott China for its egregious violations of human rights?) and the seemingly contradictory position of approving a boycott of one's own nation.

It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organizations, unions and citizens to suspend cooperation with Israel. But today, as I watch my two boys playing in the yard, I am convinced that it is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself.

I say this because Israel has reached a historic crossroads, and times of crisis call for dramatic measures. I say this as a Jew who has chosen to raise his children in Israel, who has been a member of the Israeli peace camp for almost 30 years and who is deeply anxious about the country's future.

The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews -- whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel -- are citizens of the state of Israel.

The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime.

There are only two moral ways of achieving this goal.

The first is the one-state solution: offering citizenship to all Palestinians and thus establishing a bi-national democracy within the entire area controlled by Israel. Given the demographics, this would amount to the demise of Israel as a Jewish state; for most Israeli Jews, it is anathema.

The second means of ending our apartheid is through the two-state solution, which entails Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders (with possible one-for-one land swaps), the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel, while the rest can return to the new Palestinian state.

Geographically, the one-state solution appears much more feasible because Jews and Palestinians are already totally enmeshed; indeed, "on the ground," the one-state solution (in an apartheid manifestation) is a reality.

Ideologically, the two-state solution is more realistic because fewer than 1% of Jews and only a minority of Palestinians support binationalism.

For now, despite the concrete difficulties, it makes more sense to alter the geographic realities than the ideological ones. If at some future date the two peoples decide to share a state, they can do so, but currently this is not something they want.

So if the two-state solution is the way to stop the apartheid state, then how does one achieve this goal?

I am convinced that outside pressure is the only answer. Over the last three decades, Jewish settlers in the occupied territories have dramatically increased their numbers. The myth of the united Jerusalem has led to the creation of an apartheid city where Palestinians aren't citizens and lack basic services. The Israeli peace camp has gradually dwindled so that today it is almost nonexistent, and Israeli politics are moving more and more to the extreme right.

It is therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure. The words and condemnations from the Obama administration and the European Union have yielded no results, not even a settlement freeze, let alone a decision to withdraw from the occupied territories.

I consequently have decided to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that was launched by Palestinian activists in July 2005 and has since garnered widespread support around the globe. The objective is to ensure that Israel respects its obligations under international law and that Palestinians are granted the right to self-determination.

In Bilbao, Spain, in 2008, a coalition of organizations from all over the world formulated the 10-point Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign meant to pressure Israel in a "gradual, sustainable manner that is sensitive to context and capacity." For example, the effort begins with sanctions on and divestment from Israeli firms operating in the occupied territories, followed by actions against those that help sustain and reinforce the occupation in a visible manner. Along similar lines, artists who come to Israel in order to draw attention to the occupation are welcome, while those who just want to perform are not.

Nothing else has worked. Putting massive international pressure on Israel is the only way to guarantee that the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians -- my two boys included -- does not grow up in an apartheid regime.

This article orginally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Neve Gordon is the author of "Israel's Occupation" and teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel.

Are We Really Cattle?

By: Peter Chamberlin

19 August, 2009
Countercurrents.org

Have we really become “We the sheeple,” or are we still human beings?  The planet is dying under the thrall of a small minority of men who think of the rest of the human race as “cattle,” livestock for them to buy and sell.

The ruling class behaves much like a spoiled child, if they don't get to have everything their way all of the time, they throw this massive temper tantrum and threaten to upset the whole game.  They have gotten their way in everything for so long that they have fallen under the spell of their own propaganda.  They believe that we are sub-human animals, who should be herded into the best outcome possible.  But, have the rest of us begun to accept this as well?

As members of the human herd, most of us recoil at the “bovinian” suggestion, but consider just how much we do behave like a herd.  We willingly accept being treated like a herd, trusting our lives to politicians because we appreciate not having to make hard decisions for ourselves, being contented as cows, as our leaders and their hired hands drive us down a path to destruction, for the sake of them making a few dollars more in profit.

Preserving profits for the ruling elite is the only motivation (other than media-manipulated patriotism and nationalism) compelling us to fight our resource wars in Asia and Africa.  The leaders of the entire world pretend that we are there to fight against terrorism, even though they know that the terrorism comes with us, their hope being their own little “piece of the action.”  The American way is to wage war with dollars, as well as bombs.

What the hell is the matter with people?  Has everyone so bought-in to the propaganda that leads them to their own deaths that they believe the lies that control us?  Willfully following sell-out leaders, who are leading their own countries to death and slavery is more than merely suicidal, it's something a dumb animal would do.

Does the herd even think of itself as human anymore?  Would it really matter what the herd thought about anything, anyway?  Nothing will change as long as we willingly accept this idiocy.  We have not changed.   We are still human beings.  Our feelings and concerns for ourselves, our families and our friends are legitimate, and just as real and as valid as those shared by the ruling class elitists who send our sons and daughters into battle to control the gas and oil, just like everyone who is being targeted by our government as it sends forth Special Forces and their “Islamist” counterparts to kill, not in the name of freedom, but to seize unfair economic advantage!

The entire “conflict” within the “arc of crisis” that is schemed over by Brzezinski and friends is manufactured for our entertainment and distraction.  It is foolishness to look at “militant Islamists” and the CIA Special Forces teams who are sent in to fight them as two separate entities, without realizing that they are one and the same.

