HISTORY REPEATING: U.S. Justice & The CIA - American Angels Of Death...

"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it." Dr. Josef Mengele (1945 ).

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that physicians with the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS) played an even greater role in facilitating the torture of detainees than was previously recognized.

As described in the study, "In 2003, partially in response to a CIA Inspector General investigation that questioned the use of enhanced interrogation methods and criticized the agency’s failure to consult with OMS about the risks to detainees of waterboarding, OMS physicians assumed another role, providing opinions to the agency and lawyers whether the techniques used would be expected to cause severe pain or suffering and thus constitute torture."

This advisory function came in addition to the physicians' previous involvement in the torture of detainees through performing medical evaluations before and after interrogation, monitoring waterboarding sessions, and collecting information on the effectiveness and risks of various techniques.

The study, titled "Roles of CIA Physicians in Enhanced Interrogation and Torture of Detainees," was authored by Leonard S. Rubinstein, the president of Physicians for Human Rights, and Brig. Gen. (ret.) Stephen N. Xenakis, a former Army psychiatrist who is now with the Center for Public Health and Human Rights. It is based on a previously secret document from 2004, laying out OMS guidelines for detainee interrogation, which was released by the Obama administration.

In an article for Harper's, human rights lawyer Scott Horton notes that the JAMA study makes it apparent that the OMS physicians did not merely offer a medical opinion as to what constituted torture:

"gave their bosses exactly what was expected of them: a green light to torture."

The study emphasizes that even though OMS approved the use of enhanced interrogation methods subject to "medical limitations," those limitations took no account of actual pain and suffering and were merely calculated to minimize the chances of doing permanent physical damage.

They "included durational limits for exposure to a specified temperature, either up to the time hypothermia would be expected to develop or on evidence of hypothermia; body weight loss of 10% or evidence of significant malnutrition as a result of dietary restrictions; and exposure to noise just under the decibel levels associated with permanent hearing loss. Stress positions were permitted for up to 48 hours provided the detainee’s hands were no higher than the head, weight was borne by lower extremities, and preexisting injuries were not aggravated. ... The OMS guidelines also advised that emergency resuscitation equipment be available when waterboarding was used."

Although the guidelines specify they: "the detainee's physical condition must be such that these interventions will not have lasting effect," they IGNORE professional literature on the potential health risks of the techniques, citing instead such sources as "'Wilderness Medicine' 4th Ed., Ch 6 -- Accidental Hypothermia."
"The duplicity in this affair is amazingly circular.," Horton writes. "The Justice Department’s torture lawyers relied on the CIA’s torture doctors for the conclusion that specific techniques did not produce 'severe pain' that ran afoul of the criminal law prohibition on torture; the CIA doctors relied on the Justice Department lawyers for the same conclusion. It looks like a compact, and an alert prosecutor would no doubt call it... A JOINT CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE. It’s hard to see at this point whose behavior was the more ethically odious, though evidence suggests that both engaged in professional misconduct so egregious as to warrant formal disciplinary proceedings."

"The torture doctors expect to have their identities protected, and thus to ESCAPE the natural consequences of their gross professional misconduct," Horton concludes: "This helps us understand why senior figures in the intelligence community are today ferociously pressuring the Justice Department to criminalize anyone who attempts to discover the identities of those involved. They assert that those identified would be terrorist targets. In fact, those who are unmasked face likely professional ethics proceedings, as well as the long-term risk of criminal prosecution, particularly if they ever venture beyond the borders of the United States."

-Muriel Kane (Study: CIA doctors ‘gave green light to torture’,RawStory.com, 8.5.2010. Image: Dr. Josef Mengele in his laboratory, 1945 ).

The Israeli Neocon Fantasy: A Paroxysm of U.S. Military Violence at the Promised Land's Bidding...

"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -General Omar Bradley, U.S. Army Field Commander, Battle of Normandy, WWII 1944.

Reuel Marc Gerecht's screed justifying an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening of the new Israel lobby campaign marked by the introduction of House Resolution 1553 expressing full support for such an Israeli attack.

What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.

That has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel cannot fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to start.

