Stephen's Peace and Human Rights Blog

this is an archive

2005-08-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

This site is now an archive of peace and human rights-related posts and links. It iwll no longer be updated.

All my political and personal blogging will be done on one super all-encompassing blog, My Intellectual Odyssey.

referral

2005-07-07T20:34:00.000-07:00

Please see my post about the London bombings on my Ramblings blog.

The fix was in

2005-06-25T22:08:00.000-07:00

A lot of attention seems to be focussed on the following sentence in the Downing Street Memo:

"But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Ray McGovern ovserves that several right wing pundits are using smoke and mirrors to distract form this damning part of the memo. As Ray says:

In any case, on MSNBC’s Hardball on June 21 Rhodes scholar Woolsey made a frontal assault on the word “fixed.” Taking issue with interviewer David Gregory’s suggestion that the infamous sentence is about “fixing intelligence to meet the policy,” Woolsey countered:

“I think that’s not what fixing means in these circumstances. I think people are not listening to British usage. I don’t think they’re talking about cooking the books.... I think people ought to back off a bit on this notion...”

...and focus more on Saddam Hussein’s “rape rooms” (boilerplate in Woolsey’s speeches, which he managed to include later in the interview).

Other pundits have joined the smoke-machine. On June 19, Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler opined that “maybe ‘fixed’ means something different in British-speak.” And Christopher Hitchens, in an article posted on Slate the same day Woolsey went on Hardball, wrote: “Never mind for now that the English employ the word “fix” in a slightly different way—a better term might have been ‘organized.’”

Can someone explain to me how this advances the argument?

Ray then talked to a number of British friends, all of whom said that "fixed" could only mean one thing: intelligence was being fixed. In other words, the fix was in.

Ray's conclusion, with which I whole heartedly agree, is that

"Given the seriousness of the issue and the documentary nature of the evidence, my own suggestion would be to subpoena testimony from George Tenet and other senior U.S. officials whose views were reported to Blair—and the sooner the better."

Editors come to senses

2005-06-20T23:21:00.000-07:00

Editors in the US are coming out against the war in Iraq and the Bush administration, largely thanks to the Downing Street Memo:

links for Downing Street Memo

2005-06-19T21:47:00.000-07:00

The secret Downing Street memo by Sunday Times
After Downing Street by William Rivers Pitt
The Downing Street Memos: Building a New Movement by Bernard Weiner
downingstreetmemo.com
The Latest Downing Street Memos by David Corn
What the Hell is the Downing St. Memo -- and Who Cares? by David Benjamin
Parrying Parry: Why Hope Still Lives on Downing Street by David Michael Green
Stars and Strips Reports on Downing Street Memo by Leo Shane III
AfterDowningStreet.org
Calls for Impeachment at Downing St. Hearing by CBC News
Downing Street Memo a Growing Problem for Bush by Lawrence M O'Rourke
Democrats Cite Downing Street Memo in Bolton Fight by Associated Press
Downing Street Delusions by Kevin Drum
Hearing sought on leaked war memo by Kansas City Star
Hijacking Catastrophe -- Why Downing Street Matters? -- video
Downing Street II by Ray McGovern
NYT's Downing Street Dissembling by Patrick Doherty
His Was Not To Wonder Why by Dante Zappala
Just hearsay, or the new Watergate tapes? by David Paul Kuhn
The Kinsley Paradigm: Downsizing the Downing St. Memo by Jeffrey Koloakowski
Is 'Downing Street Memo" a smoking gun? by Tom Regan

The Downing Stree Memo: Impeach Bush

2005-06-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm back, and I'm on the Downing Street Memo issue. This is an issue that the anti-Bush crowd must rally around. It's an opportunity handed on a golden platter: notes from a memo saying that the Bush administration in mid 2002 was talking about orchestrating a pre-emptive attack against Iraq.

Put aside the fact that Bush lied about WMDs, about Saddam having terrorist links, and about Iraqi involvement in 9/11. Apparently, that was not enough to keep disaster Bush from being re-elected.

Now, we have proof that the whole war was planned. Thousands of US troops died. Approximately a hundred thousand Iraqi citizens killed. And for what. A cynical self-interested scheme.

The American people should be outraged. Fortunately, there is a place for this outrage to be channeled:

The emotive and charged word "impeachment" was voiced yesterday on Capitol Hill as a clutch of Democratic congressmen, backed by distraught mothers of soldiers slain in Iraq, put together a piece of theatre that could become the summer's political drama.

John Bonifaz, a self-styled constitutional lawyer and anti-war activist, suggested there are sufficient grounds to launch an inquiry into whether the President should be impeached for lying to Congress about the justification for the war.

"The United States House of Representatives has a constitutional duty to investigate fully and comprehensively the evidence revealed by the Downing Street minutes and other related evidence, and to determine whether there are sufficient grounds to impeach George W. Bush, the President of the United States," Mr. Bonifaz said.

Impeachment, or at least an attempt at it, is essential right now. That is the only was to stop these fascists in the next four years. If Clinton can be impeached for lying about a blow job, then Bush can be impeached for lying about the war which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Vacalv Havel on Nonviolence (1986)

2005-06-14T19:38:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Vaclav Havel's "Living In Truth" (1986), and I'm going to transcribe a part of it here word for word, as I can not find it anywhere on the internet. I'll tell you why afterward I think it is important to do so.

All of this, however, is not the main reason why the 'dissident movements' support the principle of legality. That reason lies deeper, in the innermost structure of the 'dissident' attitude. This attitude is and must be fundamentally hostile towards the notion of violent change -- simply because it places its faith in violence. (Generally, the 'dissident' attitude can only accept violence as a necessary evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can only be met with violence and where remaining passive would in effect mean supporting violence: let us recall, for example, that the blindness of European pacifism, was one of the factors that prepared the ground for the Second World War.) As I have already mentioned, 'dissidents' tend to be sceptical about political thought based on faith that profound social changes can only be achieved by bringing about (regardless of the method) changes in the system or in government or in the government, and the belief that such changes -- because they are considered 'fundamental' - justify the sacrifice of 'less fundamental' -- justify the sacrifice of 'less fundamental' things, in other words, human lives. Respect for a theoretical here outweighs respect for human life. Yet this is precisely what threatens to enslave humanity all over again.

