Assassinations Anyone?
CIA Claims of Cancelled Campaign are Hogwash
By Eric Margolis
July 20, 2009 "Toronto Sun" --- CIA director Leon Panetta just told
Congress he cancelled a secret operation to assassinate al-Qaida leaders.
The CIA campaign, authorized in 2001, had not yet become operational,
claimed Panetta.
I respect Panetta, but his claim is humbug. The U.S. has been trying
to kill al-Qaida personnel (real and imagined) since the Clinton
administration. These efforts continue under President Barack Obama. Claims
by Congress it was never informed are hogwash.
The CIA and Pentagon have been in the assassination business since the
early 1950s, using American hit teams or third parties. For example, a
CIA-organized attempt to assassinate Lebanon's leading Shia cleric, Muhammad
Fadlallah, using a truck bomb, failed, but killed 83 civilians and wounded
240.
In 1975, I was approached to join the Church Committee of the U.S.
Congress investigating CIA's attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, Congo's
Patrice Lumumba, Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Add to America's hit list Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan's Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, Indonesia's Sukarno, Chile's Marxist leaders and, very likely,
Yasser Arafat.
Libya's Moammar Khadaffy led me by the hand through the ruins of his
private quarters, showing me where a 2,000-pound U.S. bomb hit his bedroom,
killing his infant daughter. Most Pakistanis believe, rightly or wrongly,
the U.S. played a role in the assassination of President Zia ul-Haq.
To quote Josef Stalin's favourite saying, "No man. No problem."
Assassination was outlawed in the U.S. in 1976, but that did not stop
attempts by its last three administrations to emulate Israel's Mossad in the
"targeted killing" of enemies. The George W. Bush administration, and now
the Obama White House, sidestepped American law by saying the U.S. was at
war, and thus legally killing "enemy combatants." But Congress never
declared war.
CHENEY'S SQUAD
Washington is buzzing about a secret death squad run by Dick Cheney
when he was vice-president and his protege, the new U.S. commander in
Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This gung-ho general led the
Pentagon's super secret Special Operations Command, which has become a major
rival to the CIA in the business of "wet affairs" (as the KGB used to call
assassinations) and covert raids.
Democrats are all over Cheney on the death squad issue, as are some
Republicans -- in order to shield Bush. But the orders likely came from
Bush, who bears ultimate responsibility.
Americans are now being deluged by sordid scandals from the Bush years
about torture, kidnapping, brutal secret prisons, brainwashing, mass
surveillance of American's phones, e-mail, and banking.
In 2001, as this column previously reported, U.S. Special Forces
oversaw the murder at Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan, of thousands of captured
Taliban fighters by Uzbek forces of the Communist warlord, Rashid Dostum.
CIA was paying Dostum, a notorious war criminal from the 1980s,
millions to fight Taliban. Dostum is poised to become vice-president of the
U.S.-installed government of President Hamid Karzai. Bush hushed up this
major war crime.
America is hardly alone in trying to rub out enemies or those who
thwart its designs. Britain's MI-6 and France's SDECE were notorious for
sending out assassins. The late chief of SDECE told me how he had been
ordered by then-president Francois Mitterrand to kill Libya's Khadaffy.
Israel's hit teams are feared around the globe.
DISGRACE
History shows that state-directed murder is more often than not
counterproductive and inevitably runs out of control, disgracing nations and
organizations that practise it.
But U.S. assassins are still at work. In Afghanistan and Pakistan,
U.S. drones are killing tribesmen almost daily. Over 90% are civilians.
Americans have a curious notion that killing people from the air is not
murder or even a crime, but somehow clean.
U.S. Predator attacks are illegal and violate U.S. and international
law. Pakistan's government, against which no war has been declared, is not
even asked permission or warned of the attacks.
Dropping 2,000-pound bombs on apartment buildings in Gaza or Predator
raids on Pakistan's tribal territory are as much murder as exploding car
bombs or suicide bombers.
© 2009 Toronto Sun
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/opinion/17krugman.html?th&emc=th
The Joy of Sachs
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed: July 16, 2009
The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six
unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record
quarterly profits - and it's preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable
to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?
First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately,
what it does is bad for America.
Second, it shows that Wall Street's bad habits - above all, the system of
compensation that helped cause the financial crisis - have not gone away.
Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it,
Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact,
has made another crisis more likely.
Let's start by talking about how Goldman makes money.
Over the past generation - ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan
years - the U.S. economy has been "financialized." The business of moving
money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has
soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff.
The sector officially labeled "securities, commodity contracts and
investments" has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in
the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.
Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its
promises - if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most
productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk.
But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face?
Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the
construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased
risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading
it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to
gullible consumers.
Goldman's role in the financialization of America was similar to that of
other players, except for one thing: Goldman didn't believe its own hype.
Other banks invested heavily in the same toxic waste they were selling to
the public at large. Goldman, famously, made a lot of money selling
securities backed by subprime mortgages - then made a lot more money by
selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed.
All of this was perfectly legal, but the net effect was that Goldman made
profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.
And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game.
The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry
highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other
people lose. If you're a banker, and you generate big short-term profits,
you get lavishly rewarded - and you don't have to give the money back if and
when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason,
then, to steer investors into taking risks they don't understand.
And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by
putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong.
I won't try to parse the competing claims about how much direct benefit
Goldman received from recent financial bailouts, especially the government's
assumption of A.I.G.'s liabilities. What's clear is that Wall Street in
general, Goldman very much included, benefited hugely from the government's
provision of a financial backstop - an assurance that it will rescue major
financial players whenever things go wrong.
You can argue that such rescues are necessary if we're to avoid a replay of
the Great Depression. In fact, I agree. But the result is that the financial
system's liabilities are now backed by an implicit government guarantee.
Now the last time there was a comparable expansion of the financial safety
net, the creation of federal deposit insurance in the 1930s, it was
accompanied by much tighter regulation, to ensure that banks didn't abuse
their privileges. This time, new regulations are still in the drawing-board
stage - and the finance lobby is already fighting against even the most
basic protections for consumers.
If these lobbying efforts succeed, we'll have set the stage for an even
bigger financial disaster a few years down the road. The next crisis could
look something like the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s, in which
deregulated banks gambled with, or in some cases stole, taxpayers' money -
except that it would involve the financial industry as a whole.
The bottom line is that Goldman's blowout quarter is good news for Goldman
and the people who work there. It's good news for financial superstars in
general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to precrisis levels. But
it's bad news for almost everyone else.
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