In Central Asia, the scary “Islamists” appear, as if by magic, wherever the oil companies have an interest.  Theories are floated that the sudden rush of militant extremists in western China and the former countries of the Soviet Union is explained as an unfortunate by-product of Pakistan's anti-Taliban offensive, as militants trained in Pakistan's FATA Region return to their native countries.

From Russia to China and southwards, attacks begin in targeted nations and then someone appears in the national media to warn of the “Islamist” threat.  News stories begin to appear of running gun battles and explosions, linking all of them to the “militant” threat.  Attacks are made upon adversaries of the United States and those countries then become blacklisted as unstable for development and the subservient, media dutifully reports that our enemies have been attacked our other enemies.

Whose interests does this serve—crazy militants, with their warped dreams of a “caliphate,” or American oil companies, who are trying to undermine China, Iran and Russia?  The “powers that be” are playing a very dangerous game with all of our lives.

How long will the countries targeted by American/Islamist limited warfare continue to tolerate this bold assault?  China, in particular, is presently bound by the economic chains that have been forged with the United States.  How much longer will it continue to abide provocations in Xinjiang and other Chinese interests from Central Asia, to Pakistan, to Africa?  It would be extremely unprofitable right now for China to haul the United States before the UN Security Council or to take military actions in retaliation for this low-intensity war that has been waged upon them.  But that will not always be true.  When the American house of cards finishes collapsing all bets will be off.

Our new administration in Washington has been empowered with as mandate for change, yet the only change that they have opted for is to accelerate the plans for world conquest in Central Asia.  The only real impediment to that plan is the American people.  Will the people continue to tolerate Obama's impersonation of Bush and allow this obscene escalation of the neocon wars?

The ruling class fears an aware, vigilant majority.  They know the people's power and they tremble before it.  It is only the people themselves, the “sheeple,” who fail to realize the awesome powers delegated into our hands. It upsets the self-appointed whenever anyone begins to regain any measure of that control back, depriving the secret rulers of their illegitimate power to dictate the terms of our lives.  The worst thing of all for them would be if all people everywhere were suddenly allowed to start thinking for themselves, with everyone making their own decisions.

The human race finds itself in an extremely unusual dilemma; if the best-laid plans of mankind's finest minds succeed, then humanity may cease to exist.  If the plan that has been crafted by the finest minds, financed by the world's greatest “benefactors” and supported by nearly every government on the face of the planet, succeeds, then “humankind” may cease to exist, to be replaced by a new master-race parasitic species and its new sub-human host species (the living remainder of the “useless eaters”).

A great moment of crisis has been manufactured for us.  The decisions that have been made have maneuvered us into a kill box, so that the harvesting of the “useless eaters” may begin.

If mankind as a whole cannot embrace a new benevolent identity and move forward together, then, thanks to our enslavement to technological advancements, our old malevolent identities are positioned to destroy all life on this planet.  A decision to change must be made on a societal level.  The world cannot change, humanity cannot evolve to the next level, until someone leads the way.  The self-appointed leadership of the “free world” has to either lead the way or get out of the path of others who understand the path to mankind's salvation.

The way of force must be replaced by the path of cooperation.  This is not a direction that is presently coming from the United States; it is entirely an Asian phenomenon.  The Western Darwinian world of domination by the strongest has brought us to the point of economic collapse and unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe.  The rulers of this old order have one solution to all problems—more force, the closed fist.  There is a better way.

Wherever the models of supply and governance are breaking-down, force is the immediate solution, the only solution offered.  If all the people cannot be fed, then obviously (only to inhuman thinkers) there must be too many people, therefore, we must thin-out the herd of “useless eaters” (non-productive members of society).  Simply helping the people in need would not be “profitable.”  The United States, as the leader of the developing world, must have more energy and other strategic resources available to it than the rest of the world, therefore, we are justified in moving those resources out of the Middle East and Central Asia into our hands, whatever is required to do so (taking by force).

Likewise, in domestic policies such as health care and education reform, it is “wasteful” of limited resources to supply high-dollar medical treatments to those patients whose health will never improve, or expensive educations to students who are less than “exceptional.”  The way of force embraces such cost-cutting ideas, depicting them as moral choices, since limited funds are not “wasted” on life-supporting treatments for the terminally ill, or on educational opportunities for mediocre students ( those should be wasted the ignorant cousins of the elite).

This is the thinking of the old order that has put us in our current dilemma.  The “selfish man” having his way when he really shouldn't, has created a real threat to all mankind.  The selfish must give way to the needs of the entire community.

A new generation of selfless leaders is arising to meet the challenge posed by the dying order.  Where “selfish man” cannot conceive of anything but a profit-based international order, “new man” cannot accept thinking that does not contain a human element, a compassionate direction.  The old malevolent thinking is violence based, whereas new man cannot conceive of killing his fellow man.  Selfless leaders of the humanity movement have great difficulty in understanding the thinking of the heartless corporate extortionists.  There is a basic disconnect between the thinking of the old man and the “new man” who is rising-up amongst them.  This gives the new man the advantage, if he can only take advantage of it.

This brings the situation down to where we witness a rising minority of “new men” facing-off against a persevering minority of the super-wealthy, who are perhaps even more dedicated to preserving their old selfish order of mankind, whatever the potential costs.  The leadership of the rising humanitarian order is trying every reasonable means at its disposal to overturn the old order, while the leadership of the house of profit is using every means in its limitless bag of tricks to destroy the threat.