'Dissident movements', as I have tried to indicate, share exactly the opposite view. They understand systemic change as something superficial, something secondary, something that in itself can guarantee nothing. Thus an attitude that turns away from abstract political visions of the future towards concrete human beings and ways of defending them effectively in the here and now is quite naturally accompanied by an intensified antipathy to all forms of violence carried out in the name of a 'better future', and by a profound belief that a future secure by violence might actually be worse that what exists now; in other words, the future would be fatally stigmatized by the very means used to secure it. At the same time, this attitude is not to be confused for political conservatism or political moderation. The 'dissident movements' do not shy away from the idea of violent political overthrow because the idea seems to radical, but because it does not seem radical enough. For them, the problem lies far to deep to be settled through mere systemic changes, either governmental or technological. Some people, faithful to the classical Marxist doctrines of the nineteenth century, understand our system as the hegemony of an exploiting class over an exploited class and, operating from the postulate that exploiters never surrender their power voluntarily, they see the only solution in a revolution to sweep away the exploiters. Naturally, they regard such things as the struggle for human rights as something hopefully legalistic, illusory, opportunistic and ultimately misleading because it makes the doubtful assumption that you can negotiate in good faith with your exploiters on the basis of a false legality. The problem is that they are unable to find anyone determined enough to carry out this revolution, with the result that they become bitter, skeptical, passive, and ultimately apathetic, in other words, they end up precisely where they system wants them to be. This is one example of how far one can be mislead by mechanically applying, in post-totalitarian circumstances, ideological models from another world and another time.

Havel wrote this in 1986. In 2003, Havel supported the US war on Iraq. He is now involved with the Committe on the Present Danger.

What happened?

AI attacked by the Bushies

2005-06-01T23:54:00.000-07:00

From Common Dreams

Bush, Cheney Attack Amnesty International
by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Stung by Amnesty International's condemnation of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and elsewhere overseas, the administration of President George W. Bush is reacting with indignation and even suggestions that terrorists are using the world's largest human rights organization.

It is worth also worth noting that this administration never finds it 'absurd' when we criticize Cuba or China, or when we condemned the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

William Schulz
Amnesty USA

'REPREHENSIBLE'
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called charges that the United States is running a gulag at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba "reprehensible," saying only a tiny fraction of US forces have been found to have abused detainees. Rumsfeld (R) fields a question from journalists as Air Force General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff looks on, during their joint news conference at the Pentagon in Washington, June 1, 2005. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

The latest denunciation came from Bush himself during a White House press conference Tuesday. ''I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world,'' he said, adding that Washington had ''investigated every single complaint against (sic) the detainees.''

''It seemed like (Amnesty) based some of their decisions on the word and allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people had been trained in some instances to disassemble (sic) -- that means not tell the truth'', Bush went on. ''And so it was an absurd report. It just is''.

At issue is an Amnesty report released last Thursday that assailed U.S. detention practices. Since its release, a succession of top administration officials and their right-wing backers in the major media has denounced the London-based group in what appears increasingly like an orchestrated effort to discredit independent human rights critics. A similar campaign appeared to target Newsweek magazine earlier this month.

''It looks like a campaign,'' Human Rights Watch advocacy chief Reed Brody said Tuesday. ''There's been a real drumbeat since Amnesty published the report. It seems like there's an attempt to silence critics.''

Bush's reaction Tuesday largely mirrored that of Vice President Dick Cheney in an interview taped on Friday and broadcast Sunday evening by CNN.

''For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously,'' the vice president said in response to Amnesty's report.

''Frankly, I was offended by it. I think the fact of the matter is, the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world.''

As to allegations of mistreatment of detainees, Cheney argued that ''if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated.''

Other senior officials have also weighed in. Like Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the Amnesty report ''absurd,'' while the military Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, said it was ''absolutely irresponsible'' and insisted that the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a ''model facility'' where prisoners have been treated ''humanely.''

Amnesty's Secretary General, Irene Khan, made the specific allegation against which the administration has unleashed its fury.

She referred to the overseas network of U.S. detention facilities established by Washington in Iraq and elsewhere as part of what it calls its ''global war on terror,'' as ''the gulag of our times,'' a reference to the system of prison and labor camps run during the Stalinist period of the former Soviet Union.

While the Washington Post, normally a defender of independent human rights groups, objected to her characterization as counter-productive, the Wall Street Journal's neo-conservative editorial staff jumped on it as ''one more sign of the moral degradation of Amnesty International.''

The Journal, which often reflects the views of influential hard-line policymakers like Cheney, called Amnesty a ''highly politicized pressure group'' whose latest accusations ''amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda.''

Anticipating the vice president's CNN's remarks, the Journal, which also has campaigned against the International Committee of the Red Cross for criticizing Washington's treatment of detainees, added that ''a 'human rights' group that can't distinguish between Stalin's death camps and detention centers for terrorists who kill civilians can't be taken seriously.''

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, two lawyers who often reflect the views of other members of the right-wing nationalist Federalist Society who hold senior legal positions in the administration, soon joined the Journal.

In an article published by the National Review Online entitled 'Amnesty Unbelievable,' the two men charged that the organization's critical report ''says much more about the nature of Amnesty International -- and the agenda of similar left-wing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) -- than it does about the human-rights record of the United States.''

Like the Journal, Casey and Rivkin said they were incensed at the suggestion by the head of Amnesty's U.S. section, William Schulz, that Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials who had a role in authorizing abusive interrogation practices should be prosecuted in foreign jurisdictions for violations of the Geneva and torture conventions committed against detainees if the administration continued to reject calls by human rights and lawyers' groups for an independent investigation.

In their view, Amnesty, ''is trapped in a 20th-century mindset where the greatest threat to individual life and liberty stemmed from the actions of sovereign governments. That is simply no longer the case.'' NGOs, they added, ''simply do not consider that the defense of the American population, and the vindication of each individual's right to live without the threat or actuality of terrorist attack, is their problem -- and it is time they did.''

Amnesty, however, has stood its ground. ''At Guantanamo, the U.S. has operated an isolated prison camp in which people are confined arbitrarily, held virtually incommunicado, without charge, trial or access to due process. Not a single Guantanamo detainee has had the legality of their detention reviewed by a court,'' despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that provided grounds to do so.

