On leave

Just leaving a quick note that I will be away on personal business for the next several days. Should be back Sunday, March 6.

Amnesty International founder dies

Amnesty International news reports that Peter Berenson, the founder of Amnesty International, has died:

Death of Amnesty International founder

Press release, 02/26/2005

Peter Benenson, the founder of the worldwide human rights organisation Amnesty International, died yesterday evening. He was 83.

Mr Benenson founded and inspired Amnesty International in 1961 first as a one-year campaign for the release of six prisoners of conscience. But from there came a worldwide movement for human rights and in its midst an international organisation -- Amnesty International -- which has taken up the cases of many thousands of victims of human rights violations and inspired millions to human rights defence the world round.

"Peter Benenson’s life was a courageous testament to his visionary commitment to fight injustice around the world," said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

"He brought light into the darkness of prisons, the horror of torture chambers and tragedy of death camps around the world. This was a man whose conscience shone in a cruel and terrifying world, who believed in the power of ordinary people to bring about extraordinary change and, by creating Amnesty International, he gave each of us the opportunity to make a difference."

"In 1961 his vision gave birth to human rights activism. In 2005 his legacy is a world wide movement for human rights which will never die."

The one-year Appeal for Amnesty was launched on 28 May 1961, in an article in the British newspaper, The Observer, called "The Forgotten Prisoners". That appeal attracted thousands of supporters, and started a worldwide human rights movement.

The catalyst for the original campaign was Mr Benenson's sense of outrage after reading an article about the arrest and imprisonment of two students in a café in Lisbon, Portugal, who had drunk a toast to liberty.

In the first few years of Amnesty International's existence, Mr Benenson supplied much of the funding for the movement, went on research missions and was involved in all aspects of the organisation's affairs.

Other activities that Mr Benenson was involved in during his lifetime included; adopting orphans from the Spanish Civil War, bringing Jews who had fled Hitler's Germany to Britain, observing trials as a member of the Society of Labour Lawyers, helping to set up the organisation "Justice" and establishing a society for people with coeliac disease.

At a ceremony to mark Amnesty International's 25th anniversary, Mr Benenson lit what has become the organisation's symbol -- a candle entwined in barbed wire -- with the words:

"The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who ‘disappeared’. That is what the candle is for."

Today Amnesty International is into its 44th year. It has become the world’s largest independent human rights organisation, with more than 1.8 million members and committed supporters worldwide.

Musician and blogger Matthew Good says that Berenson inspired him to make a difference. Hopefully, he will inspire others as well.

Paul Martin says 'No'

There are many respects in which I don't particularly care for the job Paul Martin is doing as Canada's PM, but I have to say that I am very pleased that he has said 'No' to missile defence. It is a vital decision, not only for the protection of Canadian sovereignty, but also for the pursuit of world peace, and the protection of us from annihilation.

Counter-recruitment in New York City

Military recruiters targeting high schools in New York City are facing resistance in the form of counter-recruitment campaigns. Anti-war activists are canvassing New York neighbourhoods, attempting to convince students of other options:

"We've heard everything up to and including having a desk in the guidance counselor's office," said Amy Wagner of Youth Activists-Youth Allies (YaYas), a group that focuses on counter-recruitment. "When the kid comes in to talk to the counselor about college, before the kid can get there, they've got somebody in their face saying, 'You want to go to college? How are you going to pay for college?"'

New York City organizers are educating people about alternatives to enlisting and the realities of military life. Vietnam veterans and anti-war activists Jim Murphy and Dayl Wise visit high schools, where they recount for the students stories about their time in the service.

In one class of juniors at West Side High School, Murphy told them that before the service he spent time making money playing seven-card stud. Once he left community college, he was drafted.

"I wasn't smart enough to have fear about it," Murphy told the class. "I didn't have a clue." Wise, who was in the infantry, didn't want to go to war when he was drafted. His father offered to help send him to Canada.

"I took the easy way out by reporting for duty," he said. "It takes a braver person. I let it happen to me? I didn't have a plan. I gave up control."

He warned the students: "Please have a plan. Don't let others make plans for you."

The YaYas, staffed almost entirely by high school students of color, work to make sure young people avoid falling into military service because it seems like the only option for advancement.
"It's either jail or the military," said Jeannel Bishop, a senior at Brooklyn's South Shore High School and a YaYas staffer. Many students at her school think enlistment is the best they can accomplish.

When Navy recruiters visited her school recently, students were allowed to leave class to visit with them. Bishop brought pamphlets and confronted the recruiters about their assurances of tuition and training. She pointed out to them and other students nearby that getting college money was a much more complicated and uncertain process.

"I was taking over their whole show," Bishop said. "[The recruiters] were amazed."

Three students who had been "pumped up about the military" had second thoughts after Bishop spoke. It took just a little information for them to have doubts, she said.

Besides speaking out in their own schools, the YaYas hold workshops for teenagers and make presentations to PTAs. They encourage students to post literature in the guidance office and set up counter-recruitment tables next to military recruiters. Most importantly, they want young people to make an informed choice, Wagner said.

For instance, most students don't know that:

Two-thirds of recruits don't get any college money, according to the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.

Most people in the military do not have time to attend college while in the service.

To qualify for college money recruits have to pay $100 per month for a year.

The unemployment rate for veterans is three times higher than the national average.

People who sign up with the Delayed Entry Program are told they can't change their minds, but getting out is as simple as writing a letter.

The enlistment contract is for eight years.

There are other ways to finance college, like federal financial aid, private scholarships, going to community college or joining AmeriCorps.

Read the full article here.

Letter from Ralph Nader

There is a new letter from Ralph Nader on the Democracy Rising website, calling for an end to the war and occupation of Iraq. Here it is:

Dear Friends: Since freedom and democracy are such a good thing, why not put it to the people of Iraq – in a national referendum – whether or not they want us to leave? Why not give the Iraqi people the right to exercise their “democracy” and vote whether or not they want “freedom” from our military and corporate occupation? Why not? Because eighty percent of Iraqis want us out. So do a majority of Americans. Why? Because the occupation of Iraq is not about freedom and democracy. It is about oil and military occupation.

More and more Americans know the nature of the disaster that the Bush government, in our name, has created in oil-rich Iraq – over 100,000 Iraqi civilian lives lost (according to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), over 1,400 American lives lost, and thousands more seriously wounded and sick. People see the news stories describing the U.S. corporate takeover of Iraq through insider-deal corporate contractors with Bush administration donors.

Through the Democracy Rising Peace Project we will help ignite the American people to say – Bring the troops home, it is time for a responsible and rapid withdrawal from Iraq. Enough lives lost, enough billions spent – it is time to leave Iraq to the Iraqis.

The case against the war and occupation of Iraq, and the corporate takeover of our democracy is well documented. People want to know – what are we to do?

Now is the time to act. It is time to organize to end the illegal war and occupation of Iraq.

The U.S. corporate and military forces will end up pulling out of Iraq. The question is – when? Months? Years? Decades? After how many more preventable deaths, debilitating injuries and diseases? After how much destruction?

