Les dessous de l’information mondiale-Downside World News

Testimony of Robert Kuttner
Before the Committee on Financial Services
Rep. Barney Frank, Chairman
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C.
October 2, 2007

Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:

Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Robert Kuttner. I am an economics and financial journalist, author of several books about the economy, co-editor of The American Prospect, and former investigator for the Senate Banking Committee. I have a book appearing in a few weeks that addresses the systemic risks of financial innovation coupled with deregulation and the moral hazard of periodic bailouts.

In researching the book, I devoted a lot of effort to reviewing the abuses of the 1920s, the effort in the 1930s to create a financial system that would prevent repetition of those abuses, and the steady dismantling of the safeguards over the last three decades in the name of free markets and financial innovation.

Your predecessors on the Senate Banking Committee, in the celebrated Pecora Hearings of 1933 and 1934, laid the groundwork for the modern edifice of financial regulation. I suspect that they would be appalled at the parallels between the systemic risks of the 1920s and many of the modern practices that have been permitted to seep back in to our financial markets.

Although the particulars are different, my reading of financial history suggests that the abuses and risks are all too similar and enduring. When you strip them down to their essence, they are variations on a few hardy perennials — excessive leveraging, misrepresentation, insider conflicts of interest, non-transparency, and the triumph of engineered euphoria over evidence.

The most basic and alarming parallel is the creation of asset bubbles, in which the purveyors of securities use very high leverage; the securities are sold to the public or to specialized funds with underlying collateral of uncertain value; and financial middlemen extract exorbitant returns at the expense of the real economy. This was the essence of the abuse of public utilities stock pyramids in the 1920s, where multi-layered holding companies allowed securities to be watered down, to the point where the real collateral was worth just a few cents on the dollar, and returns were diverted from operating companies and ratepayers. This only became exposed when the bubble burst. As Warren Buffett famously put it, you never know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out.

There is good evidence — and I will add to the record a paper on this subject by the Federal Reserve staff economists Dean Maki and Michael Palumbo — that even much of the boom of the late 1990s was built substantially on asset bubbles. “Disentangling the Wealth Effect: a Cohort Analysis of Household Savings in the 1990s“

A second parallel is what today we would call securitization of credit. Some people think this is a recent innovation, but in fact it was the core technique that made possible the dangerous practices of the 1920. Banks would originate and repackage highly speculative loans, market them as securities through their retail networks, using the prestigious brand name of the bank — e.g. Morgan or Chase — as a proxy for the soundness of the security. It was this practice, and the ensuing collapse when so much of the paper went bad, that led Congress to enact the Glass-Steagall Act, requiring bankers to decide either to be commercial banks — part of the monetary system, closely supervised and subject to reserve requirements, given deposit insurance, and access to the Fed’s discount window; or investment banks that were not government guaranteed, but that were soon subjected to an extensive disclosure regime under the SEC.

Since repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, after more than a decade of de facto inroads, super-banks have been able to re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s — lending to speculators, packaging and securitizing credits and then selling them off, wholesale or retail, and extracting fees at every step along the way. And, much of this paper is even more opaque to bank examiners than its counterparts were in the 1920s. Much of it isn’t paper at all, and the whole process is supercharged by computers and automated formulas. An independent source of instability is that while these credit derivatives are said to increase liquidity and serve as shock absorbers, in fact their bets are often in the same direction — assuming perpetually rising asset prices — so in a credit crisis they can act as net de-stabilizers.

A third parallel is the excessive use of leverage. In the 1920s, not only were there pervasive stock-watering schemes, but there was no limit on margin. If you thought the market was just going up forever, you could borrow most of the cost of your investment, via loans conveniently provided by your stockbroker. It worked well on the upside. When it didn’t work so well on the downside, Congress subsequently imposed margin limits. But anybody who knows anything about derivatives or hedge funds knows that margin limits are for little people. High rollers, with credit derivatives, can use leverage at ratios of ten to one, or a hundred to one, limited only by their self confidence and taste for risk. Private equity, which might be better named private debt, gets its astronomically high rate of return on equity capital, through the use of borrowed money. The equity is fairly small. As in the 1920s, the game continues only as long as asset prices continue to inflate; and all the leverage contributes to the asset inflation, conveniently creating higher priced collateral against which to borrow even more money.