Through economic and military coercion the United States has persuaded the world into allowing it almost free rein in shaping international institutions and the ideas that are acceptable to world opinion.  We have created an illusory image of ourselves which hides American war crimes and crimes against humanity behind a hypocritical mask of humanitarianism and “foreign aid.”

Membership in America's club requires a sell-out of their countrymen from the leaders of the nations that are seeking our “aid packages” or entrance into our economic system.  The sell-out is to embrace our manufactured image, blinding themselves to the reality that our leaders create.  The real image of America, one of double-dealings and secret wars, is hidden from the world by common consent.  The pay-off for these leaders is the personal fortunes that each of them has acquired and gained notoriety for in their home countries.

By letting Americans determine which words and opinions are “politically correct” in acceptable discussion in the media, crimes are hidden and false realities become the foundation of public debate.  In this way, internal debate bends to accommodate the false American reality.  This American power to simultaneously bully and seduce their way in the world, extending into the basic rights of the Nations involved, has allowed our inept leaders to force upon the world the situation we face today.  Further bullying and super-scheming by Obama and Brzezinski will not achieve American objectives of total power.  Another way must be found.

It is only a matter of time before America is taken out of the world's way.  It is inevitable that the world will embrace the way of international cooperation, over the American way of secret and open conquests.  The only alternative to a world centered on meeting its own needs is the present course we are trapped on, one wherein the victor claims all the spoils of war.  That world cannot be attained within our technological environment (do the math).  Nature will continue, either with us, or in spite of us.

The world needs a life-changing moment, one that will force all thinking humans to make life-changing decisions, so that we can all emerge from it as a different people, new men and women.

Everything is now black and white, not black or white as it should be.  The way forward is for each of us to begin to see both sides, or all sides, of contentious issues.  Life has conditioned us to divide everything new into categories, based on determinants of fear, greed, or other motivators.  We have to understand that these are the motivators of children, or animals, not adult human beings.  There are so many simple solutions to be found by those without blinders, with two eyes to see.

The world will solve its problems and go on, as long as we don't prevent that from happening.  The question of whether we will continue to seek to force the world to accept American domination, or if we will learn to play well with others, will determine whether or not we are accepted into the new order that is now emerging in Asia and beyond.

The energy supplies and other natural resources that are being fought over will be moved to markets, no matter what.  Fighting to claim them, or to keep others from obtaining them, is a backwards policy, meant to enrich the few at the sake of the many.  All of this will change.

Whether or not this Nation will be part of the new world alliance is a question that each of us must answer.  Will we passively allow the United States to perish from the face of the earth or develop into the full-blown pariah nation that have been becoming, that we will deserve for impeding the advancement of the human race, or will we stop the madness and deception by altering our leaders' commitment to their present path?   Or, will we interfere with their petty plans?

Barack Obama has a very clear choice to make, whether he is going to be remembered as humanity's emancipator from war or as history's last tyrant?   Obama has to decide what means more to him, pursuing a path that will engender hope in the entire human race, or pursuing his own ambition.  Will he take a stand for freedom and human decency by ending all of our wars right now with the stroke of a pen, or will he continue to drag us down the path of total war in Central Asia, the path that we were bound to by the former tyrants, Bush and Cheney?

peterchamberlin@naharnet.com

The Wonderful World Of Rational Superstition

By Case Wagenvoord

19 August, 2009

If you scratch at economic theory long enough, you discover it's little more than long strings of arcane mathematical formulae grounded in superstition (the Invisible Hand of the Market), platitudes (peaceful competition) and pipe dreams (eternal growth).

This could explain why our economy has made a terminal trip to the outhouse. Future historians will look back and scratch their heads and wonder how so many bright and educated people allowed superstition to drag them around by their collective nose.

Author Richard Heinburg ( http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49798 ) points out that our government has committed $23.7 trillion dollars in “total potential government support” in an attempt to reinflate a new asset bubble. This figure comes from the inspector general of the government's Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Million, billion, trillion—so what! They all sound the same, so it's hard to distinguish between them…

…unless you substitute seconds for dollars, and then you get the following relationships:

· A million is the equivalent of 11.7 days.

· A billion is the equivalent of 37 years.

· A trillion is the equivalent of 37,000 years.

Yet Obama assure us that the worst is behind us. And he is right. When you fall off a mountain, the fall eventually stops. However, the fall doesn't kill you; it's the sudden stop at the end.

Prior recessions have been like diving into a body of water. You go under water and then you bob back to the surface.

With this meltdown, we fell off the mountain, and it's doubtful we'll climb back up again.

According to Heinburg, capitalism's superstitious believe in unlimited growth has hit a wall—resource depletion. As could be expected, the mainstream response to this is another platitude, “Man's” infinite ingenuity, i.e., it's only a matter of time before we invent ourselves out of the mess we've made. The only problem with this is that you can't invent coal or oil unless you kill a lot of dinosaurs and keep them under heat and pressure for millions of years. And given that oil, coal and natural gas supply 95% of the world's energy needs, it's doubtful we'll come up with an alternative

As Heinburg explains:

“If the physical scientists who warn about limits to growth are right, confronting the global economic meltdown implies far more than merely getting the banks and mortgage lenders back on their feet. Indeed, in that case we face a fundamental change in our economy as significant as the advent of the industrial revolution. We are at a historic inflection point—the ending of decades of expansion and the beginning of an inevitable period of contraction that will continue until humanity is once again living within the limits of Earth's regenerative system.”