That's up to us. Together we can end the occupation and bring the troops home safely.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

Scott Ritter on nuclear proliferation

Scott Ritter warns that the regime change agenda of the Bush administration with respect to Iran and North Korea is extremely dangerous, and could result in nuclear
annihilation. Here is the full article:

North Korea's dramatic public revelation that it possesses nuclear weapons represents a stark challenge for the Bush administration.
The North Korean claim, if true, underscores the failure of President Bush's nonproliferation policies that since the beginning of his first term had been subordinated to a grander vision of regime change. That policy was intended to transform strategically vital regions of the world into Western-style democracies supportive of the United States and the Bush administration's vision of American global dominance.

The intermingling of nonproliferation and regime change policies was doomed to fail. One requires skillful multilateral diplomacy based on the principles of uniform application of international law, the other bold application of a unilateral doctrine of aggressive liberation rhetoric backed by the real threat of military power. When blended, as the Bush administration did, unilateralism trumps multilateralism every time. North Korea's announced accession to the nuclear club represents the inevitable result.

The end of America's meaningful role as a promoter of global nonproliferation can be traced to decisions made in the 1990s regarding regime change in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The United Nations had embarked on a bold effort to roll back the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through disarmament and, despite some initial difficulties, scored a dramatic success.

It is now clear that Iraq, under pressure from U.N. weapons inspectors, was disarmed of its WMD by 1991 and had dismantled and destroyed the last vestiges of its weapons programs by 1996. But the United States had, since 1991, committed to a policy of regime change in Iraq, which required economic sanctions-based containment linked to a continued finding of Iraqi noncompliance with its disarmament obligation.

Rather than embracing weapons inspections, three successive U.S. administrations denigrated and subverted the work of the inspectors in order to keep the primary policy objective of regime change in Iraq on track. The nail in the coffin of U.S. nonproliferation efforts came when the Bush administration willfully misstated the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs in order to justify its invasion of Iraq.

North Korea and Iran concluded from events leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration did not regard nonproliferation as an endgame but a tool designed to weaken a target state to the point that it could succumb to the grander U.S. policy objective of regime change.

Mr. Bush had stated that the world would be a better place with the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran removed. Therefore, all diplomatic efforts - whether the six-party framework with North Korea or the European Union-brokered negotiations with Iran - were regarded as disingenuous fronts intended not to facilitate nonproliferation and stability but rather instability and regime change.

With Iraq a model of the reality of America's unilateral militaristic approach toward bringing about regime change, North Korea and Iran have embarked on the only path available to either of them - acquisition of an independent nuclear deterrent intended to forestall what they perceive as irresponsible U.S. aggression.

The Bush administration has come face to face with the reality of the failure of its policies. Rather than curtailing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the administration's crusade against global tyranny has served as an accelerant in placing the most dangerous weapons known to man in the hands of xenophobic regimes that have been backed into a corner.

But the situation in North Korea and Iran could still be resolved in a way that promotes global nonproliferation objectives.

Real and meaningful economic incentives, backed by U.S. and allied willingness to permit North Korea and Iran to possess civilian nuclear programs operated under stringent international monitoring, could succeed in rolling back North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons and provide incentive for Iran to cease and desist in its own program.

But the key to any such salvation lies with the willingness of the Bush administration to unlink nonproliferation efforts from regime change. This is highly unlikely, given the reality of the ideological composition of those at the senior decision-making levels of the Bush national security team and the huge political investment Mr. Bush has made in support of his global crusade against tyranny.

"Freedom is on the march," Mr. Bush has said. Unfortunately for the United States, North Korea and Iran don't see it that way. And if America keeps marching, it could very well be in the direction of a nuclear apocalypse.

Bush in Europe

Anti-Bush protests have happened in Brussels, and more recently in http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050224/asp/foreign/story_4417780.asp, during Bush's European tour.

Meanwhile, German Prime Minister Gerhardt Schroeder joined Bush in saying that Iran must not take the step to possess any nuclear weapons.

Hunter S. Thompson

In memory of Hunter S Thompson, who died Sunday night of suicide. This article is about the political side of Hunter:

But Thompson also taught me how to do politics. Thompson was a journalist in the traditional sense of the craft and, as such, he was entirely unwilling to merely observe the wrongdoings of the political class. He wanted to create a newer, better politics -- or, at the very least, to so screw up the current machinery that it would no longer work for the people who he referred to as "these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today."

In 1970, fresh from covering the assassinations, police riots and related disappointments of the 1968 presidential campaign, Thompson waded into the fight himself as a "pro-hippie, anti-development" candidate for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, which included the ski town of Aspen. Thompson wanted to win, in order to save what was still a rural, live-and-let-live county from the influx of Hollywood stars, corporate hoteliers and the rest of the elite entourage that would make it nation's premier ski resort. But he also wanted to teach a lesson about politics that would have meaning far beyond Colorado.

Thompson ran on what he and his backers dubbed the "Freak Power" ticket, declaring in an advertisement in the Aspen Times that, "(In) 1970 Amerika a lot of people are beginning to understand that to be a freak is an honorable way to go. This is the real point: that we are not really freaks at all - not in the literal sense -- but the twisted realities of the world we are trying to live in have somehow combined to make us feel like freaks. We argue, we protest, we petition -- but nothing changes. So now, with the rest of the nation erupting in a firestorm of bombings and political killings, a handful of "freaks" are running a final, perhaps atavistic experiment with the idea of forcing change by voting..."

At a time when many of his contemporaries were disappearing into a drug haze, or shouting silly "Smash-the-State" slogans, Thompson was exploring a more radical prospect. He wanted to combine "Woodstock vibrations, New Left activism, and basic Jeffersonian Democracy with strong echoes of the Boston Tea Party ethic" into what the writer-candidate referred to as "a blueprint for stomping the (conservative Vice President Spiro) Agnew mentality by its own rules -- with the vote, instead of the bomb; by seizing the power machinery and using it, instead of merely destroying it."

The experiment was not an immediate success. But Thompson did win the city of Aspen and took 44 percent of the vote county wide. In fact, only a last-minute deal between the Democratic and Republican parties pulled together enough votes for the incumbent sheriff to beat the "Freak Power" candidate. But, as Thompson noted, "the Aspen campaign suddenly assumed national importance as a sort of accidental trial balloon that might, if it worked, be tremendously significant."

As it happened, even in defeat, the campaign proved significant. Because of all the national attention accorded Thompson's campaign, the blueprint was noted by "new politics" candidates and activists around the country. They won power in college towns such as Berkeley and Madison and Ann Arbor, and eventually in communities that were threatened by commercial and real estate pressures similar to those that were the target of Thompson's Aspen campaign. Indeed, even in Aspen, Thompson's politics would eventually win out -- in the mid-1990s, he organized a campaign that successfully blocked a plan by the Aspen Ski Company to expand the local airport to accommodate jetliners that were designed for "industrial tourism."

Hunter Thompson once said that, "Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why." And, when all the rumination about his adventurous approach to drugs and guns is done, there will remain the blueprint for that better politics that Thompson was wise enough and idealistic enough to believe might yet redeem the American dream.

