[Peace-discuss] Fw: Informed Comment

Mon May 5 02:30:00 EDT 2014

Some good stuff here...

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Informed Comment <jricole at gmail.com>
To: jencart13 at yahoo.com 
Sent: Sunday, May 4, 2014 3:33 PM
Subject: Informed Comment

Informed Comment 

Informed Comment   
________________________________

	* Boycott, divestment, sanctions movement seeks justice for Palestinians 
	* Obama Quips at White House Correspondents Dinner:  ‘Orange is the New Black’ 
	* Greenwald vs NSA’s Hayden: Glenn Wins in a Slam Dunk 
	* The Ukraine Crisis and Qatar’s Ascendancy should Make us think Big Solar, not Gas 
	* Condoleezza Rice, Charged with War Crimes at Rutgers, withdraws as Commencement Speaker 
Boycott, divestment, sanctions movement seeks justice for Palestinians 
Posted: 03 May 2014 11:45 PM PDT
(By Marilyn Jerry)
Opinion: Boycott, divestment, sanctions movement seeks justice for Palestinians (via NJ.com) 
By Marilyn Jerry With the collapse of Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to promote a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, many are asking, “What now?” Given the number of times such talks have failed, it doesn’t seem likely… 

——
Related video added by Juan Cole:
Amy Goodman/ Democracy Now! from last year:  “As ANC Votes to Support BDS, A New Doc Compares Life in Palestine to Apartheid South Africa  ”  
Obama Quips at White House Correspondents Dinner:  ‘Orange is the New Black’ 
Posted: 03 May 2014 11:28 PM PDT
CBSNews.com Web Extras:  “President Obama skewers the press, pols, and Obamacare at correspondents dinner” 
AFP reports:
Obama yuks it up with Washington reporters (via AFP) 
President Barack Obama cracked jokes about the government’s disastrous health care policy rollout and mocked political opponents at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The annual event, known informally as the “nerd prom,” brings Washington’s top… 

Greenwald vs NSA’s Hayden: Glenn Wins in a Slam Dunk 
Posted: 03 May 2014 11:15 PM PDT
(Commondreams.org joint project )
Greenwald vs NSA's Hayden: Glenn Wins in a Slam Dunk
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who brought the Edward Snowden documents to the world, debated former CIA and NSA head Michael Hayden last night in Toronto.  The debate was hosted by Munk Debates and also featured Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and rightwing lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
Before the debate, the audience voted 33% in favor of the statement, "Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms," while 46% voted against. After the debate, 59 percent of the audience agreed with Greenwald and Ohanian.
Edward Snowden also made an appearance via video link at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall during the semi-annual Munk debate.
"It's no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing. It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love."
Here is the Snowden video:
The Associated Press reports:
Greenwald opened the debate by condemning the NSA's own slogan, which he said appears repeatedly throughout its own documents: Collect it all.
"What is state surveillance? If it were about targeting in a discriminate way against those causing harm, there would be no debate," said Greenwald. "The actual system of state surveillance has almost nothing to do with that. What state surveillance actually is, is defended by the NSA's actual words, that phrase they use over and over again, 'collect it all.'"
Hayden and Dershowitz spent the rest of the hour and a half or so denying that the pervasive surveillance described by Snowden and Greenwald even exists and that the ongoing surveillance programs are necessary to prevent terrorism.
"Collect it all doesn't mean collect it all!" said Hayden, drawing laughs from the audience.
Greenwald is now a columnist for First Look Media.
The video of the debate is embedded below, but you have to skip ahead to 29 minutes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
——-
Related Video:
Munk Debate on State Surveillance: Greenwald/Ohanian vs Hayden/Dershowitz  
The Ukraine Crisis and Qatar’s Ascendancy should Make us think Big Solar, not Gas 
Posted: 03 May 2014 10:33 PM PDT
Solar & Global Politics, & Why Ukraine & Qatar Are Critical Hubs There (via Clean Technica) 
Originally published on SolarWakeup.By Yann Brandt Solar may be a small portion of energy production globally but the importance in geo-politics continues to grow. All energy usage may be local, when a homeowner plugs in their cell phone charge into… 