One could argue that the tremendous technological advances of the past 200 years have been a fluke made possible by an abundance of cheap oil, and that is what is happening now is a restoration of sanity as the Earth forces us to return to a more balanced lifestyle.

Heinburg bases his arguments on science that has not been funded by Big Oil. Counter arguments tend to leave the world of science and wander into the foggy fields of theology. “You gotta believe! We'll come up with something, so stop being such a heretical naysayer and join the church. God (the Invisible Hand) is in his heaven, and we are his chosen species, so nothing bad can happen to us.”

And witches fly on broom.

Note: If you want a good read, click on the above link. The article is long, but Heinburg is a fluid writer whose prose carries you along.

Case Wagenvoord is a citizen who reads. He blogs at http://belacquajones.blogpsot.com and welcomes comments at Wagenvoord@msn.com .

Money Is God, Greed Is King And Corruption Runs The Game

By Siv O'Neall

19 August, 2009
Axis of Logic

Never has the world been subjected to as pure and destructive lunacy as at this time in history. Never have the anti-civilization voices been heard as stridently as in the so-called debate that is going on today. The insane and desperate noise of the single-party political scene in the United States, the deafening roar of the Mafia, is threatening, and seemingly managing quite well, to out-thunder the few reasonable and civilized voices that are attempting to be heard over the din.

The civilized debate that might be expected to be going on about health care, tax reforms, regulation of financial speculation, the criminality of imperial wars, improving education and much more, is poisoned while still in the womb, by the formidable power of the one political party that is spelled M O N E Y. Their power tools are the mass media, the ceaseless propaganda machines, the formidable use of hypnotic slogans and, added to that, the severe lack of insight and intellectual curiosity of the U.S. citizens. All this is made possible through the obscene lowering of educational standards and the carefully programmed lack of information that is the normal state of things today in Middle America.

One of the most obvious and insidious weapons of the Money Party is the use of the word socialism. U.S citizens have been thoroughly brainwashed to a state of visceral fear of socialism as the great demon that is out to destroy everything that is decent in life, keep us from having any form of an individual choice as to how to live out lives. It is a decadent form of government that Europeans are victims of, where the spirit of free enterprise is deadened by too much welfare protection, where the rich have to take care of the poor who can thus go on idling their lives away in apathy and shameless dependence on the government.

While U.S citizens are either working themselves to death or being spiritually stifled by joblessness and the lack of hope for a better future, they still seem to believe that the U.S. is the greatest democracy in the world, the only really free country where everybody has the right of vote, has the possibility of climbing up the rungs on the social ladder, has the right to an excellent education, the right to free speech, ‘the good life’ in a country with a strictly limited role of the government.

The United States is supposedly in the political, military and cultural forefront all over the world and has the right to interfere wherever its authority is questioned or threatened. The terrifying lack of insight of U.S. citizens into the various passions and ambitions that make up the foundation for a meaningful life for all people in all nations and civilizations completely derails any potential of understanding how the world is made up. What drives us human beings to productiveness and to a feeling of comfort and satisfaction in our own capacity of leaving a positive imprint on the world around us? ‘Go out and buy’ say the American Money men. Give everybody a realistic chance to try his own motors, say I, and help him pull himself out of the quicksand if he fails in his efforts, due to lack of encouragement and lack of initial means of support.

The Money Party has led a centuries-long effort at deadening any humane impulse, stifling any creative and imaginative attempt to use leisure time in a constructive way, replacing all that would be of true value by inventing phony needs of accumulating wealth and symbols of status. With the effect that people are now generally convinced that money is value in itself, an end rather than a means.

The world is becoming an amoral and totally disjointed arena where insanity and unlimited greed rule and no humane principles can survive the attacks of the all powerful Money Party.

The poor are not supposed to survive, the old and sick have no more rights to a decent life. The words in the ongoing and stumbling efforts to create healthcare for all are being so completely distorted that the average American is made to believe propaganda phrases that no decent human being could possible have intended. But the average person does believe it. The hate-mongers on television have a credulous audience. It is really so simple. Socialism is the clue. Just tell people again and again, ever since McCarthyism held sway over fears and sanity, that socialism is the Devil. Make all those fundamentalists believe that anything that resembles a welfare net is a product of the anti-Christ and reason matters no more. Reason is burned at the stake. Mass hysteria takes over, leading to generalized insanity.

The men and women with a callousness that makes your blood run cold take the lead in inventing slogans – they are out to kill your grandparents, government bureaucracy will squash healthcare efficiency, you will die before your turn comes to get medical treatment. Public healthcare will cause national bankruptcy and taxes will go through the ceiling. Blatant lies are repeated again and again until a hypnotic phenomenon has converted them into truths to ignorant ‘Americans’. Government-run healthcare equals socialism – the Devil himself.

And the insane healthcare debate, if that is what it can be called, is far from being the only issue where reason has gone astray and nationalistic hubris and blindness have taken over.

‘America’ is the foremost, ‘America’ is the moral guardian of the world, ‘America’ is the only civilized nation, the only true democracy, are slogans that are so widely believed that no realistic arguments, no criminal wars, no senseless killing of innocent people, no perfectly visible crimes against citizens’ rights and screaming social injustice can possibly change the stern belief of U.S. citizens that they are at the top of the world and that nothing can limit their rights to let loose their cluster bombs and their mad destruction wherever and whenever they are told that there is a reason for U.S. intervention.