Israel fails moral test

After a few days away with computer troubles, I'm back. This article is a few days old, but I want to get it posted. It's a first-hand account of how Israel is failing the moral test with respect to Palestinians, because it is arresting those who are protesting peacefully:

According to Israeli authorities, one reason for my arrest two weeks ago in Biddu and my denial of entry into Israel in 2003 is that I "organized and participated in illegal demonstrations." Israeli authorities frequently use the term "illegal demonstrations" to describe peaceful protests against Israeli government violations of international law. This twisted reasoning needs to be exposed and rejected.

What is legal often does not completely correspond to what is moral. However, when what is moral is described as illegal, there is a major problem.

Why is it "illegal" for hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children to march peacefully to assert their right to their land in the face of Israeli soldiers, who are defending the construction of a wall that has been declared illegal by the world's highest legal body, the International Court of Justice (ICJ)? Why is it "illegal" for communities to try and implement the ICJ decision by walking together to their farmland to try peacefully to block Israeli contractors from bulldozing their land, from building a wall to cut them off from their land and from imprisoning them in their villages?

Apparently, it is forbidden for Palestinians to use the tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to try to save their land and their communities from destruction. Apparently, Israeli authorities believe that it is legal for Israeli soldiers to club Palestinian men, women and children, to use tear gas on them, shoot rubber bullets and live ammunition at them and arrest them for peacefully protesting. This use of violence against peaceful protesters is "legal" even though the ICJ declared the construction of the wall on Palestinian land illegal. The Israeli government explains the soldiers' violence as "Palestinian clashes with security forces," even though the Israeli military invariably initiates the violence and young Palestinian men only occasionally respond with rocks.

According to this perspective, Israelis and internationals like me who support Palestinians in peaceful protest for legitimate rights, are acting illegally. Therefore, we must be stopped, arrested and deported at all costs. The International Solidarity Movement documents that 68 international activists have been deported and more than 100 have been denied entry to the country, many for protesting the wall. For this reason I have been held at Ma'asiyahu prison for more than two weeks and am awaiting deportation. I was arrested leaving the village of Biddu after planting olive tree seedlings with Palestinians, Israelis and internationals along the path that is being bulldozed for the construction of the wall through Biddu's olive groves. Nonetheless, I am proud to have non-violently protested against the wall in Jayyous, Tul Karm, Al-Zawiya, Budrus and Biddu.

In reality non-violent protest has been declared illegal because it is threatening for Palestinian civilians to face Israeli soldiers with a stark and public moral choice – to allow protest for legitimate rights or to crush it with military force. Unfortunately, the Israeli military and government have repeatedly failed that moral test.

US continues to oppose ICC for Darfur

The US government continues to battle against recognition of International Criminal Court Jurisdiction for war crimes in Darfur:

The NGOs were able to hope for a while that they would be victorious. The Americans were, in fact, the first to officially describe the events at Darfur as "genocide," which in international law requires prosecution. Caught in the trap of this language that it could not leave without a follow-up, wouldn't the US be forced to cede to the Europeans' demand to empower the Court, or at least to let them do it, by limiting itself to an abstention in the Security Council?

That was underestimating the American Administration's hostility to the ICC. For several weeks, animated secret negotiations have been taking place between the capitals and in the corridors of the UN Security Council. The NGOs work the Europeans tirelessly to keep them on track and the Americans reject any concession, reopening one of the conflicts in the heart of Atlantic relations that George Bush's passage to his second term has not been sufficient to eliminate.

Ray McGovern: Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here

Ray McGovern has a lot to say in TomPaine.com on recent Bush appointees Alberto Gonzales, Michael Chertoff, and John Negroponte. Here's the full article:

The nomination of John Negroponte to the new post of director of National Intelligence (DNI) caps a remarkable parade of Bush administration senior nominees. Among the most recent:

Alberto Gonzales, confirmed as attorney general: the lawyer who advised the president he could ignore the US War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions on torture and create a “reasonable basis in law...which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.”

Michael Chertoff, confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security: the lawyer who looked the other way when 762 innocent immigrants (mostly of Arab and South Asian descent) were swept up in a post-9/11 dragnet and held as “terrorism suspects” for several months. The dictates of PR trumped habeas corpus; the detentions fostered an image of quick progress in the “war on terrorism.”

John Negroponte: the congenial, consummate diplomat now welcomed back into the brotherhood. Presently our ambassador in Baghdad, Negroponte is best known to many of us as the ambassador to Honduras with the uncanny ability to ignore human rights abuses so as not to endanger congressional support for the attempt to overthrow the duly elected government of Nicaragua in the '80s. Negroponte’s job was to hold up the Central American end of the Reagan administration’s support for the Contra counterrevolutionaries, keeping Congress in the dark, as necessary.

Introducing...Elliot’s Protégé

Stateside, Negroponte’s opposite number was Elliot Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, whose influence has recently grown by leaps and bounds in the George W. Bush administration. Convicted in October 1991 for lying to Congress about illegal support for the Contras, Abrams escaped prison when he was pardoned, along with former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger (also charged with lying to Congress), former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and three CIA operatives. Indeed, their pardons came cum laude , with President George H. W. Bush stressing that “the common denominator of their motivation...was patriotism.” Such “patriotism” has reached a new art form in his son’s administration, as a supine Congress no longer seems to care very much about being misled.

President George W. Bush completed Elliot Abrams’ rehabilitation in December 2002 by bringing him back to be his senior adviser for the Middle East, a position for which the self-described neoconservative would not have to be confirmed by Congress. Immediately, his influence with the president was strongly felt in the shaping and implementation of policy in the Middle East, especially on the Israel-Palestine issue and Iraq. Last month the president promoted him to deputy national security adviser, where he can be counted on to overshadow—and outmaneuver—his boss, the more mild-mannered Stephen Hadley.

It is a safe bet that Abrams had a lot to do with the selection of his close former associate to be director of National Intelligence, and there is little doubt that he passed Negroponte’s name around among neocon colleagues to secure their approval.

As mentioned above, like Abrams, Negroponte has a record of incomplete candor with Congress. Had he been frank about serious government-sponsored savagery in Honduras, the country would have forfeited U.S. aid—thwarting the Reagan administration’s use of Honduras to support the Contras. So Negroponte, too, has evidenced Abrams-style “patriotism.” Those in Congress who still care, beware.

Civil Liberties At Stake

The liberties that Gonzales, Chertoff and Negroponte have taken with human rights are warning signs enough. The increased power that will be Negroponte’s under the recent intelligence reform legislation makes the situation still more worrisome.

How many times have we heard the plaintive plea for better information sharing among the various intelligence agencies? It is important to understand that the culprit there is a failure of leadership, not a structural fault.

I served under nine CIA directors, four of them at close remove. And I watched the system work more often than malfunction. Under their second hat as director of Central Intelligence, those directors already had the necessary statutory authority to coordinate effectively the various intelligence agencies and ensure that they did not hoard information. All that was needed was a strong leader with integrity, courage, with no felt need to be a “team player,” and a president who would back him up when necessary. (Sadly, it has been 24 years since the intelligence community has had a director—and a president—fitting that bill.)

