September 2, 2009 – The New Dark Age

2 September, 2009 — MEDIA LENS – Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

On August 26, the Guardian newspaper published an article titled, ‘US takes on Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s nuclear programme in one massive gamble.’ Julian Borger and Ewen MacAskill told readers:

“The Obama administration’s approach to two of the world’s most intractable and dangerous problems, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s nuclear programme, is to link them together in the search for a solution to both.

“The new US strategy aims to use its Iran policy to gain leverage on Binyamin Netanyahu’s government.”

The “Iran policy” is based on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s threat of “crippling sanctions” against Iran. (BBC online, ‘Israel-US settlement deal “close”’, Analysis by Jeremy Bowen, August 26, 2009; news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8221559.stm)

The sanctions threat is to ensure that Iran does “not compromise on uranium enrichment by the end of next month.” The Guardian told its readers that not only are sanctions supposed to pre-empt any Israeli military action against Iran, “they are also a bargaining chip offered in part exchange for a substantial freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” The paper quoted one official “close to the negotiations”:

“The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not.”

So much for Obama’s much-hailed Cairo speech in June 2009 in which he promised a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” (‘Obama speech in Cairo’, Huffington Post, June 4, 2009; www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/04/obama-speech-in-cairo-vid_n_211215.html)

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31 August, 2009 — Global Research

Electronic ID cards have made alarming progress towards becoming universal, around the world. Already, over 2.2 billion people, or 33% of the world’s population, have been issued with ‘smart’ ID cards. Of those, over 900 million have biometric facial and fingerprint systems. On present plans, over 85% of the world’s population will have smart ID cards by 2012. Most of the remaining population won’t have escaped – largely, they are already enrolled in earlier generation ID systems, often in repressive states, such as Myanmar (Burma).

Understandably, campaigns against the introduction of ID cards have tended to play up the problems with ID systems, presenting them as being unworkable and creating unmanageable problems with privacy invasion, fraud, unauthorised database access, organised crime, reliability of biometric recognition, etc. As a result, a substantial number of people believe mandatory ID cards ‘just won’t happen’.

It’s long past time to stop burying our heads in the sand. There are no obstacles to the worldwide introduction of mandatory, electronic ID cards

All those problems with ID systems may be real, but they are not enough to stop implementation, primarily because these are problems that will affect people as individuals, not their governments – our problem, not theirs.

There has been hardly any meaningful debate about one of the biggest issues of our time. Most ordinary people don’t like the idea, but project goes ahead anyway.

It’s also time to look at what ID systems are really intended to do, not the public justification. Since governments probably always knew that ID cards wouldn’t stop terrorism, organised crime, ID theft, fraud, etc., there has to be some other reason for their introduction – and it appears to be a reason that governments don‘t want to own up to, in public.

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