Speaking for me only.

As many of you may know, the United Nations issued a fact finding report on the 22-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On April 3, 2009, the President of the Human Rights Council established the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict with the mandate “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from December 28 2008 and January 18, 2009.” Justice Richard Goldstone, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was chosen to head the mission.

The report, according to Human Rights Watch, “determined that both Israel and Hamas had committed serious violations of the laws of war during the 22-day conflict last December and January, some amounting to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.”

“… these elections have been a disaster for Afghanistan, they’ve been a disaster for the international effort. If Karzai emerges as president at the end of this process, his credibility is going to be much reduced for the large part of the country. It clearly has undermined international support for the Afghan effort. When I’m home in Vermont, people are saying, ‘Well, what are we fighting for in Afghanistan?’ Before, you could answer, ‘Well, September 11th.’ Now people say we’re fighting to hold a corrupt government that has done this sort of thing in power. So, the elections-the issue of fraud is hugely important.”  – Peter Galbraith

Looks like Townshend’s own Peter Galbraith isn’t letting up on the UN-Afghan election scandal. Why should he? I think he got screwed.

He’s featured in the lead story on Huffington Post and he was also today’s top story on Democracy Now!

Looks like there’s much more to the story. I won’t be surprised if more comes out this week.  

Hope you don’t mind some non-political stuff, but this merits special attention. – Christian

This HS football game is getting a lot of attention all over New England. It was a topic of discussion on WBZ Channel 4’s “Sports Final,” a CBS affiliate in Boston.  

Just when Otter Valley thought they had the game won, one of their players celebrated too early.  He spiked the ball thinking the game was over. Mt. Mansfield recovered the ball over and ran it in for the game-winning touchdown. Big lesson for this kid… and future Vermont football players.

Here’s a developing story that’s percolating around the Intertubes.

The Timesonline reports that U.N. ambassador to Afghanistan Peter Galbraith has been removed from his position by his supervisor Kai Eide, of Norway.  James Bone in New York, Jerome Starkey in Kabul and Tom Coghlan report.

America’s top diplomat at the United Nations mission in Afghanistan has been ordered out of the country after a row with his boss over how to respond to last month’s fraud-riddled presidential elections, it has been alleged.

The alleged quarrel is threatening to spark a mutiny within the UN mission. At least a dozen senior staff are backing the American, Peter Galbraith, in the dispute with his Norwegian superior, Kai Eide.

Mr Galbraith, a close friend of the US special envoy Richard Holbrooke, left for Boston on Sunday after a heated meeting with Afghan election officials. His “pointed” questions to the Independent Election Commission (IEC) were evidence of a much tougher line towards the Afghan authorities than the “softly-softly” approach of Mr Eide, who heads the UN mission to Kabul.

“The relationship between Kai and Peter has completely broken down,” said a diplomat in Kabul. “Peter has left the country. The official line is that he’s on a three-week mission to New York. But Kai just turned round to Peter and said, ‘I want you out’.”

To read more click here.

Galbraith, a resident of Townshend, is a former ambassador to Croatia and played a significant role in the 1995 Erdut agreement, ending the war between Serbia and Croatia.  

Crossposted at Huffington Post.

How progressive is Barack Obama?  It’s a question pundits, bloggers, and journalists have trouble grappling with.  But one individual goes beyond the Obama phenomenon and investigates who Obama is and what he’s all about.  In Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics,  author Paul Street cuts to the chase and takes a closer look at the man who became the 44th president of the United States. What Street uncovers is a man crafted by campaign consultants with political beliefs consistent with elite party interests.  

Street is an independent journalist, policy adviser, and historian.  He is a former vice-president for research and planning at the Chicago Urban League, and author of Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era.

I caught up with Street to discuss his new book by Paradigm Publishers.  

You paint a portrait of Obama that shows he’s a centrist and not inclined to support progressive causes and ideas.  What has shaped Obama’s views on politics and how has he been shaped to representing elite interests?

Street: Trying to figure out who Obama is, is like trying to nail down a blob of mercury.  It’s very difficult.  Is he progressive or not may in a certain sense be somewhat besides the point.  It’s one thing to be a progressive as the head of a Urban League affiliate or a union Local or something, but Obama is in the top executive position, the apex of an empire as far as I’m concerned.  That’s the world you enter once you decide it’s really about getting into the political system and rising to the top.  