Lost in all the hand-wringing about lack of intelligence sharing is the fact that the CIA and the FBI have been kept separate and distinct entities for very good reason—first and foremost, to protect civil liberties. But now, under the intelligence reform legislation, the DNI will have under his aegis not only the entire CIA—whose operatives are skilled at breaking (foreign) law—but also a major part of the FBI, whose agents are carefully trained not to violate constitutional protections or otherwise go beyond the law. (That is why the FBI agents at Guantanamo judged it necessary to report the abuses they saw.)

This is one area that gives cause for serious concern lest, for example, the law enjoining CIA from any domestic investigative or police power be eroded. Those old enough to remember the Vietnam War and operation COINTELPRO have a real-life reminder of what can happen when lines of jurisdiction are blurred and “super-patriots” are given carte blanche to pursue citizen “dissidents”—particularly in time of war.

Aware of these dangers and eager to prevent the creation of the president’s own Gestapo, both the 9/11 Commission and Congress proposed creation of an oversight board to safeguard civil liberties. Nice idea. But by the time the legislation passed last December, the powers and independence of the “Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board” had been so watered down as to be a laughingstock. For example, the Board’s access to information from government agencies requires the approval of the DNI and the attorney general, who can withhold information from the Board for a variety of reasons—among them the familiar “national security interests.” In addition, the Board lacks subpoena power over third parties. Clearly, if the Board does not have unfettered access to information on sensitive law enforcement or intelligence gathering initiatives, the role of the Board (primarily oversight and guidance) becomes window dressing. In short, the Board has been made lame before it could take its first step.

“What the hell do we care; what the hell do we care” is the familiar second line of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” Suffice it to say that, with Chertoff, Abrams and now Negroponte back in town, those concerned to protect civil liberties here at home and to advance them abroad need to care a whole lot.

Corruption, Politicization of Intelligence

Gen. William Odom, one of the most highly respected and senior intelligence professionals, now retired, put a useful perspective on last summer’s politically driven rush into wholesale intelligence reform. In a Washington Post op-ed on Aug. 1, he was typically direct in saying, “No organizational design will compensate for incompetent incumbents.” I believe he would be the first to agree that the adjectives “careerist and sycophantic” should be added to “incompetence,” for incompetence often is simply the handmaiden of those noxious traits. And the failure of the 9/11 Commission and the Congress to insist that real people be held accountable is a major part of the problem.

Intelligence reform in a highly charged political atmosphere gathers a momentum of its own, and the reform bill Congress passed late last year is largely charade. The “reforms” do not get to the heart of the problem. What is lacking is not a streamlined organizational chart, but integrity. Character counts. Those who sit atop the intelligence community need to have the courage to tell it like it is—even if that means telling the president his neocon tailors have sold him the kind of suit that makes him a naked mockery (as with the fashion designed by Ahmed Chalabi).

Is John Negroponte up to that? Standing in the oval office with Gonzales and Chertoff, will Negroponte succumb to being the “team player” he has been...or will he summon the independence to speak to the president without fear or favor—the way we used to at CIA?

It is, of course, too early to tell. Suffice it to say at this point that there is little in his recent government service to suggest he will buck the will of his superiors, even when he knows they are wrong—or even when he is aware that their course skirts the constitutional prerogatives of the duly elected representatives of the American people in Congress. Will he tell the president the truth, even when the truth makes it clear that administration policy is failing—as in Iraq? Reports that, as ambassador in Baghdad, Negroponte tried to block cables from the CIA Chief of Station conveying a less rosy picture of the situation there reinforces the impression that he will choose to blend in with the white-collar, white, White House indigenous.

The supreme irony is that President Bush seems blissfully unaware that the politicization that Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and he have fostered in the intelligence community has lost them an invaluable resource for the orderly making of foreign policy. It pains me to see how many senior careerists at CIA and elsewhere have made a career (literally) of telling the White House what they think it wants to hear.

If that proves just fine with the new DNI and he contents himself with redrawing wire diagrams, the security of our country is in greater danger. If, on the other hand, Negroponte wants to ensure that he and his troops speak truth to power–despite the inevitable pressure to fall in line with existing policy—he has his work cut out for him. At CIA, at least, he will have to cashier many careerists at upper management levels and find folks with integrity and courage to move into senior positions. And he will have to prove to them that he is serious. The institutionalization of politicization over the last two dozen years has so traumatized the troops that the burden of proof will lie with Negroponte.

The President’s Daily Brief

The scene visualized by President Bush yesterday for his morning briefing routine, once Negroponte is confirmed, stands my hair on end. I did such morning briefings for the vice president, the secretaries of State and Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Assistant from 1981 to 1985—each of them one-on-one. Our small team of briefers was comprised of senior analysts who had been around long enough to earn respect and trust. We had the full confidence of the CIA director; when he was in town we would brief him just before lunch, hours after we had made the rounds downtown.

When I learned a few years ago that former director George Tenet was going down to the oval office with the briefer, I asked myself, “What is that all about?” The last thing we wanted or needed was the director breathing down our necks. And didn’t he have other things to do?

We were there to tell it like it is—and, in those days, at least, we had career protection for doing so. And so we did. If, for example, one of those senior officials asked if there was good evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we knew that the serious, honest analysts thought not, we would say “No sir.”

But you ask, “Even if the director has said it was a ‘slam dunk?’” Yes. Even after the director had said it was a slam dunk! But bear in mind that in those days the task was not so heroic. We did not have the director standing behind us to “help.”

From what President Bush said yesterday, John Negroponte, the man farthest removed from substantive intelligence analysis—not to mention the background and genesis of the briefing items chosen for a particular day—will be the president’s “primary briefer.” I am told that President Bush does not read the President’s Daily Brief, but rather has it read to him.

Who will do the reading? Who will attempt to answer the president’s questions? Will there be a senior analyst there in a supporting role? Will s/he have career protection, should it be necessary to correct Negroponte’s answers? Will Negroponte ask CIA Director Porter Goss to participate as well? Will the briefer feel constrained with very senior officials there? Will s/he be able to speak without fear of favor, drawing, for example, on what the real experts say regarding Iran’s nuclear capability and plans? These are important questions. A lot will depend on the answers.

We had a good thing going in the '80s. Ask those we briefed and whose trust we gained. It is hard to see that frittered away. Worst of all, the president appears oblivious to the difference. I wish he would talk to his earthly father. He knows.

Shelter Under the Anti-war Umbrella

David Solnot of Alternet suggests strategies for the anti-war movement to take from here. They are people power, using grassroots organizing, education, and demonstrations; attacking the three pillars of war, which are: troops, corporate profiteers, and corporate media disinformation; a shared strattegy framework, which involes collaboration with other progressive campaigns; and finally, battle of the story, which means the anti-war movement framing and telling its own stories.