U.S. citizens are never taught to reason, to disagree, to doubt. The average American wears blinders so impenetrable that he can’t possibly see the world the way it is. ‘Truth’ is a malleable piece of clay that is made up for him and he swallows it hook, line and sinker.

Civilization is dying. The very notion of civilization is dead. Money has taken over. Money has been the heir apparent for centuries and in the Empire’s frantic reaching out of its tentacles over the rest of the world, it has already managed to convert a majority of the Western world, and more, to the belief that the Free Market is the solution to global well-being. As all people with open eyes know and see, the Free Market was set up in order to get rid of the poor and to enable the Money wizards to rule with virtually no opposition. The fact that the planet is destroyed in the process seems to be of no importance to these lunatics. Maximizing profit is the only real goal and people and the planet be damned. The Free Market juggernaut crushes everything in its way. That’s what it was invented for and fascism is the name of the game. It is worse than any previous fascist regime since it has more power and practically no opposition, since the lawlessness is mostly hidden behind a screen of secrecy and lies.

The only hope for humanity today is in the form of socialism that is growing in Latin America, in spite of the violent resistance and frequent sabotage from the U.S. governments. This enormously important phenomenon is what sends chills along the spines of U.S. politicians and the Money men all over the Western world.

Siv O'Neall is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. Her insightful essays are republished and read worldwide. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com. Read her Biography and more of her articles on Axis of Logic

Iraq War's Winners and Losers

Published on Monday, August 17, 2009 by Consortium News

by Sherwood Ross

"On my last day in Iraq," veteran McClatchy News correspondent Leila Fadel wrote August 9, "as on my first day in Iraq, I couldn't see what the United States and its allies had accomplished. ... I couldn't understand what thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed."

Quite a few oil company CEO's and "defense" industry executives, however, do have a pretty good idea why that war is being fought.  As Michael Cherkasky, president of Kroll Inc., said a year after the Iraq invasion boosted his security firm's profits 231 percent: "It's the Gold Rush."

What follows is a brief look at some of the outfits that cashed in, and at the multitudes that got took.

"Defense Earnings Continue to Soar," Renae Merle wrote in The Washington Post on July 30, 2007. "Several of Washington's largest defense contractors said last week that they continue to benefit from a boom in spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan..."

Merle added, "Profit reports from Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin showed particularly strong results in operations in the region." More recently, Boeing's second-quarter earnings this year rose 17 percent, Associated Pressreported, in part because of what APcalled "robust defense sales."

But war, it turns out, is not only unhealthy for human beings, it is not uniformly good for the economy.  Many sectors suffer, including non-defense employment, as a war can destroy more jobs than it creates.

While the makers of warplanes may be flying high, these are "Tough Times For Commercial Aerospace," Business Week reported July 13. "The sector is contending with the deepening global recession, declining air traffic, capacity cuts by airlines, and reduced availability of financing for aircraft purchases."  The general public suffers, too.

"As President Bush tried to fight the war without increasing taxes, the Iraq war has displaced private investment and/or government expenditures, including investments in infrastructure, R&D and education: they are less than they would otherwise have been," write Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Stiglitz holds a Nobel Prize in economics and Bilmes is former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce. They say government money spent in Iraq does not stimulate the economy in the way that the same amounts spent at home would.

The war has also starved countless firms for expansion bucks.

"Higher borrowing costs for business since the beginning of the Iraq war are bleeding manufacturing investment," Greg Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse. And when entrepreneurs -- who hire so many -- lack growth capital, job creation takes a real hit.

We might recall too, the millions around the world who filled the streets to protest President Bush's impending attack on Iraq and who have quit buying U.S. products, further reducing sales and employment.

"American firms, especially those that have become icons, like McDonald's and Coca-Cola, may also suffer, not so much from explicit boycotts as from a broader sense of dislike of all things American," Stiglitz and Bilmes wrote.

"America's standing in the world has never been lower," the authors said, noting that in 2007, U.S. "favorable" ratings plunged to 29 percent in Indonesia and nine percent in Turkey. "Large numbers of wealthy people in the Middle East - where the oil money and inequality put individual wealth in the billions - have shifted banking from America to elsewhere," they said.

Because the Iraq war crippled that country's oil industry, output fell, supplies tightened, and, according to Palast, "World prices leaped to reflect the shortfall."

What's more, Palast pointed out, after the Iraq invasion the Saudis withheld more than a million barrels of oil a day from the market. "The one-year 121 percent post-invasion jump in the price of crude, from under $30 a barrel to over $60, sucked that $120 billion windfall to the Saudis from SUV drivers and factory owners in the West," he said.

Count the Saudis among the big winners.

The oil spike subtracted 1.2 percent from the gross domestic product, "costing the USA just over one million jobs," Palast reckoned. Stiglitz and Bilmes said the oil price spike meant "American families have had to spend about 5 percent more of their income on gasoline and heating than before."

Last year, the Iraq and Afghan wars cost each American household $138 per month in taxes, they estimated. Count the Joneses among the big losers.

Palast wrote, "It has been a very good war for Big Oil - courtesy of OPEC price hikes. The five oil giants saw profits rise from $34 billion in 2002 to $81 billion in 2004...But this tsunami of black ink was nothing compared to the wave of $120 billion in profits to come in 2006: $15.6 billion for Conoco, $17.1 billion for Chevron and the Mother of All Earnings, Exxon's $39.5 billion in 2006 on sales of $378 billion."

Palast noted that oil firms have their own reserves whose value is tied to OPEC's price targets, and "The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil oil alone by just over $666 billion...