Gerecht openly expresses the hope that any Iranian response to the Israeli attack would trigger full-scale U.S. war against Iran. "If Khamenei has a death-wish, he'll let the Revolutionary Guards mine the strait, the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It might be the only thing that would push President Obama to strike Iran militarily...." Gerecht suggest that the same logic would apply to any Iranian "terrorism against the United States after an Israeli strike," by which we really means any attack on a U.S. target in the Middle East.

Gerecht writes that Obama might be "obliged" to threaten major retaliation "immediately after an Israeli surprise attack."

That's the key sentence in this very long Gerecht argument. Obama is not going to be "obliged" to join Israeli aggression against Iran unless he feels that domestic political pressures to do so are too strong to resist. That's why the Israelis are determined to line up a strong majority in Congress and public opinion for war to foreclose Obama's options.

In the absence of confidence that Obama would be ready to come into the war fully behind Israel, there cannot be an Israeli strike.

Gerecht's argument for war relies on a fanciful nightmare scenario of Iran doling out nuclear weapons to Islamic extremists all over the Middle East. But the real concern of the Israelis and their lobbyists, as Gerecht's past writing has explicitly stated, is to destroy Iran's Islamic regime in a paroxysm of U.S. military violence.

Gerecht first revealed this Israeli-neocon fantasy as early as 2000, before the Iranian nuclear program was even taken seriously, in an essay written for a book published by the Project for a New American Century. Gerecht argued that, if Iran could be caught in a "terrorist act," the U.S. Navy should "retaliate with fury". The purpose of such a military response, he wrote, should be to "strike with truly devastating effect against the ruling mullahs and the repressive institutions that maintain them."

And lest anyone fail to understand what he meant by that, Gerecht was more explicit:

"That is, no cruise missiles at midnight to minimize the body count. The clerics will almost certainly strike back unless Washington uses overwhelming, paralyzing force."

In 2006-07, the Israeli war party had reason to believed that it could hijack U.S. policy long enough to get the war it wanted, because it had placed one of its most militant agents, David Wurmser, in a strategic position to influence that policy.

We now know that Wurmser, formerly a close adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu and during that period Vice President Dick Cheney's main adviser on the Middle East, urged a policy of overwhelming U.S. military force against Iran. After leaving the administration in 2007, Wurmser revealed that he had advocated a U.S. war on Iran, not to set back the nuclear program but to achieve regime change.

"Only if what we do is placed in the framework of a fundamental assault on the survival of the regime will it have a pick-up among ordinary Iranians," Wurmser told The Telegraph. The U.S. attack was not to be limited to nuclear targets but was to be quite thorough and massively destructive. "If we start shooting, we must be prepared to fire the last shot. Don't shoot a bear if you're not going to kill it."

Of course, that kind of war could not be launched out of the blue. It would have required a casus belli to justify a limited initial attack that would then allow a rapid escalation of U.S. military force. In 2007, Cheney acted on Wurmser's advice and tried to get Bush to provoke a war with Iran over Iraq, but it was foiled by the Pentagon

As Wurmser was beginning to whisper that advice in Cheney's ear in 2006, Gerecht was making the same argument in The Weekly Standard:

"Bombing the nuclear facilities once would mean we were declaring war on the clerical regime. We shouldn't have any illusions about that. We could not stand idly by and watch the mullahs build other sites. If the ruling mullahs were to go forward with rebuilding what they'd lost--and it would be surprising to discover the clerical regime knuckling after an initial bombing run--we'd have to strike until they stopped. And if we had any doubt about where their new facilities were (and it's a good bet the clerical regime would try to bury new sites deep under heavily populated areas), and we were reasonably suspicious they were building again, we'd have to consider, at a minimum, using special-operations forces to penetrate suspected sites."

The idea of waging a U.S. war of destruction against Iran is obvious lunacy, which is why U.S. military leaders have strongly resisted it both during the Bush and Obama administrations. But Gerecht makes it clear that Israel believes it can use its control of Congress to pound Obama into submission. Democrats in Congress, he boasts "are mentally in a different galaxy than they were under President Bush." Even though Israel has increasingly been regarded around the world as a rogue state after its Gaza atrocities and the commando killings of unarmed civilians on board the Mavi Marmara, its grip on the U.S. Congress appears as strong as ever

Moreover, polling data for 2010 show that a majority of Americans have already been manipulated into supporting war against Iran - in large part because more than two-thirds of those polled have gotten the impression that Iran already has nuclear weapons. The Israelis are apparently hoping to exploit that advantage.
"If the Israelis bomb now, American public opinion will probably be with them," writes Gerecht. "Perhaps decisively so." Netanyahu must be feeling good about the prospects for pressuring Barack Obama to join an Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

It was Netanyahu, after all, who declared in 2001, "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in the way."