John Negroponte

In yet another bit of bad news, John Negroponte, US Ambassador to Iraq, as appointed Director of National Intelligence by Bush. This guy has quite a bit of blood on his hands, as a supporter of the Contras in Nicaraugua, and concealer of human rights abuses, including the actions of death squads, in Honduras. Here is David Corn on Negroponte.

Democracy According to Elliot Abrams

The new US Deputy National Security Advisor, Elliot Abrams, could not be a less appropriate choice to push Bush's agenda for "advancing democracy." As Larry Birns in Counterpunch asks, "Why has an admitted perjurer, a facilitator of death squads and an arms broker to Islamic terrorists just been appointed to be deputy national security adviser to President Bush?"

Good question. See the full article here.

The US Constitution is Godless

According to Brooke Allen in The Nation, contrary to the impression that has been created by the Bush administration, the US was not built on Christian principles. Rather it was based on enlightenment principles of science and reason. God is not mentioned once in the US constitution, and is mentioned rarely in other important historic documents, and not in any kind of sectarian ways. The Founding Fathers of the American nation were diests; that is they believed in one supreme being, but not not connect him to the Chrstian Church. They were not Christians in the sense of believing in the divinity of Christ.

Here is the full article.

Arthur Miller: Why I Wrote "The Crucible"

In memory of Arthur Miller, who died recently at the age of 89, this is from "Why I
Wrote The 'Crucible'":

"The Crucible" was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma—the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore. The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union's abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. The days of "J'accuse" were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dalí watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.

President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving it—of having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the right—turned out to be momentous. At first, he was outraged at the allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called the charge of "coddling Communists" a red herring dragged in by the Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own.

The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit artists' names to the House Committee for "clearing" before employing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front organization.

The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us—indeed, from me. In "Timebends," my autobiography, I recalled the time I'd written a screenplay ("The Hook") about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen's union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, "The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out." By then—it was 1951—I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvellous in it which I longed to put on the stage.

Bill Maher

I just watched Bill Maher on Larry King Live. I don't get his HBO show, so this is a rare treat. He tells it like it is, and doesn't give a shit about censorship. I don't agree with everything he says, but I do agree with a lot of it.

Anyway, he says that if the Republicans are portraying themselves as the party of faith and God, then the Dems should portray themselves as the party of science and reason. Hmm.

Maybe that's it to reaching the Anmerican people. When attempting to appeal to them, invoke the tradition of science and reason. Invoke Jefferson. Invoke Madison. Invoke Paine. Use language like logic, reason, science, and common sense when attempting to communicate with the larger US public.

Nuclear Industry Rejuvenation

This is from an article by Jeffrey St. Clair in Counterpunch, on a recent rejuvenation of the nuclear arms manufacturing industry in the US, courtesy of the US Congress.

And don't look now, but the nuclear weapons clique has launched a covert counterattack using a small provision in the very same funding bill as a kind of radioactive loophole for a new generation of nuclear weapons.

Buried in the mammoth omnibus appropriations bill was an obscure single item for something called the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. With an initial seeding of $10 million, this innocuous-sounding project will likely become the drawing room for the kind redesigned nuclear warheads that Congress tried to eliminate.

The project will fund the work of 100 nuclear weapons designers at three bomb-making laboratories: Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia. Proponents expect the project to start slowly, then gather budgetary momentum within the next five years. By 2015, they expect to unveil their new warhead design and inaugurate a new series of underground nuclear tests.

And guess what? Instead of the small, mini-nuke feared by anti-nuke activists, these weapons designers are moving in the opposite direction. These new nukes are likely to be bigger, bulkier and many times more potent than the current generation of weapons.

Once the project gets rolling, it nearly impossible to turn off the flow of money. For one thing, the beneficiaries of these doomsday funds will soon extend beyond the weapons labs and to defense contractors, the most omnipotent lobby on the Hill. That's because the new heavier warheads will need a new generation of rockets to launch them on their path of annihilation. Here's where Lockheed and Boeing enter the picture.

All of this was sold to congress on the grounds of reliability. The nuclear priesthood at the labs and in the Pentagon complained to congress that the current nuclear arsenal is becoming decrepit. Most of the 10,000 nuclear warheads in the US arsenal were designed to last about 15 years. The average age of a warhead is now 20 years. And some are 30 years old and older.

The bombmakers gripe that the arsenal is getting so old that the reliability of the weapons to generate city-destroying thermonuclear blasts is now in doubt. In addition, the nuclear cohort chafes that the global test ban treaty, which outlaws underground detonations of nuclear weapons, makes it impossible for them to assess what they snidely refer to as the "health" of the US stockpile--as if regular nuclear blasts in the Nevada desert were only a kind of treadmill to evaluate the vitality of geriatric warheads.

The only alternative, lament the weapons designers, is to redesign a new generation of warheads that are bigger and easier to certify as being reliable, that is ready to incinerate millions at the touch of a button.

Of course, a new generation of nukes will inevitably bring the US into stark conflict with the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, long the bane of the weapons-designers and the neo-cons in the Bush administration. And once nuclear testing begins a new arms race could follow, with Pakistan, India, China, North Korea, Israel, Russia and Iran all in the mix.

And what about those mini-nukes? Don't count them out just yet.

In January, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fired-off a memo to the Department of Energy requesting that the agency quietly revive funding for a study on the design of bunker busting bombs.

The Four Freedoms

This is Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the four basic freedoms, as he describes them:

The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are :

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.
The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding straight of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree
to which they fulfill these expectations.

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for
immediate improvement. As examples:

We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause.

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception --the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands, heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

Make Poverty History

A coalition of Canadian labour groups, developmentorganizations, and Canadian celebrities have joined forces to combat poverty globally and in Canada:

The group, including comedian Mary Walsh, singer Tom Cochrane and UN envoy Stephen Lewis, is calling on the Paul Martin government to spend more on foreign aid.

It also wants action to end child poverty in Canada, and to eliminate debts owed by foreign countries.

The campaign, called Make Poverty History, is part of a larger global movement being conducted in more than 50 countries.

Lewis said the number of people living in poverty is astounding — an estimated 1.2 billion, with almost half in Africa.

Cochrane urged Ottawa to spend more to help create jobs in Third World countries, and to stop the spread of AIDS.

Walsh said a big part of reducing poverty involves helping children. She said that can be done through federal tax credits.

Here is the official campaign website.

MLK: Revolution of Values

From Martin Luther King's "Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam" speech, 1967. Put it in the modern context.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triple ts of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs re-structuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: " This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling difference s is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlef ields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense aga inst communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

Christian Fascism in America

In Counterpunch, Professor of History Gary Leupp describes Christian fascism in America, and counsels that the antidote may be Christian anti-fascism:

Fascism feeds on fear. Hitler's Reichmarshall Hermann Goering declared that "people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and attack the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." Question for discussion, ladies and gentlemen: How does this apply here? Are the myriad threats the movement has used to frighten all who will listen (weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds over New York, Muslims in general, liberal college professors, homosexuals) working to get people to do the bidding of leaders in this country?