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was asked to run for president in 1967 and of course it would’ve been just a protest candidacy.  Dr. King turned it down.  He said something like ‘it’s not my role as a organizer or a social justice activist.’  So whatever Obama’s values may truly be, once you enter into that ‘I’m going to the prince or king and I’m going to rise to the top’ it really may not matter all that much.  Then you’re in a whole other ball game where you’re talking about money, concentrated wealth, and a disproportionate influence that is exercised in this dollar democracy we have.  I think Obama’s calculus was that he wanted to win.  

He was a progressive community organizer for years.  But what nobody seems to know was that Obama hated it.  Ryan Lizza wrote about it The New Yorker.  Obama told his mentor in community organizing that “there’s nothing for me to continue on this path.”  So he went into politics.  When that takes over and you’re working for David Axelrod and Richard Daley, etc., a lot of those principles that you may or may not have are going to go by the wayside.  

Supporters of Obama claim he’s a president who believes in the idea of pragmatism and consensus building.  Is it consensus building or conciliation?

I remember John Edwards saying in Iowa that you don’t cut deals with big business. I remember Edwards called out Hillary Clinton and Obama on the “complete fantasy” that meaningful progressive from could be attained by “sitting down at a negotiating table” with the big insurance and oil and drug companies. Whatever his motives, Edwards accurately said that “only an epic fight” with concentrated economic and political power could achieve big progressive change.  In Iowa, Edwards would quote FDR on how the “economic royalists hate me” and “I welcome their hatred.” Obama’s response to Edwards’ “big table fantasy” line at one of the Iowa debates was what the prolific left author Mike Davis calls “typical eloquent evasion”; “we don’t need more heat, we need more light.”  Well, shoot, crazy John Edwards was right!  We need more heat from the bottom up and on the left-progressive side.

I’ve often heard the argument that a majority of Americans don’t buy into party purity ideals of the likes of Dennis Kucinich, John Edwards, or Mike Gravel. Some Democrats believe if we elect leaders like that, we’ll only lost more elections.  Is that true?

They can’t get elected because they can’t be taken serious by the media. I saw Edwards destroy the opposition at a campaigner. Then I went to see Clinton and she was incredibly boring.  After that, it was really transparent that Edwards wasn’t being taken seriously.  Kucinich was also treated as a gadfly.  It just doesn’t make any sense for NBC, owned by General Electric, ABC, which is Disney, or Fox, which is Rupert Murdoch, to really give a lot of favorable coverage to someone they can’t trust to handle their corporate interests.  If that log jam could be broken, the two things I would emphasize that need to be changed are the money primaries, the need for money or access to people who have it, and the media filters.  If you can get past those, you’ll see there’s a lot of good progressive opinion data on issues.  If you can get the focus away from the marketing of politics (i.e. personalities, what they look like, what they’re name sounds like, whether we want to have a beer with them, etc.), then that could help the likes of Kucinich, Edwards, etc.  

You write a chapter called “How Black is Obama?”  What does he represent as an African-American leader and what does he represent in terms of change related to racism?

I remember Obama as a state Senator and I worked in black communities in the Urban League.  You’d be amazed how unpopular Obama was initially.  You didn’t hear people say Obama was “too white.”  Instead, he’s “too bourgeois.”  I heard that a lot. He got killed by Bobby Rush in a U.S. congressional primary in 2000.  Rush said again and again, Obama went to Harvard, he lived over in Hyde Park, etc.  As Obama’s star was rising, you heard a lot of “he didn’t really come from the community,” or “he didn’t rise from the community.”  Obama was handed to black America rather more than he arose from black America.  Obama was more African plus American than he was African-American.

If you track Obama’s positions on race, you can find a lot of traditional black-bourgeoisie, personal responsibility lectures to blacks, like his recent NAACP address.  He’s similar to Henry Louis Gates who has centrist-culturalist explanations of why black people are disproportionately poor.  Obama also said some things about history, that I find very odd.  He once talked about how the GI Bill was this great victory for ordinary working class Americans.  But the GI Bill was deeply discriminatory on race terms.  His Philadelphia speech was eloquent and effective, but if you dig down, there’s a narrative in there that a lot of racial justice advocates are not pleased with.  That narrative is ‘we can understand why Reverend Jeremiah Wright may be angry because of his age, where he comes from, and how he was a product of the Jim Crow era, but there’s a pronounced suggestion that that kind of anger is not appropriate.’  Many people in the general black community take exception to that, especially when 2.3 million people are behind bars and half of them are African-American.  

