CounterPunch

The Intelligence Oversight Mess

Rectifying the Hit-Team Affair

By JOHN PRADOS

There are two real questions lurking behind the smoke and mirrors. The first is that the CIA accepted an action order from the vice president, who is not in its chain of command. Under the conventionally understood system, the CIA works only for the president. A vice president has no authority to issue orders. If George W. Bush delegated that authority, he never told the American people.

The second is that the White House and executive authorities arrogated to themselves the right to decide which anticipated intelligence activities had to be revealed to Congress. As the late Senator Barry Goldwater, conservative Republican to a fault, famously declaimed at the time of the Iran-Contra affair, "This was no way to run a railroad."

Bush administration abuses and a CIA director's weakness demonstrate that intelligence oversight is too important to be left to individuals. It's time to codify requirements for congressional notification, putting back into law something that was briefly there decades ago. This should not be a matter of an executive order from President Barack Obama, though that could be a temporary measure pending the passage of legislation. Executive order restraints can be changed at the stroke of a pen. The United States needs a statute that puts in precise writing what intelligence activities the Congress must be informed of. That is the way to avoid travesties like the hit-team affair.

Ghettos, Demolitions and Housing Shortages

The Reality of Israel's "Open" Jerusalem

By JONATHAN COOK

Reality is that in both a practical and legal sense Mr Netanyahu’s “open city” is a fiction, extended only to the settlers and not to Mrs Khurd or to the 250,000 other Palestinians of East Jerusalem.

Mrs Khurd, for example, has been forced to live in a tent after settlers ousted her from her East Jerusalem home of five decades in November. She also has no hope of moving back to the house taken from her family in Talbiyeh, now in West Jerusalem, during the 1948 war that established Israel.

In addition, movement restrictions mean that almost all of the nearly four million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are banned from entering the city or visiting its holy sites.

Inside Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, Israel enforces a strict programme of segregation to disadvantage the Palestinians, says Jeff Halper, of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Israeli Jews have the freedom to live in both parts of the city, with 270,000 in West Jerusalem and a further 200,000 living in East Jerusalem in rapidly expanding settlements heavily subsidized by the state.

Palestinians, meanwhile, are denied the right to live both in West Jerusalem and in many residential areas of East Jerusalem. Even in their tightly controlled neighborhoods in the city’s east, at least 20,000 of their homes are subject to demolition orders, according to Mr Halper.

Daniel Seidemann, a Jerualem lawyer, says that in his 20 years of handling residency rights cases for Palestinians he has never heard of a Palestinian with a Jerusalem ID living in West Jerusalem.

The reason, he points out, was that almost all land inside Israel’s 1948 borders, including West Jerusalem, has been registered as “state land” managed by a body known as the Israel Lands Authority.

The authority allows neither Palestinians nor Israelis to buy property on state land. Instead long-term renewable leases are available to Israeli citizens and anyone eligible to immigrate to Israel under the country’s Law of Return -- meaning Jews.

The settlements in East Jerusalem -- now covering 35 per cent of the eastern city, according to Mr Seidemann -- are also built on land declared as “state land”, in violation of international law. Again this means that only Israelis and Jewish foreign nationals are entitled to lease land there.

Because they do not hold Israeli citizenship, the Palestinians of East Jerusalem are disqualified from acquiring property either in West Jerusalem or in the settlements of East Jerusalem.

“The extraordinary situation is that a Palestinian who had his land expropriated to build the settlement of Har Homa [on the outskirts of East Jerusalem] cannot lease land there, whereas a Jew from Paris or London who is not even an Israeli citizen can.”

Mr Seidemann also pointed out that the country’s Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that a Palestinian family forced out of what became the Jewish quarter of the Old City in 1967 had no right to return to their property.

The court justified its decision on the grounds that each religious community should have its own quarter. “However, that ruling has not stopped the Israeli government from helping Jewish settlers to encroach on the Muslim and Christian quarters.”

AIG and the System

The Masters of Perfidy

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

The first clue that something was terribly amiss with the insurance giant AIG should have been made manifest when the conglomerate began offering products--and financial products at that. What exactly does an insurance company produce? The short and nasty answer is that AIG manufactured precisely what it was meant to guard against. Namely, risk. Extreme risk.

Ultimately, AIG was cashiered on several trillion dollars of risky financial products, sewn together by Ivy League math whizzes and aces in the arcane art of arbitrage. These were fanciful consolidations of debt that no sane insurer would ever have indemnified. When the company crashed in the dismal autumn of 2008, it turned sheepishly to the insurer of last resort for rescue: the U.S. government. The disgraced executives made the case that the rot in AIG was spreading and was threatening to go systemic. Too big to fail became the mantra of the bailout. AIG, perhaps the most recklessly managed company in the world, was so thoroughly enmeshed in nearly every sector of the American—and even global—economy that to let it sunder would be to risk the crash of the nation. Or so they said.

Both the Bush and the Obama teams—themselves thoroughly marinated in the AIG mindset—quickly capitulated to financial extortion and infused the company with more than $182 billion in taxpayer cash—a sum that continues to rise each month with the inexorability of a lava dome inside an active volcano. Thus did the Obama administration in one of its first official acts endorse the remorseless logic of throwing good billions after bad.

The Treasury Department and AIG’s management were so harmonious that Timothy Geithner allowed AIG’s executives to continue to run the company even after the bailout. The top brass at AIG had successfully duped Geithner and his political puppet master Larry Summers into buying the far-fetched idea that the collapse of AIG had been perpetrated by a handful of rogue traders operating out of satellite offices in distant London and suburban Wilton, Connecticut.

Indeed, Geithner and Summers were so sympathetic to the plight of these corporate titans that they sanctioned more than $450 million in executive bonuses to managers at AIG, including the disgraced Financial Products Division.

Of course, AIG had, among other giants of Wall Street, insured Goldman Sachs, which had made its own dementedly bad investments in subprime loans to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. And there was no way in hell that Geithner, Summers or Hank Paulson was going to let Goldman Sachs eat those loans. And that bit of political sleight-of-hand seems to have paid off handsomely for Goldman Sachs, which just posted record quarterly profits of $700 million only a brief nine months after it seemed like the investment house was on the verge of an ignominious collapse. In other words, the $54 billion in direct payments the feds had lavished on Goldman, Merrill-Lynch and the other Wall Street firms was just the icing on a very rich cake.

In a sense, it’s only fitting that the government ended up as the ultimate guarantor for those furious seasons of Wall Street greed. After all, by consciously dismantling the regulatory framework that tended to constrain the felonious instincts that come naturally to the Wall Street player (such as the Glass-Steagall Act), the government played a decisive role in fostering the rampant financial criminality and looting that reached its apogee in 2008, crashing the global economy, draining retirement funds and pension accounts and casting millions from their homes and millions more into the perdition of long-term unemployment. All of this coming down in an era of extreme government austerity, typified by over-burdened and underfunded social welfare programs. As with the defunct regulations to restrain corporate crimes, so too had the economic safety net been sheared away--its tethers sliced by Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton—long before the economy cratered. Now there is nothing to cushion the blow on the long fall to the bottom.

The architects of this economic deregulation achieved a truly fearful bi-partisan symmetry that persists to this day. Even now, amid the rubble of Wall Street’s collapse, the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives remain as uniform as conjoined twins in their devotion to a broadly deregulated market. Any talk of bringing back forceful correctives such as a new and improved Glass-Steagall Act was immediately squelched by Obama, flanked by John McCain and Mitch McConnell, as well.