''Guantanamo is only the visible part of the story. Evidence continues to mount that the U.S. operates a network of detention centers where people are held in secret or outside any proper legal framework -- from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond,'' it added, noting that Bush had failed to respond to these ''longstanding concerns.''

''It is worth also worth noting,'' stressed Schulz, ''that this administration never finds it 'absurd' when we criticize Cuba or China, or when we condemned the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.''

Bush's and Cheney's insistence that the detainees themselves concocted the reported abuses also drew criticism.

''You really don't have to look further than the Pentagon's own reports,'' said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. ''There's ample substantiation of serious abuses,'' she said, adding that the administration's ''ostrich approach'' was ''dangerous. The problems are there, and they're going to continue to pose a risk to U.S. lives and policy until they're dealt with.''

HRW's Brody echoed that view. ''What is sad is that this effort at damage control may work in the U.S.,'' he said, ''but unless the administration addresses the real issues of concern -- torture, rendition, disappearances, systematic humiliation of Muslim prisoners -- then the U.S. image in the world will continue to erode.''

Torture's Dirty Secret: It Works

2005-05-15T19:42:00.000-07:00

In the Nation, Naomi Klein writes that while torture doesn't work as a interrogation tactic, it does as a social control instrument. Thus, she reveals the real reason why torture is practiced, and continues to be practiced.

This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

It is not even argued in the US that torture works as an interrogation tool:

No one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool--least of all the people who practice it. Torture "doesn't work. There are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 16. And a recently declassified memo written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative techniques." The Army's own interrogation field manual states that force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

And thus a link to global empire. The reasons for torture as expressed by Klein need to be brought to public consciousness so this insanity can stop.

starting a new blog

2005-04-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

I am taking a break from this, my political blog. I find it too restrictive right now. I need an open space for my pallette. Therefore, I am starting a new personal poetry/prose/whatever blog called Ramblings that will inculde some political commentary

Bono after Martin for backing down on.7%

2005-04-25T20:28:00.000-07:00

From the Globe and Mail:

The Prime Minister is acting like a number cruncher and not a statesman in his approach to foreign aid, says Bono, the lead singer of U2 and onetime celebrity ally of Paul Martin.

A champion of Third World debt relief, Bono said he is "bewildered" by the government's decision this week that dedicating 0.7 per cent of the gross domestic product to ending global poverty is too expensive.

In an interview with CBC's The House on Saturday he pointed out that Germany has "the same kind of fiscal discipline" Mr. Martin is famous for, is struggling to integrate economically depressed East Germany and has still managed to pledge 0.7 per cent.

"When I hear him speak like that I hear him speak as a finance minister, not a Prime Minister," Bono said.

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"I like him enormously. I've sat with him, I've worked with him. I believe him when he talks," he added. ". . . But there are moments when you have to look up from the number. That's why you want to be in politics. What's upsetting about this is it feels like business as usual."

A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said in response that Mr. Martin does not want to dwell on "artificial deadlines."

"The Prime Minister has great respect for Bono and Canada remains committed to the 0.7-per-cent target," Amy Butcher said. "In fact, the budget saw an 8-per-cent increase to the aid budget."

Bono warned that part of the global appeal of Canada stems from its humanitarian approach and that underfunding foreign aid works to counter that image.

He urged Canadians to call the Prime Minister's Office directly, saying that only public pressure will convince the government that fighting poverty is politically viable.

"It's a Canadian idea, the Pearson commitment," he said. "Let's go for it; let's be remembered for something other than the Internet, which is wonderful, [and] the war against terror."

Bolton nomination in jeopardy

2005-04-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

Here is an update of John Bolton. It looks like his nomination is in aserious jeopardy. If it was in fact defeated, that would be HUGE

Carl Ford on John Bolton

2005-04-20T01:14:00.000-07:00

Huge news that I'm a bit late on posting. Carl Ford, a staunch Republican and former Director of Intelligence and Research at the US State Department, lambasted John Bolton during Senate Confirmation Hearings on April 12. Here is a transcript with commentary, from Democracy Now, followed by an Amy Goodman interview with Ray McGovern.

AMY GOODMAN: After being sworn in, Ford began his testimony.

CARL FORD: Mr. Chairman, it's customary for me to thank you and the committee for the opportunity to come before the Foreign Relations Committee and present my views. Thankful is not the emotion that I am feeling this morning. It's a very awkward situation for me to be in. I was raised with the admonition that if you can’t find something good to say about somebody, you don't say anything at all. God knows I have not lived up to that high ideal throughout my life, but I have always tried, and even to this day, it's an important principle in the way that I conduct myself. It's also awkward because I consider myself to be a loyal Republican and conservative to the core. I'm a firm and enthusiastic supporter of President Bush and his policies, and I'm a huge fan of Vice President Cheney, who I worked with when he was Secretary of Defense. So, the notion of coming before you and making critical remarks about a presidential nominee is not something I take lightly, not something that I haven't done a lot of soul-searching on, and clearly, it's one of the more difficult assignments I have been given. But I also have to admit that I'm conscious that I might not be completely objective about Secretary Bolton. I was a party to the confrontation the Secretary had with I & R. I was a bit player, to be sure, but I was directly involved. And at the end of the day, you will have to decide whether my assessment is fair and balanced.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Carl Ford, the former Director of Intelligence and Research, I & R, at the State Department, testifying Tuesday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. After a few brief remarks from Republican Senator, Richard Lugar, Ford addressed the controversial Bolton incident.