-Gareth Porter ("The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign, CommonDreams.Org, 7.30.2010. Image: -Kumar Corcoran, Jesus With A Sniper Rifle, 2010 ).

ON JOURNALISM: HELEN THOMAS - She Dared To Question & The Hypocrisy Of The News Media...

"You don't spread democracy through the barrel of a gun. " -Helen Thomas, Journalist & White House Correspondent, 1960-2010.

By now you’ve heard: pioneering Washington journalist Helen Thomas has, thanks to a viral video interview, been pilloried for offensive comments about Israel and ousted from the press corps’ inner sanctum. Her words were definitely incendiary: Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Europe and America.

But the reaction suggests that the Rabbilive ambush was just a catalyst for a gathering storm of political enmity. She was after all, one of the few hard-nosed reporters (and women) in the briefing room who ruthlessly challenged the White House on foreign policy issues.

To George W. Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleischer comments were tantamount to a call for genocide: “She is advocating religious cleansing. How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”

Getting fired for bigoted words? Somehow that fate has not befallen the cabal of right-wing Bloviators who have literally built their careers pushing the propaganda war against Latinos, other people of color, gay people, liberals and anyone else they disagree with. They’re not journalists in the formal sense, but their frothing tirades, word-for-word, arguably wield more influence over the corporate news cycle.

In contrast to Thomas-Gate, though, Limbaugh and friends don’t need to be ambushed and exposed by rogue YouTube muckrakers. They’ve spewed their venom to millions daily on television and radio, backed by advertisers, media executives and an audience that happily blinds itself to political hypocrisy

At the Huffington Post, some cooler heads have spoken in Thomas's defense while criticizing her remarks, noting a double standard in how Americans talk about who should “get the hell out.”

On moral relativism, Paul Jay of Real News argues:

“The obvious comparison is asking all European Americans to "get the hell out", and leave the land to its rightful owners, Native Americans. One could argue Mexican Americans might have an argument to stay in certain parts of the country. The European migration to America isn't such a stretch if one thinks about it. Colonialism makes use of people fleeing religious persecution to populate their new possession . . .”

At any rate, we all know what's going on here. The hyper-pro-Israel lobby, in both parties, hasn't much liked the fact that Helen Thomas dares to speak up and question that most sacred of topics, and right from the front row of the White House Press Gallery.

James Zogby of the Arab American Institute puts Thomas's comments in perspective and calls out the right-wingers, embodied in the character assassination of Ari Fleischer, for its far more virulent rhetoric against people of color, gays, and, oops, yes, Jews:

“Where was their indignation when Rush Limbaugh was making disgraceful and insulting comments about African Americans, gays, Muslims, and women and then was hosted and toasted at the White House? And did they speak out when Pat Robertson was making bizarre pronouncements connecting the devastation of Katrina or Ariel Sharon's stroke with God's justice? If I thought they understood shame, I would advise them to feel some.”

When Lou Dobbs, Glen Beck and company have likened immigration to an illegal invasion of America's God-given dominion, they're just brandishing their patriotism, right? As opposed to the misguided journalists who dare question an actual occupation perpetuated by the U.S., in another part of the world. Granted, it's hard to tell who's blaming who for what sometimes, as right-wingers tend to employ the same terminology when debating immigration and America's Muslim and Arab adversaries: invaders, terrorists, conquerors, and the occasional fascism reference.

Language is a funny thing. With all her experience in the White House press corps, Helen Thomas should have known what words are off limits. There are some lines you just can't cross in the media... unless ( of course ) you're the one who gets to write the rules.

CREDITS: -Michelle Chen ("Helen Thomas Pays for Crossing a Line Others Trample", RaceWire.Com & The Applied Research Center, 6.9.2010. Image: - Photographer Unknown, President John F. Kennedy interviewed by Helen Thomas, 1960s).

21st Century Society: The Empathy Deficit, Children & The Rise of Narcissism...

