The Ruthless Truth blog

Iran rejects NATO chief’s claims

Global Research, April 11, 2010

Press TV

The Iranian embassy in Copenhagen has responded to the NATO chief’s recent claims about Tehran’s nuclear program, calling them "misleading false assumptions". 
"The former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s Wednesday article, which raised some issues about Iran, was full of misinterpretations, ill-intent, and false accusations about Tehran’s peaceful nuclear and missile activities," the embassy said in a statement. 
"He, like others who seek any opportunity to spread their warmongering views, has one again resorted to preconceptions, lies and deception," it added. 
The embassy also said that the NATO chief was making such accusations against Iran, because of his close relationship with former US and British leaders, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, "the architects of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan." 
In his article, which was published on April 1, the secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization accused Iran of concealing its nuclear facilities. 
He also claimed that Iran has rejected "all offers of co-operation from the US, European Union, and others," while announcing "plans to enrich its uranium to levels that appear incompatible with civilian use." 
In its statement, the embassy responded to the points raised by Rasmussen, arguing that "constantly, and especially during the past seven years," the Iranian nuclear program had been under the supervision of UN nuclear watchdog inspectors. 
"As these inspectors have not reported any concealed facilities, then how has Rasmussen allowed himself to make such allegations with such conviction?" 
The embassy also pointed out what Rasmussen meant by "plans to enrich its uranium to levels that appear incompatible with civilian use" had to be Iran’s recent announcement that it was reprocessing nuclear material to a level of 20 percent. 
Iran has started 20 percent enrichment to provide fuel for the Tehran Reactor which produces radioisotopes for medical purposes. Nuclear weapon proliferation would require reprocessing to a level of over 80 percent. 
According to the embassy, Rasmussen has "deliberately" omitted that fact in his article to "sway public opinion." 
"In his point of view, is medical usage not a peaceful purpose? All these activities are being carried out under the watchful eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency and its cameras," the statement said. 
The embassy also noted offers made to Tehran had so far been nothing but demands for full "surrender" of Iran’s legitimate nuclear rights in return for permission to purchase "specified" goods and services from "specified" US and European companies.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18611

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Matthew Campbell
Timesonline UK
Sun, 11 Apr 2010 08:22 EDT

© Unknown
Two men in the streets of the New Baghdad district of eastern Baghdad after being fired upon by the helicopter

Whistleblowers on US ‘massacre’ fear CIA stalkers
two men in the streets of the New Baghdad district of eastern Baghdad after being fired upon by the helicopter
Two men in the streets of the New Baghdad district of eastern Baghdad after being fired upon by the helicopter
Matthew Campbell
Activists behind a website dedicated to revealing secret documents have complained of harassment by police and intelligence services as they prepare to release a video showing an American attack in which 97 civilians were killed in Afghanistan.
Julian Assange, one of the founders of Wikileaks, has claimed that a restaurant where the group met in Reykjavic, the capital of Iceland, came under surveillance in March and one of the group’s volunteers was detained for 21 hours by police.
Assange, an Australian, says he was followed on a flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen by two American agents. The group has riled governments by publishing documents leaked by whistleblowers.
Last week it released the cockpit recording from an American Apache helicopter as it killed Iraqi civilians, including a Reuters photographer, in Baghdad in 2007.
Assange claims surveillance has intensified as he and his colleagues prepare to put out their Afghan film. It is said to concern the so-called "Granai massacre", when American aircraft dropped 500lb and 1,000lb bombs on a suspected militant compound in Farah province on May 4 last year. Several children were among those killed.
In messages on Twitter, the internet social networking site, Assange complained of "covert following and hidden photography" by police and foreign intelligence services. There have been thinly veiled threats, he says, from "an apparent British intelligence agent" in a car park in Luxembourg.
"Computers were also seized," another member of Wikileaks said on Twitter, raising alarm among supporters with a subsequent post: "If anything happens to us, you know why … and you know who is responsible."
Their apprehension is perhaps understandable. America’s defence establishment has made clear that it would like to silence the site. In 2008, the Pentagon produced a report on how to undermine and neutralise Wikileaks. This, too, emerged on the website.
Assange, who is believed to be 37, founded Wikileaks three years ago with a group of like-minded computer programmers, academics and activists. The site says it has had more scoops since then than The Washington Post in three decades and has become a global clearing house for sensitive documents. It has exposed crimes from toxic dumping and tax evasion to extrajudicial murders in Kenya.
Assange says the 38-minute Iraqi video broadcast by the group is evidence of "collateral murder" by American forces. It shows a group of Iraqi men being killed by gunfire from the helicopter. A helicopter then shoots at a van arriving to take the bodies away.
A crew member is heard saying: "Nice shooting." When it emerges that two children in the van have been injured, someone else says: "Serves them right for bringing their children into a battle."
The film, in which American forces kill with the seeming detachment of video gamers, has been seen by millions on the internet since it was first aired on Monday. The website, which claims to exist on a shoestring budget, says it has since received more than £100,000 in donations.
America’s military defended the killings, saying no disciplinary action had been taken at the time of the incident. However, Reuters has striven in vain since 2007 to obtain access to the video under freedom of information laws.
Broadcasting such a film could expose Wikileaks to prosecution in America but the organisation appears to have put itself beyond the reach of court injunctions by existing only in the digital sphere.
There has been speculation that Wikileaks might be part of a sophisticated "psy-ops" campaign by the CIA. If that is the case, says Assange, "I only wish they would step forward with a cheque."