CARL FORD: I can guarantee you, though, if Secretary Bolton had chosen to come to me, or in my absence, my principal deputy, Secretary Tom Finger, I wouldn't be here today. He could have approached me in the same tone and in the same attitude, shaking his finger, red in the face, high tone in his voice, and I wouldn't be here today. If he had gone to Secretary Powell or Secretary Armitage and complained loudly about the poor service that he was receiving from I & R and the terrible treatment, that he had been stabbed in the back by one of I & R's analysts, I wouldn't be here today. The fact is that it's appropriate if someone is unhappy with the service they're getting from one of the service organizations in a bureaucracy, that they should complain. They should yell as loud as they want to yell. But instead of doing any of those three things, Secretary Bolton chose to reach five or six levels below him in the bureaucracy, bring an analyst into his office, and give him a tongue lashing. And I frankly don't care whether he is saying scat for five minutes. The attitude, the volume of his tone, and what I understand the substance of the conversation, he was so far over the line that he meets -- he's one of the sort of memorable moments in my 30-plus year career. Unfortunately, those two moments that he has given me are very negative. That is, I have never seen anybody quite like Secretary Bolton. He doesn't even come close. I don't have a second and third or fourth in terms of the way that he abuses his power and authority with little people. I say that because, if you bark back at him, he doesn't bother you anymore. And anyone who has either generally the same rank or even a step or so below, they don't have so much to fear. We can defend ourselves. There are a lot of screamers that work in government. But you don't pull somebody so low down in the bureaucracy that they're completely defenseless. It's an 800-pound gorilla devouring a banana. The analyst was required simply to stand there and take it. Secretary Bolton knew when he had the tirade that, in fact, that was the case. Now, I would argue that that action, by itself, certainly brings real questions to my mind about his suitability for high office. But it was also -- that person was an analyst, an intelligence analyst. And it's clear that there is a difference of opinion in the way people look at political pressure. If you don't mind, I'd like to take just a moment and wander off on political pressure before I finish my answer to my question.

SEN. GEORGE ALLEN: Mr. Chairman, just for point of clarification, the analyst was who? Now, is this Westermann you are talking about?

CARL FORD: Senator, I frankly don't like the idea of my analyst being named and argued about in public.

SEN. GEORGE ALLEN: I just wanted to –

CARL FORD: He didn't do anything wrong. If you have a complaint with him, talk to me. If you don't believe what I say, talk to me.

SEN. GEORGE ALLEN: I'm just trying to understand, Mr. Ford, just so -- just trying to get the chronology and who --

CARL FORD: It was an analyst at I & R.

SENATOR: Is this Mr. Westermann?

CARL FORD: It was an analyst at I & R. I actually believe that you're off on the wrong track. When people start taking a guy way down in the bureaucracy, just doing his job, and start making him the issue. He could have done everything wrong, everything. He could have been 150% wrong. It does not justify the treatment he received from a superior officer. I have never seen it in my career. I don't think that any of you have seen it before. Unfortunately, my judgment, my opinion, he is a quintessential, kiss up, kick down sort of guy. There are a lot of them around. I'm sure that you have met them. But the fact is that he stands out that he has got a bigger kick, and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy he is kicking. And he stands out. I don't have any other examples to give you of someone who acts this way.

AMY GOODMAN: Carl Ford yesterday at the hearing, the Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee emphasize that the incident described by John Bolton is just one example of this conduct, and said they could provide more witnesses. The New York Times noted Carl Ford's testimony offered an extraordinary public glimpse into the long-running and raw intelligence wars within the Bush administration, pitting hawks like Bolton, a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney, against the more circumspect intelligence operatives at the State Department, who among other differences had cast doubt on some prewar claims about Iraq. Democrats charge Bolton's actions have grave and far-reaching implications for U.S. credibility, while Republicans painted it as an isolated incident. After break, we'll go to California Senator, Barbara Boxer. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us. Well, why don't we go to Barbara Boxer right now.

SEN. BARBARA BOXER: I want to put something new into the record here. That was written before we knew that John Bolton was going to be nominated to this position. I hope that you read it, and I hope Senator Chafee, in particular, reads it. Because what this is about is a way bigger picture, Mr. Ford. And you're mentioned in this particular article, by the way, in a good way, so don't worry. It ran in the Washington Monthly. It's called “Analyze This.” And I ask unanimous consent to place the whole story in the record.

SEN. RICHARD LUGAR: Placed in the record in full.

SEN. BARBARA BOXER: Now, the thesis here by the writer is that the I & R is the best intelligence agency we have, that they have been closest to right of all of the intelligence agencies, and they look at -- he looks at the Iraq situation as a specific case in point. And he says, “Indeed, on the whole question of Iraq's nuclear capabilities, I & R came consistently closer to the truth than did other agencies.” And he goes on and says, “They don't just tolerate dissent there, they actually encourage it.” So, it's the different culture than what we are used to in the C.I.A. And there's a couple of other quotes. “An important reason for I & R's success is that the agency has a culture that tolerates dissent. The lasting criticism of the C.I.A. the 9/11 Commission produced was the agency's tendency to shoehorn evidence to fit the results that the higher-ups desired.” And it goes on: “Remember, David Kaye, the chief American arms inspector after the war told The New York Times the tubes were the only piece of physical evidence about the Iraqi weapons program that they had, and that the I & R was the only one to back the Department of Energy when they said the tubes could not be used for nuclear weapons.” And then, just to finish my quotes here, "A culture of dissent must be nurtured and protected if it is to thrive. And State has usually given I & R the requisite political insulation. Another part of the reason for I & R's insulation has to do with the kind of people who have led it. I & R analysts give former I & R director Ford, for instance, tremendous credit for shielding the bureau from political pressure.” Quote, “Carl earned the respect of the people in the bureau for standing up for the work of the bureau.” And then it says, “Not everyone in Washington is a fan of I & R. Many neoconservatives especially see the agency has a threat to the more vigorous military projects that they advocate.”

Mr. Chairman, the reason this is such an important point is it's really central. This is not one isolated incident. It's three incidents. And it fits into the larger pattern of whether we are going to have an intelligence community that is free from political pressure, whether it comes from me, or from you, or from Mr. Bolton or anyone else. And the fact that Mr. Bolton tried to say it wasn't a big deal, and he shrugged it off, fades in the light of this testimony, and the fact that we learned today that Secretary Powell actually mentioned the name of this analyst and came over to the State Department, so anyone who was fooling himself into thinking this all came out alright, there’s no “there” there, is essentially fooling himself. Because bottom line again is this was pressure, heavy duty pressure, inappropriate pressure applied to a line analyst here, and thank goodness that analyst did have the character to stand up to it and that he had someone like you, Mr. Ford, to say “knock it off” even to as big a bully as Mr. Bolton is. And I think Mr. Bolton needs anger management at the minimum, and he doesn't deserve to be promoted based on this alone, let alone all of his comments about how the U.N. doesn't exist and it should lose ten floors and no one would care. That aside, which is bewildering in itself, this is, based on this testimony, I think, explosive. And I hope that this committee will tell the President, “Mr. Bolton is your friend. He is a strong partisan. You can use him, but not in the job of the United Nations.”