"A morality practiced without empathy squanders the conscience." -Howard Hall

College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new meta-analysis presented to at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by University of Michigan researchers. It includes data from over 14,000 students.

Although we argue in "Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered" that modern child-rearing practices are putting empathy at risk, this is the largest study presented so far to quantify the decline.

Previous research done by psychologist Jean Twenge had measured what she labeled a "narcissism epidemic," with more students showing selfish qualities and with increases in traits that can lead to a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. That is a condition in which people are so self-involved that other people are no more than objects to reflect their glory.

But I was less than convinced by that data because some of the measures of narcissism--statements like "I am a special person," might reflect a lifetime spent in classrooms aimed at raising self-esteem rather than a true increase in self-centeredness. The survey on empathy used in this study--which you can take for yourself: HERE however, is another matter.

While it so obviously measures empathy that you could easily game it to make yourself look kinder and nicer, the fact that today's college students don't even feel compelled to do that suggests that the study is measuring something real. If young people don't even care about seeming uncaring, something is seriously wrong. Another survey in the research found that people also think that others around them are less compassionate.

Why might today's students be less empathetic than their elders?

One of the culprits we identify in "Born for Love" is the way that they spent most of their time early in life. Today's kids play outdoors much less, and they spend far less time in unstructured activity with others than prior generations.

Without unstructured free time with playmates, children simply don't get to know each other very well. And you can't learn to connect and care if you don't practice these things. Free play declined by at least a third between 1981 and 2003, right when the kids who hit college in 2000 and later were growing up.

Worse, much of the time that used to be spent playing outdoors is now spent in front of screens. Television, obviously cannot teach empathy. Even nonviolent kids' TV, research finds, is filled with indirect aggression and linked to increased real-world bullying. Though social media is an improvement on passive TV viewing and can sometimes aid real friendships, it is still less rich than face to face interaction. This is especially important for the youngest children whose brains are absorbing social information that will shape the way they connect for the rest of their lives.

Another factor is the "self esteem movement" and its pernicious notion that "you can't love anyone else until you love yourself." Today's kids grew up with parents who were taught by therapists and self help groups attended by millions that caring too much for other people or having your happiness tied to theirs was "co dependence," and that people should be able to be happy on their own, needing no one.

In reality, we need each other to be both mentally and physically healthy. Solitary confinement, in fact, is one of the most stressful experiences someone can undergo: this wouldn't be true if most people were happy without social contact. Normal people kept in complete isolation can become psychotic in as little as a few days.

Further, unless you have been loved well from infancy, loving others is difficult--children who are resilient to early trauma are those who find others to care for them to make up for abusive or neglectful caregivers. If the only love they get is from a therapist or teacher who tells them to love themselves before trying to make other connections, they are extremely unlikely to recover.

Perhaps an even larger factor is the merging of the left's "do your own thing" individualism with the right's glorification of brutal competition and unfettered markets. You wind up with a society that teaches kids that "you're on your own" and that helping others is for suckers. A country where the mystical new age "Secret" is that the rich deserve their wealth and got it by being positive and good--while the poor, too, get what's coming to them because they didn't try hard enough.

At the same time, deregulation and reduced taxes on the wealthy from Reagan onwards produced massive growth in economic inequality, which is probably also a critical part of empathy's decline. Empathy requires an ability to understand others--it's easiest to do this when you spend time them regularly and know how to read them.

Economic inequality, however, by radically separating the rich from the poor and shrinking the middle class, literally physically isolates us from each other and provides few opportunities for connection or understanding. If you spend your time in limos and gated communities and first class, you aren't likely ever to meet poor people who aren't there to serve you; outside that context, you won't know how to relate to them.

And then, if you know nothing about someone's real situation, it's easy to caricature it as being defined by bad choices and laziness, rather than understand the constraints and limits the economy itself imposes. Seeing yourself doing so well and others doing poorly tends to bolster ideas that "you deserve your wealth," simply because guilt otherwise becomes uncomfortable, even unbearable.

In reality, self esteem doesn't come from thinking positive or telling yourself that you are special or worthy, though telling kids they are rotten and selfish can surely destroy it. And, sadly, you can be optimistic all you like in an economy with 20% unemployment and still not get a job through no fault of your own.

So what can be done about what President Obama as a candidate presciently labeled the "empathy deficit"?

