"America has no functioning democracy at this moment," Carter said, according to Der Spiegel.

‘America has no functioning democracy’ – Jimmy Carter on NSA
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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP)Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP)
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Former US President Jimmy Carter lambasted US intelligence methods as undemocratic and described Edward Snowden’s NSA leak as “beneficial” for the country.

Carter lashed out at the US political system when the issue of the previously top-secret NSA surveillance program was touched upon at the Atlantic Bridge meeting on Tuesday in Atlanta, Georgia.


He also believes the spying-scandal is undermining democracy around the world, as people become increasingly suspicious of US internet platforms, such as Google and Facebook. While such mediums have normally been associated with freedom of speech and have recently become a major driving force behind emerging democratic movements, fallout from the NSA spying scandal has dented their credibility.

It’s not the first time Carter has criticized US intelligence policies. In a previous interview with
CNN, he said the NSA leaks signified that “the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far." He added that although Snowden violated US law, he may have ultimately done good for the country.

"I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial."

Jimmy Carter was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. After leaving office, he founded the Carter Center, an NGO advocating human rights. The ex-president’s human rights credentials won him Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Carter has frequently criticized his successors in the White House. Last year, he condemned the Obama administration for the use of drone attacks in his article "A Cruel and Unusual Record" published in the New York Times.

The Zimmerman trial in Pesrspective

the following is the last half of an article by TA-NEHISI COATES's in the latest issue of Atlantic magazine:

....The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

One need only look the criminalization of Martin across the country. Perhaps you have been lucky enough to not receive the above "portrait" of Trayvon Martin and its accompanying text. The portrait is actually of a 32-year old man. Perhaps you were lucky enough to not see the Trayvon Martin imagery used for target practice (by law enforcement, no less.) Perhaps you did not see the iPhone games. Or maybe you missed the theory presently being floated by Zimmerman's family that Martin was a gun-runner and drug-dealer in training, that texts and tweets he sent mark him as a criminal in waiting. Or the theory floated that the mere donning of a hoodie marks you a thug, leaving one wondering why this guy is a criminal and this one is not.

We have spent much of this year outlining the ways in which American policy has placed black people outside of the law. We are now being told that after having pursued such policies for 200 years, after codifying violence in slavery, after a people conceived in mass rape, after permitting the disenfranchisement of black people through violence, after Draft riots, after white-lines, white leagues, and red shirts, after terrorism, after standing aside for the better reduction of Rosewood and the improvement of Tulsa, after the coup d'etat in Wilmington, after Airport Homes and Cicero, after Ossian Sweet, after Arthur Lee McDuffie, after Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpers, after Kathryn Johnston and the Danziger Bridge, that there are no ill effects, that we are pure, that we are just, that we are clean. Our sense of self is incredible. We believe ourselves to have inherited all of Jefferson's love of freedom, but none of his affection for white supremacy.

You should not be troubled that George Zimmerman "got away" with the killing of Trayvon Martin, you should be troubled that you live in a country that ensures that Trayvon Martin will happen. Trayvon Martin is happening again in Florida. Right now:
TA-NEHISI COATES


In November, black youth Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old Jacksonville resident, was the only person murdered after Michael Dunn, 46, allegedly shot into the SUV Davis was inside several times after an argument about the volume of music playing.
According to Dunn's girlfriend, Rhonda Rouer, Dunn had three rum and cokes at a wedding reception. She felt secure enough for him to drive and thought that he was in a good mood. On the drive back to the hotel they were residing at, they made a pit stop at the convenience store where the murder occurred. At the Gate Station, Rouer said Dunn told her that he hated "thug music." Rouer then went inside the store to make purchases and heard several gunshots while she was still within the building.
Upon returning and seeing Dunn put his gun back into the glove compartment, Rouer asked why he had shot at the car playing music and Dunn claimed that he feared for his life and that "they threatened to kill me." The couple drove back to their hotel, and claim they did not realize anyone had died until the story appeared on the news the next day.
After killing Jordan Davis, Michael Dunn ordered a pizza.
When you have a society that takes at its founding the hatred and degradation of a people, when that society inscribes that degradation in its most hallowed document, and continues to inscribe hatred in its laws and policies, it is fantastic to believe that its citizens will derive no ill messaging.