Fascism also feeds on ignorance. "Good Germans" were truly persuaded that Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks threatened them in 1939. Fascism is inherently anti-intellectual, deploying emotions (national pride, resentment at "outsiders," feelings of injury, millenarian hope) and targeting prominently among internal enemies those who challenge its self-validating myths. A key factor in the American variety is a frontal assault on whole fields of science, especially those challenging the Biblical depiction of the earth as merely 6000 years old.

A top Bush aide actually told the New York Times' Ron Suskind that administration officials disparagingly dismiss what they call "the reality-based community"---specifically, people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality" as irrelevant. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he declared. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality---judiciously, as you will---we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

In other words, truth is for wimps; forget about it. We are the champions, the powerful, we make it up as we go along and if you want a piece of it, embrace the delusion. We will punish the French for rationally rejecting the attack on Iraq, and for that matter for inflicting the Enlightenment (with its emphasis on unmanly, unheroic rational empiricism) a few centuries back. We will punish the CIA for obnoxiously promoting reality-based intelligence over the requested, required disinformation before the Iraq attack. This is the sort of fascistic thought not only trumpeted by right wing talk radio, but from countless pulpits, cable news, and the White House---proudly irrational, fear mongering, sneering, creating its own reality with the calculated support of large sections of corporate America.

and...

The question in my mind is this: Given that this fascist tide is so related to a post 9-11 foreign policy so shaped by non-Christians, can we indeed call the movement "Christian fascist"? If one does so, one acknowledges the obvious: that Bush's social base is largely a Christian fundamentalist one, committed to what it perversely terms a "family values" agenda. But Christian fundamentalists, who have been agitating for years for prayer in the schools, textbook censorship, public display of the 10 Commandments, etc., haven't from the grass roots been demanding U.S. military action to achieve regime change in the Middle East. The movement to achieve that central aspect of the fascist program comes from the elite, with the neocons in and out of government playing key roles. Their plans for the Middle East do happen to dovetail with the fundamentalists' "End Times" hopes and expectations for that region, such that even the collapse of the original justifications for the Iraq War doesn't daunt the latter in their support for what they see as God's plan. The neocons in power, in concert with their fundamentalist colleagues (Bush and Cheney among them) have played the Christian fascists at the grass roots like a harp.

Does calling the fascist trend in general "Christian fascist" send the wrong message to those Christians who reject it and find it irreconcilable with what they consider Christianity? Surely such believers are the majority among the 75-80% of the American people who identify themselves as Christians. Is it unfair to staunch Catholics, who follow their church's teachings on issues such as abortion and homosexuality and might, say, vote to ban gay marriage but who passionately oppose the war? Might we, noting the non-Christian input into this fascist trend refer to it merely as "religious fascism"? Or just "American fascism"?

Yes, you have at the summit Bush and Cheney, registered Methodists who may or not sincerely believe in the theology of John Wesley, which is not all that dissimilar to that of his contemporary Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, but derive support from the religious right, especially the less educated among them. But then you have the above-quoted Methodist minister Rev. William E. Alberts too. The problem is not any specific religion but the specific necessity of crisis-ridden capitalism to transform the world, exploiting religion whenever it's useful to do so. Hitler embarked on his world-transforming mission depicting himself as devout God-fearing man; in Mein Kampf he refers repeatedly to "the Lord," "the Almighty," and Jesus as "the great founder of a new doctrine." "I am fighting for the work of the Lord," he declared, and a whole lot of German Christians, Protestants and Catholics, believed him. Soldiers for the Wehrmacht wore belt buckles with the slogan Gott mit uns (God is with us).

peace talks

Israel-Palestinian peace talks are in Egypt. What will happen? Is there any reason for optimism? It's good that they are talking right now. Abbas is right to reach out, as long as he doesn't intend to betray his people, and continues the demand for a Paltestinian State. As for Sharon, he's talking peace right now, but let's watch him closely. He is a hawk and a war criminal after all. Also, the US should never be in a mediating position between these two. They are not a disinterested third party, and there are actually many supporters of Bush who want to keep all of the occupied territories so they can have their Armaggeddon.

To censor or not to censor (that is the question)

As part of the Progressive Blogger's Union, I am to post a blog on the new FCC director Kevin Martin. I must confess that I have not been following it that closely. From what I've read it sounds like he's a real Bush buddie, and even more hardline on "indecency" that Michael Powell, his predecessor was. Who's to say what indecency is anyway. I think that it is vital that progressives defend freedom of expression in all its manifestations (with rare exceptions such as threats of physical harm), because it is a slippery slope issue. First the stablishment will ban erotica, porn, and so forth, and then they'll finding excuses to ban political ideas which threaten their power.

will vote for food; Woolsey

According to William Rivers Pitt, many Iraqis reported that they voted to keep their food rations from being taken away:

Dahr Jamail, writing for Inter Press Service, reported that "Many Iraqis had expressed fears before the election that their monthly food rations would be cut if they did not vote. They said they had to sign voter registration forms in order to pick up their food supplies. Just days before the election, 52 year-old Amin Hajar, who owns an auto garage in central Baghdad, had said, 'I'll vote because I can't afford to have my food ration cut. If that happened, me and my family would starve to death.'"

'Will Vote For Food' is not a spectacular billboard for the export of democracy.

"Where there was a large turnout," continued Jamail, "the motivation behind the voting and the processes both appeared questionable. The Kurds up north were voting for autonomy, if not independence. In the south and elsewhere Shias were competing with Kurds for a bigger say in the 275-member national assembly. In some places like Mosul the turnout was heavier than expected. But many of the voters came from outside, and identity checks on voters appeared lax. Others spoke of vote-buying bids.

If this is true, it is shameful beyond words.

Meanwhile, neocon James Woolsey thinks that anyone who can be "associated" with Islamists must be intimidated by the US government:

Former CIA Director James Woolsey told a congressional panel Wednesday that the U.S. government should treat the ideological bedfellows of Islamic terrorism the same way it treated Communists and their supporters during the Cold War.

Drawing parallels between what he said were two totalitarian ideologies, Communism and Islamic extremism, Woolsey noted that even at the height of the struggle with the Soviet Union, "We could not make it illegal to be a member of the American Communist Party.

"Congress tried and the Supreme Court struck it down," he told a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

But, he added, lawmakers were able to make "American Communists' lives very complicated and very difficult by making them register, by all sorts of steps."

Woolsey's suggestion was greeted with horror by one student of the period.

Sam Walker, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and author of a history of the ACLU, said that the registration scheme introduced in the 1954 Communist Control Act had "done nothing to improve national security."

"On the contrary it may have damaged national security, by inhibiting an open debate about U.S. foreign policy," he told United Press International. He said it "resulted in the serious harassment of people for simply expressing a political viewpoint."

Walker said that groups that had nothing to do with Communism -- the peace movement and even civil-rights activists -- "were labeled wholesale."

"It was guilt by association," he said.

Yikes!

