A chorus of statements from human rights organizations has determined that both Israel and Palestinian authorities have failed to conduct independent, impartial investigations into alleged war crimes committed during last year’s Israeli assault on Gaza.

The United Nations’ Goldstone report called on both sides to conduct independent investigations in accordance with international standards over the war crimes allegations. A U.N. resolution that was adopted in November implored Israel and Hamas to undertake these investigations within three months—and that time frame is up now.

Both the Israeli and Palestinian reports were given to the United Nations in late January, and they both denied wrongdoing. Much of the Israeli report focuses on the capacity of the military to investigate itself.

Below are excerpts from some of the human rights organizations’ statements concerning Israel’s and the Palestinians’ investigations.

From Human Rights Watch:  “Israel has failed to demonstrate that it will conduct thorough and impartial investigations into alleged laws-of-war violations by its forces during last year’s Gaza conflict. An independent investigation is needed if perpetrators of abuse, including senior military and political officials who set policies that violated the laws of war, are to be held accountable.”

From B’Tselem:  “No system can investigate itself. The [Israeli] report emphasizes the independence of the military justice system in interpreting the law. However in all other matters, it is an integral part of the military… B’Tselem again urges Israel to immediately establish an independent investigative apparatus composed of persons from outside the military. The investigation must examine not only the conduct of the soldiers in the field but also the orders given them and the policy that was set by the senior military echelon and the political echelon.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, in addition to criticizing the Israeli undertakings, has said that the investigations carried out by Hamas and by officials in Ramallah are not credible, as has Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch called the Hamas claim that their rocket attacks into Israel are not war crimes “factually and legally wrong.”

In addition, a coalition of Israeli human rights groups sent an open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 4 days before the Israeli response was released to the U.N., calling on Israel to “establish, without delay, an independent and impartial investigation mechanism to thoroughly examine the allegations raised regarding violations of international law during Operation Cast Lead.”

Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon’s only statement on the responses has been to say that, “no determination can be made on the implementation of the (UN) resolution by the parties concerned.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said they were “shocked and appalled by this lack of responsibility,” by Ban, saying that Israel has not conducted credible investigations and that the United Nations has a responsibility to ensure accountability for war crimes.

This article originally appeared on Mondoweiss.

Port-au-Prince police headquarters is gone, already bulldozed. A nearby college is pancaked. Government buildings are destroyed. Stores fallen down. Tens of thousands of structures destroyed; hundreds of thousands homeless.

Giant piles of concrete, rebar, metal pipes, plastic pipes, doors and wires.

Corpses are still buried within the mountains of rubble. No estimates of how many thousands of people are dead inside.

Electrical poles bend over streets, held up by braids of thick black wires. On some side streets, the wires are still hanging down to the ground.

Buildings take unimaginable shapes. Some are halfway standing—one facade erect, the other sloping to the ground. Some have collapsed like cakes. Others, smashed like children’s toys.

Everywhere are sheet shelters. In parks, soccer fields, in the parking lot of the TV station, tens of thousands literally in the streets and on sidewalks.

Thousands of people standing in the hot sun waiting their turn. Outside the hospital are clinics, money transfer companies, immigration offices, and the very few places offering water or food.

Troops and heavy machinery are only seen in the center of the city.

After days in Port-au-Prince, I have seen only one fight—two teens fought on a street corner over a young woman. No riots. No machetes.

Children wait in line for food in downtown Port-au-Prince, Feb. 2. PHOTO CREDIT: MARK OVASKA

Men and boys are scavenging useful items from the mounds of fallen buildings. Women are selling mangoes and nuts on the street. Teens are playing with babies.

Beautiful hymns are lifted as choirs calling to God in every sheet camp, every evening. People pray constantly. The strikingly beautiful tap-tap cabs, brightly emblazoned with “In God We Trust” or “Merci Jesus.”

Everyone needs tents and food and medical care and water, but when you talk to people, most will lead you to an ailing great-grandma or the malnourished child—someone weaker, in even direr need of help.

What should outsiders do, I asked Lavarice Gaudin? Lavarice, who helps the St. Clare’s community feed thousands each day through their What If Foundation, said, “Help the most poor first. Some who labored their whole lives to make a one-bedroom home will likely never have a home again. Haiti needs everything. But we need it with a plan. Pressure the Haitian government; pressure USAID to help the poorest.”

International volunteers who work hand-in-hand with Haitians are welcomed. Others, not so much.

Lavarice saw the Associated Press story that reported only one penny of every U.S. aid dollar will go directly in cash to needy Haitians. “I can understand that they distrust the government,” she said, “But why not distribute aid through the churches and good community organizations?”

And: “We hope this will help us develop strong leadership that listens and responds to the people.”

And: “No matter what, we will never give up. Haitians are strong, hopeful people. We will rebuild.”

Bill Quigley is Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights and a long-time Haiti human rights advocate.

This article originally appeared on The Smirking Chimp.

A website first developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2007 is being used to help focus where help is urgently needed in post-earthquake Haiti.

Ushahidi, the website whose name means “testimony” in Swahili, has been used in the Democratic Republic of Congo to monitor unrest and al-Jazeera used it to track violence in Gaza. It was also used to monitor the 2009 Indian elections and to help gather reports during the swine flu outbreak.

“Born from post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, Ushahidi provided invaluable assistance to those providing relief,” said Ory Okolloh, Ushahidi’s co-founder and executive director at the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

The open-source Ushahidi platform has already received and mapped 13,000 calls of help from people in Port-au Prince. The website can be found at ushahidi.com.

Gaddafi Pleads with Obama to Lay Down the Guns

Libyan leader, Moummar Gaddafi, speaking at the recently concluded African Union summit in Ethiopia, called on President Barack Obama to end all U.S.-sponsored wars around the world.

The Libyan leader singled out Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine as battles which were unjust.

“The war against Iraq and Afghanistan is not profitable for America and as a matter of fact, (these wars) were lost as soon as they began. America is today involved in the Iraqi quagmire and is also lost in the Afghan mountains and has achieved none of its objectives and this represents very complicated situations inherited by Obama ,” Gaddhafi observed.

The Libyan leader, whose term as head of the AU was expiring, handed over the AU mantle to president of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika.

Also at the summit, the African Union unveiled its new flag—a dark green background symbolizing hope, and stars to represent Member States.

‘No Excuse to Remain Poor,’ Says New AU President

Incoming African Union chairperson and President of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, told the assembled African nations at his swearing in ceremony that Africa has no excuse to remain poor.

While Africa has multiple problems, the continent was not poor, he said, but was endowed with great mineral wealth and other resources, which the developed world was exploiting.

Since 2010 is viewed as a year for Africa, he said the chance had come for Africa to be recognized.