It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended. To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn't come back from twenty-four down.

To paraphrase a great man: We are what our record says we are. How can we sensibly expect different?

Mandela’s Greatness May Be Assured -- But Not His Legacy By John Pilger

published in Counterpunch and ICH newsletter

July 11, 2013 "Information Clearing House - When I reported from South Africa in the 1960s, the Nazi admirer Johannes Vorster occupied the prime minister’s residence in Cape Town. Thirty years later, as I waited at the gates, it was as if the guards had not changed. White Afrikaners checked my ID with the confidence of men in secure work. One carried a copy of Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. “It’s very eenspirational,” he said.

Mandela had just had his afternoon nap and looked sleepy; his shoelaces were untied. Wearing a bright gold shirt, he meandered into the room. “Welcome back,” said the first president of a democratic South Africa, beaming. “You must understand that to have been banned from my country is a great honour.” The sheer grace and charm of the man made you feel good. He chuckled about his elevation to sainthood. “That’s not the job I applied for,” he said drily.

Still, he was well used to deferential interviews and I was ticked off several times – “you completely forgot what I said” and “I have already explained that matter to you”. In brooking no criticism of the African National Congress (ANC), he revealed something of why millions of South Africans will mourn his passing but not his “legacy”.

I had asked him why the pledges he and the ANC had given on his release from prison in 1990 had not been kept. The liberation government, Mandela had promised, would take over the apartheid economy, including the banks – and “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Once in power, the party’s official policy to end the impoverishment of most South Africans, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), was abandoned, with one of his ministers boasting that the ANC’s politics were Thatcherite.

“You can put any label on it if you like,” he replied. “…but, for this country, privatisation is the fundamental policy.”

“That’s the opposite of what you said in 1994.”

“You have to appreciate that every process incorporates a change.”

Few ordinary South Africans were aware that this “process” had begun in high secrecy more than two years before Mandela’s release when the ANC in exile had, in effect, done a deal with prominent members of the Afrikaaner elite at meetings in a stately home, Mells Park House, near Bath. The prime movers were the corporations that had underpinned apartheid.

Around the same time, Mandela was conducting his own secret negotiations. In 1982, he had been moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison, where he could receive and entertain people. The apartheid regime’s aim was to split the ANC between the “moderates” they could “do business with” (Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo) and those in the frontline townships who led the United Democratic Front (UDF). On 5 July, 1989, Mandela was spirited out of prison to meet P.W. Botha, the white minority president known as the Groot Krokodil (Big Crocodile). Mandela was delighted that Botha poured the tea.

With democratic elections in 1994, racial apartheid was ended, and economic apartheid had a new face. During the 1980s, the Botha regime had offered black businessmen generous loans, allowing them set up companies outside the Bantustans. A new black bourgeoisie emerged quickly, along with a rampant cronyism. ANC chieftains moved into mansions in “golf and country estates”. As disparities between white and black narrowed, they widened between black and black.

The familiar refrain that the new wealth would “trickle down” and “create jobs” was lost in dodgy merger deals and “restructuring” that cost jobs. For foreign companies, a black face on the board often ensured that nothing had changed. In 2001, George Soros told the Davos Economic Forum, “South Africa is in the hands of international capital.”

In the townships, people felt little change and were subjected to apartheid-era evictions; some expressed nostalgia for the “order” of the old regime. The post-apartheid achievements in de-segregating daily life in South Africa, including schools, were undercut by the extremes and corruption of a “neoliberalism” to which the ANC devoted itself. This led directly to state crimes such as the massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in 2012, which evoked the infamous Sharpeville massacre more than half a century earlier. Both had been protests about injustice.

Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid. He saw this as part of “reconciliation”. Perhaps he and his beloved ANC had been in struggle and exile for so long they were willing to accept and collude with the forces that had been the people’s enemy. There were those who genuinely wanted radical change, including a few in the South African Communist Party, but it was the powerful influence of mission Christianity that may have left the most indelible mark. White liberals at home and abroad warmed to this, often ignoring or welcoming Mandela’s reluctance to spell out a coherent vision, as Amilcar Cabral and Pandit Nehru had done.

Ironically, Mandela seemed to change in retirement, alerting the world to the post 9/11 dangers of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. His description of Blair as “Bush’s foreign minister” was mischievously timed; Thabo Mbeki, his successor, was about to arrive in London to meet Blair. I wonder what he would make of the recent “pilgrimage” to his cell on Robben Island by Barack Obama, the unrelenting jailer of Guantanamo.

Mandela seemed unfailingly gracious. When my interview with him was over, he patted me on the arm as if to say I was forgiven for contradicting him. We walked to his silver Mercedes, which consumed his small grey head among a bevy of white men with huge arms and wires in their ears. One of them gave an order in Afrikaans and he was gone.

John Pilger’s film, Apartheid Did Not Die, can be viewed on www.johnpilger.com

Israel moves ahead with plan to expell thousands of Bedouins from Negev and steal their land

On 8th anniversary of Palestinian BDS Call, BNC calls to isolate Knesset over Prawer Plan
by Annie Robbins on July 10, 2013


“Prawer Plan” to uproot and dispossess indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian Communities in the Naqab (Negev) is latest definitive evidence of the colonial nature of Zionism

Occupied Palestine, 9 July 2013 – The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) condemns the racist and colonial “Prawer Plan” which was adopted by the Israeli government as official policy and recently passed by parliament (Knesset) in the first reading. This plan calls for ethnically cleansing tens of thousands of Bedouin Palestinian citizens of Israel by confiscating hundreds of thousands of dunams [1] of land that they have owned for generations in the Naqab and destroying their homes and communities to expand Jewish-only settlements in the Naqab.

On today’s 8th anniversary of the Palestinian BDS Call, the BNC, which is the largest coalition in Palestinian society, reiterates its unwavering support for the struggle of our people in the 1948 territory against Israeli apartheid and its racist laws [2] and warmly welcomes the principled support for this struggle by anti-Zionist Jewish Israelis. The BNC calls upon all people of conscience around the world to escalate BDS campaigns against the state of Israel and its institutions which are responsible for this latest chapter of ethnic cleansing against our people.

In response to the Israeli parliament’s approval in the first reading of this racist “Prawer Plan”, and given its record of enacting tens of racist laws in the past, Palestinian civil society, as represented in the BNC, calls upon the Inter-Parliamentary Union to freeze the Knesset’s membership until it repeals all racist laws that are inconsistent with international law and the principles and objectives of the United Nations and of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, in particular the principle of “protection and promotion of human rights.”

The “Prawer Plan” is a new chapter of the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) against the indigenous Palestinian people which started in 1948 when Zionist militias, and later the newly established State of Israel, uprooted and dispossessed a majority of Palestinians from their ancestral land.

The main objective of the Prawer scheme is to sever the historical ties that bind Bedouin Palestinian communities to their land. It therefore presents new irrefutable evidence of the colonial nature of Zionism in thought and practice, as well as the nature of the apartheid system which the Israeli regime imposes on our people in the 1948 territory, reaching its peak with the insistence of this regime on maintaining an exclusionary “Jewish” identity that relegates the indigenous Palestinians into an inferior status by law. This aspect of Israel’s regime of oppression recalls the defining characteristics of apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow South in the United States.