The fourth parallel is the corruption of the gatekeepers. In the 1920s, the corrupted insiders were brokers running stock pools and bankers as purveyors of watered stock. 1990s, it was accountants, auditors and stock analysts, who were supposedly agents of investors, but who turned out to be confederates of corporate executives. You can give this an antiseptic academic term and call it a failure of agency, but a better phrase is conflicts of interest. In this decade, it remains to be seen whether the bond rating agencies were corrupted by conflicts of interest, or merely incompetent. The core structural conflict is that the rating agencies are paid by the firms that issue the bonds. Who gets the business — the rating agencies with tough standards or generous ones? Are ratings for sale? And what, really, is the technical basis for their ratings? All of this is opaque, and unregulated, and only now being investigated by Congress and the SEC.

Yet another parallel is the failure of regulation to keep up with financial innovation that is either far too risky to justify the benefit to the real economy, or just plain corrupt, or both. In the 1920s, many of these securities were utterly opaque. Ferdinand Pecora, in his 1939 memoirs describing the pyramid schemes of public utility holding companies, the most notorious of which was controlled by the Insull family, opined that the pyramid structure was not even fully understood by Mr. Insull. The same could be said of many of today’s derivatives on which technical traders make their fortunes.

By contrast, in the traditional banking system a bank examiner could look at a bank’s loan portfolio, see that loans were backed by collateral and verify that they were performing. If they were not, the bank was made to increase its reserves. Today’s examiner is not able to value a lot of the paper held by banks, and must rely on the banks’ own models, which clearly failed to predict what happened in the case of sub-prime. The largest banking conglomerates are subjected to consolidated regulation, but the jurisdiction is fragmented, and at best the regulatory agencies can only make educated guesses about whether balance sheets are strong enough to withstand pressures when novel and exotic instruments create market conditions that cannot be anticipated by models.

A last parallel is ideological — the nearly universal conviction, 80 years ago and today, that markets are so perfectly self-regulating that government’s main job is to protect property rights, and otherwise just get out of the way.

We all know the history. The regulatory reforms of the New Deal saved capitalism from its own self-cannibalizing instincts, and a reliable, transparent and regulated financial economy went on to anchor an unprecedented boom in the real economy. Financial markets were restored to their appropriate role as servants of the real economy, rather than masters. Financial regulation was pro-efficiency. I want to repeat that, because it is so utterly unfashionable, but it is well documented by economic history. Financial regulation was pro-efficiency. America’s squeaky clean, transparent, reliable financial markets were the envy of the world. They undergirded the entrepreneurship and dynamism in the rest of the economy.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the beneficial effect of financial regulations has either been deliberately weakened by public policy, or has been overwhelmed by innovations not anticipated by the New Deal regulatory schema. New-Deal-era has become a term of abuse. Who needs New Deal protections in an Internet age?

Of course, there are some important differences between the economy of the 1920s, and the one that began in the deregulatory era that dates to the late 1970s. The economy did not crash in 1987 with the stock market, or in 2000-01. Among the reasons are the existence of federal breakwaters such as deposit insurance, and the stabilizing influence of public spending, now nearly one dollar in three counting federal, state, and local public outlay, which limits collapses of private demand.

But I will focus on just one difference — the most important one. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Federal Reserve had neither the tools, nor the experience, nor the self-confidence to act decisively in a credit crisis. But today, whenever the speculative excesses lead to a crash, the Fed races to the rescue. No, it doesn’t bail our every single speculator (though it did a pretty good job in the two Mexican rescues) but it bails out the speculative system, so that the next round of excess can proceed. And somehow, this is scored as trusting free markets, overlooking the plain fact that the Fed is part of the U.S. government.

When big banks lost many tens of billions on third world loans in the 1980s, the Fed and the Treasury collaborated on workouts, and desisted from requiring that the loans be marked to market, lest several money center banks be declared insolvent. When Citibank was under water in 1990, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York personally undertook a secret mission to Riyadh to persuade a Saudi prince to pump in billions in capital and to agree to be a passive investor.