"Chevron Oil, where Condoleezza Rice had served as a director, gained a quarter trillion dollars in value...I calculate that the top five oil operators saw their reserves rise in value by over $2.363 trillion."

Who's surprised when Forbes reports of the ten most profitable corporations in the world five are now oil and gas companies - Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, and Petro-China.

"Since the Iraq War began," Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive wrote, "aerospace and defense industry stocks have more than doubled. General Dynamics did even better than that. Its stock has tripled."

An Associated Pressaccount published July 23 observed: "With the military fighting two wars and Pentagon budgets on a steady upward rise, defense companies regularly posted huge gains in profits and rosier earnings forecasts during recent quarters. Even as the rest of the economy tumbled last fall, military contractors, with the federal government as their primary customer, were a relative safe haven."

Among the big winners are top Pentagon contractors, as ranked by WashingtonTechnology.com as of 2008. Halliburton spun off KBR in 2007 and their operations are covered later. Data was selected for typical years 2007-09.

1. Lockheed Martin, of Bethesda, Maryland, a major warplane builder, in 2007 alone earned profits of $3 billion on sales of nearly $42 billion.
2. Boeing, of Chicago, saw its 2007 net profit shoot up 84 percent to $4 billion, fed by "strong growth in defense earnings," according to an Agence France-Presse report.
3. KBR
4. Northrop Grumman, of Los Angeles, a manufacturer of bombers, warships and military electronics, had 2007 profits of $1.8 billion on sales of $32 billion.
5. General Dynamics, of Falls Church, Virginia, had profits in 2008 of about $2.5 billion on sales of $29 billion. It makes tanks, combat vehicles, and mission-critical information systems.
6. Raytheon, of Waltham, Massachusetts, reported about $23 billion in sales for 2008. It is the world's largest missile maker and Bloomberg News says it is benefiting from "higher domestic defense spending and U.S. arms exports."
7. Scientific International Applications Corp., of La Jolla, California, an engineering and technology supplier to the Pentagon, had sales of $10 billion for fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2009, and net income of $452 million.
8. L-3, of New York City, has enjoyed sales growth of about 25 percent a year recently. Its total 2008 sales of $15 billion brought it profits of nearly $900 million. Its primary customer is the Defense Department, to which it supplies high tech surveillance and reconnaissance systems.
9. EDS Corp., of Plano, Texas, purchased by Hewlett-Packard in May, 2008, had 2007 sales of nearly $20 billion. Its priority project is building the $12 billion Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, said to be the largest private network in the world.
10. Fluor Corp., of Irvine, Texas, an engineering and construction firm, had net earnings of $720 million in 2008 on sales of $22 billion.

The good times continue to roll for military contractors under President Obama, who has increased the Pentagon's budget by 4 percent to a total of about $700 billion. One reason military contractors fare so well is that no-bid contracts with built-in profit margins tumble out of the Pentagon cornucopia directly into their laps.

The element of "risk," so basic to capitalism, has been trampled by Pentagon purchasing agents even as its top brass rattle their missiles at supposedly enemy governments abroad. If this isn't enough, in 2004 the Bush administration slipped a special provision into tax legislation to cut the tax on war profits to 7 percent compared to 21 percent paid by most U.S. manufacturers.

Former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, according to author Pratap Chatterjee in his Halliburton's Army, raked in "more than $25 billion since the company won a ten-year contract in late 2001 to supply U.S. troops in combat situations around the world."

As all know, President Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney previously headed Halliburton (1995-2000) and landed in the White House the same year Halliburton got its humungous outsourcing contract. Earlier, as Defense Secretary, (1989-1993) Cheney sparked the revolutionary change to outsourcing military support services to the privateers. Today, Halliburton ranks among the biggest "defense" winners of all.

Halliburton's army "employs enough people to staff one hundred battalions, a total of more than 50,000 personnel who work for KBR, a contract that is now projected to reach $150 billion," Chatterjee wrote.

"Together with the workers who are rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and the private security divisions of companies like Blackwater, Halliburton's Army now outnumber the uniformed soldiers on the ground in Iraq."

Accompanying Pentagon outsourcing, Chatterjee wrote, "is the potential for bribery, corruption, and fraud. Dozens of Halliburton/KBR workers and their subcontractors have already been arrested and charged, and several are already serving jail terms for stealing millions of dollars, notably from Camp Arifjan in Kuwait."

There's likely no better example of how Halliburton/KBR literally burned taxpayers' dollars than its destruction of $85,000 Mercedes and Volvo trucks when they got flat tires and were abandoned.

James Warren, a convoy truck driver testified to the Government Affairs Committee in July 2004, "KBR didn't seem to care what happened to its trucks...It was common to torch trucks that we abandoned...even though we all carried chains and could have towed them to be repaired."

Bunnatine Greenhouse, once top contract official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, made headlines by demanding old-fashioned free enterprise competitive bidding. She told a Senate committee in 2005: "I can unequivocally state the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed" in 20 years of working on government contracts.

Greenhouse was demoted for her adherence to the law, Chatterjee said, but she became a cover girl at Fraud magazine and was honored by the Giraffe Society, a tribute to one Federal employee who stuck her neck out.

Tales of Halliburton/KBR's alleged swindles fill books. Rory Maybee, a former Halliburton/KBR contractor who worked at dining facilities in Camp Anaconda in 2004 told the U.S. Senate Democratic Policy Committee "that the company often provided rotten food to the troops and often charged the army for 20 thousand meals a day when it was serving only ten thousand."