The key thing is to recognize the value of relationships and the fact that we are not independent but interdependent. We all need each other. We're actually both happier and healthier if we're kind.

Countries with high economic inequality tend to have high crime, high corruption, low levels of trust, high infant mortality and lowered life expectancy-- as well as difficulty growing their economies. In contrast, those with lower inequality have higher happiness, greater health, lower crime, better growth and longer life.

And so, if, say, health care for all or better unemployment benefits or higher quality schools means that those lucky enough to have well-paying jobs have to pay higher taxes, well, is that really so terrible?

If we continue to believe that it is, if we continue to split into "us" v. "them," "haves" v. "have nots," the empathy decline will undoubtedly continue and we will face a meaner, nastier world in which ideas about humans being selfish and competitive rather than caring become a self fulfilling prophecy by crushing the tendency toward kindness with which we are all born.

CREDITS: -Maia Szalavitz, ("Shocker: Empathy Dropped 40% in College Students Since 2000", Psychology Today, 5.28.2010. Image:- LitteredGlass, "Children Playing Marbles, Flickr, 1970).

THE GOD OF WAR: "Not With A Bang But A Wimper...

THE GOD OF WAR doesn't dine on raw shank bone or bellow orders quite like he used to. When he talks to Congress, it goes more like this:

"And, oh, while you're up, I'm going to be needing, uh. . . $159 billion this go-around, you know, for the troops. Thanks."

It works.

With the war on terror in its 9th year and disappearing from even the pretense of national debate, let alone outrage and protest, and with the President of Hope prosecuting it so quietly most of us no longer notice, we could be at an eerie national transition point, beyond which war is no longer controversial or a big deal but just the way things are: "normal," like background noise. And the enormous transfusions of cash it requires - well, nice people don't talk about it.

Oh Lord.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Then along comes Alan Grayson freshman congressman from Florida, who has some fresh ideas about how to forestall this Orwellian transition. He introduced one of these ideas in the House last week. It's called H.R. 5353: The War Is Making You Poor Act. It's steeped stunningly in common sense and common knowledge, appeals in a blatant, teabagger sort of way to self-interest and everyman's taxation phobia - and strikes me as the focal point, almost Gandhiesque in the clarity of its outrage, of a reborn movement to end our wars in Asia and halt the spread of American hubris.

"The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars," Grayson wrote. "War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore."

H.R. 5353 directly addresses the war's current "emergency" spending bill, which is about to come up for a vote and will - of course! of course! - pass as usual, with little debate, with perfunctory media mention. The current White House request, part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2011, is for $159.3 billion.

The War Is Making You Poor Act plucks that number out of anonymity and screams, "Wait a second!" This is an enormous amount of money, almost beyond calculation, and we must not make a decision about it transfixed in financial numbness.

The bill mandates that our operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan be funded out of the regular Department of Defense budget, which in 2011 is $549 billion. The $159.3 billion in special funds would be used instead to eliminate the federal tax on every American's first $35,000 of income (or $70,000 for married couples). And that still leaves $16 billion for paying down the national debt.

Yeah, I know, it's crazy. You can't mess with the system like this. The War God's funding machine grinds with bipartisan inevitability. I've watched the process over the years in mounting despair. Our elected reps are, at best, helplessly polite in the face of this inevitability. Dissent is token. We're on a permanent war footing in this country and will be till hell freezes over. Thus it is written. Read the New York Times.

Grayson's bill comes from so far outside the Beltway consensus I felt instant enthusiasm for it. My guess is that others will, too. Within a few days of the bill's introduction, nearly 24,000 people had signed the congressman's online petition endorsing it. For starters, I'd like to see that number hit six figures. Why not seven?

The bill right now has seven co-sponsors: Dennis Kucinich, Lynn Woolsey, John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Bob Filner and two Republican mavericks, Ron Paul and Walter Jones. Call your rep and urge him or her to support it as well. This is the only way it's going to happen, folks - we have to make our numbers felt on Capitol Hill. We have to break the unwritten rules that make even honest debate over these hellish wars impermissible.