“We should remain committed as African Union to the principles of development, peace and security in Africa … five years from now, no African child should die of malnutrition or go to bed hungry,” he declared.

Dr. Wa Mutharika, 76, is a former Economics Minister and World Bank official who studied at the University of Delhi. Born and raised in the tea-growing district of Thyolo, he entered politics at a young age and narrowly won the presidency in a hotly contested election in 2004. He was re-elected on a pledge to fight corruption in 2009.

In 2005, he helped Malawi weather one of its worst food shortages—producing 45 percent less than the national requirement—by giving out seed and fertilizer at a reduced cost.

De Klerk Lauded for Freeing Mandela 20 Years Ago

Twenty years ago today, former president F.W. de Klerk called an end to the racist system of apartheid. Not long after, he ordered the release from prison of anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela.

De Klerk was “one of the braver apartheid rulers,” observed former ANC secretary general Cyril Ramaphosa in an interview with SABC radio.

“Of all the apartheid rulers he was the braver one, who took the steps,” Ramaphosa said, but added, “He had to do it….His hand had been forced by pressure inside and outside the country for reforms.”

Mandela was released from Victor Verster prison near Cape Town nine days later to scenes of wild rejoicing and led the ANC in three years of multi-party negotiations on the transition to democracy.

“By 3:30, I began to get restless,” recalled Mandela in his book Long Walk to Freedom, “as we were already behind schedule. I told the members of the Reception Committee that my people had been waiting for me for twenty-seven years and I did not want to keep them waiting any longer…

“When I was among the crowd I raised my right fist, and there was a roar. I had not been able to do that for twenty-seven years and it gave me a surge of strength and joy. As I finally walked through those gates to enter a car on the other side, I felt—even at the age of seventy-one—that my life was beginning anew.

“My ten thousand days of imprisonment were at last over.” Many years later, when the book Long Walk to Freedom appeared, Mandela was asked about a movie version and he suggested that he be played by actor Morgan Freeman. That movie, Invictus, is now showing at cinemas worldwide.

These briefs are published weekly by Global Information Network.

Angelique Hughes holds her grandson, Kamani, who looks at a photo of his mother, Specialist Alexis Hutchinson.

But only a few days before Hutchinson’s original deployment date, she was told by the Army she would not get the time extension after all, and would have to deploy despite the fact that her son had nowhere to go. Faced with this choice, Specialist Hutchinson chose not to show up for her plane to Afghanistan. The military arrested her and placed her child in the county foster care system.

“I think they didn’t believe her that she was unable to find someone to care for her infant,” Hutchinson’s civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, said at the time. “They think she’s just trying to get out of her deployment. But she’s just trying to find someone she can trust to take care of her baby. She has never intended to get out of her deployment.”

The Army put Hutchinson in the position of having to choose between caring for her infant son or deploying to Afghanistan. She chose to care for her son, and is paying the price. Currently, she remains assigned to Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, where she has been posted since February 2008.

Hutchinson is not unique in facing unthinkable choices when it comes to having to choose between family obligations and the U.S. military. While Sussman explained that she has not heard of another case identical to Hutchinson’s, where the military arrested a mother and placed her child in foster care, “I’ve spoken with many soldiers who have told me that that was the choice they were given [to place their child in foster care and deploy, or face court martial]. I spoke with someone yesterday who knew someone who had to place their child with a distant relative to avoid having them being placed in foster care by the military.” A soldier in the Florida Coast Guard had just contacted her over a similar situation addition, Sussman said.

“If We Wanted You to Have a Family, There Would Have Been One In Your Duffle Bag.”

Army regulations exist to deal specifically with soldiers who have children. “If a soldier can’t find adequate childcare, they are supposed to be discharged honorably, according to Army Regulation 635-200,” says Sussman, “The regulation in this, Chapter 5, is separation for convenience of the government, deals with this, and 5-8 is the discharge, which is involuntary separation due to parenthood. This is considered a punishment to people in the Army, because the assumption is that people want to stay in the Army, but this is for times when it’s not a fit.”

“The military is aware that these things happen, and I believe the regulations anticipate child-care plans sometimes falling through, and there are sometimes no alternatives,” Sussman added, “They [U.S. Military] recognize the parent does have a duty to care for their child if they can’t find a backup for when they are deployed. The military doesn’t want people deployed who are distraught about their children.”

Kathleen Gilberd, co-chair of the Military Law Task Force, part of the National Lawyers Guild, agrees.

“There is a pregnancy discharge, a parenthood discharge for sole-parents who can’t find someone to give total care to their kids, there’s a hardship discharge where an unusual family problem that requires the soldier to be with a family in financial crisis or a family member who has a severe mental health problem,” Gilberd explains. “But, despite regulations existing to deal with these problems, these are typically ignored by the military. The military will typically say, ‘Well, we looked at it, but we can’t help you with this.’”

Gilberd says there are common phrases in the military that speak to this: “If we wanted you to have a family, there would have been one in your duffle bag.” Or, “If we wanted you to have a wife, we would have issued you one.”

“Family is subsidiary to military needs,” she adds. “Soldiers hear this from the beginning.”

Gilberd is currently working on a case similar to Hutchinson’s, but her client is not ready to go public yet. Gilberd says, “The military isn’t going to be forthcoming about the reasons soldiers refuse to deploy or go AWOL, but I certainly run into many cases of soldiers struggling with the military while they try to care for their children, or sick family members.”

Army Spc. Alexis Hutchinson with son Kamani Hutchinson. PHOTO CREDIT: Alexis Hutchinson / Oakland Tribune

The U.S. Military has, via a large and ongoing propaganda effort, attempted to sell itself as being “family friendly” in an attempt to lure recruits with families to join.

On the U.S. Army’s primary recruiting website, goarmy.com, a section titled “Army Families” has sections for health care, finances, family services, and even a section on relocating with a sub-section titled “Helping Children Cope.” A small paragraph addresses the stress on children whose military parent(s), faced with moving on a regular basis, feel the stress. A sentence states, “If you have young children, their first move can be challenging and maybe even downright scary.”

But moving is not the most frightening proposition faced by children whose parents are in the military today. Rather, it is the unwillingness by the military to accommodate the needs of their parents.

When Sergeant Heath Carter returned from the invasion of Iraq, he discovered that his daughter, Sierra, was living in an unsafe environment in Arkansas under the care of his first wife, who had full custody of the child. Heath and his new wife, Teresa, started consulting attorneys in order to secure custody of Sierra, who also suffered from a life-threatening medical condition. Precisely during this time, the military chose to keep changing Carter’s duty station from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, then to Fort Stewart, Georgia. Not only did these constant transfers make it difficult for Carter to see his daughter, they also reduced his chances of gaining custody of Sierra. Convinced that this was a matter of life and death for his daughter, he requested compassionate reassignment to Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, about two hours from his first wife’s home in Arkansas.