PNAC at it again

More frightening news. I just came across a letter sent from the Project for A New American Century to US congressional leaders, all but calling for a military draft. Let's take a look at it:

Dear Senator Frist, Senator Reid, Speaker Hastert, and Representative Pelosi:

The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away.

Our quest for full spectrum dominance is reall and important, and it is not going away.

The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today.

There's the 'f' word again. Require's a larger military force why? Because you know that you will be attacking other countries in the middle east?

The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's (and tomorrow's) missions and challenges.

So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required,

Yeah, it depends on which countries we choose to invade.

and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.

There is abundant evidence that the demands of the ongoing missions in the greater Middle East, along with our continuing defense and alliance commitments elsewhere in the world, are close to exhausting current U.S. ground forces.

Well, maybe if they're exhausted,, they should go home, seeing as they are doing more harm than good there in the first place.

For example, just late last month, Lieutenant General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, reported that "overuse" in Iraq and Afghanistan could be leading to a "broken force." Yet after almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice's term, a "generational commitment."

Evident based on what? The middle east doesn't want us their, and anyone who has no ulterior motives should not want to be there militarily on behalf of the US.

The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.

The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality. We understand the dangers of continued federal deficits, and the fiscal difficulty of increasing the number of troops. But the defense of the United States is the first priority of the government. This nation can afford a robust defense posture along with a strong fiscal posture. And we can afford both the necessary number of ground troops and what is needed for transformation of the military.

It's all a scam. We need to lower taxes to stimulate the economy (which is bullshit) even though we acknowledge that the deficit is a huge problem. In spite of all that let's in crease defence spending to further strengthen the military-industrial complex's hold on the rest of the world, er, I mean, make the world safe for democracy.

In sum: We can afford the military we need.
Yes you can. You have it right now.


As a nation, we are spending a smaller percentage of our GDP on the military than at any time during the Cold War. We do not propose returning to a Cold War-size or shape force structure. We do insist that we act responsibly to create the military we need to fight the war on terror and fulfill our other responsibilities around the world.

I've got a better idea. Actually fight the war ON terror instead of the war OF terror. Stop terrorizing innocent countries and thereby creating new enemies.

The men and women of our military have performed magnificently over the last few years. We are more proud of them than we can say. But many of them would be the first to say that the armed forces are too small. And we would say that surely we should be doing more to honor the contract between America and those who serve her in war. Reserves were meant to be reserves, not regulars. Our regulars and reserves are not only proving themselves as warriors, but as humanitarians and builders of emerging democracies. Our armed forces, active and reserve, are once again proving their value to the nation. We can honor their sacrifices by giving them the manpower and the materiel they need.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution places the power and the duty to raise and support the military forces of the United States in the hands of the Congress. That is why we, the undersigned, a bipartisan group with diverse policy views,

Yeah, sure you are. You are adherents to philosophical neoconservatism, and you are all strong advocates of the development of a US global empire.

have come together to call upon you to act.

If you care about the international peace and security including the peace and security of your own people, please don't.

You will be serving your country well if you insist on providing the military manpower we need to meet America's obligations, and to help ensure success in carrying out our foreign policy objectives in a dangerous, but also hopeful, world.

Your foreign policy objectives, which anyone can find by going to your site, I could do without. It is they which will only result in making the world more dangerous. As for hope, that lies in saying no to the neocon scam.


Respectfully,

Peter Beinart Jeffrey Bergner Daniel Blumenthal

Max Boot Eliot Cohen Ivo H. Daalder

Thomas Donnelly Michele Flournoy Frank F. Gaffney, Jr.

Reuel Marc Gerecht Lt. Gen. Buster C. Glosson (USAF, retired)

Bruce P. Jackson Frederick Kagan Robert Kagan

Craig Kennedy Paul Kennedy Col. Robert Killebrew (USA, retired)

William Kristol Will Marshall Clifford May

Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey (USA, retired) Daniel McKivergan

Joshua Muravchik Steven J. Nider Michael O'Hanlon

Mackubin Thomas Owens Ralph Peters Danielle Pletka

Stephen P. Rosen Major Gen. Robert H. Scales (USA, retired)

Randy Scheunemann Gary Schmitt

Walter Slocombe James B. Steinberg

Bush speech critique

Please see Stephen Zune's (not me) piece-by-piece deconstruction of Bush's State of the Union speech.

The coming fascism

There is a very real fear that the US state is in the process of becoming, if it is not already, fascist. Many of the 14 characteristics of fascism outlined by political scientist Laurence Britt resonate, when we consider the characteristics of the Bush administration. Here is a list, probably not exhaustive, of what the author thinks will happen in the coming years, and they all seem likely to me:

When all fascisms exhibit the same social and political agendas (the 14 points listed by Britt), then it is not hard to predict where a new fascist uprising will lead. And it is not hard. The actions of fascists and the social and political effects of fascism and fundamentalism are clear and sobering. Here is some of what’s coming, what will be happening in our country in the next few years:

The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.

Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.

Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children’s education to Christian schools.

More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work

Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state’s official stories.

The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veterans’ Day sermon for this year.)

More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.

More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.

Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.

Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.

Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control – the New York Times, for instance.

Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America’s workers to a more desperate and powerless status.

Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.

Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.

In the near future, it will be illegal or at least dangerous to say the things I have said here this morning. In the fascist story, these things are un-American. In the real history of a democratic America, they were seen as profoundly patriotic, as the kind of critical questions that kept the American spirit alive — the kind of questions, incidentally, that our media were supposed to be pressing.
Can these schemes work? I don’t think so. I think they are murderous, rapacious and insane. But I don’t know. Maybe they can. Similar schemes have worked in countries like Chile, where a democracy in which over 90% voted has been reduced to one in which only about 20% vote because they say, as Americans are learning to say, that it no longer matters who you vote for.

Stay on the lookout, folks. These are extremely dangerous times, and we, especially US citiznes, have to take a stand for true liberty. To paraphrase Howard Zinn, you can't stand still on a moving train.

A few thoughts on specific issues for the anti-war movement

While I have it in my mind, here are some ideas as to where the anti-war movement can go from here, regarding Iraq.

-Demand an official body count of Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion started.

-maintaining food rations.

-drop Iraq's debt.

-boycott targetted corporations tied to the military-industrial complex and in Iraq.

-impeach Bush (and tied in with that, the 2006 US congressional campaign).

-the US must leave Iraq, and take their military bases with them.

Gorbachev on the Iraqi elections

Mikhail Borbachev has said that the Iraq elections are fake:

In an interview with the Interfax news agency, he said the elections are “very far from what true elections are. And even though I am a supporter of elections and of the transfer of power to the people of Iraq, these elections were fake.”

“I don’t think these elections will be of any use. They may even have a negative impact on the country. Democracy cannot be imposed or strengthened with guns and tanks,” the agency quoted Gorbachev as saying.

Rumsfeld faces war crimes arrest in Germany

According to Reuters, Donald Rumsfeld may be subject to arrest by the German federal prosecutor's office for war crimes if he enters Germany for an international security conference next week.

The complaints were brough by the US based Center for Constitutional Rights.

Germany has universal jurisdiction in international criminal cases, due to a German law that was passed in 2002.