In 1998, the Fed convened a meeting of the big banks and all but ordered a bailout of Long Term Capital Management, an uninsured and unregulated hedge fund whose collapse was nonetheless putting the broad capital markets at risk. And even though Chairman Greenspan had expressed worry two years (and several thousand points) earlier that “irrational exuberance” was creating a stock market bubble, big losses in currency speculation in East Asia and Russia led Greenspan to keep cutting rates, despite his foreboding that cheaper money would just pump up markets and invite still more speculation.

And finally in the dot-com crash of 2000-01, the speculative abuses and insider conflicts of interest that fueled the stock bubble were very reminiscent of 1929. But a general depression was not triggered by the market collapse, because the Fed again came to the rescue with very cheap money.

So when things are booming, the financial engineers can advise government not to spoil the party. But when things go bust, they can count on the Fed to rescue them with emergency infusions of cash and cheaper interest rates.

I just read Chairman Greenspan’s fascinating memoir, which confirms this rescue role. His memoir also confirms Mr. Greenspan’s strong support for free markets and his deep antipathy to regulation. But I don’t see how you can have it both ways. If you are a complete believer in the proposition that free markets are self-regulating and self- correcting, then you logically should let markets live with the consequences. On the other hand, if you are going to rescue markets from their excesses, on the very reasonable ground that a crash threatens the entire system, then you have an obligation to act pre-emptively, prophylactically, to head off highly risky speculative behavior. Otherwise, the Fed just invites moral hazards and more rounds of wildly irresponsible actions.

While the Fed and the European Central Bank were flooding markets with liquidity to prevent a deeper crash in August and September, the Bank of England decided on a sterner course. It would not reward speculators. The result was an old fashioned run on a large bank, and the Bank of England changed its tune.

So the point is not that the Fed should let the whole economy collapse in order to teach speculators a lesson. The point is that the Fed needs to remember its other role — as regulator.

One of the odd things about the press commentary about what the Fed should do is that it has been entirely along one dimension: a Hobson’s choice: — either loosen money and invite more risky behavior, or refuse to enable asset bubbles and risk a more serious credit crunch — as if these were the only options and monetary policy were the only policy lever. But the other lever, one that has fallen into disrepair and disrepute, is preventive regulation.

Mr. Chairman, you have had a series of hearings on the sub-prime collapse, which has now been revealed as a textbook case of regulatory failure. About half of these loans were originated by non-federally regulated mortgage companies. However even those sub-prime loans should have had their underwriting standards policed by the Federal Reserve or its designee under the authority of the 1994 Home Equity and Ownership Protection Act. And by the same token, the SEC should have more closely monitored the so called counterparties — the investment and commercial banks — that were supplying the credit. However, the Fed and the SEC essentially concluded that since the paper was being sold off to investors who presumably were cognizant of the risks, they did not need to pay attention to the deplorable underwriting standards.

In the 1994 legislation, Congress not only gave the Fed the authority, but directed the Fed to clamp down on dangerous and predatory lending practices, including on otherwise unregulated entities such as sub-prime mortgage originators. However, for 13 years the Fed stonewalled and declined to use the authority that Congress gave it to police sub-prime lending. Even as recently as last spring, when you could not pick up a newspaper’s financial pages without reading about the worsening sub-prime disaster, the Fed did not act — until this Committee made an issue of it.

Financial markets have responded to the 50 basis-point rate-cut, by bidding up stock prices, as if this crisis were over. Indeed, the financial pages have reported that as the softness in housing markets is expected to worsen, traders on Wall Street have inferred that the Fed will need to cut rates again, which has to be good for stock prices.

Mr. Chairman, we are living on borrowed time. And the vulnerability goes far beyond the spillover effects of the sub-prime debacle.

