March 2, 2014

Resolving Nuclear Arms Claims Hinges on Iran’s Demand for Documents

WASHINGTON, Mar 1 2014 (IPS) - The Barack Obama administration has demanded that Iran resolve “past and present concerns” about the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear programme as a condition for signing a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Tehran.


Administration officials have suggested that Iran must satisfy the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding the allegations in the agency’s report that it has had a covert nuclear weapons programme in the past.

But the record of negotiations between Iran and the IAEA shows Tehran has been ready for the past two years to provide detailed responses to all the charges of an Iranian nuclear weapons work, and that the problem has been the refusal of the IAEA to share with Iran the documentary evidence on which those allegations have been based.

The real obstacle to providing those documents, however, has long been a U.S. policy of refusing to share the documents on the assumption that Iran must confess to having had a weaponisation programme.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, declared Feb. 12, “The authenticity of each allegation should be proven first, then the person who submitted it to the agency should give us the genuine document. When we are assured of the authenticity, then we can talk to the agency.”

http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/03/resolving-nuclear-arms-claims-hinges-irans-demand-documents/

February 21, 2014

Warning: Saudi mayhem ahead

By Pepe Escobar

Move over, Peter O' Toole. It's Charles of Arabia time. Prince Charles switched to Lawrence mode when he went schmoozing and dancing in Riyadh this past Tuesday with the natives. And just like clockwork, the next day BAE Systems - Europe's number one weapons peddler - announced that the UK and the House of Saud had agreed on "new pricing" for an extremely juicy deal; 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets.

The Eurofighter is a direct competitor of the spectacularly unsalable French Rafale and the very expensive American F-35s and F-16s. The Associated Press duly included in its dispatch - reproduced by virtually every newspaper around the world - the
Washington-enforced meme "Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries are fortifying their military capabilities to counter a perceived threat from regional rivals, particularly Iran." As if Tehran was going to bomb the House of Saud tomorrow.

The Eurofighter, on the other hand, has already been employed against fellow Arabs - as in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's humanitarian bombing of Libya back to failed-state status. It's open to debate whether the House of Saud might be tempted to employ it against the enemy within: aspiring Saudi women drivers.

Brandishing the official excuse that near-nonagenarian King Abdullah was not able to receive him, Charles of Arabia declined to discuss with the House of Saud the absolutely appalling women's rights, migrant workers' rights and for that matter the full human rights situation in the kingdom. Of course not; this is only brought up when demonizing Russia, China and/or Iran.

remainder: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-03-210214.html

February 18, 2014

Edwin Sutherland: The 75th Anniversary of His Coining The Term White-Collar Crime

By William K. Black


Introduction

This year is the 75th anniversary of Edwin Sutherland’s presidential address to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in 1939. In the course of beginning to write a book from a white-collar criminological perspective about our modern financial crises I decided to reread Sutherland’s address (which was published as an article in 1940) to see how it stands up in light of modern white-collar criminological research and theory. It reads exceptionally well today. It is not even archaic in tone. Sutherland begins by listing eleven (there were two van Sweringen brothers involved in their scam) examples of the kind of criminals he was referring to.

“The present-day white-collar criminals, who are more suave and deceptive than the ‘robber barons,’ are represented by Krueger, Stavisky, Whitney, Mitchell, Foshay, Insull, the Van Sweringens, Musica-Coster, Fall, Sinclair, and many other merchant princes and captains of finance and industry, and by a host of lesser followers.”

Musica-Coster is hyphenated because he used an alias, as did his brothers, to aid his ability to continue to defraud even after one set of his frauds was discovered. Each of the eleven people listed ran what we now call a “control fraud” (where the person controlling a seemingly legitimate entity uses it as “weapon” to defraud. Ten of the individuals controlled private entities. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall was the corrupt public official leading the Tea Pot Dome scandal. I am near Minneapolis this semester (go north for the winter, brilliant idea) and in driving into the city tonight I saw Foshay Tower (the tallest building west of Chicago and east of California when it was built). Wilbur Burton Foshay made Sutherland’s list.

Nine of the eleven fraud schemes involved financial sector frauds. Harry F. Sinclair, who purchased the sweetheart lease to the Tea Pot Dome from Secretary Fall, was engaged in good old fashioned corruption. Sutherland recognized that accounting was what we now call the “weapon of choice” in financial sector frauds.

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/02/edwin-sutherland-75th-anniversary-coining-term-white-collar-crime.html

February 16, 2014

The Arab Spring is not over

by Jimmy Carter @CarterCenter February 14, 2014

Jimmy Carter writes that the democratic process requires patience and the right forms of assistance


There have been dramatic political upheavals in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, and the Carter Center — the nonprofit foundation I head that seeks to promote human rights, democracy and alleviation of suffering worldwide — has been invited to witness the transition process from authoritarianism to democracy in all of them. We still see citizens struggling to improve their lives and shape their own destiny, with sharply different prospects.

Egypt has been least adaptable to change, and is undergoing a reversion to de facto military rule — perhaps even more restrictive than under former President Hosni Mubarak and previous regimes. The Carter Center witnessed reasonably good elections for parliament and president in 2012, when the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Freedom and Justice Party and its presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, emerged victorious. But Egypt’s high court nullified the parliamentary choices, and instead of requiring a new election when Morsi proved unable to govern under these circumstances, there was a military takeover with the apparent approval of a public whose first priority was stability.