The “Prawer Plan” violates universal principles of human rights, such as equality and effective participation in decision-making matters that are related to human life and well-being. It specifically violates the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [3], which in Article (8) states that “Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture,” including “Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources,” as well as “any form or forced population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights.”

The plan also violates article (10) of the Declaration which prevents forcible removing of the indigenous peoples from their lands or territories.

“Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option of return.”

All Palestinians in the 1948 territory, regardless of their different ideologies or political affiliations, are waging a determined and unified struggle against the Israeli apartheid regime that they are forced to live under in order to preserve what remains of their lands. Since the 1948 Nakba, successive Israeli governments have illegally looted and confiscated most of the land owned by Palestinians, who became citizens of the state, in order to further entrench the existing apartheid system that racially privileges Jewish citizens over Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) citizens, with legal and legislative cover. The Israeli judicial system and parliament share direct responsibility for their indispensable role in this ongoing process of dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian minority in Israel.

The time-honored logic of consistently pressuring rogue states to bring about their compliance with international law, including human rights principles, should be further applied to Israel, a regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid over the Palestinian people. BDS is one of the main forms of Palestinian popular and civil resistance which aims at regaining our fundamental rights, whether individual or collective, including the rights of nearly 1.5 million Palestinians in the 1948 territory.

BDS has proven over the last 8 years to be the most effective form of international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality. The impressive achievements of the BDS movement in the last few months, such as Stephen Hawking’s boycott of an Israeli conference organized by Shimon Peres, and the frantic reaction of the Israeli establishment to the inspiring growth of the BDS movement across the world have underlined Israel’s vulnerability to this non-violent, rights-based movement that is anchored in international law, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


[1] One dunam = 1000 m2
[2] The 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines apartheid as “inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” http://untreaty.un.org/cod/icc/statute/romefra.htm Israel’s regime over its own Palestinian citizens fits this definition as it maintains more than 50 laws that racially discriminate against them. http://adalah.org/eng/Israeli-Discriminatory-Law-Database
[3] http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf

Egypt in Danger, 8 Reasons Why

from The Palestine Chronicle


By Abdelrahman Rashdan

Egyptians are again amazing the whole world with their abilities to change their political realities; yet this time might be to the worse.

The military coup that took place in response to the mass demonstrations in Egypt which lasted for few days came in to mark a new fundamental change in the political life. It seems now that the streets have become the ballot box, and military helicopters have now become the tool for counting the vote, while the results get announced by uniformed military personnel.

The reasons why Egypt reached this stage are numerous and can be tackled in another analysis, yet what is more important now is to underscore the looming danger that the country is heading towards.

Here are the reasons why I think Egypt's political future is in danger:

1 -Military coup is different from the January 25 revolution:

Egyptian people are divided now between supporters and opponents and each side has its own reasonable arguments. It is not black and white as it was before, not a dictator that has been abusing his people for 30 years.

2- Ballot boxes lost credibility:

Egyptians that have stood in endless lines for hours to cast their votes in three elections and two referendums have their votes simply replaced by the eyes of the military looking down their helicopters for the past few days to estimate the number of people on the streets, and determine which bloc has the majority: the opposition or supporters of the democratically elected president.

At the same time, there is a big portion of the masses supporting the Islamic movements, especially youth, which only participated in the democratic process because it was the only option available although they see it as a mean that contradicts Islamic Shari'ah. The military coup just proved them right now; they have all the Islamic and pragmatic reasons to reject democracy. I wouldn't be surprised if new solutions found increasing popularity in Egypt soon.

3- Referendum on early presidential elections not considered:

Detentions and media bans after the coup was launched say a lot about the democracy and rule of law that Egypt will witness for the upcoming period.
If the opponents of President Morsi represent the majority of Egyptians, as claimed by the military coup, then why did not the military allow all the Egyptians an equal chance to say their opinion about conducting early presidential elections? This way it would have been a democratic process to oust Morsi instead of an army boot stepping on the mouths of all other Egyptians, who have also filled up streets in masses since July 1st.

