NOAM CHOMSKY: The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. …They show that Arab opinion …—holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second major threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority, in fact, 57 percent, say that …it would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. …
+
When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here, Clinton and the media, have drawn. There’s also a minor problem. That’s the major problem. The minor problem is that we don’t know from the cables what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was selected from the range of what they say. So there’s a filtering process. We don’t know how much it distorts the information. But there’s no question that what is a radical distortion is—or not even a distortion, a reflection of the concern that the dictators are what matter. The population doesn’t matter, even if it’s overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. policy. This shows up elsewhere…. –Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal “Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership”
Month: December 2010
Friday Iran Talking Points
from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for December 3rd, 2010:
National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies Benjamin Weinthal blogs on a WikiLeaks cable that had originated in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Apparently, a senior adviser to Angela Merkel, Christoph Heusgen, proposed a quid-pro-quo relationship between Netanyahu ending settlement construction and “favorable†treatment of the Goldstone Report in the UN Security Council. Weinthal refutes the possibility of linkage between ending settlement construction and achieving peace between Israel and its neighbors. Instead, he rolls out the neoconservative trope of “reverse linkage,†arguing, “[U.S. diplomats’] willingness, like that of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, to remain incurably fixated on the construction of housing complexes as the impediment to peace shows the dangerous merger of American and EU foreign policy. Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons is relegated to an inferior status — at the expense of global security.â€
The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin interviews Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Post for the Right Turn blog, extracting tough talk from him on Iran. She writes, “McConnell agrees with those who think strong measures are needed to disrupt the Iranian regime’s nuclear program: ‘What I am saying is that we should be squeezing these guys like a lemon.’ He says he senses, as the WikiLeaks documents suggested, that Arab leaders are deeply worried and believe ‘only we have the swat’ to deal with the threat.â€
Pajamas Media: Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ “Freedom Scholar†Michael Ledeen transcribes a made-up conversation with a dead friend, former CIA counter-intelligence official James Jesus Angleton. They banter about a number of possible conspiracies within the ongoing news stories about Iran –addressing the Stuxnet virus, the WikiLeaks cable dump, and the bombing of two Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran. Ledeen, feigning use of a Ouija board, has his ghost friend suggest that the Russians could be behind the Stuxnet virus, and that the murdered Iranian nuclear scientists could have been killed by Tehran for their (possible) collusion with the Russians, Israelis, or Americans.
Eric Garris on Fox Business (video)
Antiwar.com founder and managing editor Eric Garris appeared on Fox Business Network’s Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano Friday night.
He spoke about the latest WikiLeaks disclosures.
Here is a clip that starts with Garris:
Wikileaks Shut Down — But Not For Long (Includes New Domain)
U.S-based domain provider DNS.net shut down WikiLeaks Thursday night claiming relentless cyber attacks on the site, but WikiLeaks was up by the crack of dawn ET, on a new Swiss server, www.wikileaks.ch or http://213.251.145.96/. WikilLeaks announced it via Twitter around 4:30: “Free Speech has a number…”
Pathetically, CNN International refused to include the new address in its own reporting of the event. Meanwhile, Jumpin’ Joe Lieberman has moved on from Amazon, and has pressured another provider to drop a site carrying WikiLeaks-related content. This time, as Glenn Greenwald points out, the targeted website is independent from WikiLeaks and was merely publishing graphs based on WikiLeaks info on its site.
“(Lieberman) is on some kind of warped mission where he’s literally running around single-handedly dictating what political content can and cannot be on the Internet, issuing broad-based threats to “all companies” that — by design — are causing suppression of political information.”
Interesting times ahead.
Daniel Ellsberg Says Boycott Amazon
Open letter to Amazon.com Customer Service:
December 2, 2010
I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.
For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.
I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better. I hope that these others encourage their contact lists to do likewise and to let Amazon know exactly why they’re shifting their business. I’ve asked friends today to suggest alternatives, and I’ll be exploring service from Powell’s Books, Half-Price Books, Biblio and others.
So far Amazon has spared itself the further embarrassment of trying to explain its action openly. This would be a good time for Amazon insiders who know and perhaps can document the political pressures that were brought to bear–and the details of the hasty kowtowing by their bosses–to leak that information. They can send it to Wikileaks (now on servers outside the US), to mainstream journalists or bloggers, or perhaps to sites like antiwar.com that have now appropriately ended their book-purchasing association with Amazon.
Yours (no longer),
Daniel Ellsberg
Call Interpol! A Condom Broke! (WikiLeaks)
Given the breathlessness of U.S. media coverage, one would think that WikiLeaks’ Julien Assange was wanted for raping half the virgins in Sweden.
The reality is far less saucy. The New York Times summarized the charges against Assange: H/T Salon
According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use. Mr. Assange has questioned the veracity of those accounts.
How many uncaptured war criminals are on Interpol’s target list? How many people accused of genocide? How many politicians are out and about who should be on the Interpol list for war crimes?
The U.S. government is busy screwing Americans and much of the world – and Interpol goes off hot and heavy seeking a broken condom culprit???