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/206550-Whistleblowers-on-US-massacre-fear-CIA-stalkers

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Socialist Women Declare a Global Feminist Holiday

by Megan Cornish

Global Research, March 8, 2010

Freedom Socialist Party – 2010-02-01

Women are a revolutionary force. That fact shows in their holiday, International Women’s Day (IWD), both its past and present. Because the profit system depends on the second-class status of women, the day that honors them is bound to be connected to momentous happenings.

There were at least 984 events last year in 64 countries. The day is an official holiday in 29 countries — not accidentally, mostly those with an anti-capitalist history. They include China, Cuba, Vietnam, states in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and some in Africa.

The wealthier nations — North American and European countries, Australia — don’t recognize it. It’s notable that both IWD and May Day, the international workers’ holiday, were started to commemorate the struggles of workers in the U.S. — but neither is recognized officially in the heart of Capital.

A militant beginning. The holiday’s roots are in the struggles of working women and their socialist supporters. It’s believed that a mass protest by women garment and textile workers in New York City in 1857 occurred on March 8, and that in March two years later the same women won a drive to unionize. They were fighting against brutal working conditions, low wages, and the 12-hour day.

On March 8, 1908, socialist women organized a demonstration of 15,000 in New York. Their demands were pay raises, shorter hours, the vote, and an end to child labor. After that, the Socialist Party of America decided to celebrate a women’s day in the U.S., the first of which was held in 1909.

International Women’s Day was founded the following year, a century ago, at the Second International Socialist Women’s Conference held alongside the International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark. The attendees represented socialist parties, working women’s clubs, and unions, and included the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, at a time when few women had the right to vote.

U.S. delegates went intending to propose an international women’s day, only to find that German feminist Clara Zetkin had beaten them to it. Zetkin was a prominent member of the German socialist party, which had a strong history of defending women’s rights. Women from 17 countries voted unanimously to create the holiday. The next year, 1911, celebrations started with a bang, with more than a million people demonstrating in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland.

The need for such a day got a chilling but powerful push from the great Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, in New York. Locked exits and poor safety measures caused the deaths of 146 workers, mostly women. It became an international scandal that ignited labor organizing. It helped build the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which was one of the first primarily female unions and became one of the largest unions in the U.S.

In 1913 and 1914, as the drumbeats for World War I were beginning to sound, major IWD demonstrations calling for peace took place in Europe. World War I began in August 1914. For several years, IWD was suppressed both by capitalist governments and by some socialist parties, those that had betrayed international working-class solidarity by backing their own nations in the war.

A revolutionary spark. But the most momentous IWD so far was in Russia on March 8, 1917. The story is told magnificently in Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Women started the insurrection that overthrew the all-powerful czar — and led to the Bolshevik revolution eight months later.

Women textile workers in Petersburg were desperate and angry because of severe food shortages and the slaughter of several million Russian soldiers in the war. They went on strike, and called on other factories to support them. The strike and demonstrations grew from day to day, and five days later, the Russian monarchy was gone for good.

Ongoing insurgency. IWD isn’t just a ceremonial occasion. In Iran in 2007, police violently broke up an IWD protest and arrested dozens of women. The day has a militant history in Iran.