We need to step back and consider the purpose of regulation. Financial regulation is too often understood as merely protecting consumers and investors. The New Deal model is actually a relatively indirect one, since it relies more on mandated disclosures, and less on prohibited practices. The enormous loopholes in financial regulation — the hedge fund loophole, the private equity loophole, are justified on the premise that consenting adults of substantial means do not need the help of the nanny state, thank you very much. But of course investor protection is only one purpose of regulation. The other purpose is to protect the system from moral hazard and catastrophic risk of financial collapse. It is this latter function that has been seriously compromised.

HOEPA was understood mainly as consumer protection legislation, but it was also systemic risk legislation.

Sarbanes-Oxley has been attacked in some quarters as harmful to the efficiency of financial markets. One good thing about the sub-prime calamity is that we haven’t heard a lot of that argument lately. Yet there is still a general bias in the administration and the financial community against regulation.

Mr. Chairman, I commend you and this committee for looking beyond the immediate problem of the sub-prime collapse. I would urge every member of the committee to spend some time reading the Pecora hearings, and you will be startled by the sense of déjà vu.

I’d like to close with an observation and a recommendation.

My perception as a financial journalist is that regulation is so out of fashion these days that it narrows the legislative imagination, since politics necessarily is the art of the possible and your immediate task is to find remedies that actually stand a chance of enactment. There is a vicious circle — a self-fulfilling prophecy — in which remedies that currently are legislatively unthinkable are not given serious thought. Mr. Chairman, you are performing an immense public service by broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the immediate crisis and immediate legislation.

Three decades ago, a group of economists inspired by the work of the late Milton Friedman created a shadow Federal Open Market Committee, to develop and recommend contrarian policies in the spirit of Professor Friedman’s recommendation that monetary policy essentially be put on automatic pilot. The committee had great intellectual and political influence, and its very existence helped people think through dissenting ideas. In the same way, the national security agencies often create Team B exercises to challenge the dominant thinking on a defense issue.

In the coming months, I hope the committee hears from a wide circle of experts — academics, former state and federal regulators, financial historians, people who spent time on Wall Street — who are willing to look beyond today’s intellectual premises and legislative limitations, and have ideas about what needs to be re-regulated. Here are some of the questions that require further exploration:

First, which kinds innovations of financial engineering actually enhance economic efficiency, and which ones mainly enrich middlemen, strip assets, appropriate wealth, and increase systemic risk? It no longer works to assert that all innovations, by definition, are good for markets or markets wouldn’t invent them. We just tested that proposition in the sub-prime crisis, and it failed. But which forms of credit derivatives, for example, truly make markets more liquid and better able to withstand shocks, and which add to the system’s vulnerability. We can’t just settle that question by the all purpose assumption that market forces invariably enhance efficiency. We have to get down to cases.

The story of the economic growth in the 1990s and in this decade is mainly a story of technology, increased productivity growth, macro-economic stimulation, and occasionally of asset bubbles. There is little evidence that the growth rates of the past decade and a half — better than the 1970s and ‘80s, worse than the 40’s, 50’s and ‘60s — required or benefited from new techniques of financial engineering.

I once did some calculations on what benefits securitization of mortgage credit had actually had. By the time you net out the fee income taken out by all of the middlemen — the mortgage broker, the mortgage banker, the investment banker, the bond-rating agency — it’s not clear that the borrower benefits at all. What does increase, however, are the fees and the systemic risks. More research on this question would be useful. What would be the result of the secondary mortgage market were far more tightly subjected to standards? It is telling that the mortgages that best survived the meltdown were those that met the underwriting criteria of the GSE’s.

Second, what techniques and strategies of regulation are appropriate to damp down the systemic risks produced by the financial innovation? As I observed, when you strip it all down, at the heart of the recent financial crises are three basic abuses: lack of transparency; excessive leverage; and conflicts of interest. Those in turn suggest remedies: greater disclosure either to regulators or to the public. Requirement of increased reserves in direct proportion to how opaque and difficult to value are the assets held by banks. Some restoration of the walls against conflicts of interest once provided by Glass Steagall. Tax policies to discourage dangerously high leverage ratios, in whatever form.