Food swindling, though, is small potatoes. Say Stiglitz and Bilmes: "KBR has also been implicated in a lucrative insurance scam that has gouged U.S. taxpayers for at least $600 million."

To fatten profit margins, contractors who cheat U.S. taxpayers apparently think nothing of underpaying their help.

"While the executives of KBR, Blackwater, and other firms are making profits, many of those performing the menial work, such as cooking, driving, cleaning, and laundry, are poorly paid nationals from India, Pakistan, and other Asian and African countries," Stiglitz and Bilmes wrote. "Indian cooks are reported to earn $3-$5 a day. At the same time, KBR bills the American taxpayer $100 per load of laundry."

Blackwater, the security firm repeatedly charged with shoot-first tactics, fraudulently obtained small-business set-aside contracts worth more than $144 million, the authors asserted.

According to Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill, the security firm in 2004 got a five-year contract to protect U.S. officials in Iraq totaling $229 million but as of June 2006, just two years into the contract, it had been paid $321 million, and by late 2007 it had been paid more than $750 million.

Scahill reported an audit charged that Blackwater included profit in its overhead and its total costs. The result was "not only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit to profit," Scahill wrote. "The audit also alleged that the company tried to inflate its profits by representing different Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies."

"As of summer, 2007, there were more ‘private contractors' deployed on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq (180,000) than there were actual soldiers (160,000)," Scahill said. "These contractors worked for some 630 companies and drew personnel from more than 100 countries around the globe. ... This meant the U.S. military had actually become the junior partner in the coalition that occupies Iraq."

And each Blackwater operative was costing the American taxpayers $1,222 per day. The Defense Department remains, of course, America's No. 1 Employer, with 2.3 million workers (roughly twice the size of Wal-Mart, which has 1.2 million staffers) perhaps because America's biggest export is war.

"Who pays Halliburton and Bechtel?" philosopher Noam Chomsky asked rhetorically in his Imperial Ambitions. "The U.S. taxpayer," he answers.

"The same taxpayers fund the military-corporate system of weapons manufacturers and technology companies that bombed Iraq. So first you destroy Iraq, then you rebuild it. It's a transfer of wealth from the general population to narrow sectors of the population."

It's also been a body blow to Iraq, killing an estimated one million inhabitants, forcing two million into exile and millions more out of their homes. Incredibly, the U.S. proposed to reconstruct the nation it invaded with their oil revenues - and then, after taking perhaps $8 billion left the job undone. (Since the U.S. kept no records of how the dough was dispensed, it is not possible to identify the recipients.)

As Stiglitz and Bilmes remind us, "The money spent on Iraq could have been spent on schools, roads, or research. These investments yield high returns."

In an article in the Aug. 24 Nation, policy analyst Georgia Levenson Keohane cites the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to the effect that 48 states are reporting deficits totaling nearly $166 billion, projected to reach, cumulatively, $350 billion-$370 billion by 2011.

"Although many states have attempted tax increases, these are politically challenging and often insufficient to close the gaps. Consequently, statehouses have been forced to cut vital services at a time when the need for them is ever more desperate," Keohane wrote.

In the same issue, reporter Marc Cooper notes the poverty rate in Los Angeles county borders on 20 percent; that California's schools are ranked 47th nationally; that the state college system has suspended admissions for Spring 2010; that thousands of state workers are being laid off and/or forced to take furlough days; that unemployment has reached 12 percent; that state parks are being closed; that personal bankruptcies peaked last; that one in four "capsized mortgages in the U.S. is in California."

Plus, California's bond rating is just above the junk level and it faces a $26 billion budget shortfall. 

California's woes need to be examined in the light of the $116 billion the National Priorities Project of Northampton, Massachusetts, says its taxpayers have shelled out for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.

Those same dollars roughly would put four million California students through a four-year college. Bear in mind, too, outlays for those wars are but a fraction of all Pentagon spending, so the total military tax bill is far higher than $116 billion to California.

In calling for a reduction in military spending, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, said, "The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity even with a repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy....

"[American] well-being is far more endangered by a proposal for substantial reductions in Medicare, Social Security or other important domestic areas than it would be by canceling weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face."

On the other hand, maybe Americans want to keep paying to operate 2,000 domestic and foreign military bases and spend more money on armies and weapons of death than all other nations combined. Maybe they like living in the greatest Warfare State the world has ever known.

My hunch, though, is a lot of Americans haven't connected the country's looming bankruptcy with the greedy, gang from the military-industrial complex out to control the planet, its people and its precious resources.

After the long-suffering civilian population of Iraq, whose crime was having oil - a country Steiglitz says that has been rendered virtually unlivable - the big losers are the American taxpayers who are bleeding income, jobs and quality of life, not just sacrificing family members, on behalf of a runaway war machine.

California's plight is being repeated everywhere. A great nation is being looted and millions of its citizens are being pauperized before our eyes.

© 2009 Consortium News

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes”. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.

A Thousand Little Gitmos

Published on Monday, August 17, 2009 by Mother Jones

How the federal courts turned into star chambers for terrorism cases—and why Obama may keep them that way.

by Petra Bartosiewicz

The last person to see Syed Mehmood Hashmi as a free man was his friend Mohammed Haroon Saleem, who on June 6, 2006, drove Hashmi to London's Heathrow Airport, walked him to the security checkpoint, and watched him hoist his bag and head for the gate. But Hashmi never made his flight. At passport control, constables pulled him from the line and told him they had an extradition warrant on behalf of the US government. He was to be charged with aiding Al Qaeda.