His appeals to the military command, the legal department, a military chaplain, and even to his congressman failed, and the military insisted that he remain in Georgia. Having run out of all available avenues, in May 2007 he went AWOL from Fort Stewart and headed home to Arkansas where he fought for and won custody of Sierra, and was able to literally save her life by obtaining for her the medical care she needed.

But on Jan. 25, 2009, Carter was arrested at his home by military police, who flew him back to Fort Stewart where he has been awaiting charges since then. Initially, his commander told him it would take a month and a half for him to be sent home. Instead, several months later, it was decided he would receive a court-martial.

“Now I have to wait for the court martial,” Carter explained in an interview last fall. “It’s taken this long for them to decide. If we had known it would take this long, my family could have moved down here. Every time I ask when I’ll have a trial, they say it is only going to be another two weeks. I get the feeling they are lying.”

His ordeal has forced Carter to reflect on the wars. He admits that, although his original reason for going AWOL was personal and he had otherwise been proud of his missions, he sees things in Iraq differently today. “I don’t think there is any reason for us to be there except for oil.”

To add insult to injury, Sergeant Carter’s command even offered him a deployment to Afghanistan amid his struggles.

An equally shocking story is that of Army Specialist Leo Church.

Shortly after Church completed his Basic Training, he received a call from his partner and mother of his two children, informing him that they were homeless and living in a van. Church asked his commander for permission to leave Fort Hood and go get his family, but permission was denied.

“Seeing that I had no other choice I left to pick up my children and then immediately returned to Ft. Hood, back to my company,” Church wrote of his experience in a statement from Sept. 1, 2009. “When I returned I was charged for leaving without permission and given an Article 15, and my pay was cut in half. Things only got worse from there.”

Church’s captain suggested that he have his children live with him, and Church could take them to work with him, except there was a six-month wait for this to be approved. “Knowing that I was not allowed to have them in my room overnight and it being inappropriate to take them to my company to work, I left to take my children to Amarillo, Texas so I could find them a safe place to live,” Church wrote of the situation, “Having only my mother to turn to, but knowing that she could not keep them 24 hours a day for me to be able to return to Ft. Hood, I stayed and found myself a civilian job. I knew my obligation was to the Army and my company, but my children were my obligation long before I ever considered enlisting and they needed their father.”

Church was picked up for being AWOL in 2007 and flown back to Fort Hood where he was returned to his company, and threatened with 15-20 years in prison for having gone AWOL, despite the fact that it was to take care of his children. His partner left him during this time as well.

“So, again I found myself leaving, this time not for my children, but for me,” Church added, “I was scared and alone, and had no one to help me as it had been since the first day I arrived at Ft. Hood.”

This time Church “started to build the foundation for my life,” adding, “a beautiful home, an excellent job, a wonderful wife, Amanda, and my only son on the way, I could not have been happier. But, my desertion charge had been discovered and I was once more picked up and returned to Ft. Hood.”

Church was unable to find anyone to support his wife and children, and the Army refused to assist him, so he and his wife were forced to give their newborn son, Austin, for adoption. Meanwhile, Church was court-martialed and spent several months in the brig at Fort Lewis in Washington State. Of that time he wrote: “I have lost so much because of the Army; I don’t have custody of my daughters and I had to give up my son for adoption, all because of the Army. My wife is struggling to make ends meet now without me.” On December 9, 2009, Church was released from the stockade, and discharged from the Army.

According to Gilberd, Church’s story is not unique.

“When there’s a parent dying who wants their son or daughter home with them, or there is a child with special needs who needs intensive parent support, or some other family emergency, the military is not willing to provide that support,” she explained. “Military regulations say there should be assistance available to the soldiers, and superiors are supposed to help with this, but soldiers find that the opposite happens.”

After remembering an incident during the first Gulf War, when “there were reservist mothers who were breastfeeding who were ordered to active duty,” Gilberd shared another story.

“Jose Crespa came home from an Iraq deployment. He went home on leave and found his sister had developed schizophrenia. His mom was unable to deal with the situation, which was complicated by the fact that his sister had a child to care for. He went AWOL for a month [late 2007] to help them, then went back to Fort Carson and let the military know what was going on. They threatened him with a general court martial, and it took attorney intervention and his Article 138 Complaint (A Redress of Grievance procedure for when soldiers are wronged by their command) to get him out.”

Crespa was lucky to have good attorneys, as he was discharged without any disciplinary action and with an honorable discharge. However, things usually don’t turn out this way.

“I wish I could say that’s a common outcome,” was Gilberd’s comment on Crespa’s case.

The Pentagon tracks hard numbers of soldiers going AWOL, and since October 2001, more than 50,000 soldiers have done so. But the military does not keep track of the reasons why soldiers go AWOL, or get hardship discharges, including when the reasons are those like Hutchinson’s, Carter’s, Church’s, or Crespa’s, or if the soldier has PTSD, or other mitigating circumstances.

According to Gilberd, cases like Crespa’s “get lost in the shuffle,” and added, “To most folks, this is just one more AWOL, or one more hardship discharge. There’s no way to know how many soldiers are going AWOL and are trying to apply for hardship discharges, but counselors run across these cases often.”

“Looking at these reasons would not reflect well on the military, but there are lots of these,” Gilberd continued, “And to me, the irony is that there are procedures that should be available to these folks to get out, but the problem is that the command is not willing to follow the procedures. And it’s all part of that “there’s no family in your duffle bag” mindset. So it’s all about keeping the numbers up, and having enough deployable service-members, and not letting too many people go.”

As the military now finds itself preparing to deploy 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan and maintains more than 120,000 in Iraq, it is under tremendous pressure to maintain personnel in the ranks, which only exacerbates these problems.

“When a division is seen as having too many discharges or disciplinary problems, pressure comes down on them to not let so many people go,” said Gilberd, “So the lower command gets subtle pressure for them to stop [losing personnel], and ultimately people become disposable. And not just the soldier, but their kids, or their mother, father, sister, or infant.”

Dahr Jamail is author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Jamail’s work has been featured on National Public Radio, the Guardian, The Nation, Truthout.org and The Progressive.

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.org.

Jaisal Noor: How does it feel to finally be released after three weeks in detention?

Jean Montrevil: Well, I’m very happy to be home with my kids and my wife and my family. You know, at the same time we left [detention], I left 25 Haitians behind who can’t get released until they spend ninety days or have their case reviewed. And I’m the lucky one, you know. I feel lucky that I had so many people supporting me, from elected officials and the clergy members and my church behind me. But at the same time it’s really a mix of emotions where you have, your country right now is being destroyed, being totally destroyed, two million people homeless, and then the United States, this country who, who talks about human rights in other countries, who judge other countries about human rights, and wanted to lock me up. I’m very disappointed on Obama, very disappointed. Hopefully, with this movement we can really highlight the destruction of families [through deportation] and what’s happening in this country.

