February 22, 2024

Articles for This Issue:

DWF NEWS

February 22, 2024

How the CIA Destabilizes the World

Jeffrey D. Sachs

World Court to Review 57-Year Israeli Occupation

Human Rights Watch

False Equation: Anti-Israel Is Not Anti-Semite or Anti-Jew

Eric Zuesse

Imperiled Gazans Do Have Somewhere to Go

Sam Husseini

Gross National Happiness

Hank Stone

Earth Constitution's Disarmament Plan to Abolish Militarism

Glen T. Martin  World Constitution & Parliament Association

How the CIA Destabilizes the World

Jeffrey D. Sachs

There are three basic problems with the C.I.A.: its objectives, methods and accountability. 

Its operational objectives are whatever the C.I.A. or the president of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law.

Its methods are secretive and duplicitous.

Its unaccountability means that the C.I.A. and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress is a doormat, a sideshow.

As a recent C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, said of his time at the C.I.A.: 

“I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

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World Court to Review 57-Year Israeli Occupation

Human Rights Watch

16 Feb 2024 – An unprecedented number of countries and international organizations are expected to participate in the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) oral hearings on Israel’s occupation beginning February 19, 2024, Human Rights Watch said today. Fifty-two countries and three international organizations will participate in the oral proceedings, more than in any other case since the world’s highest court began functioning in 1946.



The oral proceedings stem from a December 2022 request by the United Nations General Assembly for an advisory opinion by the court on the legal consequences of Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The court has the opportunity to address the prolonged occupation, to consider Israel’s practices and policies violating international legal prohibitions against racial discrimination, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, and to appraise the legal responsibilities of other countries and the UN to address violations of international law arising from the occupation.

Although ICJ advisory opinions are non-binding, they can carry great moral and legal authority and can ultimately become part of customary international law, which is legally binding on states. 

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False Equation: Anti-Israel Is Not Anti-Semite or Anti-Jew

Eric Zuesse

Editor's note [R. Kotila]:  

The present analysis is an EXCERPT taken from an email communication (received 2/21/24) from outspoken journalist Eric Zuesse. I felt that this particular analysis needed more public exposure for those of us who are dismayed at Israel's brutal genocidal Gaza attack, and who speak out on behalf of the Palestinians. EXCERPT taken from  https://theduran.com/many-alternative-news-media-just-tell-different-lies-from-mainstream-ones/

EXCERPT from Zuesse's article

I have been as critical against Israel as anyone, but Israel was originally established, set up, so as to claim that anyone who is against Israel is against Jews — against all Jews — which is itself a lie and certainly doesn’t fit me nor the many other people who believe that racist-fascist (or “nazi”) Jews (commonly called simply “Zionists”) aren’t all Jews, and maybe even constitute only a minority of Jews worldwide. But, just like anti-Semites, Zionists equate anti-Israel with anti-Semite (anti-Jews) — and the creators of the Israeli state constantly reinforced that false equation, so that, in their eyes, any Jew OUTSIDE Israel is merely a tool for the Jews INSIDE Israel to use in order to lobby in those other countries (especially in the United States) in support of the nazi Jewish state: Jewish nazism. The people whom U.S. President Joe Biden appointed to run the U.S. State Department are overwhelmingly such nazi Jews, and this U.S. President has made clear that for as long as Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza, even if it turns out to have been outright genocide of Gazans (the residents in Gaza) continues, the U.S. will continue to supply the weapons and ammunition with which to do it. He complains about how they do it (he pretends to care about Gaza’s civilians), but he never has set any conditions upon what Israel’s Government will do with America’s donated tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons, bombs, and bullets, for this operation: he is complicit in whatever Netanyahu decides to do to the Gazans but lies to the American people so as to hide that blatant fact.

Zionists created the Israeli state to be the apartheid and expansionist Jewish-supremacist nation that it is. I, and many other non-anti-Semitic persons, condemn Israel but not Jews, and thus call-out the supporters of Israel for their self-‘justifying’ nazi-Jewish lies about who and what they really are. Many Jews don’t even care whether the Old Testament’s Israel was authentic or instead mainly ‘mythological’ (i.e., propagandistic, fictional), but Zionism is based upon Deuteronomy and the other rabidly racist and imperialist supremacist parts of Judaism’s Scripture, which is the Pentateuch or first five books of the Christian bible. Sadly, even lots of Jews ignore this fact (which now plays out before our very eyes) — that Israel is based upon such passages as Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 7:16 and 20:15 -18, which have ‘God’ say that when the Israelites enter the promised land they are to wipe out the Canaanites, Hittites, Girgishites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, living there. Therefore, many of them are suckers for Israel — they buy into, even if they don’t knowingly share — the nazi-Jewish or “Zionist” propaganda-line. They thus become used by the Zionists, suckers of AIPAC, ADL, etc., even if they aren’t Zionists. And so the Zionists and their creation (Israel) present the ugliest possible picture to the outside world, not only about themselves, but of all Jews.

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

Imperiled Gazans Do Have Somewhere to Go

Sam Husseini

By Sam Husseini, Consortium News. Many professing solidarity with Palestinians — including alleged legal experts — being slaughtered in Gaza have said they have “nowhere to go.” It’s not true. They do. Somewhere they actually should go. Their homes in what is now Israel. The majority of families of Palestinians in Gaza were forced there by Israel in 1948. See this great thread by Hanine Hassan: “Who told you that the 1.5 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in Rafah have nowhere left to go? My family, now in Rafah, has a home in Jaffa, from which we were expelled by a fascist German family. 