——
Related video:
CNN:  “Civil war looming in Ukraine?”  
Condoleezza Rice, Charged with War Crimes at Rutgers, withdraws as Commencement Speaker 
Posted: 03 May 2014 09:15 PM PDT
Condoleezza Rice on Saturday pulled out of giving the commencement address at Rutgers University after professor and student protests.
Rutgers historian Professor Rudy Bell argued that while it would be appropriate to have Rice on campus as part of an academic debate, she is unsuitable as a commencement speaker because of her role in an administration that launched an illegal and destructive war and practiced torture.  He said, “Commencement is a day when we honor the graduates, who have accomplished so much. It’s a day when there should not be controversy.”  He also pointed to her role in an administration that practiced torture. 
Some 50 students occupied the offices of Rutgers University’s president last week in protest.
Professor Bell is being polite.  Dr. Rice is a war criminal in international law.  She played a key role in launching a war that contravenes the United Nations charter, which requires that use of force against another country come either in self-defense after an attack or be authorized by the United Nations Security Council (as was the case with the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Libya).  Even if one took seriously the “responsibility to protect,” which some feel justifies a humanitarian intervention to stop an ongoing genocide, there was no massive humanitarian crisis in 2002 in Iraq that justified a foreign invasion.  Nor did any large international organization back the war in Iraq– even the US’s NATO allies were almost universally opposed (excepting the UK and some recent Eastern European additions, who also cooperated with Bush’s torture program).
Not only did she back an illegal invasion and occupation, she did so on the basis of a set of falsehoods.  She retailed 56 distinct falsehoods to the American people.  She warned that we do not want the smoking gun for Iraq’s (non-existent) nuclear weapons program to be a mushroom cloud, a piece of war propaganda that would have caused Goebbels’ heart to swell with pride.  As then Rep. Robert Wexler argued, Rice had at hand intelligence that contradicted her talking points, but always made a forceful case for war.  She even had the US public convinced that poor, weak, ramshackle Iraq, lacking a navy or air force and under severe economic sanctions for a decade, posed an existential threat to the United States.
Rice’s actions established a precedent that has been cited by Vladimir Putin for his intervention in the Ukraine, and so contributed to a profound weakening and deterioration of the framework of international legality that the post-World War II generation, including Dwight Eisenhower, attempted to erect.
As for Iraq, she left it a broken country, with hundreds of thousands dead, 2 million displaced abroad, 4 million displaced internally, likely 400,000 badly wounded, where car bombings and sniping still take some 800 lives a month and where radical Sunni al-Qaeda affiliates have established themselves and Iran-linked radical Shiite militias have free play.  She hinted around at an al-Qaeda link to Iraq before she invaded it, but there was none. She brought al-Qaeda to Iraq and it has killed far more Iraqis than the 3000 Americans whose lives it took on September 11.   Iraq never had anything at all to do with al-Qaeda, but she made it a scapegoat so as to get at its petroleum resources.
I’m with Rudy Bell, that campuses should be open to all kinds of people.  But when we bring war criminals, it should be at least in part to debate with them their criminal actions, not to honor them with a doctorate and give them $35,000.  And graduating students at a liberal arts university deserve to hear from admirable people, like Foreign Service Officers John H. Brown  and  Peter Van Buren.   High office does not mint a person as an exemplar.  It is a platform for potential achievements, and where it is used for death and mayhem and illegality, it is a badge of dishonor.
Related videos:
Representative Press:  “Condoleezza Rice: Liar, Secretary of State, War Criminal pt1″ 
Pt. 2: 
Pt. 3  
You are subscribed to email updates from Informed Comment 
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. Email delivery powered by Google 
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140504/27f403e9/attachment-0001.html>