JN: The Obama administration has decided to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitian-Americans currently in the United States for 18 months. What else can Obama do to help Haitians after the earthquake?

JM: As a Haitian, we’ve been trying to get TPS for a long time. And now, with the world’s worst disaster, Obama had the opportunity to really show the kind, American spirit and share the country’s prosperity. He really had an opportunity to do the right thing. Giving TPS for 18 months is unacceptable. People are still going to be afraid of coming out of the shadows just for 18 months. I think Obama can do more for the Haitian people and he can serve the American people better.

JN: As someone who sends remittances back home to Haiti, how important is the food and money you’re able to send to relatives there?

JM: The money that we send back home is the biggest source of income for Haiti. The United States knows it. The world knows it. So I can tell you that my brothers, my friends, they’re depending on money that I send to them to live, and so are millions of Haitians. So, giving people TPS is an opportunity to get a social security card to go to work and then have an income and be able to send money back home. And one of the stories that’s coming out right now in Haiti is the long lines at Western Union. My friend who’s in Haiti told me that his sister sent him some money. He could not go and get it because the line of the Western Union in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, of which they only have two was seven blocks long.

JN: You were telling me earlier that you just got word from a friend back home that some of the food you recently sent ended up being extremely important after the earthquake.

JM: On Christmas Eve, I sent him food: 110 pound bag of rice, 50 pound bags of beans, two dozen sardines, spaghetti, a case of milk, oil, and charcoals to cook. And with that food, he split it in half and gave it to my brother. On Sunday he was telling me how grateful he was. If it wasn’t for that food how him and his wife and his kids were going to probably starve. And that same food that I sent he had to share it with his neighbors because their neighborhood didn’t have food to eat after the earthquake because the supermarket was closed.

JN: Rev. Schaper, what is your reaction to Jean’s detention and subsequent release?

Donna Schaper: There are thousands of people like this, and we do believe that the American people are good-hearted enough to say, “Wow, that can’t be. We don’t want that.” So what we did was to mobilize our hearts, our community, our elected officials. We had phenomenal support from the elected officials in New York City — Congressman Nadler, Congresswoman Velasquez, Congressman Rangel. We had people who wrote and wrote and called and called, and then we called ICE every day.

It’s not just about Haitians, and it’s not just about Jean. Jean’s gonna have survivor’s guilt because there are 26 other Haitians who aren’t out, and there are lots of Chinese and Dominicans and Russians and Irish who are being treated inhospitably by this great nation. So we want the nation to repent, to change, and we’re just trying to let people know because we do believe that if people knew how bad this was they’d wake up.

JN: Even before Haiti was devastated by the earthquake, eight out of 10 Haitians were surviving on less than $2 a day. After the disaster, the amount of poverty in Haiti has skyrocketed. What should the United States’ role be in helping Haiti, and what do you think of the United States allowing Haitian refugees to enter the country?

DS: There is no reason not to welcome people here, and immigrants of all kinds, including Haitians, make extraordinary gifts to this nation. They build us up culturally. They build us up morally. They build us up economically. They are gifts. So I welcome gifts, and particularly under the circumstance of what’s gonna happen. I think we need to bring as many people in as possible. We also need to facilitate the leadership of the Haitians for themselves and not have a lot of bureaucracies and a lot of international aid agencies who think they know what’s best for Haiti. I’m particularly concerned about the people understanding the history of Haiti. It’s not like the United States didn’t have a hand in the poverty and devastation and deforestation that was already there. It’s not like the forced urbanization to Port-au-Prince did not hurt people. You know, in a way it’s tragic how stupid and lacking in common sense, not to mention morality, we are when it comes to helping people help themselves. Haiti’s perfectly capable of taking care of itself, and we need to get resources there and then get out of the way.

Transcription provided by Amy Kraft and Alan Good.

Paul Volcker, chairman of Barack Obama's newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board. PHOTO CREDIT: ALTERNET.

Anxious about his own political survival, Geithner rushed to warn us that the markets would be in worse shape if Bernanke were pushed out, a proclamation that put bank stocks back on the ascent—hooray for the bailout-backers! Geithner has spent years working as a lackey for our biggest banks and knows he’s got “fall guy” written all over him, so he’s been covering his tracks of late. (We’ll see just how well at today’s AIG hearing before the House Oversight Committee.) He’ll be going on the offensive until someone on his own team decides he’s expendable. It would be nice if Obama figured that out and chucked Geithner out before he deals out any more damage.

The until-recently-sidelined Volcker is a better fit for popular opinion. He has both criticized the insane subsidies the government is funneling to the financial sector, and offered serious, concrete ways to reduce the risks reckless banks foist on the public. But Obama’s Volcker-inspired proposal falls far short of the full Glass-Steagall resurrection that is needed to truly stabilize the financial system (along with a handful of other smaller-bore regulations).

Glass-Steagall barred the combination of risky, high-flying investment banking with boring commercial lending—accepting deposits and making loans. But Volcker’s ideas only take aim at a relatively small portion of the risks embedded in the investment banking business.  As long as commercial lending and investment businesses remain intertwined under the same umbrella, financial behemoths will still be inclined to gamble their capital in securities trading rather than support the economy by lending to businesses and consumers. Given all the cheap money banks can currently get from the federal government, they have no obligation to do otherwise. When markets go up, securities trading is inherently more profitable, since, after all, the markets are up. For banks, the more trading they can do, the more easy profits they can score.

Volcker has always maintained that it would be difficult to explicitly break up the banks in a true Glass-Steagall sense. He has focused on ways to reduce their most obvious, unnecessary risk-taking activities and cut them off from some forms of taxpayer assistance in a bind. Yet Volcker would still allow boring commercial banks to perform securities underwriting, package mortgages into crazy securities and engage in risky asset lending—as long as these were “client-driven” activities.

What is “client-driven” trading? Well, it’s the vast majority of what we ordinarily think of as risky trading activities.

These ideas represent the core of Obama’s latest bank reform plan. Banks that accept federally guaranteed deposits wouldn’t be able to own, invest or sponsor hedge or private equity funds, nor could they run propriety trading operations (betting their own capital for the hell of it). There would be no limits on investment banks that don’t accept deposits, no limits on independent hedge funds or private equity firms, and no return to Glass-Steagall.

The major problem with the Volcker rule is that it only bans “prop trading,” when it should ban all trading at economically essential commercial banks. As it stands now, the plan would be a minor inconvenience to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley; if they wanted to keep their hedge funds, they’d have to give up their Bank Holding Company status and their cheap loans from the Fed. My guess is they’ll simply negotiate a grandfather clause and keep the BHC banner, but even if it were revoked, the Volcker plan is too little, too late. The Fed granted BHC status to Goldman and Morgan in the middle of the crisis to give them access to billions of dollars of government backing. Even if it’s revoked now, we know it can be given back when another crisis hits.