The Future of Iraq and US Occupation

The great dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky commented recently on the future of the US occupation in Iraq. This is an excerpt from an excerpt on the Internaional Relations Center website:

Let’s just imagine what the policies might be of an independent Iraq, independent, sovereign Iraq, let’s say more or less democratic, what are the policies likely to be?

Well there’s going to be a Shiite majority, so they’ll have some significant influence over policy. The first thing they’ll do is reestablish relations with Iran. Now they don’t particularly like Iran, but they don’t want to go to war with them so they’ll move toward what was happening already even under Saddam, that is, restoring some sort of friendly relations with Iran.

That’s the last thing the United States wants. It has worked very hard to try to isolate Iran. The next thing that might happen is that a Shiite-controlled, more or less democratic Iraq might stir up feelings in the Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia, which happen to be right nearby and which happen to be where all the oil is. So you might find what in Washington must be the ultimate nightmare—a Shiite region which controls most of the world’s oil and is independent. Furthermore, it is very likely that an independent, sovereign Iraq would try to take its natural place as a leading state in the Arab world, maybe the leading state. And you know that’s something that goes back to biblical times.

What does that mean? Well it means rearming, first of all. They have to confront the regional enemy. Now the regional enemy, overpowering enemy, is Israel. They’re going to have to rearm to confront Israel—which means probably developing weapons of mass destruction, just as a deterrent. So here’s the picture of what they must be dreaming about in Washington—and probably 10 Downing street in London—that here you might get a substantial Shiite majority rearming, developing weapons of mass destruction, to try to get rid of the U.S. outposts that are there to try to make sure that the U.S. controls most of the oil reserves of the world. Is Washington going to sit there and allow that? That’s kind of next to inconceivable.

What I’ve just read from the business press the last couple of days probably reflects the thinking in Washington and London: “Uh well, okay, we’ll let them have a government, but we’re not going to pay any attention to what they say.” In fact the Pentagon announced at the same time two days ago: we’re keeping 120,000 troops there into at least 2007, even if they call for withdrawal tomorrow.

And the propaganda is very evident right in these articles. You can even write the commentary now: We just have to do it because we have to accomplish our mission of bringing democracy to Iraq. If they have an elected government that doesn’t understand that, well, what can we do with these dumb Arabs, you know? Actually that’s very common because look, after all, the U.S. has overthrown democracy after democracy, because the people don’t understand. They follow the wrong course. So therefore, following the mission of establishing democracy, we’ve got to overthrow their governments.

Bush's speech

This is from David Corn's article in the Nation on George Bush's State of the Union speech:

Bush's approval ratings have been low, but in the aftermath of the Iraqi elections, he approached this speech as a conquering hero--a vindicated hero. There was, of course, no mention of Iraq's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction. No recognition that America's standing in the world has fallen to an all-time low. No acknowledgment that the administration had failed to plan adequately for the post-invasion period. Bush has not a bashful bone. For him, the Iraqi election was a signal (from God?): full steam ahead. He did not shy away from the freedom-is-our-mission rhetoric of his inaugural speech, which was widely criticized for being cynically unrealistic. Bush declared, "America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." And he named names, calling upon Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two autocracies long supported by Washington, to move toward democracy. Certainly, he--or Condoleezza Rice--might be on the phone tomorrow to Cairo and Riyadh, explaining that Bush does not expect immediate action. Nevertheless, such words probably will provide encouragement to democracy activists in those countries and in others. These people, though, should keep in mind that Bush's father--who clearly is no role model for his son--egged on the Shiites in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War and then did not come to their rescue when they were slaughtered.

Bush also showed he has not lost his appetite for regime change and muscle-flexing. He warned Iran to abandon any pursuit of nuclear weapons, vowing that America will stand with Iranians who seek liberty. He placed Syria in the crosshairs. There was no reference to the "axis of evil," but Bush did move Syria ahead of North Korea in the you-better-worry-next category.

US urged to support ICC for Dafur's sake

The US is being pressured to support the International Criminal Court for Darfur's sake. Sources as diverse as Human Rights Watch, and a number of prominent Republicans including John McCain, have called for the Bush administration to reverse it's stance on the ICC. Jack Goldsmith suggested they can use support for the ICC to its own political advantage.

UN report on Sudan

The UN International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-Generalreport has been released, and the commission confirmed that atrocities are being committed in Darfur, but that policies of genocide are not being acted upon. The report also said, however, that individuals may be acting with the intent of committing genocide. Tens of thousands have been killed, and up to 1.85 million have been displaced from their homes.

The report made several recommendations, of which the key ones relating to the international community will be listed here. It suggests the trying of culprits in these atrocities in courts of international law. Specifically, they recommended that the UN Security Council refer these cases to the International Criminal Court. They outlined six reasons for doing so:

First, the International Criminal Court was established with an eye to crimes likely to threaten peace and security. This is the main reason why the Security Council may trigger the Court’s jurisdiction under Article 13 (b). The investigation and prosecution of crimes perpetrated in Darfur would have an impact on peace and security. More particularly, it would be conducive, or contribute to, peace and stability in Darfur, by removing serious obstacles to national reconciliation and the restoration of peaceful relations. Second, as the investigation and prosecution in the Sudan of persons enjoying authority and prestige in the country and wielding control over the State apparatus, is difficult or even impossible, resort to the ICC, the only truly international institution of criminal justice, which would ensure that justice be done. The fact that trials proceedings would be conducted in the Hague, the seat of the ICC, far away from the community over which those persons still wield authority and where their followers live, might ensure a neutral atmosphere and prevent the trials from stirring up political, ideological or other passions. Third, only the authority of the ICC, backed up by that of the United Nations Security Council, might compel both leading personalities in the Sudanese Government and the heads of rebels to submit to investigation and possibly criminal proceedings. Fourth, the Court, with an entirely international composition and a
208 set of well-defined rules of procedure and evidence, is the best suited organ for ensuring a veritably fair trial of those indicted by the Court Prosecutor. Fifth, the ICC could be activated immediately, without any delay (which would be the case if one were to establish ad hoc tribunals or so called mixed or internationalized courts). Sixth, the institution of criminal proceedings before the ICC, at the request of the Security Council, would not necessarily involve a significant financial burden for the international community.

The establishment of a commission to arrange compensation for victims was also mentioned, and supported on moral and legal grounds. The report suggests the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission, so that there can be a "full disclosure of the whole range of criminality." They did say, however, that

Whether a TRC would be appropriate for Sudan, and at what stage it should be established, is a matter that only the Sudanese people should decide through a truly participatory process. These decisions should ideally occur (i) once the conflict is over and peace is re-established; (ii) as a complementary measure to criminal prosecution, which instead should be set in motion as soon as possible, even if the conflict is underway, with a view to having a deterrent effect, that is, stopping
further violence; and (iii) on the basis of an informed discussion among the broadest possible sections of Sudanese society which takes into account international experience and, on this basis, assesses the likely contribution of a TRC to Sudan.

Read a BBC writeup on the report.