A good, thorough piece about the how the International Crisis Group pushes for war.

Only a political and media mainstream complaisant about NATO adventurism could mistake Crisis Group for a muscular but essentially peace-loving NGO, as though it were the armed wing of Amnesty International.

(via Instapaper)

ashleighlgray:

The advisory committee on business appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers, was pressured not to make public Blair’s “consultancy” deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant UI Energy Corporation. He gets an estimated £2m a year for “advising” investment bank JPMorgan and undisclosed sums from other financial services companies. He makes millions from speeches, including reportedly £200,000 for one speech in China.

In his unpaid but expenses-rich role as “peace envoy” in the Middle East, Blair is in effect a voice of Israel, which has awarded him a $1m “peace prize.” In other words, his wealth has grown rapidly since he launched the bloodbath in Iraq with George W Bush.

Though this may seem like a return to the country’s violent past, Dr. Juan Almendares, the former rector of the country’s biggest university, says there is an important difference between the repression following the 2009 coup and the war against the Honduran people fought throughout the 1980s. “It’s important to understand that in the eighties the direct confrontation was more the political sector working together with army,” he said. “But today, the struggle is precisely about the neoliberal economic model, imperial globalization, and this whole campaign by financial capital to gain power over our lands, to take our resources.”

(via Instapaper)

Former Colombian Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos was elected president with the votes of just 30 percent of all voters on the electoral rolls, while turnout stood at a mere 45 percent in this country caught up in a civil war since 1964.

It’d be interesting to see a demographic breakdown of those that voted.

(via Instapaper)

IPS article on the widespread use of torture in Latin America, focusing mostly on Venezuela and Colombia. Utterly horrific.

(via Instapaper)

Pepe Escobar spells out why the West are in Afghanistan:

So what’s “the mission” in AfPak? For the Obama team it’s rather to use Afghanistan as a pawn to expand the already abysmal fissure between the US and Iran, and to throw Shi’ite Iran and Sunni Wahhabi Saudi Arabia at each other’s throats.

But for the industrial-military complex it goes way beyond. It’s about the new great game in Eurasia. It’s about the Pentagon’s full “spectrum dominance doctrine”, which presupposes setting up strategic Afghan bases to control and survey strategic competitors Russia and China very close to their borders. It’s still about the late 1990s all over again; to isolate or crush or bribe the Taliban so the ultimate pipe-dream - the Trans-Afghan Pipeline (TAP) - can be built to carry Turkmen gas to Western markets, and not the rival, anathema IP (Iran-Pakistan) pipeline. In a nutshell, it’s about infinite war.

(via Instapaper)

Did you notice there was one department that didn’t figure in the budget cuts?

Yes, it was the Ministry of Defence. Which is pretty surprising, since the UK spends more on its military than Russia. In fact, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, last year it was the world’s third biggest spender on military matters. We can be proud that our country, in 2009, a time of economic chaos, managed to spend $69bn on warfare – I’m sorry: “defence”.

Only China and the US spent more last year than us. Isn’t that something?

Now you may ask: “Who are our enemies, apart from those we’ve created by invading Iraq and Afghanistan?” After all, fundamentalist Islam wasn’t a problem before we started attacking Islamic countries – even secular Islamic countries like Saddam’s Iraq. Well the answer is: “We don’t know.”

(via Instapaper)

“People think we should give asylum only to those who have a genuine need, not to those who have a so-called bogus claim,” she says. “But what people don’t understand is that the system is not fair. People don’t flee their country unless they have a very good reason for doing so, and it is difficult to prove what happened to you unless you have scars from torture up your arms. The fact that you failed in your asylum claim does not mean that you are not a genuine asylum seeker.”

(via Instapaper)

Columnist William Ospina wrote that the elections represent merely a replacement of one caste — wealthy rural landowners, like Uribe’s family — by another — prominent urban families, like Santos’s.

What will undoubtedly be kept alive by Santos, according to Ospina, is Uribe’s “democratic security policy,” under which “the theft of land, forced displacement, espionage, killings with state weapons, subsidies to the privileged, and scandalous levels of poverty have prevailed.”

Colombia is one of the 13 countries in the world with the largest gaps between rich and poor, according to the Gini index, which measures income inequality.

Forty-six percent of the country’s 42 million people live below the poverty line, according to official figures.

(via Instapaper)