Banning prop trading alone won’t be enough to stabilize investment banks like Goldman Sachs, much less commercial banks that actually do something for the economy. Of all the bank holding companies, the only firm with any kind of remotely large-scale prop operation is Goldman Sachs, which CFO David Viniar said at last week’s earnings call is “a very, very small piece of what we do.” Indeed, it amounts to about 10 percent of the firm’s total revenues. Total trading however, makes up 76 percent of its profits. That’s where the real risk is fermenting.

What’s more, it’s impossible to tell just how much trading is uniquely proprietary and how much can be classified as client-driven. Proprietary trading isn’t even specifically broken out on most of the banks’ filings, and where it is, it’s not an overriding factor.

Goldman garners a higher portion of revenues from trading than any other bank. Its 2009 revenues were $45.2 billion (it still enjoys generous various government support, including $12.9 billion from the AIG shell-game), with 76 percent or $34.4 billion coming from trading related business, compared to 41 percent or $9 billion in 2008, and 68 percent in 2007 and 2006. Only approximately 10 percent of its revenues come from what it lists as proprietary trading.

JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley trade under investment banking division headings with negligible contributions from anything deemed proprietary. Yet JPMorgan Chase’s 2009 net profits shot up to $11.7 billion this year, more than twice its 2008 figures, bolstered by its trading activity. In 2009, Morgan Stanley’s trading revenue was 27 percent of total revenues, compared to a loss in 2008. By the third quarter of 2009, trading was the firm’s most profitable division. There’s plenty of risk, but it isn’t from strictly proprietary trading.

Bank of America has its fixed income, currency and commodities trading figures merged together, making it impossible to see the contribution of Merrill Lynch’s sizable trading activities, or the line between proprietary and client-driven trading. Its 2009 trading revenue was $15 billion, or 13 percent of total net revenue, up from a $6 billion loss the previous year and $7.2 billion, or 11 percent in 2007.

Citigroup, having led the banking industry in government support at $374 billion, saw its net revenues recover (up 65 percent in 2009 vs. 2008), as it made $21.4 billion in trading revenue, or 27 percent of net revenue compared to a loss of $22.1 billion in 2008. The firm breaks out its trading revenue figures to some extent, but alters classifications frequently. It has about a trillion dollars of transactions residing off balance sheet—risky as hell, but not considered proprietary.

So at all of the major financial conglomerates, trading activities that sparked major losses in the crash remains through the roof.  And we don’t really know how much of it Volcker would crack down on.

We are kidding ourselves if we think banning proprietary trading or official hedge fund or private equity relationships will have a meaningful impact on our broken banking system. A new Glass-Steagall, by contrast, would force a true distinction between commercial banks with access to federal support and those that rely on trading and investment banking. It would detangle the risky Merrill Lynch enterprises from Bank of America, and expunge Bear Stearns and other investment bank subsidiaries from the books of JPMorgan Chase. It would remedy the Robert Rubin-Larry Summers-deregulation-spawned nightmare that is Citigroup.

Absent this clear separation, these too-big-to-fail firms will just call every trade they make “client-driven” and alter their technical financial distinctions accordingly. A proprietary trading ban is meaningless if everything risky is easily reclassified as client-driven trading. We can’t limit something that isn’t fully disclosed or can be easily camouflaged. If we don’t restrict all trading at bank holding companies by separating out the investment banking operations from the commercial banking business, we’ll be outdone by loopholes, and stay one step behind the banks on every move.

Volcker has the right idea, but Obama must take it much further if he wants to protect our economy from Wall Street excess.

Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos and author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street.

This article originally appeared on AlterNet on Jan. 27.

James Perry, a Mayoral candidate in the upcoming New Orleans election. PHOTO CREDIT: CHICAGOIST.COM

The election will be on Saturday, Feb. 6 (with a run-off in March if no candidate wins more than 50 percent) and is shaping up to be an historic milestone in the city’s post-Katrina political realignment. After more than 30 years of black mayors, the best-funded and highest-polling of the 11 candidates in this election, Mitch Landrieu, is white, and the seven-person city council may be heading towards a 5-2 white majority.

Outside of New Orleans, progressives and liberals are excited about Perry. They’re receiving emails, Tweets and Facebook updates about his progressive platform. But in New Orleans, the candidate seems relatively unknown.

That’s surprising given Perry’s work over the years. Since Hurricane Katrina, he’s testified before Congress about the obstacles to rebuilding New Orleans and the larger Gulf Coast region. He’s also overseen lawsuits and reports that have challenged housing discrimination in the city and its surrounding suburbs. A charismatic speaker with a broad and deep knowledge of the issues facing the city, Perry has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars–mostly through small donations–over the last year.

According to polls, though, his campaign hasn’t caught on with voters, many of whom still don’t seem to know about his accomplishments. “I think people don’t know that James was behind all those things,” said political consultant Vincent Sylvain, who’s not working with Perry’s campaign. “You have to remember that when he engaged in these fights it was not for glory.”

Political analyst and Xavier University professor Silas Lee agreed that Perry’s candidacy seems to have not caught on with voters. “The public seems less receptive to a candidate with less political experience,” he said, explaining that this tendency has made people lean towards Landrieu, a Democratic candidate who has advertised his connections in Washington, D.C. and Baton Rouge as important assets.

Political contests in New Orleans often pivot on racial divides that are unpredictable. When Ray Nagin was first elected in 2002, he won (against another black candidate) with 80 percent of the white vote and about 40 percent of the black vote. But when he won re-election in 2006, it was with about 80 percent of the black vote and about 20 percent of the white vote. This election, all the candidates are stressing their abilities to heal this racial divide.

With many of the city’s poor people dispersed, analysts like Sylvain question whether a progressive candidate can win in the new New Orleans. Perry is campaigning hard, appearing at several events every day and striving to fundraise enough to be competitive. “We have to challenge this system,” he said in an interview at the city’s Urban League office after the fourth major debate in three days. “And if we don’t get a progressive mayor, I don’t know if we ever challenge the system in a real way.”

Social justice activists in the city note that he’s the only candidate to talk about the city’s problems as systemic. Discussing the city’s tourism-based economy, Perry said: “New Orleans has a system that is almost designed to be oppressive.” He described a workforce subsisting on minimum-wage jobs and a public housing system that subsidizes employers who pay unfair salaries. “If we paid people a living wage, then we could really transform our city,” said Perry.