Mainstream coverage of Grayson's bill has been skimpy and dismissive. The big news outlets crossed over long ago into Orwell's nightmare and, at their privileged remove, fully embrace it. As Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald notes: "The decree that we are ‘at war' has been repeated over and over for a full decade, drummed into our heads from all directions without pause, sanctified as one of those Bipartisan Orthodoxies that nobody can dispute upon pain of having one's Seriousness credentials immediately and irrevocably revoked."

I submit that it's time to reclaim our country - $159 billion at a time.

-Robert C. Koehler, "Stopping Orwell's Nightmare", CommonDreams.org, 5.27.2010. Image: "The Monolith" from "2001: A Space Odyssey," directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968 ).

THE PATRIOT GAME: America's Perceived Invulnerability Is Gone Forever....

"With Faisal Shahzad's failed plot, we got lucky. Again. But sooner or later, our luck is going to run out.

Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year-old Pakistani-American charged with attempting to blow up a carload of explosives in Times Square, is the latest of many 9/11-II hopefuls. He left a trail of clues about his intentions, many missed by those charged with keeping America safe and secure.

He bought the car with cash, spent five months in Pakistan (probably for terrorist training) and reentered the States without inquiry. Headlines naively ponder whether he is part of an "international plot." This is like wondering if the oil spill in the Gulf is related to offshore drilling.

Shahzad is -- formally or informally -- tied to millions who hate America for what they see as military aggression and religious bigotry. They want to destroy the U.S., city by city, bridge by bridge, tunnel by tunnel. And they will do whatever it takes: kill our children, destroy our physical, economic and technological infrastructure, poison our food/water supplies -- anything.

Just remember:

• On Jan. 4, an unidentified and unauthorized man was seen returning from a secure area at Newark Liberty Airport into the public area. All passengers in the secure area were rescreened. Delays of flights lasted more than six hours. The man who caused the alarm disappeared.

• On April 8, LAX flights were delayed when a man selected for secondary screening grabbed his bag and vanished into the terminal.

• On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a plane he intended to destroy after his father warned U.S. officials, and after paying $2,800 cash for airfare. He never made the no-fly list.

• On Jan. 7, New York Post reporter Lorena Mongelli, testing metal detectors that failed to recognize a passenger's 14-inch titanium hip replacement, took an 8-inch rod of titanium (used in knives, guns and brass knuckles) through security at Terminal 7 at JFK -- twice

More chilling is the alarm sounded in February by CIA chief Leon Panetta, who told the Senate Intelligence Committee that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil is inevitable. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked if the next attack might come within six months: Panetta and the other intelligence officials with him agreed with Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who called such a timeframe "certain."

America needs to face this reality. No agency or individual can permanently halt the boundless opportunities for successful attacks that today's technology provides. Experts say we were fortunate to thwart several close calls, but every gambler knows luck doesn't last forever.

Our vulnerabilities, like our enemies, take many forms. Radicalized Muslims, enraged by a American disrespect for Islam, by U.S. foreign policy, and by wars and occupations in their homelands, are now most likely to blow up our dreams. But they are not alone: They have the support (and sometimes sympathy) of those who hate the U.S. for other reasons.

In 2009, Pew researchers counted 1.57 billion Muslims in 200 countries -- 23 percent of the world's population, mainly in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, a short 10- to 15-hour flight from New York or Los Angeles. If only a tiny fraction of them become radicalized against the United States, it could spell serious trouble.

Americans, so many of them focused on being a "Christian" country and wrapped in their flag, are often blind to their country's image in the world. Enormous foreign debt threatens to destroy our economy and sovereignty; the World Health Organization ranks the U.S. healthcare system at 37th in the world -- behind Saudi Arabia (26th), Morocco (29th) and even Colombia (22nd) -- and security in U.S. airports is worse than in Israel, Canada or India. Still, Americans speak of U.S. "superiority" and reject that their country could be flawed and hated.

But today's playing field has been leveled by technology, and no amount of patriotism will restore U.S. invulnerability. It's gone forever, if it ever existed. America's survival depends on its willingness to accept the world as it is now, reject xenophobia and develop foreign policies that rein in extremists worldwide while returning the U.S. to a position of global respect, rather than disdain."

-Mary Ann Sorrentino ( EXCERPT: “In This Era, "Homeland Security" is an Oxymoron,” Salon.com, 5.6.2010. Image: -Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, (A Humbler) "Captain America," Created in 1941 during WWII, Captain America served as an effective propaganda tool).