AMY GOODMAN: California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer at the John Bolton confirmation hearings on Tuesday.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Ray McGovern. He was with the Central Intelligence Agency for more than a quarter of a century. He was one of the top daily briefers for George H.W. Bush when he was Vice President. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ray McGovern.

RAY McGOVERN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to the whole scenario yesterday of Carl Ford, the significance of him coming forward and testifying?

RAY McGOVERN: Yeah. Well, just listening to your clips -- I heard the whole thing yesterday, but listening to your clips, I'm getting the idea that there's a little taste of democracy now coming in here. It's really good to have this kind of information aired so the public can judge what kinds of pressures intelligence analysts have been put to over the last couple of years. Needless to say, I admire Carl Ford very, very much. He is appropriately protective of the people who work in his organization, people who are really under more fire than anyone else. Why? Well, because they didn't have the same ideological proclivities as the so-called neoconservatives. And they wouldn't -- you know, they wouldn't heel. They wouldn't bow. Witness the fact that in that famous or infamous estimate back dated October 1, 2002, they took a footnote saying this uranium from Niger business is a canard, and the story is, (quote), “highly dubious.” They dismissed the aluminum tubes canard, siding with the Department of Energy and saying, look, the specifications are exactly what they need for conventional artillery, and worst of all, when they were asked to predict when Iraq's nuclear weapons program was likely to yield a nuclear weapon, they said, well, you know, we really cannot predict that, because we cannot predict the end of a program that we don't see as having started. There's no evidence that Dick Cheney is correct in saying this program was reconstituted. So, you get a little idea of why a fellow like Bolton would get all red in the face when he is faced by junior people who stick to their guns and say, look, we're going to call it the way we see it, and we don't care what your grade is.

AMY GOODMAN: Ray McGovern, the significance of Secretary of State Colin Powell intervening and what he did?

RAY McGOVERN: Yeah. That is very unusual, and again, it's very much to his credit. He did pretty much give I & R free reign. Now, it would have been nice if he heeded their analysis more, because, as I’ve just said, they were right on a lot of things and specifically on things that Powell was wrong on, when he went before the world and the U.N. on February 5, 2003. But he did have the right instincts, and I applaud Carl Ford, as well, for inviting the secretary down to give a little morale and pep talk to the folks, because clearly there was this chilling effect. Clearly, the analysts were fearful of their careers if they would be subjected to the kinds of things that Westermann was subjected to. Now, what's really striking and, you know, I have great admiration for I & R, the State Department intelligence unit, and I have worked with them very closely for those 27 years, cooperatively, I might say. We really learned a lot from them, and they from us.

Now, take the situation at C.I.A. during precisely the same time. We know that Vice President Cheney was visiting the C.I.A. regularly to make sure that their analysis was good. See, now, people ask me, was that unusual? I say, no, that wasn't unusual. That was unprecedented. Never in my 27 years there did a Vice President come to the agency on a working visit. We would always go down to him. So, the fact that he made multiple visits, and curiously enough, the director of analysis didn't know how many. She said, well, between five and eight, which suggests to me that Vice President Cheney was turned loose on analysts just as junior as Mr. Westermann. Now, the cardinal sin here, in my view, is that George Tenet had every responsibility to prevent that from happening to his analysts. If George Tenet had the kind of integrity that Carl Ford had -- Carl Ford, as you well discerned was incredibly outraged at this the attempt to prostitute the intelligence product. Now, if George Tenet was anything like Carl Ford, he would have protected his analysts from this kind of pressure, and it wasn't only Cheney. The likes of Newt Gingrich would go up there from the defense board there that he serves on and make sure that their analysis was in tune with what Cheney and others wanted. So, you have a real contrast here. You have the analysts at the C.I.A. receiving not only no protection, but every encouragement to not tell it like it is, but tell it like the administration wants it to be. And on the other hand, you have the State Department with a fellow like Carl Ford, who adheres to the long tradition of intelligence professionals who stand up to that kind of pressure. And if they encounter it more and more, they go to the boss and they go to the Secretary of State and say, look, if you want to hear it straight from us, you have got to protect us from the likes of John Bolton.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Ray McGovern, with the C.I.A. for more than a quarter of a century.

Disaster Capitalism

2005-04-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein exposes the industry that is "Disaster Capitalism"
It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, government and UN aid agencies and international financial institutions. And from the people living in these reconstruction sites--Iraq to Aceh, Afghanistan to Haiti--a similar chorus of complaints can be heard. The work is far too slow, if it is happening at all. Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and decision-making. Expert "democracy builders" lecture governments on the importance of transparency and "good governance," yet most contractors and NGOs refuse to open their books to those same governments, let alone give them control over how their aid money is spent.

Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times ran a distressing story reporting that "almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding." The dispatch could easily have come from Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times just reported, all of Bechtel's allegedly rebuilt water plants have started to break down, one more in an endless litany of reconstruction screw-ups. It could also have come from Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai recently blasted "corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable" foreign contractors for "squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid." Or from Sri Lanka, where 600,000 people who lost their homes in the tsunami are still languishing in temporary camps. One hundred days after the giant waves hit, Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent out a desperate e-mail to colleagues around the world. "The funds received for the benefit of the victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, not to the real victims," he wrote. "Our voices are not heard and not allowed to be voiced."

But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose. According to Guttal, "It's not reconstruction at all--it's about reshaping everything." If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them. Kumara, in another e-mail, warns that Sri Lanka is now facing "a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization," potentially even more devastating than the first. "We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines."

John Bolton on the UN

2005-04-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

Listen to John Bolton talk about the United Nations, and say that it doesn't exsit, that it is inseparable from the United States, and that the United States must be expected to pursue its own interests. John, that's exactly why there needs to be an impartial international body like the United Nations is supposed to be. Saying that the United States must be expected to pursue its own interests makes the case for us.

Thoughts on Zahra Kazemi

2005-04-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

I would like to talk about Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian Canadian journalist who was killed by Iranian journalists, and my feelings around that. It has angered me considerable that it happened. It angers me that the Iranian government, in the face of evidence to the contrary, could try to suggest that she died as the result of an accident. It angers me that they thought they could get away with it.