A native New Orleanian, Perry founded a fair housing center in Mississippi before becoming director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center in 2005. His central promise is to reduce the city’s murder rate by 40 percent in his first term, saying he would do this by focusing the police department’s resources on what he says are “one or two hundred individuals” who are responsible for most of the violent crime in the city and away from the nonviolent offenses that he says the department currently focuses on. He said that if he was elected and did not meet his promised goal he wouldn’t run for re-election.

Perry has also promised to attack blight by “making sheriff sales a priority,” as well as offering homeowners counseling and financial assistance to help them keep their homes.

After eight years of Nagin (who is prevented by term limits from running again), dissatisfaction with the mayor is at the highest point in the history of mayoral polling in New Orleans, and the electorate seems ready for a new direction. Perry represents a marked change from Nagin, who was the city’s first businessman mayor.

For Perry’s supporters, the lack of local traction has been frustrating. He’s racked up some high-profile endorsements from national figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., musical legend Dr. John and Phoenix Suns All-Star Grant Hill. The Nation magazine endorsed him, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter hosted a benefit for him, but no Louisiana politicians have stood up to support his campaign.

Perry supports the right of gays and lesbians to marry legally, but the city’s LGBT organizations have endorsed other candidates or stayed silent. The Forum For Equality PAC, the largest of those political organizations, made a joint endorsement of two other candidates with less progressive positions on gay and lesbian issues, leaving some onlookers to think that they’re hedging their bets with the candidates that seem more likely to win. “I’ve taken on cases on behalf of the LGBT community many, many, times,” says Perry. “Forum for Equality’s decision puzzles me. But it doesn’t change my resolve.”

While Perry’s writing has been featured in national publications and on the Huffington Post blog–often with his partner, Melissa Harris Lacewell, a scholar and regular guest on MSNBC–he’s received little local media attention. In fact, many observers say that the local daily paper has decided that Landrieu has already won, and national press like the New York Times have followed their lead.

Mayoral candidate Troy Henry, a former Enron executive who polls say is leading among the black candidates, has criticized the press coverage of the campaign, which he says has anointed Landrieu the front-runner and declared the election all but decided. At a recent news conference, Henry told the assembled print and television reporters: “There’s not an African American among you in the press today. How you interpret what you say and how African American candidates like myself interpret what you say is different.”

With 11 candidates running for mayor, political ads blanketing the airwaves, and political yard signs posted all over town, the race is clearly not decided. Adding to the unpredictability, the election falls not only during Mardi Gras season–a time of parades, balls and festivities around the city–but also the same weekend that the city’s enormously popular football team, the Saints, will be playing in the Super Bowl.

Landrieu, the current Lieutenant Governor and brother of Louisiana’s U.S. Senator, does hold a commanding lead in most polls. This is Landrieu’s third run at the office, which was held by his father from 1970-1978. The elder Landrieu was the last white mayor of New Orleans and is often credited with integrating city hall.

Landrieu’s father ran city hall during a time of changing demographics in New Orleans. Through the 1960s and ’70s, as integration took hold, the city’s white population fled to the suburbs. The white population of New Orleans dropped about 160,000 from 1960 to 1980, while the black population increased by 40,000. The city became, as Mayor Nagin famously said in 2006, a “Chocolate City.”

In the aftermath of Katrina, the trend has in many ways reversed.

Although the exact changes in New Orleans’s population will not be known until after this year’s Census is completed, the city seems to have lost tens of thousands more black residents than white residents.

On WBOK, a black-owned radio station that has become the unofficial voice of black politics in the city, callers expressed fears that white New Orleanians are making a political power grab. The station’s morning call-in show is dedicated almost exclusively to the issues around the upcoming election, and it offers a helpful if unscientific perspective on the community’s feelings about the upcoming election.

Listening to the show or reading the pages of the city’s three black-owned newspapers, it appears that Perry has failed to catch on among black voters. Perhaps this is because he is not as well-known as Landrieu and doesn’t have the deep pockets of businessman candidates Troy Henry and John Georges, who have less than $500,000 combined in contributions but have supplemented that total with $1.9 million in personal loans to their campaigns. Perry comes from outside of the city’s black political power structure, having never worked for a political campaign before or held an elected office.

Many voters feel that, at 34, Perry is too young for the position, but this hasn’t hurt him with everyone. Yvette Thierry, the lead organizer with Safe Streets Strong Communities, a grassroots criminal justice reform organization, said that Perry’s youth is an advantage. “We need new voices and new ideas,” she said, adding that she is still an undecided voter.

Sylvain agreed that his age does not have to hold Perry back. “I don’t think James has done a good enough job of reminding people that when [former mayor] Marc Morial took office, Marc was only 35,” said Sylvain. “And that has probably been a failure of his campaign.”

To Perry, one of his biggest obstacles is a class divide in the black community.

“There are folks who are really focused on the interests of the wealthy and upper-income African American community, and then there are folks like me who are focused on low-income communities and focused on really answering the question of why people are poor and transforming our community.” Perry believes that his work for social justice will catch on with voters by election day, even if the city’s power structure is ready to count him out.

This article originally appeared in ColorLines Magazine.

As previously reported on this web site, the U.S. military has sent shock troops—anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists—with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, who also donned helmets and flak jackets. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 U.S. combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. The program is currently comprised of approximately 400 employees, and is actively seeking new recruits.

Anthropology, in particular, has been referred to throughout history as the “handmaiden of colonialism,” thus putting anthropologists, at least those with a moral conscience, on guard against anything that smells like exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and a leading member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, told Time magazine that the militarization of anthropology will cause the field to become “just another weapon … not a tool for building bridges between peoples.” Anthropology has core professional ethics standards that require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists do no harm. How likely do you think these will be adhered to by the flack-jacket-wearing, gun-toting, embedded anthropologists working directly with regimental combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

The two highest ethical principles of anthropology are protection of the interests of studied populations and their safety. All anthropological studies consequently are premised on the consent of the subject society. Clearly, the HTS anthropologists have thrown these ethical guidelines out the window. They are to anthropology what state stenographers like Judith Miller and John Burns are to journalism.

Truthout consulted David Price, author of “Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War” and a contributor to the “Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual,” a work of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, of which he is a member.

According to Price, “HTS presents real ethical problems for anthropologists, because the demands of the military in situations of occupation put anthropologists in positions undermining their fundamental ethical loyalties to those they study. Moreover, it presents political problems that link anthropology to a disciplinary past where anthropologists were complicit in assisting in colonial conquests. Those selling HTS to the military have misrepresented what culture is and have downplayed the difficulties of using culture to bring about change, much less conquest. There is a certain dishonesty in pretending that anthropologists possess some sort of magic beans of culture, and that if only occupiers had better cultural knowledge, or made the right pay-offs, then occupied people would fall in line and stop resisting foreign invaders. Culture is being presented as if it were a variable in a linear equation, and if only HTS teams could collect the right data variables and present troops with the right information conquest could be entered in the equation. Life and culture doesn’t work that way; occupied people know they are occupied, and while cultural knowledge can ease an occupation, historically it has almost never led to conquest—but even if it could, anthropology would irreparably damage itself if it became nothing more than a tool of occupations and conquest.”