Pythagoras: Mysticism: The DNA Of Economics...

“As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are no longer fit for freedom.”

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.” -Pythagoras

THE PHILOSOPHY:

"The Pythagoreans: the main difficulty in life to overcome: the body and its necessities which subdue man. It is necessary to free oneself from these. The body is a tomb -- one must triumph over it, but not lose it. To so so requires that one attain the state of enthusiasm (en- theos). In this way, one attains a self-sufficient, theoretic life -- a life not tied to the necessities of the body, a divine life. Such a man is a wise man, a sophos. (The term philosophia, "love of wisdom," is first used in Pythagorean circles.)" -K&R, pp. 257ff.

THE IDEA:

The Greek philosopher and mystic Pythagoras was born around 570 BC. He spent his youth traveling to Egypt, Syria and Babylon, where he immersed himself in the mystical teachings of the East. At the age of 40, he established his own quasi-religious cult in Crotona, southern Italy. His teachings attracted hundreds of followers, some of whom suffered severe privations – including a five-year vow of silence – to become a part of his inner circle, known as the Mathematikoi.

The cult’s philosophy was based on reason and number. To the Pythagoreans, number was all. Each number had a special, almost magical meaning. The monad, unity, represented the original unity from which the universe was created, and was associated with divine intelligence. The dyad, two, represented the division of this unity into duality. (The even numbers, which contained the number two, were therefore seen as representing weakness and mutability.) Three represented all things with a beginning, middle and end. Four represented completion – like the four seasons.

The most perfect number was the decade, ten. The sum of one, two, three and four, it represented the totality of forces that make up the universe. In reference to the decade, the Pythagoreans compiled a list of ten opposing principles, which divided phenomena into two classes:

good • evil
limited • unlimited
odd • even
one • plurality
right • left
MALE • FEMALE ( remember this philosophy stems from the male point of view).
at rest • in motion
straight • crooked
light • darkness
square • oblong

By aligning themselves with the qualities in the first column, the Pythagoreans believed they could achieve purity and become closer to the gods.

The reasons why they chose these ten pairs has puzzled scholars from Aristotle on, but some can be guessed at. In Pythagoras’s philosophy, for example, the universe consisted of two components: the Limited, which signified order, and the Unlimited, which represented chaos and plurality. The former was associated with the monad and odd numbers, the latter with the dyad and even numbers. Pythagoras’s biographer, Iamblichus, wrote:

“The right hand he called the principle of the odd number, and is divine, but the left hand is the symbol of the even number and of that which is dissolved.”

The right hand is controlled by the left side of the brain, which we now associate with linear, logical reasoning of the sort championed by the Pythagoreans. This preference for the right hand has passed on through language – the word “sinister” comes from the Latin sinestra, meaning left.

THE CONCLUSION:

So what does this ancient mysticism have to do with the hard, cold logic of neoclassical economics – which views humanity as a mere aggregate of rational, self-interested actors? The model for economists has long been Newtonian, mechanistic physics, which, in turn, is explicitly based on Pythagorean thought. So this list of pairs is like two complementary strands of the DNA of economics.

Consider that neoclassical economics:

* is based on the idea of scarcity and emphasizes limited resources like oil at the expense of unlimited resources like wind;

* rejects uncertainty and duality (symbolized to the Pythagoreans by evenness);

* is based on the primacy of the individual (one) over society (plurality);

* values right-handed logic, ignoring emotion and left-handed thought;

* is based on a male paradigm that undervalues things like childcare;

* sees the economy as a static system, maintained at rest by the invisible hand of capitalism;

* uses a simplistic, linear (straight) approach to model complex, nonlinear (crooked) phenomena;

* attempts to shine the light of reason and observation over the economy, rejecting the indeterminacy (darkness) of human systems;

* reduces complex and often strongly biased social and political systems to the simple symmetry (squareness) of mathematics.

Neoclassical economists are Pythagoreans. They still think that number is all. And they are still trying to find good and attain Utopia by aligning themselves with the first column of this ancient list. Since the 1960s, a number of new sciences have emerged that directly challenge the Pythagorean paradigm. Fuzzy logic, fractals, network theory and nonlinear dynamics deal with systems that are indeterminate, crooked, plural and in motion. Feminists and ecologists have also pointed out the defects in the neoclassical system. As economists incorporate these voices and developments, we will come nearer to an economics that is not just post-autistic, but post-Pythagorean.