Dissent was severely restricted for citizens and journalists during last month’s approval of the new constitution, which limits the scope of Islamic law and provides for more gender equality and personal freedom, but gives the military ultimate authority. Seemingly immune from constitutional restrictions, the generals of Egypt’s armed forces control their own budget, select the defense minister and retain the right to conduct trials of civilians in military tribunals. The Interior Ministry and judiciary are also granted extraordinary privileges.

Our role in Libya has been to observe the post-Kaddafi election in July 2012 and prospectively to witness the election this month of delegates who will draft a new constitution. The interim government, expected to function until the end of this year, is weak and unable to administer all regions of the country, especially areas in the east and the southern desert that are controlled by militia factions. This threatens national stability and the oil revenues that fund the state. The delegates will be divided among the country’s three regions, giving exceptional weight to the underpopulated and historically alienated regions — equivalent to advantages that America’s founders gave smaller states in the U.S. Senate and Electoral College, which we have learned to accommodate.

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/arab-spring-democracyegyptlibyatunisia.html

February 13, 2014

Report Prompts Renewed Push To Limit Restraint, Seclusion

By Michelle Diament

to Senator Harkin, I so do not want him to retire.


February 13, 2014

Widespread use of restraint and seclusion in the nation’s schools is putting kids with disabilities at risk and current laws offer families little recourse, a U.S. Senate investigation finds.

A 54-page report from the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee unveiled Wednesday documents 10 cases where students have experienced restraint or seclusion at school. Among them are the story of a 12-year-old Florida boy with developmental disabilities who was restrained 89 times in 14 months without his parents’ knowledge and the case of a 14-year-old in Georgia who committed suicide after being repeatedly secluded at school.

The findings were issued as Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, announced plans to introduce federal legislation to limit the use of restraint and seclusion in schools, practices which data suggest are most frequently used on students with disabilities.

Currently, Harkin said that there are laws to protect individuals in jails and hospitals but there are no nationwide standards for schools.

remainder:http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2014/02/13/report-renewed-restraint/19106/

February 12, 2014

( Updated ) Mom creates birthday Facebook page after son says he has no friends

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

February 11, 2014 (KALAMAZOO, Mich.) (WLS) -- Ten-year-old Colin, of Kalamazoo, Mich., told his mom not to throw him a birthday party because he has no friends.

Colin, who suffers from Asperger's, told his mom there would be no point in throwing a birthday party because all of the kids at school "don't like me" and "make fun of me."

That's when Colin's mom came up with a special surprise. She created a Facebook page called "Happy Birthday Colin" where people can leave birthday messages for Colin, and it's getting lots of attention.

Leave a birthday wish on Colin's page

"I am Colin's mom, I created this page for my amazing, wonderful, challenging son who is about to turn 11 on March 9th," she wrote February 2. "Because of Colin's disabilities, social skills are not easy for him, and he often acts out in school, and the other kids don't like him... He eats lunch alone in the office everyday because no one will let him sit with them.

"So I thought, if I could create a page where people could send him positive thoughts and encouraging words, that would be better than any birthday party. Please join me in making my very original son feel special on his day," Mom wrote.

The page has 81,389 likes so far. Colin's mom said she's hoping to keep it a secret until March 9. But he's already heard chatter at school about being on the news.

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/national_world&id=9427862

February 11, 2014

Misread Telexes Led Analysts to See Iran Nuclear Arms Programme

Analysis by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Feb 5 2014 (IPS) - When Western intelligence agencies began in the early 1990s to intercept telexes from an Iranian university to foreign high technology firms, intelligence analysts believed they saw the first signs of military involvement in Iran’s nuclear programme. That suspicion led to U.S. intelligence assessments over the next decade that Iran was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.

The supposed evidence of military efforts to procure uranium enrichment equipment shown in the telexes was also the main premise of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation of Iran’s nuclear programme from 2003 through 2007.

But the interpretation of the intercepted telexes on which later assessments were based turned out to have been a fundamental error. The analysts, eager to find evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, had wrongly assumed that the combination of interest in technologies that could be used in a nuclear programme and the apparent role of a military-related institution meant that the military was behind the procurement requests.

The intercepted telexes that set in train the series of U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran was working on nuclear weapons were sent from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Credit: public domain.
In 2007-08, Iran provided hard evidence that the technologies had actually been sought by university teachers and researchers.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/02/misread-telexes-led-analysts-see-iran-nuclear-arms-programme/

February 2, 2014

BOOK REVIEW – Gareth Porter: A Manufactured Crisis

January 31, 2014

by Peter Jenkins

The subtitle of Gareth Porter’s new book, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, is well-chosen. Large parts of A Manufactured Crisis are indeed untold till now. They amount to what the author terms an “alternative narrative”.

But don’t be misled by “alternative”. This is not the work of some crank who imagines conspiracies where none exist. One senses, rather, from the author’s meticulous sourcing and the extent of his research that what motivates him is a fierce hunger for truth and aversion to deceit.

Porter has been investigating the Iranian nuclear case for the best part of a decade. The result of his researches is both a fascinating addition to a growing corpus, unlike any previous work on the issue, and a disturbing indictment of US and Israeli policies.

One central theme is that hidden motives have coloured these policies. On the US side, Porter explains, the end of the Cold War led to a federal bureaucratic interest in exaggerating the WMD and missile threat posed by Iran (and other emerging countries) to justify funding bids. During the presidency of George W. Bush some senior administration members also sought to exploit nuclear fears to “delegitimize” the Iranian government and engineer a pretext for enforced regime change.

http://beforeitsnews.com/middle-east/2014/01/book-review-gareth-porter-a-manufactured-crisis-2456802.html