You also ask “How Anti-war is Obama?” Is he an imperialist just like George W. Bush or a more of a benevolent dictator with the same polices?

Obama has never denounced the war in Iraq as immoral.  Obama’s has been very careful to oppose something that’s not working.  He’s always been very careful to suggest that it is a reflection of benevolent intentions.  Even to the point of campaigning in Wisconsin by telling autoworkers, we’re spending enough money to help the Iraqis, now we need to spend it to help out America.  We’re not helping them and we ought to be.  We owe them big time.

In his career, Obama was much less anti-war in his image.  He did speak out against the Iraqi invasion in Daley Square in October 2002.  But on the day before Obama’s famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he told The New York Times, he might have voted for the war had he been in the U.S. Senate at the time and had access to the same information as other senators.  During the convention. Obama also told The Chicago Tribune reporters Jeff Zeleny and David Mendell “that there’s not that much difference between my position [on Iraq] and George Bush’s position at this stage.”  He told the journalists “the difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.”  That’s a remarkable statement to make. Yes, he did speak against the war.  However, he never said it would be immoral, he never said it would’ve been criminal, and he never said anything about Iraqi casualties.  

Speaking for myself.

Now normally I don’t get fired up over something unless it deals with Israel-Palestine or something similar, but Van Jones’ resignation struck a nerve in me, as I’m sure it did with others who follow Green Mountain Daily. I wrote something similar over at Blue Hampshire, but here’s what I wrote.

Van Jones was one of rare true progressives in the Obama Administration. He was one of the rare people I respected. Now he’s gone because he said something that politicians say all the time about the opposite party.  So where was Obama? Why didn’t he speak up? Where was the rest of the administration? Where was the rest of Democratic Party? Did they realize who they had on their side?

More below the fold.  

As for signing the petition on whether the Bush Administration had a hand in the 9-11 terrorist attacks, I don’t see anything wrong with that. I think there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered what happened that day. I don’t think there’s anything controversial with signing something like that. In fact, Jane Hamsher writes today that “35% of Democrats surveyed believed as of 2007 — that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11.” So it’s not like Jones is alone on this. There’s so much more Hamsher writes about this. I’ll leave it for you to check out.

John Nichols, of The Nation said it best today about Jones and the Democratic Party’s capitulation.

“President Obama and his aides let the right spin a fantasy about a man who led the highly-regarded Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and was recently listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential player’s of 2009.

In so doing, they allowed Glenn Beck to define the administration.

This won’t make the Obama presidency stronger; nor will it position the president to work more effectively with Congress on issues such as health care reform – let alone “green jobs” initiatives.

The right now knows they can make this administration blink. And they will keep poking and prodding White House aides and appointees until Obama and his inner circle push back.”

But the person who said it best today was a well-known anti-racism activist Tim Wise.

Tim Wise said the following about Jones’ departure.

“If you think it’s merely a coincidence that the right has sought to make [Van] Jones such an issue–rather than some of the other administration officials they are now threatening to “expose”; (two of whom are white)–then you haven’t been paying attention to Republican and conservative politics for the past forty years. This is what they do. It’s the only language they speak, at least fluently.”

Wise titled this article “The Afrikaner Party Draws First Blood: Van Jones, Barack Obama and the Audacity of Capitulation.” I think that title is 100% accurate about the state of the Obama administration today. The Obama administration seems to me like the party that is willing to throw  any respectable leader, even a civil rights leader, under the bus if it meant winning elections. If standing for what’s right and what’s principled means losing elections, then the Democratic Party, my party, will compromise their integrity.

I realize that politics is not perfect.  But if I were in Obama’s shoes, I’d draw the line, keep Jones in my administration and tell the bloviators at Fox and co. to #@! off. I would not expect the Obama administration to believe what Beck says on his shows, nor react to what he says. They know Jones well and what he’s all about. The fact that they can’t stand up for a man like him, doesn’t say much about the party and the president I voted for. Thankfully my former governor and current Senator have the courage to stand up for him. Where’s Leahy and Welch? Hopefully they’ll have something to say.  

Maybe Alternet’s Don Hazen was right. Jones is too classy to be involved with the Obama administration. I’m sure he’ll do a lot more outside of government than to work with a bunch of weak-minded politicians.

Not a good weekend for being a Democrat.  

Another amazing Gallery Walk in Brattle-town! The Brattleboro Brass Band put on a great show on Eliot Street tonight.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend!