Maybe we should just close the loophole in the 1940 Act and require of hedge funds and private equity firms the same kinds of disclosures required of others who sell shares to the public, which in effect is what hedge funds and private equity increasingly do. The industry will say that this kind of disclosure impinges on trade secrets. To the extent that this concern is valid, the disclosure of positions and strategies can be to the SEC. This is what is required of large hedge funds by the Financial Services Authority in the UK, not a nation noted for hostility to hedge funds. Indeed, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, which might have chosen to operate as private equity, makes the same disclosures as any other publicly listed firm. It doesn’t seem to hurt Buffett at all.

To the extent that some private equity firms and strategies strip assets, while others add capital and improve management, maybe we need a windfall profits tax on short term extraction of assets and on excess transaction fees. If private equity has a constructive role to play — and I think it can — we need public policies to reward good practices and discourage bad ones. Industry codes, of the sort being organized by the administration and the industry itself, are far too weak.

Why not have tighter regulation both of derivatives that are publicly traded and those that are currently regulated — rather weakly — by the CFTC: more disclosure, limits on leverage and on positions. And why not make OTC and special purpose derivatives that are not ordinarily traded (and that are black holes in terms of asset valuation), also subject to the CFTC?

A third big question to be addressed is the relationship of financial engineering to problems of corporate governance. Ever since the classic insight of A.A. Berle and Gardiner Means in 1933, it has been conventional to point out that corporate management is not adequately responsible to shareholders, and by extension to society, because of the separation of ownership from effective control. The problem, if anything, is more serious today than when Berle and Means wrote in 1933, because of the increased access of insiders to financial engineering. We have seen the fruits of that access in management buyouts, at the expense of both other shareholders, workers, and other stakeholders. This is pure conflict of interest.

Since the first leveraged buyout boom, advocates of hostile takeovers have proposed a radically libertarian solution to the Berle-Means problem. Let a market for corporate control hold managers accountable by buying, selling, and recombining entire companies via LBOs that tax deductible money collateralized by the target’s own assets. It is astonishing that this is even legal, let alone rewarded by tax preferences, even more so when managers with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders are on both sides of the bargain.

The first boom in hostile takeovers crashed and burned. The second boom ended with the stock market collapse of 2000-01. The latest one is rife with conflicts of interest, it depends heavily on the perception that stock prices are going to continue to rise at multiples that far outstrip the rate of economic growth, and on the borrowed money to finance these deals that puts banks increasingly at risk.

So we need a careful examination of better ways of holding managers accountable — through more power for shareholders and other stakeholders such as employees, proxy rules not tilted to incumbent management, and rules that reward mutual funds for serving as the agents of shareholders, and not just of the profit maximization of the fund sponsor. John Bogle, a pioneer in the modern mutual fund industry, has written eloquently on this.

Interestingly, the intellectual fathers of the leveraged buyout movement as a supposed source of better corporate governance, have lately been having serious second thoughts.

Michael Jensen, one of the original theorists of efficient market theory and the so called market for corporate control and an advocate of compensation incentives for corporate CEOs has now written a book calling for greater control of CEOs and less cronyism on corporate boards. That cronyism, however, is in part a reflection of Jensen’s earlier conception of the ideal corporation.

I don’t have all the answers on regulatory remedies, but people smarter than I need to systematically ask these questions, even if they are beyond the pale legislatively for now. And there are scholars of financial markets, former state and federal regulators, economic historians, and even people who did time on Wall Street, who all have the same concerns that I do as well as more technical expertise, and who I am sure would be happy to find company and to serve.

One last parallel: I am chilled, as I’m sure you are, every time I hear a high public official or a Wall Street eminence utter the reassuring words, “The economic fundamentals are sound.” Those same words were used by President Hoover and the captains of finance, in the deepening chill of the winter of 1929-1930. They didn’t restore confidence, or revive the asset bubbles.

The fact is that the economic fundamentals are sound — if you look at the real economy of factories and farms, and internet entrepreneurs, and retailing innovation and scientific research laboratories. It is the financial economy that is dangerously unsound. And as every student of economic history knows, depressions, ever since the South Sea bubble, originate in excesses in the financial economy, and go on to ruin the real economy.