-David Orrell ( "Post- Pythagorean Economics", Ad Busters, 7.15.09. Image: -Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel, The Vatician, Rome, Completed: 1512 ).

Obama: The Audacity Of Hopelessness...

With Obama's massive troop escalation (can the Nobel Peace Prize be rescinded?) he's made Afghanistan his war, reminiscent of President Johnson's Vietnam War escalation. At the current death rate of 500 soldiers per year the events depicted in the film will soon become a shattering reality for many more Americans. And next year Obama will spend some $65 billion on Afghanistan, more than for the Iraq war.

Afghanistan, the "Graveyard of Empires," is this administration's most egregious failing and is now fated to define Obama's legacy. Beyond Afghanistian, maintaining permanent military bases and large garrisons in Iraq, allowing Israel to evade a just two state peace with the Palestinians, clandestine Blackwater (now Xe services) assassins roaming around Pakistan, the killing of hundreds of Pakistani civilians by CIA Predator drone attacks authorized by Obama early in his tenure, and a continuing U.S. military build-up in Colombia under the guise of a phony "war on drugs," also are on the list.

A one-year litany of domestic disappointments could be captured by a bumper sticker reading "the audacity of hopelessness." After handing over almost $3 trillion to bankers, we have a jobless "economic recovery," an official 10.2 percent unemployment rate which is actually 16.5 percent, the number of home foreclosures continues to rise and a country in which one in four children only manage to keep hunger pangs at bay because of food stamps and soup kitchens.

In the face of this situation Obama's first stimulus package was pitifully small, and while it did "save" some jobs, it wasn't nearly enough for serious job creation. Obama's professed support for helping workers to unionize evaporated shortly after his inauguration. And under Obama's watch, as noted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, "Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families' heads, the wise guys of Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion dollar bonuses -- this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam..."(10/20/09).

The nine largest banks are distributing $32.6 billion in bonuses. But given the jobs crisis and depression-like situation confronting tens of millions of our fellow citizens, Obama found a record-breaking $664 billion for the Pentagon for fiscal 2010. Finally, Obama and many Democrats quickly abandoned government single payer national health insurance -- the only plausible solution to our healthcare crisis -- caving to the despicable, predatory, for-profit private health insurance lobbyists. (Note: These lobbyists gave $1.8 million to 18 key members of Congress).

For those who worked and voted for Obama, especially younger folks, all of this must be a bitter pill to swallow, a giant step backward toward disillusionment and cynicism. I prefer to interpret it as a necessary and valuable lesson in electoral illusions for those truly serious about making this a better country:

Obama, a brilliant and charismatic politician, was always a conservative corporate Democrat, a self-described believer in "the free market," and an enthusiastic accommodator to the rich and powerful. In the words of one pundit, Obama is Clinton without the sleaze. He would never have been given a favorable vetting by the financial elites who chose our presidential candidates if he represented the slightest threat to their domestic interests and global empire. By the way, the latter includes 800 military bases in 130 countries.

According to astute political analyst Paul Street, the Obama campaign set new corporate fundraising efforts, including nearly $1 million from Goldman Sachs. In short, aside from some crafty rhetoric Obama was never a social justice populist and viewing him that way always contained a massive dose of wishful thinking. In that narrow sense, Obama has been entirely consistent and didn't really betray anyone.

More and more Americans are wise to the fact that because Democrats and Republicans are virtually indistinguishable on the issues that matter most, the "change we can believe it" will not be forthcoming from these two business parties.

Short term we need a mobilized and vocal movement from below that dramatically increases the political costs for those resisting needed reforms. Longer term, we need systemic change, change in the class structure of capitalism. Until and unless workers who produce all the goods and services in our society participate in making the major economic policy decisions -- to run the economy democratically -- we will only be tinkering with a system that primarily serves those who own it. We need a new broad-based political party that actually responds to the genuine grievances and aspirations of ordinary working people and youth.

-Gary Olson ( “Obama’s First Nine Months: Change We Can Believe In?,” CommonDreams.Org, 12.3.2009. Image: "Obama Fraud," Image Products, 2009 ).