MEDIA ROOTS– Barack Obama is fighting wars on multiple fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and now Libya. His cabinet just approved the biggest military budget since WW2 to fight the global “War on Terror”, and at this rate he will have spent over $8 trillion on defense alone if he serves a full eight year term (including the hidden costs of the war economy). Half of all US tax dollars is spent on US military actions, and the American government spends more on national defense than every other country’s military budget in the world combined.

Every American should ask themselves why it is necessary to spend such an outrageous amount of money on national defense. Is this government really trying to protect the people of this country from the ominous threat of terrorism, or could policy makers be more invested in resource control and profit maximization for their corporate financeers?

This video breaks down how Barack Obama is accelerating America’s descent into a war economy.

For more information and resources, please watch the brilliant film Lifting the Veil about Barack Obama and the failure of capitalist “democracy”: http://bit.ly/hH2BCH

Photo by flickr user Ethan

NATIONAL JOURNAL– With U.N. coalition forces bombarding Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi from the sea and air, the United States’ part in the operation could ultimately hit several billion dollars — and require the Pentagon to request emergency funding from Congress to pay for it.

The first day of Operation Odyssey Dawn had a price tag that was well over $100 million for the U.S. in missiles alone. And the U.S. military, which remains in the lead now in its third day, has pumped millions more into air- and sea-launched strikes targeting air-defense sites and ground-force positions along Libya’s coastline.

The ultimate total that the United States spends will hinge on the length and scope of the strikes as well as on the contributions of its coalition allies. But Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said on Monday that the U.S. costs could “easily pass the $1 billion mark on this operation, regardless of how well things go.”

Read more on the Cost of Libya Bombing Piling Up.

© 2011 National Journal

photo by flickr user mshamma

INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY – PRESS RELEASE: CNN is reporting: “Police in Tunisia’s capital city used batons and tear gas to clear a peaceful demonstration on Friday. … [This occurs] after days of riots that have killed at least 21 people.”

STEPHEN ZUNES
Zunes just wrote the piece “Pro-Democracy Uprising Fails to Keep Washington From Backing Tunisian Dictatorship.”

Zunes is professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER

Alexander is director of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College in North Carolina and a specialist on Tunisia. He is author of Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb.

He said today: “Until this week, I was betting that [Tunisian President] Ben Ali would ride this out. But the regime’s traditional tools can no longer address the situation.

“There’s broad-based social unrest, people have no faith in the government given the mafia-type corruption around the president’s family, human rights abuses, and until yesterday, his refusal to make any kind of political reform.

“Economics is huge in this. In mid-December, a university graduate lit himself on fire after police busted him for selling vegetables. The economy has generally been unable to generate good jobs for university graduates and has gotten even worse since the global recession, especially since Tunisia is largely dependent on exporting to Europe.

“The U.S. government has been predictably quiet given that Tunisia  has been pro-U.S. Some WikiLeaks revelations regarding Tunisia became public in November. What struck many Tunisians was that U.S. diplomats seemed to privately have the same conception of Ben Ali that they did. Another aspect of what is happening is the role  social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, has played in protesters organizing themselves.

“General strikes now underway in Tunisia are particularly significant given how hard Ali has worked to co-opt the unions.”

Earlier this month, Foreign Policy published a piece by Alexander titled “Tunisia’s protest wave: where it comes from and what it means”

Graphic video and regular information about Tunisia is available via: angryarab.blogspot.com

Twitter feed about Tunisia

Twitter feed from Tunisia — translation plug-in available

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

THE PENINSULA – Top officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA, and many officials keep visiting US embassies in their respective countries voluntarily to establish links with this key US intelligence agency, says Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks.

“These officials are spies for the US in their countries,” Assange told Al Jazeera Arabic channel in an interview yesterday.

The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA.

Assange or Mansour, however, didn’t disclose the names of these officials. The WikiLeaks founder said he feared he could be killed but added that there were 2,000 websites that were ready to publish the remaining files that are in possession of WikiLeaks after “he has been done away with”.

Click to read the full article on Arab officials working for the CIA.

Article by Mobin Pandit & Ahmed El Amin

Photograph by Flickr user: Jan Krömer 

© COPYRIGHT THE PENINSULA, 2010