  – Army Times

Crossposted at Huffington Post.

“Mission compromised” may best describe U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan.  According to journalists Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, American foreign policy and military officials are making several costly miscalculations of Afghanistan’s politics, history, and culture.  In their new book, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Gould and Fitzgerald demolish the myths, falsehoods, and assumptions that are being perpetuated since the 1980s.  

In 1981, Gould and Fitzgerald were the first US television crew granted visas to enter Afghanistan.  One year later, they produced the landmark PBS documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds.  Gould and Fitzgerald continued to write about Afghanistan including a script with Oliver Stone and contributed to another book called, Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future.  Since the release of Invisible History,  Gould and Fitzgerald appeared on Democracy Now!, GRITtv, and C-SPAN Book TV.  

I caught up with Gould and Fitzgerald and discussed recent developments in Afghanistan.  Here’s what they had to say.  

Huffington Post; On Wednesday, president Barack Obama launched a major military operation in southern Afghanistan.  How will this affect the U.S.’s relationship with Pakistan?

Paul Fitzgerald: This has been foretold for some time that it was going to be happen.  We knew quite a while ago that 17,000 troops would be going into Helmand Province and fight the Taliban.  This has been one of the more curious aspects of the way in which the war was being fought.  When we were there in 2002, we were told by Time Magazine correspondent Rob Schultheis that the Inter-Services Intelligence was all over the place down there.  That was well-known in 2002 and the United States wasn’t doing anything about it.

Elizabeth Gould: What we’ve been observing over and over again is that the United States (and its goals and objectives) keeps coming up against a reality check that doesn’t add up.  One of the concerns that even though General Stanley McChrystal is making statements that Afghan civilians are his top priority, there are other issues which have been contentious and very difficult for the United States to really incorporate in a meaningful way.  What we’re dealing with is the follow-up, the actual ability to change the way in which we approach the region, which is still through a military lens and has already been designated as a failure.  One of the reasons it’s a concern is because it’s simply isn’t enough to change the military position.  Something like 400,000 troops would been needed to stabilize the country.  That’s one of the experiences we had in 2002.  When the Iraq War started, there was absolutely no question [in everyone’s mind] that the Taliban was going to return to Kabul.  That was a given and in the ensuing years, it built and built.  

Fitzgerald:  The original force structure was 1.6 soldiers per thousand residents. That was the combined force of the United States and NATO and like Elizabeth said, it would have required between 400,000 and 450,000 soldiers [to stabilize the country].  So it was inadequate from the very beginning.  What’s going on in Helmond is the Obama Administration is trying to establish some credibility for the first time.  The United States doesn’t have any credibility, militarily or civilly, in terms of backing up the civilian government.    

Would you say that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is emboldening or strengthening the Taliban?

Gould: Well, first of all we have to define the Taliban.  We’re dealing with Pakistani Taliban and we’re dealing with Afghan Taliban.  The Pakistani Taliban is linked to the ISI, which is running the action arm of the Taliban.  The Pakistani Taliban is what we have to be concerned about.  It’s not that Afghan Taliban hasn’t utilized their tactics, but they’re not the engine of this process.  If we don’t deal with the Pakistani situation, we’re not going to solve Afghanistan situation.  The truth is that a majority of the Afghan Taliban could very well be non-ideological Afghans who are only in the Taliban because they do not have an economy at this point.  This could be the real motivation for many Afghanis [to join] the Taliban at this point.

Fitzgerald: What the United States has been doing since 2001 has essentially been empowering the Taliban.  These predator drone strikes have been an absolute disaster.  They have been using the predator drones in bombing raids because they did not have enough troops to begin with.  It was a cascading series of problems with one thing leading to the next and the next.  The more Afghan civilians they killed, the worse it became for the U.S.  The more you kill, the worse it gets for you to the point where the United States had very little support in the areas it was conducting predator drone strikes.  So the United States handed victory to the Taliban on a silver platter.

Then how can the United States win the hearts and minds of Afghanis?

Fitzgerald: Well, you really don’t have to look very far within Afghanistan itself to see the areas of Afghanistan where reconstruction efforts are working.  [In other areas where] where there is a lighter footprint, there are nations conducting reconstruction efforts or providing security to the Afghan people  where the Taliban has no influence.  In Herat, they’ve been able to rebuild the city. They’ve been able to rebuild the roads and they have consistent electricity.  They don’t have that in Kabul or other Pashtun areas because of the insurgency.  