Today Hashmi, who is 29, sits in a windowless cell, in solitary confinement. He is not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio or read a newspaper unless it is at least 30 days old and censored. He is not allowed to speak to guards, other inmates, or the media, or to write anyone but his attorney and his family (once a week on three single-sided pages). The only people cleared to visit, besides his lawyer, are his mother and father, but he couldn't see them for three months after he was caught shadowboxing in his cell-an infraction that cost him visiting privileges. Hashmi's lawyer, Sean Maher, says the isolation is slowly driving his client mad.

Hashmi is not in Guantanamo Bay, nor is he an enemy combatant. He's a US citizen, born in Pakistan and raised in Flushing, Queens, facing trial in federal court in Manhattan. His home for the past two years has been the Special Housing Unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a stone's throw from the Brooklyn Bridge. Hashmi might be guilty, he might not. We may never know-because when he goes before judge and jury later this year he won't get a fair trial. Much of the government's evidence against him is secret, and he can't see it because he doesn't have a security clearance. Maher, who does have a security clearance, can't see much of it either. Maher finds this incredible.

"There are cases across the country where men are being convicted and given astronomical sentences under the most inhumane and draconian conditions possible," says Maher. "Animals at the Bronx Zoo get treated better than this."

As one of his first official acts, President Obama issued an order to shutter Guantanamo and review all US terrorism detention policies. But no change is on the horizon for the dozens of terror cases cycling through the federal court system-some of which, thanks to a range of post-9/11 measures, have come to resemble the kind of jurisprudence practiced at Guantanamo.

Defendants who have never been tried or convicted of anything are locked in solitary confinement, sometimes for years. Evidence is routinely kept secret from the defense. Attorneys are forbidden to reveal classified information even if it's already in the public domain. (Among the materials deemed too hot for public consumption in Hashmi's case is a college term paper titled "How Did 9/11 Change the World?") In some cases, the prosecutors are not permitted to view the most sensitive classified evidence in their own cases-instead, intelligence agencies present this critical information to the judge alone. Many of these cases involve US citizens or legal residents; in many instances, they are setting precedents that degrade legal standards across the system.

This, according to the government, is how Hashmi ended up behind bars: In 2004, while in graduate school in London, he allowed an acquaintance from Queens named Mohammed Junaid Babar to crash at his apartment for two weeks. Babar stashed his luggage at Hashmi's place-luggage that, the government says, contained "military gear" for Al Qaeda. (Babar eventually pled guilty to handing the gear-a bunch of raincoats and waterproof socks-off to Al Qaeda's No. 3 man.) The government says Hashmi knew the contents of the luggage and their destination, so he knowingly aided someone who was aiding terrorists. Babar is now the government's star witness against Hashmi, a role he has played in other cases in an effort to whittle down his own sentence; he may ultimately get off with time served. Meanwhile Hashmi, who is not accused of any direct connection to Al Qaeda, faces 70 years in prison.

There's no argument against reasonable measures to secure possibly dangerous terrorists. But in cases like Hashmi's, secrecy is often applied with little vetting from judges, who defer to the government's claims of national security. Maher says this can mean something as basic as not being allowed to show his client a photograph to see if he can identify the people in it. "How can you defend someone like this?" he asks.

Prosecutors have also had wide latitude to use secret witnesses, as well as information of questionable origin. A 2005 case involving Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a US citizen, hinged on a coerced confession obtained by Saudi authorities. During the trial, which Amnesty International declared unfair, prosecutors used a controversial tactic called the "silent witness" rule to show some evidence to jurors but not defense attorneys.

All the secrecy might make sense if it involved truly sensitive information. But when such evidence has been exposed, it's often proved to be flawed or irrelevant. In one 2007 case, a prosecutor told me, a piece of the government's classified evidence turned out to be a newspaper clipping. And in the 2006 trial of two Albany men charged in a plot to traffic a Stinger missile, a crucial piece of the government's evidence turned out to be a mistranslation of the word "mister" or "brother," wrongly interpreted as "commander." After the mistake was revealed in open court, the Justice Department locked down all its evidence and demanded that defense attorneys review materials with a DOJ monitor present at all times.

Obama's detention-review commission is due to make its recommendations this summer; one much debated option is a new national security court, staffed by specially cleared judges and juries, with lower due-process standards and far-reaching secrecy measures. The idea was first articulated in a 2006 white paper by Andrew C. McCarthy, the government's lead attorney in the trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the cleric who conspired to blow up various New York landmarks. McCarthy argued that the federal courts are unfit to try terrorism cases and that the presumption of innocence should not take precedence in matters of national security. Sensitive information cannot be shown to the defense, he wrote, because "to disseminate it, especially in wartime, is to educate the enemy."

McCarthy's ominous language belies the fact that most of the people tried on terrorism charges since 9/11 have only been charged with "material support," which can mean helping terrorists or merely thinking about doing so someday. The notion that we should retrofit the federal courts with a special star chamber for such cases is fraught with constitutional peril. As Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, who has presided over some of the most high-profile terrorism trials since 9/11, has put it, classification should be used only in cases of genuine national security concern-not to hide information that is merely "embarrassing and...ugly."

This story was supported by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

Copyright ©2009 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.