4- Unholy relationship between the opposition and Mubarak's regime:

It is a return of Mubarak's regime in a new face, if one wishes to say it bluntly. In reality, Dr. Mohamed al-Baradie - opposition leader who was invited during the military's declaration of the coup - declared it clearly days before the June 30th demonstrations; he said that Egyptians have to start a process of national reconciliation with "what is called the old regime," except for those who committed crimes.

Considering the fact that most of the figures of the old regime have been surprisingly granted acquittals from charges levied against them, so al-Baradie won't have a problem in letting them on board, contributing again to pushing the political wargon. In fact, , scores of influential figures from Mubarak's regime did participate in the June 30th demonstrations that culminated in the removal of Morsi through being in the streets or propagating it through media.

So it would not be a surprise to witness, very soon, well-funded and publicized political parties with Mubarak's men on top, or appointed in key positions and ministries.

5- Absence of unifying national figure to lead the country:

The last time all Egyptians stood together hand in hand was during the 18 days of the January 25 Revolution. Since then, divisions have been increasing by time with figures rising and others falling; the division reached its unprecedented peak during the June 30 events where some members of Islamic and other groups got killed in the streets in day light for their political affiliations.

Now, after the military coup, Egyptians stand even more divided between supporters and opponents of the coup. It is absolutely impossible to reach national agreement, or even comforting majority, on any figure, which brings Egypt to presidential elections results close to the level that brought Morsi to power -almost 52 percent - and the cycle repeats itself.

6- Military above the state:

For the second time in two-and-half years the military comes in to settle, mainly peaceful, political disputes. The June 30th demonstrations asked for the intervention of the military from its beginning, some demonstrators were even camping in front of the ministry of defense in an attempt to pressure the defense minister to step in.

Such military intervention in the political life sets a golden rule for Egypt: the state is still under the military and not vice versa. In fact, this has been the sole demand of the January 25th Revolution, to make Egypt a a civilian state after decades of being ruled by presidents with military background and support.

Not only that Egypt has failed again to create a healthy and democracy-based relationship between its government and military, it has reached a worse situation where people beg the military to take over and sort out matters that are supposed to be originally and purely civilian and peaceful in nature.
It is a return of Mubarak's regime in a new face.

In one of the international reactions to this event, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague noticed the looming danger; he told BBC, "If one president can be deposed by the military then of course another one can be in the future - that's a dangerous thing."

7- Weakening the military:

Continuous intervention in the political life will definitely make the Egyptian military distracted from its sole purpose: protecting the country against foreign enemies. The resources of the military are getting consumed in internal struggles while Egypt's borders are heating up from almost all its fronts, east, west, and south.

8- No clear roadmap:

Although the Defense Minister Al-Sisi declared the presence of a very clear road map in case the political parties were not able to settle their dispute, 48 hours before the coup, he failed to state any dates for any step, including the presidential and parliamentary elections. This reminds Egyptians with the promises of Tantawi to hand in the state to an elected government very soon, which turned out to be a painful year-and-half.

Not only that, as soon as the Sisi military coup was broadcasted on the television, pro-Morsi channels were blackened-out and their staff detained, and the Freedom and Justice Party newspaper banned. This is in addition to the reports of arresting and detaining big number of Muslim Brotherhood leaders and placing them on travel ban; something that says a lot about the democracy and rule of law that Egypt will witness for the upcoming period.

Square One

There are hundreds of thousands of pro-Morsi supporters still holding their grounds in the streets amid complete media blackout. Their news is being leaked through social media and some non-Egyptian satellite channels that have not been cutoff. It is not up yet; events are escalating hour-by-hour as people are increasingly realizing that Egypt is back to square one.

- Abdelrahman Rashdan is an academician of the Future University in Egypt. He holds a Master's degree in International Affairs and a Certificate in Middle East Studies from Columbia University. (This article was first published in OnIslam.com on July 04, 2013)