Gould: But again, most of the insurgency is coming from Pakistan to keep things unstable. The Afghan Pashtuns are joining the Taliban primarily because of the economy.  

Fitzgerald:  I would say the central problem with what’s going on in Afghanistan right now has been the strange U.S. relationship with Pakistan.  That is at the core of it.  Former president Pervez Musharraf pretended to hunt the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the Bush Administration pretended to believe them.  It was like that old Soviet joke about “they pretended to work and the bureaucrats pretended to believe them.”

What are the questions the American media is not asking about the situation in Afghanistan? What should they be asking and investigating?

Fitzgerald: Well, the big issue is broad-brushing in terms of who the Taliban are.  The differences between the Afghani Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban is the Pakistani Taliban are really the ones behind the whole thing.  They take their orders and funding from Al Qaeda and they give the orders to the Afghan Taliban.  The other thing is there is no general understanding of what Afghanistan was prior to the Soviet invasion.  We keep coming against that all the time.  We keep coming up against ‘Well, the Afghans never had a society anyway, they were never civilized, they were always backward, and therefore you couldn’t reform them.’  It’s a logic train that was profoundly wrong from the very beginning.  

Gould:  Here’s a very current example of how the mindset really has been.  Jon Stewart, of The Daily Show, had an Afghan filmmaker on as one of his guests.  In the film, there was footage from the 1980s and it showed women in mini-skirts (or something like that) that totally shocked Stewart.  Stewart said ‘My God! I had no idea that place had anything modern.  I just assumed it was like in the dark ages.’  This is part of the propaganda campaign that really got going in the 1980s that pigeon-holed Afghanistan vis-a-vis the Freedom Fighters or the idea that the Taliban and their extreme interpretation of Sharia Law was somehow normal.  This was phony.  

Charles G. Cogan wrote in the fall 2008 World Policy Journal that the Taliban was a wholly-owned subsidiary Pakistani ISI and it was created with the intent of setting up a Pakistani-friendly government in Afghanistan.  When the Mujahideen were not able to take over Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, the Taliban were sent in to do the job.  It may have had Afghans as a part of it, but this was a Pakistani-friendly government.  

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, was on Rachel Maddow talking about how the Taliban is indigenous to Afghans. Brezezinski should know full well that the actual creation of the Taliban is Pakistani intelligence.  People just sign on to it because they don’t know the difference between the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, and the real origins of these things.

In our book, we want to give a single source so that you can get the straight goods on what role the United States played and how various agencies interacted that resulted in this crisis for Afghanistan.  

For more information visit www.invisiblehistory.com or City Lights Books at www.citylights.com/publishing/

                        Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald

It happened again folks.  Bob Audette of the Brattleboro Reformer reports another leak was discovered at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant yesterday. This time it’s in the condenser.  Audette writes the following

“The miles and miles of pipes that are used to cool reactor steam produced by Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant sprang another leak Monday.

According to a press release from Yankee, the plant will be reducing power in “the next several weeks” to attempt to repair the condenser, stated Rob Williams, spokesman for Yankee, in a press release detailing the leak.

The condenser acts as a radiator, using water from the Connecticut River to cool steam from the reactor, turning it back into water before sending it back to the reactor.

The condenser is overpressurized to prevent reactor water from getting into the river.

The leak is allowing river water to enter the system and was discovered after plant technicians identified a slight increase in the chloride concentration in the reactor water.”

VY spokesman, Rob Williams.

“This condition has occurred at Vermont Yankee several times over the life of the plant including the last operating cycle,” stated Williams. “Planning is under way to temporarily reduce power to allow technicians to identify the precise location of the leak and to repair it.”

In April 2008, a similar leak forced the plant to power down to 45 percent of its 650-megawatt capacity. The leak was estimated to be about one quart a minute.

According to the recent audit of the power plant, “the condenser is near the end of its useful life and might not be able to operate reliably through 2012 without some remedial actions.”

Folks, this power plant is not reliable. If the state chooses to keep it, expect more problems like this in the future. Vermont Yankee is going to continue operating until it falls apart. That’s not a good business plan for Vermont’s energy needs.

To read the rest of the article click here.

BRATTLEBORO- I think this image says it all. Bernie Sanders comes face-to-face with “Cow-vis” Presley. The Strolling of the Heifers was amazing today. Great time had by all.

Below the fold is a “low-tech” YouTube and a slideshow from today’s events. Hope you enjoy.