But it is when I get to that point that I have to ask myself some questions. Why am I so angry? Should I not be as angry if she were not a Canadian citizen? Get away with it or what? It is exactly at times like this when I must take a step back, and ensure that my anger is channelled constructively. What would retalization solve? What would it do to the region? What would it do to the innocent people who live there?

It is for this reason that I proclaim loudly, this is an international incident, so the best answer is the International Criminal Court. No matter what the parties or dynamics involved, the position must be maintained that aggression and violence causes more problems than it solves, that no one is above the law, and therefore international law must be appealed to.

Because the Bible Tells Me So

2005-04-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

Today, the Conservatives and other opponents of same-sex marraige rallied in Ottawa.

Many oppose it because the Bible tells them to.

On that note, today in cyberland I came across a letter that had been sent to Dr. Laura Schlesinger. It reads as follows:

J. Kent Ashcraft
May 2000

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Leviticus 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Leviticus 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

d) Leviticus 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Leviticus 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

g) Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 19:27. How should they die?

i) I know from Leviticus 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Leviticus 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Leviticus 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.

Hilarious.

War Resisters

2005-04-09T00:16:00.000-07:00

I went to hear a woman, Kelly Dougherty, talk tonight. She is a veteran of the Iraq War, who has come out against it, and helped form the organization Iraq Veterans Against the War. The talk was put on by the War Resisters Support Campaign. She was obviously a little nervous with public speaking, but what she had to say about the war, how a lot of soldiers feel about the war, and what they were going through, was captivating.

I would recommend supporting the War Resisters. I think that soldiers, recruits, and potential recruits, are a cruicial point of resistance at this time. One thing Kelly said, in response to a question, was that she thinks that the US military would face much more resistance in reaction to the delcaration of a new war, say in Iran, than it did in response to the declaration of the Iraq war.

The Hypocrisy of Natan Sharansky

2005-04-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

Here is a good article on human rights advocate and hero-turned-human rights violator Natan Sharansky.

Of course most Americans don't remember Sharansky's history as a "refusenik" or "prisoner of conscience." They probably don't even remember the Soviet "gulags." What they do know about Sharansky is that he has become the "darling" of the Bush Administration. It has been reported that it was a long conversation Sharansky had with Vice President Cheney that led to the Administration's decision to isolate, ignore, and seek the removal of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. And, more recently, it was after a long meeting in the White House between President Bush and Sharanksy that the President emerged to praise his book The Case for Democracy. President Bush said, "I felt like his book just confirmed what I believe. He writes a heck of a lot better than I could write, and he's certainly got more credibility than I have..."

"Ay," to borrow from Shakespeare, "there's the rub." The point is, does Sharansky have credibility? The recent above-mentioned criticisms from the right and left appear to agree that because of his silence in the face of Israeli abuses of Palestinian human rights and denial of democratic rights to this occupied people, he is not credible.

Now there is an important lesson here, not only for Americans and Israelis, but for Arabs as well. For our commitment to human rights to be consistent and not hypocritical, it must be absolute. We, too, must measure human rights by one yardstick.

Disparity in Wealth

2005-04-06T23:40:00.000-07:00

"The chasm between rich and poor is not a divide between who has intelligence and drive and who does not. Rather it results from a society whose rules allow some to amass wealth greater than could be enjoyed in a thousand lifetimes, while they deny others enough money to scrape through just one lifetime." - from Common Dreams.

Reinstating the Draft?

2005-04-04T23:56:00.000-07:00

There's more talk of a military draft. This is from the San Fransisco Chronicle:

The war-strained all-volunteer U.S. military has a growing manpower problem and a cross-section of Washington policymakers has proposed a solution -- increase the size of the regular military by 30,000, 40,000 or even 100,000 or more.

While just about all the proponents maintain they want to achieve the increase by offering recruits bigger financial incentives or through appeals to patriotism, lurking in the background is a possibility that for now remains anathema to all but a few. The military draft, which coughed up its last conscript in 1973, could make a comeback if recruiting doesn't pick up and if America's commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan turn into long-term occupations or if the Bush administration's tough-minded foreign policy means military action in places like Iran or North Korea.

It's important to note that the Bush administration adamantly scorns the idea of a resumed draft. It won't even agree to a permanent increase in the Army's size, which Congress temporarily boosted by 30,000 last year, saying instead that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plan to transform the military into a high-tech, mobile force will meet the nation's needs.

But the administration does admit it has a problem, particularly in filling the ranks in the 500,000-person regular Army and the 675,000-person Army National Guard and Army Reserve, which have been called upon to carry a large part of the burden of deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. In a March 23 press conference, Army Secretary Francis Harvey said that in the first two months of 2005, the active Army was meeting 94 percent of its recruiting goal, the Reserve 90 percent and the Guard 75 percent.

However,

The idea is widely attacked. "The argument for a draft is political hot air," said Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank.

But he warned that if the Iraq occupation drags on, other foreign military operations are launched and a half-million more soldiers are needed, "I don't think we can get there without a draft."

"Anything less than that, I can't see it's necessary and it would be counterproductive" by burdening the military with people who don't want to be there, Goure added.

Charles Pena of the libertarian Cato Institute, which opposes the draft, said the only way the public would accept a draft would be if it was part of a broader national service plan in which young people could still volunteer for the military.

"It might be politically acceptable if all the pressures lead to an increase in the military," Pena said. "But if the administration can transform Iraqi security forces so they assume more of the operations in Iraq and can bring forces home, we'll see the pressures wane."

Lawrence Korb, assistant defense secretary under President Ronald Reagan, supports the all-volunteer military. But he said the Bush administration is severely straining the military and faces a deadline.

"You've got about another year," said Korb, who is now an analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. "If you don't cut back in Iraq, your all-volunteer Army and Marine Corps are going to be in big trouble."

The Pope Has Died

2005-04-02T15:35:00.002-08:00

The Pope has died today at the age of 84.

In some respects I admired the man, but in other respects, mmmm not so much. He stood as a beacon for world peace, and opposed war and violence, including the war on Iraq. He also decried global economic inequality. In this sense, he was a progressive Christian in the tradition of Christ

On the other hand, he was was too conservative with respect to "private morality". He opposed homosexuality. He opposed not only abortion, but even birth control!