On IWD in 1979, in the midst of the revolution that ousted the U.S.-backed shah, and just after the right-wing Islamic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, 100,000 women and male supporters rallied at Tehran University. Then 20,000 women, wearing western clothes instead of the mandated full-length veil, marched through the city. Protests were organized in other cities, too. Women demanded equal rights, including the right to dress as they wished. Religious vigilantes dispersed the women, although they fought back over the course of several days. It was the failure of left parties to defend the women that led to the ultimate defeat of the revolution.

Female leadership is a high-water mark in struggles too numerous to count. Women workers were instrumental in nationalizing banks during the uncompleted Portuguese revolution in 1977. Women played a vital role in Latin American upheavals of the 1980s, including Nicaragua’s Sandinista rebellion. Europe in the ’80s saw a huge upsurge of feminism, particularly within socialist and communist parties.

Last year, women played a forefront role in the uprising in Honduras against the coup that ousted the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya.

In the U.S., the huge feminist movement launched in the late 1960s began with radical aims. Despite the achievement of some reforms and a sea change in social attitudes, those aims remain to be fulfilled — as they do in the rest of the world.

The dynamism and revolutionary role of women workers that IWD commemorates is a key to understanding our times. Revolts by those on the bottom against the crimes of the profit system spring up continually. And those on the bottom are women, of all colors and nationalities and sexual persuasions, and as the most downtrodden part of every other oppressed group.

In the process of accomplishing their own liberation, women will be essential to the liberation of humanity.

Global Research Articles by Megan Cornish

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17687

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Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney were Right About Barack Obama

by Chris Hedges

Global Research, March 2, 2010

Truthdig – 2010-03-01

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives. 

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.

He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers’ defective products. These policies would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums and see most of the seriously ill left bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel’s brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims’ lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.

The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea-party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now, were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the protofascists. Take a look at the 3,000-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who flew his Piper Cherokee last month into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring dozens. He was not alone in his rage.

“Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?” Stack wrote. “Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political ‘representatives’ (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the ‘terrible health care problem’. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.”

The timidity of the left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the Democrats have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the longer they beg Obama and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse. It is time to walk out on the Democrats. It is time to back alternative third-party candidates and grass-roots movements, no matter how marginal such support may be. If we do not take a stand soon we must prepare for the rise of a frightening protofascist movement, one that is already gaining huge ground among the permanently unemployed, a frightened middle class and frustrated low-wage workers. We are, even more than Glenn Beck or tea-party protesters, responsible for the gusts fanning the flames of right-wing revolt because we have failed to articulate a credible alternative.

A shift to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader, along with genuine grass-roots movements, will not be a quick fix. It will require years in the wilderness. We will again be told by the Democrats that the least-worse candidate they select for office is better than the Republican troll trotted out as an alternative. We will be bombarded with slick commercials about hope and change and spoken to in a cloying feel-your-pain language. We will be made afraid. But if we again acquiesce we will be reduced to sad and pathetic footnotes in our accelerating transformation from a democracy to a totalitarian corporate state. Isolation and ridicule—ask Nader or McKinney—is the cost of defying power, speaking truth and building movements. Anger at injustice, as Martin Luther King wrote, is the political expression of love. And it is vital that this anger become our own. We have historical precedents to fall back upon. 

“Here in the United States, at the beginning of the twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name,” the late historian and activist Howard Zinn said in a lecture a year ago at Binghamton University. “Millions of people in the United States read socialist newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress and socialist members of state legislatures. You know, there were like fourteen socialist chapters in Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism—who stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair. Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be restored.”

Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism, organizing and mobilization that empower groups to confront the hegemony of the corporate state and the power elite. The longer socialism is identified with the corporatist policies of the Democratic Party, the longer we allow the right wing to tag Obama as a socialist, the more absurd and ineffectual we become. The right-wing mantra of “Obama the socialist,” repeated a few days ago to a room full of Georgia Republicans, by Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. speaker of the House, is discrediting socialism itself. Gingrich, who looks set to run for president, called Obama the “most radical president” the country had seen in decades. “By any standard of government control of the economy, he is a socialist,” Gingrich said. If only the critique were true.

The hypocrisy and ineptitude of the Democrats become, in the eyes of the wider public, the hypocrisy and ineptitude of the liberal class. We can continue to tie our own hands and bind our own feet or we can break free, endure the inevitable opprobrium, and fight back. This means refusing to support the Democrats. It means undertaking the laborious work of building a viable socialist movement. It is the only alternative left to save our embattled open society. We can begin by sending a message to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader. Let them know they are no longer alone.

Chris Hedges is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Chris Hedges

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17875

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Corrupt Royal Saudi Family?

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