The handbook for the HTS offers the human terrain “toolkit” for the U.S. military to understand subjects living in militarily occupied areas. It stated:

“HTTs will use the Map-HT Toolkit of developmental hardware and software to capture, consolidate, tag, and ingest human terrain data. HTTs use this human terrain information gathered to assist commanders in understanding the operational relevance of the information as it applies to the unit’s planning processes. The expectation is that the resulting courses of actions developed by the staff and selected by the commander will consistently be more culturally harmonized with the local population, which in Counter-Insurgency Operations should lead to greater success. It is the trust of the indigenous population that is at the heart of the struggle between coalition forces and the insurgents.”

The mission of the human terrain social scientists gains legitimacy and credibility when expressed in terms of engineering the “trust of the indigenous population.”

The military’s benign description specifies that HTS will “improve the military’s ability to understand the highly complex local social-cultural environment in the areas where they are deployed.” Proponents of the program go as far as to claim that its goal is to help the military save lives.

“Human Terrain Teams (HTT) are special units that imbed with battalions in Afghanistan and are trained to promote counterinsurgency practices,” Price explained to Truthout, “Each Human Terrain Teams has a team leader who is usually retired military personnel, frequently from Special Forces, and each team has a social scientist. Though these social scientists are often referred to as ‘anthropologists’ in the press, the program has had great difficulty hiring many anthropologists to work on the program—especially those with relevant linguistic or cultural experience. These Human Terrain Teams are envisioned as providing cultural information to the occupying troops, and to also conduct research on populations under military control—though the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) recent report found that in many instances the tasks undertaken by HTS blur distinctions between research and intelligence work. But the basic tasks and methods of HTT violate basic ethical tenants of anthropological field research as the safety of research participants cannot be assured, nor can voluntary informed consent; and questions remain about what becomes of HTT data gathered in the field.”

In December, the AAA held annual meetings in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the association made public a significant report titled the “AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC),” co-authored by David Price, which dealt directly with the ethical problems of the HTS.

Key findings in the executive summary of the report state:

“1. HTS and similar programs are moving to become a greater fixture within the U.S. military. Given still outstanding questions about HTS, such developments should be a source of concern for the AAA but also for any social science organization or federal agency that expects its members or its employees to adhere to established disciplinary and federal standards for the treatment of human subjects.

“2. The current arrangement of HTS includes potentially irreconcilable goals which, in turn, lead to irreducible tensions with respect to the program’s basic identity. These include HTS at once: fulfilling a research function, as a data source, as a source of intelligence, and as performing a tactical function in counterinsurgency warfare. Given this confusion, any anthropologist considering employment with HTS will have difficulty determining whether or not s/he will be able to follow the disciplinary Code of Ethics.”

And:

“In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of ‘anthropology’ within DoD.”

While there has been some recent coverage of the HTS, Price told Truthout, “I haven’t seen anything written that really gets to how these HTS teams fit into Obama’s plans for increased counterinsurgency domination in Afghanistan.”

The HTS continues to be condemned by the AAA, and in the wake of the filing of the CEAUSSIC, Price said, “our committee’s evaluation of the program is purely negative and among our conclusion we determined that: ‘When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment—all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application—it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.’”

In a recent article on the topic, that links the HTS with the increasing use of drones and the U.S. military expansion of AFRICOM, Price wrote, “Today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, anthropologists are being told that they’re needed to make bad situations better. But no matter how anthropological contributions ease and make gentle this conquest and occupation, it will not change the larger neocolonial nature of the larger mission; and most anthropologists are troubled to see their discipline embrace such a politically corrupt cause.”

While the vast majority of mainstream media coverage of the HTS has been and remains favorable, Time magazine wrote a critical piece of the HTS after the CEAUSSIC was filed.

The House Armed Services Committee is currently undertaking a review of the HTS by directing the secretary of defense to undertake an assessment of HTS, and another HTS team member was wounded in Afghanistan. Given the Obama administration’s escalation of counter-insurgent warfare and “soft power” as the US becomes further entrenched in Afghanistan, it is very likely more money will be allocated to HTS, despite any independent study indicating that HTS operates in any way similar to how it is promoted in the media.

Nevertheless, the use of HTS continues unabated in Afghanistan, and is going to be expanded in the future in Africa, both where, according to Price, the future of the program rests.

“The military seems increasingly interested in adapting some sort of Human Terrain like program for use in AFRICOM, and given AFRICOM’s merging of military personnel and projects with counterinsurgent tactics and goals, it stands to reason that as AFRICOM takes on an increasing role in exploiting civil unrest in Africa as a way to leverage an increasing American military presence in resource rich Africa, something like HTS will be a part of these plans,” Price told Truthout, “Given all the bad publicity HTS has been getting, I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed the name but used a similar program.”

Another problem with the problems is corruption. Currently, HTS training is geared towards Afghanistan, not Iraq, and is being conducted by the contracting firm CLI Solutions. The firm is funding training schools in Leavenworth, Omaha, and elsewhere, in addition to having found a way to rip off taxpayers and continue paying HTS using the “GG” scale (different than GS, GG provides a loophole in the GS systems that allows the government to sometimes hire “experts” at rates off the prevailing scale), which has elevated the pay scale back up to the levels it did when BAE Systems, a British military contractor, the world’s second largest, ran the program.

Of this trick, Price revealed to Truthout that it is “a real boondoggle for the American taxpayers” and added, “Someone leaked the pay-scale to me and it shows scenarios where a GG-15, working 60 hours a week in the field in Afghanistan for 12 months would make over $230k per year, so presto change, we’re back to the gravy train money days of BAE. That they are allowed to use the GG scale is scandalous: GG needs to exist in concept (so that for example when some expensive piece of government equipment needs to be worked on by experts, we can find a way to hire them) but use of GG for this end seems a clear abuse of what it was created for. So far no one has written anything on this in the press.”

When asked why U.S. taxpayers should be concerned about this payment scheme, Price told Truthout, “In terms of Pentagon spending and waste, $250,000,000 dollars spent on Human Terrain each year is small potatoes, but the program can’t work as advertised. Taxpayers should be concerned that their president is committing us to a counterinsurgency-based war that will likely be impossible to successfully implement, and if the failed Human Terrain program is one of the star programs of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

Price refers to the AAA report as “devastating” with regard to the HTS, President Obama’s policy of a huge escalation of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan as “doomed” and said the only way Obama’s handling of the HTS has differed from Bush’s is to have brought about “increases in HTS funding.”