It remains to be seen whether we have dodged the bullet for now. If markets do calm down, and lower interest bail out excesses once again, then we have bought precious time. The worst thing of all would be to conclude that markets self corrected once again, and let the bubble economy continue to fester. Congress has a window in which restore prudential regulation, and we should use that window before the next crisis turns out to be a mortal one.

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. He writes regularly for the magazine on political and economic issues. Bob has just completed a book, to be published in 2007, on the connection between political and economic inequality and systemic risks facing the economy. He is pursuing these issues as a distinguished senior fellow at Demos. Click here to read more about Kuttner.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_alarming_parallels_between_1929_and_2007

_____________________________________________________

Durkin Uncovered Information That She Said Troubled Her Just Before She Was Killed in Afghanistan
Massachusetts Army National Guard Specialist Ciara Durkin, 29, of Quincy, Mass., died on Thursday, Sept. 27, 2008, in Afghanistan. (Family photo via The Boston Globe/AP Photo)From GMA Oct. 4, 2007

Share There is a new mystery in Afghanistan and at its heart is the death of a U.S. soldier and the family she left behind.

Top lawmakers have gotten involved and are seeking answers from the Pentagon about Ciara Durkin and the details surrounding her death. She was killed by a gunshot wound, inside the tightly secured Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

Massachusetts Army National Guard Spc. Ciara Durkin, 29, on home leave in early September, gave her siblings what now seems ominous advice. She told them that if anything were to happen to her while she was serving to investigate.

Friday, Ciara was found dead near a church in the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. She had been shot in the head. So far, the Army only has said that her death was not combat related.

“We need answers. We’d like answers. We want to know how our beloved Ciara spent the last moments of her life and why was she taken from us,” Ciara’s sister Maura Durkin said.

Ciara was part of a National Guard Finance Unit and her siblings say recently she had told them that she was uncovering some things she didn’t like — and that she was making enemies.

They thought she was joking.

Most frustrating to the family, the Army is offering very little information and no explanations. A military spokesman told ABC News that a “round-the-clock” investigation is under way.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who has been helping the family, says it’s not enough and he and is demanding answers.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Kerry asked why the family had not been given autopsy results and why the Army hadn’t answered the family’s request for an independent autopsy.

The Durkin family, nine siblings in all, moved to Massachusetts from Ireland when Ciara was a girl. Ciara was openly gay, but her brothers and sisters doubt that had anything to do with her death.

“We keep being told it takes time, and while we understand and appreciate that, we are desperate for information,” sister Diedre Durkin said.

Photos: Pretty in Pink for BridesBreast Cancer Myths, Squashed!ABC News On Call+ Breast Cancer Center: Expert Advice from Nation’s Top Doctors
Ciara’s brother Pierce Durkin said she sounded heartbreakingly upbeat on the day she died. It was his birthday and she left him a voice mail.

“I had just missed her call and she said ‘Hey Lorbell, I love you very much, I can’t wait to see you,’ and then she started singing ‘Happy Birthday,’” he said.

Pierce said that an autopsy has been done and that results will be delivered Friday. He added that the family plans to commission an independent autopsy.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Story?id=3687897&page=2

 _____________________________________________________________

comment :

She discovered a secret, and was killed before she told anyone. Seems pretty clear to me.

Why, oh why, do people like this not FUCKING write it down, make copies, and give them to multiple people they can trust, the moment they realise they are on to something? Or are they so fricking naive they think assasinations never happen?

The only mystery in this story, is why the year of her death is given as 2008. A typo – the biggest mystery here.

OK. A ‘What did she discover’ guessing game. Here’s my starters:

• Casualty figures are at least ten times higher than reported.
• The US is running a vast mind control production line in secret prisons around the world, in which captured ‘enemy combatants’ (ie anyone they grabbed) get turned into programmed zombie agents of the NWO/zionistas. To be released back to civilian life, where they become robot-like police, security guards, infiltrators, etc. Might explain whats up with a lot of US police, etc too.