Let us hope that the next Pope continues to represent peace and justice, but decides to put "private morality" issues to one side, so that they be exactly that: private.

Amnesty International Criticizes US Report

2005-04-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

Amnesty International issued a press release in response to the human rights report released by the US State Department. While applauding them for pleadging to take on human rights initiatives, the pointed out that hte US must start walking the talk if they are not to be viewed with skepticism.

Amnesty International USA applauds the U.S. initiatives to promote human rights outlined in the Department of State's annual human rights policy assessment, Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The U.S. Record: 2004-2005, but warns that as long as the White House continues to flout international law and blatantly disregard the Geneva Conventions, many of its policies to promote democracy and human rights will be greeted with deep skepticism.

"Last year's report was postponed following release of the horrific photos from Abu Ghraib, which cast a shadow on the report's legitimacy by calling the United State's own human rights record into question," said Alexandra Arriaga, Director of Government Relations for Amnesty International USA. "The U.S. authority to promote human rights abroad diminishes every time it sanctions rendition, refuses to thoroughly investigate detainee abuse, denies its citizens access to an attorney or habeas corpus, or approves small arms shipments to countries with abysmal human rights records. The U.S. loses its moral voice on human rights every day it continues to detain without charge or trial the hundreds of individuals held at Guantanamo Bay, most believed to be innocent of crimes and swept up in a dragnet. The Department of State is right to herald its human rights achievements, but its worthy efforts are undercut by the administration's overall approach, making its report tantamount to a business ethics manual published by Enron."

Amnesty International urges the White House to hold U.S. agents and officers accountable to international law and calls for a thorough, independent inquiry into domestic allegations of detainee abuse and torture as well as in U.S. detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba. Amnesty International calls for those detained in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere to be charged and tried in fair and public trials that meet international standards for justice or to be released. The human rights organization also calls for an end to extraordinary renditions—the outsourcing of torture to other nations—and for the immediate cessation of all small arms transfers to countries with questionable human rights records.

Zahra Kazemi

2005-04-01T20:10:00.000-08:00

This is from the CBC. Not to say that one life is more important than another, but as fellow citizens, when need to be extremely concerned, and stand up for our rights to exist peacefully within other countries.

Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died in Iranian custody on July 11, 2003, almost three weeks after she was arrested for taking pictures outside a prison during a student protest in Tehran.

Two days later, Iran's official news agency reported that Kazemi had died in hospital, after suffering a stroke while she was being interrogated. On July 16, 2003, the story changed. Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Iran's vice-president, conceded that Kazemi died as a result of being beaten.

Later, the Iranian government would charge an Iranian security agent in Kazemi's death. He was acquitted of a charge of "quasi-intentional murder. In July 2004, Iran's judiciary said the head injuries that killed Kazemi were the result of an "accident."

The case stayed under the radar screens of most Canadians until March 31, 2005, and the stunning revelations of Shahram Azam, a former staff physician in Iran's Defence Ministry. He said he examined Kazemi in hospital, four days after her arrest.

Azam said Kazemi showed obvious signs of torture, including:

Evidence of a very brutal rape.
A skull fracture, two broken fingers, missing fingernails, a crushed big toe and a broken nose.
Severe abdominal bruising, swelling behind the head and a bruised shoulder.
Deep scratches on the neck and evidence of flogging on the legs.

Read the rest of it here.

Child Hunger in Iraq; The State of the Planet

2005-03-30T20:40:00.000-08:00

Child hunger in Iraq has doubled to 8% for Children in Iraq since the war on Iraq began, according to a report prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Concerns were also expressed with respect to North Korea and Darfur Province. So, it would seem the the picture is not as rosy as The Washington neocons would have us believe. What else is new?

In other shitty news, 1360 scientists from 95 countries have reported that "Humans are damaging the planet at an unprecedented rate and raising risks of abrupt collapses in nature that could spur disease, deforestation or "dead zones" in the seas,", according to Reuters Alertnet. Maybe this'll finally motivate us to act.

Interview with Scott Ritter

2005-03-29T23:49:00.000-08:00

I have found on Raw Story an absoutely excellent interview with Scott Ritter. Emphasis is heavy on the nature of the neocons, its control of govnerment organs such as Congress, and hopes for the future. It is an informative and revealing interview. Here's a fair chunk of it:

So your implication is that in our current foreign policy the neocons have set the tone via thinktanks or supposed thinktanks?

Yes. Look at who funds the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, and I think you'll have your answer.

The American Heritage Leninist

What do you think these institutions are trying to achieve? I know the public claim is conservative values, but there is a some speculation regarding what appears more like Leninist, even Trotskyite values, especially given the current domestic government involvement and control or attempt at control of almost every facet of society, economy, family, etc. Even the term Leninist was used by the Heritage Foundation to describe their approach to Social Security during the 1980s (read it here – PDF).

A high-level source, a neocon at that, within the system has said to me directly that 'John Bolton's job is to destroy the U.N., Rice's job is to destroy the State Department's and replace it with a vehicle of facilitation for making the Pentagon's national security policy.'

And what of Karen Hughes' appointment?
Hughes – she is a salesperson; she will sell the policy. She is irrelevant. She is nothing. Her appointment means nothing. Rice has already capitulated to the Pentagon and the White House, and Hughes' appointment is but a manifestation of that larger reality.

The neocons are parasites. They build nothing. They bring nothing. They don't have a foundation. They don't stand for business. They don't stand for ideology. They use a host to facilitate and grow their own power. They are parasites that latch onto oil until is no longer convenient. They latch on to democracy until it is no longer convenient.

Rice's appointment to the State Department is simply to reshape it into a neocon vehicle.

Why the State Department? Why Rice?

The State Department still has free thinkers in it. Rice is a dilettante. Anyone who was there during the Reagan era and her advising on Soviet policy knows how inept she is. She is not there because she is a brilliant secretary of state.

The media has bought into this, because the neocons cleverly put a woman, an African-American woman at that, into this position. So when Rice goes abroad, people do not look at the stupid things she says, they look at what she was wearing and such.

'Godless people who want power, nothing more'

So you believe the neocons are elitist parasites?
Yes, elitism is the perfect term.

Do you consider it localized or global elitism?