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Gross National Happiness

Hank Stone

Editor's note  Economists are fond of talking about Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is a measure of economic activity, the total value of goods produced and services provided annually in a country.  Did you know, though, that more wars means more weapons sold, hence a larger GDP? Headline on page 2 article in the Wall Street Journal (2/20/24): "How Ukraine War Boosts U.S. Economy." How sad. The shameful fact is that America is in the War Business. -- R. Kotila, Ph.D. 

Gross National Happiness

Hank Stone  

Economists are fond of talking about Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is a measure of economic activity. Everything bought or sold makes the GDP rise.

Why GDP? It is easy to calculate and is taken as a rough measure of a country’s economic health. The more being bought or sold, the more robust and profitable is the economy.

So the higher the GDP the better, right? Not necessarily.

If a hurricane destroys 1,000 houses, that also contributes to the GDP. Rebuilding those houses requires money to be spent. War also raises GDP, first for weapons, and then to rebuild.

So, in 2008, the King of Bhutan declared that his country would measure its success not by money spent, but with an index of measurements built around 4 pillars:

1. Ecological sustainability,
2. Sustainable and equitable socio-economic development,
3. Preservation and promotion of a free and resilient culture, and
4. Good governance and equality before the law.

What if the point of government were to be make people happy? 

Gross National Happiness (GNH) is seen as part of the Buddhist “Middle Way,” where happiness comes from balanced living rather than from an extreme approach. The American way, by contrast, is making small numbers of very rich people extremely rich, making government serve the corporations, using up natural resources as fast as possible, arranging profitable wars, and postponing climate restoration through governmental inaction.

The preamble of the U.S. Constitution says,” We the People of the United States [establish this Constitution] in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Our founding fathers clearly had in mind that the American people should be happy, safe, free, prosperous, and have a secure future.

The GNH of Bhutan consists of a range of objective indicators reasonably associated with the 4 pillars (above). I also learned doing testing at Xerox for 30 years, how powerful it is to simply ask a representative sample of people what you want to know. Like, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?” These days, that sort of poll is very easy, cheap, and accurate. So we can measure happiness accurately and cheaply—if we want to know.

Of course, measuring our happiness would immediately reveal people’s revulsion at wars, extreme imbalances of wealth, failures to protect the environment, dishonest government, desire for single-payer healthcare, and for women to control their own bodies. Like, democracy.

So-- would happiness for Americans, achieved in cooperation with a successful future for the whole world, be so terrible?

Hank Stone   hstone@rochester.rr.com  One Page Perspective #71

Earth Constitution's Disarmament Plan to Abolish Militarism

Glen T. Martin  World Constitution & Parliament Association

Dear Professor Martin, 

Inquirer: In Article 17.3.12.7 of the Earth Constitution the Earth Federation government must "Prohibit and completely terminate the production of nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction;"

"But what about the war industry? What about Armed Forces?"

Professor Martin: ... The Earth Constitution progressively disarms the nations and ends with an entirely disarmed world with only civilian law enforcement and no military weapons of any sort. (It is explicitly there in Article 17). All this is right in the Constitution, explicit.  Article 1 gives the goals ...  Article 4 gives the World Parliament the authority to achieve these goals and the setting up of a world system with binding courts, civilian police, and an executive branch that can solve the problems that exacerbate war (like global poverty, injustice, and greed), is precisely what will abolish all militarization.

Inquirer: "I want to see the Universal Abolition of Militarism, that is the disappearance from the planet of Armed Forces. This will make the War industry obsolete."

Dr. Martin: One cannot do this without a system in place: courts, executive, police, human rights protection (Obudsmus), etc. ...  There can not be abolition of militarism unless the entire world system is converted to a peace system.  This is exactly what the Earth Constitution does.

Inquirer: "I also want to see a plan, drawn with the help of capable scientists and engineers, how to transform ALL machinery currently producing instruments to shorten our lives (from small grenades to giant warships), to machinery that make our lives longer and nicer."

Dr. Martin replies: Also, in terms of your great point that “all the war-ships in the world should become pleasure cruisers,” that is absolutely correct. It will be enforceable under the Earth Constitution for several reasons, one of which is that the oceans and waterways of the world belong to the people of Earth (Article 4), which means that there are no such thing as lawless “international waters” that allow the Japanese to destroy the whale population and the US to patrol the planet with its military ships. All will be enforceably illegal, including during the period when the World Disarmament Agency is busy dismantling all these warships, subs, military planes, tanks, and all the rest. In the end there will be no more military weapons at all (by law) and the manufacture, possession, design, investment in, transport, or deployment of any and all military equipment will be enforceably illegal.

17.5.2.7 All nations which have not already done so shall immediately transfer all military weapons and equipment to the World Disarmament Agency, which shall immediately immobilize all such weapons and shall proceed forthwith to dismantle, convert to peaceful usage, recycle the materials thereof, or otherwise to destroy such weapons and equipment.

17.5.2.8 All armies and military forces of every kind shall be completely disarmed, and either disbanded or converted and integrated on a voluntary basis into the nonmilitary World Service Corps.

-- Glen T. Martin    gmartin@earthconstitution.world