1. She discovered lots of soldiers and even their higher-ups ( higher-ranking army staff) is doing drugs, and does sell everything from army material to highly secret/classified information to afghan drug dealers in order to get another fix.

2. She discovered that there are big drug trafficking organisations (gangs) within the US forces in Afghanistan, smuggling tons of Heroin over to the US.

3. She has found out that the drug smuggling is only the tip of the iceberg, and that not only gangs from US military but also private conrators and even CIA is involved.

Terra H.

____________

US mission in Afghanistan is all about protecting the herion flow into the US and guarding the poppy fields anyway.  In Iraq it is the oil fields in Afghanistan it is the opium/poppy fields.

Seele.

Why is Antiwar.com hiding the Iraq Genocide?

Friday, 05 October 2007

Dear Margaret Griffis,
AntiWar.com

I hope you’re well.

I read on Antiwar.com that you edit the website’s page Casualties in Iraq – The Human Cost of Occupation

While that page includes a big Iraq Body Count’s banner and other IBC references, I could not find any mention of:

the studies conducted by the world leaders in the field of epidemiology and published as peer-reviewed scientific papers in the world’s leading medical journal, the Lancet;

the recently published ORB poll suggesting a total of 1,220,580 deaths as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)

The British media watchdog Media Lens recently wrote:

IBC only collects records of violent civilian deaths reported by two different (mainly Western) media sources operating in Iraq. Epidemiologists report that this type of study typically captures around 5 per cent of deaths during high levels of violence, such as exists in Iraq. By contrast, the Lancet studies provide figures for all deaths – violent and non-violent, civilian and military, reported and unreported. The Media Ignore Credible Poll Revealing 1.2 Million Violent Deaths In Iraq, SEPTEMBER 18, 2007

In its latest Alert, Media Lens wrote:

The mainstream media are continuing to use figures provided by the website Iraq Body Count (IBC) to sell the public a number for total post-invasion deaths of Iraqis that is perhaps 5-10% of the true death toll. MEDIA ALERT: IRAQ BODY COUNT: “A VERY MISLEADING EXERCISE”, October 3, 2007

Gilbert Burnham, MD and Professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Les Roberts, Associate Professor at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health recently wrote:

Not wanting to think about civilian deaths in Iraq has become almost universal. The average American believed approximately 9,900 Iraqis had died as a result of the war according to a February 2007 AP poll. Unfortunately, recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be one-hundred times worse than Americans realize. (…) There are now two polls and three scientific surveys all suggesting the official figures and media-based estimates in Iraq have missed 70-95% of all deaths. The evidence suggests that the extent of under-reporting by the media is only increasing with time. Ignorance of Iraqi death toll no longer an option, Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham

Patrick McElwee and Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy recently wrote:

The best estimate indicates that more than a million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation. It is reasonable to suppose that if politicians and news media in the United States were forced to confront this reality, pressure for the end of the war would increase dramatically, and cavalier discussions of new military actions in Iran and Pakistan would be less likely. Is the U.S. Responsible for a Million Iraqi Deaths?, Patrick McElwee and Robert Naiman

In April 2006 I wrote Antiwar.com on the same issue but I didn’t received any reply.

I know other people wrote you on the same issue in these years and again in these weeks and days. Again, Antiwar.com has not replied to anybody.

Why is AntiWar.com – on its page Casualties in Iraq – The Human Cost of Occupation – hiding to its readers the Iraq Genocide?

Thank you for your time and please, I would like to hear from you this time.

Sincerely,
Gabriele Zamparini
London

AMSI Net- The Cat’s Dream

http://heyetnet.org/en/content/view/1869/1

 _____________________________________________________________

Comment :

These “anti-war” type orgs get started by well wishing people (sometimes) and if they begin making waves government agents are sent in to steer the direction of the org.

Often come in with really good looking info, (that in the end leads to nowhere) or money for promotions but only the ones they suggest.

I’d be very surprised in any org larger than one man today doesn’t have it’s government agent high up in the org.

I scuttled “Standupnz” for that exact reason.