Stacey Fritz is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who studies cold war militarization of the Arctic and other aspects of modern American militarism, including its impacts on academia. She is also a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, an independent ad-hoc group that seeks to promote an ethical anthropology and that believes that anthropologists should refrain from directly assisting the US military in combat. On Nov. 18, Fritz debated Kathleen Reedy, an employee in the HTS, assigned to the 1/25th Stryker Brigade out of Fort Wainwright, Fairbanks.

“She seemed to be trying to make herself believe the HTS lines, but they are so unbelievable that I think that it is very, very difficult to debate/defend that perspective, especially since I had plenty of quotes from military leaders saying very candidly that the HTTs do HUMINT [Human Intelligence gathering] that the military uses to figure out who the bad guys are and which good guys can be co-opted.”

Fitz explained that Reedy opted not to debate the central HTS issues, but rather attempted to persuade the audience that she, as an anthropologist, had control over her information, and that she maintained “strong ethical guidelines concerning what she would pass on to them.”

Fritz believes the entire edifice of ethics that anthropologists who participate in the HTS believe it is flawed.

“One of the main questions the NCA asks concerns whether the good intentions of anthropologists working in HTTs are being met—this is important—the anthropologists really are or come off as seeming well intentioned, but I don’t think that it is believable that their actions could be positive even on the surface since the entire discussion presupposes that the military means the population well, and that there is such thing as a non-violent counterinsurgency war,” Fitz told Truthout, “Of course, a huge portion of individuals in the military mean well and want the best for the Iraqis, which is great, but the policy under which they are acting makes that impossible. If they were doing what the Iraqis wanted, they would leave.”

Price feels it is imperative for individuals to watch how the Obama administration uses and augments the HTS, because the mainstream media has largely been a unwilling to carry out much overdue critical reportage of the program.

“Since its conception HTS has been given an uncritical free ride in the press,” Price explained, “There have been glossy profiles on its designers and supporters in places like the Wall Street Journal, Elle, and the New Yorker. I’ve seen drafts of feature stories on HTS that had critical counter-points removed by editors because they ‘complicated the narrative,’ and academics working on HTS have not had to answer the mounting questions about fundamental ethical, financial, and design problems that haunt the program—in some cases skipping out on academic conferences where they had agreed to engage with me and others. The mainstream media has cut HTS a lot of slack as it uncritically portrays the program as a way to engage in less lethal conquest; and given the severity of the findings of this recent American Anthropological Association report—which The New York Times did cover (in a small story in the Arts Section)—I have a hard time imagining a report from the American Medical Association or the Association of Applied Biologists declaring a key governmental program to be operating outside the most basic ethical and practical boundaries of the disciplines of medicine or biology, and receiving such little notice.”

Fritz explained why this likely occurs. “I think the most important thing for the public to understand is the bigger picture of U.S. counterinsurgency wars. Counterinsurgency wars have always been fought on two fronts—one against the insurgents and the other, a propaganda war against a less than supportive public at home. This kind of tactic particularly appeals to liberals who are opposed to the war and grasp at any information that lets them feel better about it. It’s very seductive—I think the worse people feel the more desperate they are to just believe that something like HTS is making a bloody illegal occupation better.”

This article originally appeared on Truthout.

Haitians gather on the streets of one of the many tent cities occupying the area of Leogane. PHOTO CREDIT: FLICKR.COM/MARINE CORPS NEWS

With the rainy season approaching, one of the emergency needs of Haitians is to get tents. I have seen hundreds of little red topped Coleman pup tents among the sheet shelters. There are tents in every space, from soccer fields and parks to actually in the streets. There is a field with dozens of majestic beige tents from Qatar marked Islamic Relief. But real tents are outnumbered by sheet shelters by a ratio of 100 to 1.

Rescues continue but the real emergency remains food, water, healthcare and shelter for millions.

Though helicopters thunder through the skies, actual relief of food and water and shelter remains mimimal to non-existent in most neighborhoods.

Haitians are helping Haitians. Young men have organized into teams to guard communities of homeless families. Women care for their own children as well as others now orphaned. Tens of thousands are missing and presumed dead.

The scenes of destruction boggle the mind. The scenes of homeless families, overwhelmingly little children, crush the heart.

But hope remains. Haitians say and pray that God must have a plan. Maybe Haiti will be rebuilt in a way that allows all Haitians to participate and have a chance at a dignified life with a home, a school and a job.

One young Haitian man said, “One good sign is the solidarity of the world. Muslim doctors, Jewish doctors, Christian doctors all come to help us. We see children in Gaza collecting toys for Haitian children. It looks very bad right now, but this is a big opportunity for the world and Haiti to change and do good together.”

Bill Quigley is Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights and a long-time Haiti human rights advocate.

This article originally appeared on The Smirking Chimp.

For some Upper West Side residents, their usual stroll down Broadway this evening had a surprise:  a group of 20 New York Jews denouncing Israel’s occupation of Palestine were standing with thought-provoking signs while a few passed out flyers.

Challenging the assumption that all Jews support Israel no matter what, the action, organized by Jews Say No, called on Israel to lift the blockade of Gaza and to end the longest running military occupation in recent history.  The group was founded last year during Israel’s war on Gaza.

“Too often, Jews are seen as supporters of Israel.  We’re here to say that not all Jews support what Israel is doing in the West Bank, in Gaza, and inside Israel,” said Hannah Mermelstein, an activist with Adalah NY who recently returned from Palestine.

Signs decrying the slur that Jews who speak out against Israel’s occupation are “self-hating” were prevalent, while the hundreds of flyers that were passed out gave information on the siege of Gaza, the illegal separation wall in the West Bank, Israel’s routine use of collective punishment on Palestinians, and how to get involved with anti-occupation activism.

“I’m here to tell not only Jews but the world that the oppression of Palestinians is akin to the oppression of us all,” said Nic Abramson, a participant in the recent Gaza Freedom March.

The demonstration was met with varied responses from passers-by in a city that includes nearly a million Jews.  While there was hostility and anger directed at the protestors, Donna Nevel, an organizer with Jews Say No, said that many of the responses were positive.  One Jewish father applauded the action, saying that “seeing you all here is the best lesson I could give my child,” who attends a Jewish day school.

Observers have taken notice at the seeming surge of Jewish anti-occupation activism since the brutal Israeli onslaught of Gaza, which killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, and resulted in widespread destruction.

“I believe genocide is being committed on the people of Gaza, and I’m paying for it and it’s in my name,” said Fran Korotzer, a member of Jews Say No.

The United Nations’ Goldstone Commission report, authored by a respected South African jurist who is a Zionist Jew, concluded that “Operation Cast Lead” “was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”

“In the last year, there has been an opening,” said Nevel.  “I think what’s different is that people are walking by and asking questions.  Israel can’t hide anymore.”