Neal

The patriotic Iraqi website albasrah.net reported on Tuesday that 22 Iraqi Resistance fighting groups had convened a Unification Congress in a liberated neighborhood in Baghdad.

The Congress resolved to unite all the Resistance groups that were in attendance at the meeting, which agreed that its aim was the total liberation of the entirety of Iraq, however long that might take. The congress also decided that membership in the unified Resistance front would be open to other armed Resistance groups or fighters wishing to join. The Congress also resolved to create a Supreme Command of the Jihad and Liberation struggle and it elected Iraqi President ‘Izzat Ibrahim ad-Duri the Supreme Commander of the Jihad and Liberation. Also elected at the meeting were a first deputy supreme commander and a deputy for military affairs.

The Supreme Command of the Jihad then convened its own meeting at which a General Staff was created under the command of the Supreme Commander of the Jihad. Lieutenant General ‘Amir Muhammad Amin was named Deputy Supreme Commander for Military affairs. Also created at the meeting were a religious consultation body headed by Shaykh ‘Ali ‘Abdallah al-‘Ubaydi. A national security board was also chosen to be headed by General Khalid Sulayman Khalaf. A board for administrative and financial affairs was created under the command of Lieutenant General Muhammad Salig ‘Alwan and a board for information and mobilization was named under the command of General Salah ad-Din Ahmad. Dr. Kan‘an Amin was named official spokesman for the Jihad and Liberation Command.

The Supreme Command declared that the Jihad and Liberation command upheld “sacred principles” that could not be violated and stated that no party was authorized to enter into negotiations with the American enemy except on the basis of those principles. The Command stated that the jihad would continue and escalate until the American enemy recognized it and fled from Iraq.

The Command stated that for any negotiations to take place, the Americans must:

Officially recognize the patriotic Resistance and all the patriotic, Arab nationalist, and Islamist Resistance organizations in all their armed and civil organizations as the sole legitimate representative of Iraq and its great people.

Officially announce an unconditional withdrawal from Iraq – whether that be immediate or in short stages.

Halt raids, pursuits, killings, destruction, sabotage, dispossessions, and expulsions and withdraw the occupation troops from all population centers.

Free all prisoners and detainees without exception and compensate them for their losses.

Return to service the Iraqi Army and national security forces, which were declared dissolved by the Americans during their invasion in 2003. They are to be restored in keeping with the rules and traditions that were in force before the American invasion and they must also be compensated for their losses.

Pledge to compensate Iraq for all the material and moral losses and injuries caused the country by the occupation.

Cancel all laws, decrees, and other pieces of legislation issued after the occupation.

Hold direct talks with the Resistance on implementing a program to fulfill the principles adhered to by the Supreme Command if the Americans want to have save face. Otherwise the Americans will simply have to leave in defeat.

In addition the Command said that meetings must be held on the re-establishment of a government, adding that one-man rule was being done away with and replaced with system based on Islamic democratic principles as distinct from the imperialist democracy that is notorious for its practice of self-serving double standards.

The Resistance organizations taking part in the founding congress of the Jihad and Liberation organization are:

The Army of the Men of the Naqshbandiyah Order.
The Army of the Prophet’s Companions.
The Army of the Murabiteen.
The Army of al-Hamzah.
The Army of the Message.
The Army of Ibn al-Walid.
The United Command of the Mujahideen (Iraq).
The Liberation Brigades.
The Army of al-Mustafa.
The Army of the Liberation of Iraq.
Squadrons of the Martyrs.
The Army of the Sabireen.
The Brigades of the Jihad in the Land of the Two Rivers.
The army of the Knight for the Liberation of the Kurdish Self-Rule Area.
Squadrons of the Jihad in al-Basrah.
Jihadist Squadrons of al-Fallujah.
The Patriotic Popular Front for the Liberation of Iraq.
The Squatrons of the Husayni Revolution of at-Taff.
Squadrons of the Liberation of the South.
Army of Haneen
Squadrons of Diyala for Jihad and Liberation.
The Squadrons of Glory for the Liberation of Iraq.

http://www.albasrah.net/en_articles_2007/1007/iraqiresistancereport_031007.htm