The neocons believe in what they think is a noble truth, power of the few, the select few. These are godless people who want power, nothing more. They do not have a country or an allegiance, they have an agenda. These people might hold American passports, but they are not Americans because they do not believe in the Constitution. They believe in the power of the few, not a government for or by the people. They are a few and their agenda is global.

You suggest the Republican Party is simply an organizational host. Is there any vestige left of the host or has the entire party been devoured?

The Republicans have been neutered by the neocons.

Your concept of neocons seems confusing because, using your host/parasite paradigm, they cannot tell between the host and the parasite which invades it.
I know people who have worked for George H. W. Bush, both when he was vice president and president. Bush Sr. called the neocons the 'crazies in the basement.' I think it is dangerous to confuse the two, because there are Americans who love their country and are conservatives who do not support what is going on. Until the host rejects the parasite, it is difficult to separate the two. Brent Scowcroft for example is not a neocon, yet people call him one. Scowcroft worked hard to reign in the 'crazies in the basement,' as did Reagan.

Many have defined the neocon movement based on the highly intellectual, albeit warped, musings of Strauss and Bloom. Yet one could hardly call the current leadership intellectual or even capable of digesting this philosophy. Even neocon thinkers are jumping off the ship. Do you believe this is simply trickle-down Machiavellianism in much the same way that Communism trickled down as an aberration of its original intent?

No plan survives initial contact with the enemy. The neocon ideology was always hypothetical in its pure application until now. What we are seeing today is what happens when theory (bad theory at that) makes contact with reality. You get chaos, through which the neocons are now trying to navigate.

Is Karl Rove a neocon?

Karl Rove is not part of the neo-conservative master group; he is a host.

Then who is steering the ship?

An oligarchy of 'public servant' classes who are drawn from business, and serve naked economic interests. This is true whether you are Democrat or Republican.

Patriot Enactment

Several insiders have expressed concern over possible oil shortage riots. Would the Patriot Act be put to use, in your opinion, to address such riots?
[The Patriot Act] is simply the neocons putting their judicial agenda in place by other means. It was a compilation of all of the conservative initiatives, not neocon initiatives, which the conservative Republicans have been pushing for, including a more conservative law enforcement element.

This is not unhealthy as long is it is done properly, through legislation, proper channels of debate and discourse. A lot of this had been submitted in the past, but was rejected. After 9/11 all of these initiatives were lumped together.

There are some things in the Patriot Act I agree with, but the Patriot Act requires a responsible society. The neocons they have no interest in a responsible society; they simply used the conservatives as a vehicle to push an agenda to assault the individual civil liberties.

As the Patriot Act is now, how it came about, is entirely un-American. It is extreme legislation that does nothing to address the issues it professes to, but moreover, it is as an existing law, un-American. What makes it un-American is that no one read it before they voted for it. So the process was un-American, and the motivation behind it was un-American. We cannot have a nation that is governed by fear. The patriot act is un-American simply because it exists.

So how do citizens address this situation since the very means of addressing it via Congress seem to have been closed off?

Congress has ceased to function as a viable tool of government. What is needed is for leaders of honor to resign in protest.

I have had this conversation with some in Congress and have asked about their thoughts on shutting down Congress and cleaning house. Their counter is that they are afraid to 'leave the crazies in control.'

They are already in control. If the people want to heal this country, the people have to purge the failing of this country. Vote them out, it might take two or three cycles, but it will happen and it will take time.

Everyone who voted for the war in Iraq should be voted out of office because it violated article six of the Constitution. Everyone who voted for the Patriot Act needs to go because they did not represent the people by voting on legislation they did not read. They have to go, regardless of party. They have through their actions decided who stays and who goes.

Hope, and worries, for the future

You suggest Americans vote out all who voted for these measures. If New Yorkers voted out Hillary, who voted for both the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq, and who is also leading pack of the Democratic Party for the 2008 nomination, what then?

Hillary is the manifestation of all that ails the Democratic Party. She stands for nothing. She has been compromised by her voting record ... how can she stand for anything worth supporting? And yet, she will be the Democratic nominee in 2008, thus guaranteeing another Neocon/Republican victory. 'Dump Hillary Now' would be the smartest move Dean could make as the new Democratic National Committee Chair. ... Like I said, it might take two or three cycles, but it will happen and it will take time.

What about Dean?
Dean has to be part of the process of rebuilding and that will take time. Dean cannot run for president, because Dean cannot run as a Democrat – the party is not set up to sustain someone like him. He is one of the exceptions in a corrupt party. He is also not corrupted by his voting record. He is someone who represents something, he did not vote for the war in Iraq, for example.

We talked about this current social crisis as a closed loop during the second installment. Have you ever seen a loop like this throughout the history of the U.S.? What does this mean?

The American experiment is much too complex to be destroyed by the neocons. In the end, the neocons will lose. It may take ten to twelve more years, and the costs will be horrific, but America will survive. There will be one hell of a mess to clean up, though, after the fall of the neocons.

Where do you see America, should things continue as is, in five years from now?
At war, bankrupt morally and fiscally, and in great pain ... and only half-way through the nightmare. Ten to twelve years is what we will have to get through, but we will get through it.

2005-03-27T14:57:00.000-08:00

Here's more on the National Defense Strategy.

Nationl Defense Strategy

2005-03-26T17:14:00.000-08:00

Here is the new US National Security Strategy. Also, Jim Lobe of Inter Press has some excellent commentary on it.

Orwellian goodies in this little bundle of joy include "global freedom to act", and "At the direction of the President, we will defeat adversaries at the time, place, and in the manner of our choosing setting the conditions for future security."

"Looking South"

2005-03-25T12:25:00.000-08:00

Hey, this sounds like a good idea:

The Bush Administration in general, and Paul Wolfowitz in particular, would have you believe that 1,500 Americans have died, perhaps 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, and more than $200 billion has been spent on invading and occupying Iraq, in the name of “democracy”.

Funny then that Paul Wolfowitz is now being promoted in a secret, opaque, closely held process that freezes out most of the world. Of special note, the selection of the new World Bank head freezes out the 1 billion people who live on less than $1 per day, and the 3 billion who live on less than $2 per day. It freezes out the entire Southern hemisphereAfrica, Asia, South America. In fact, it freezes out everyone who is not a Bush loyalist in the U.S., or a nervous European elite.

It is as if fighting world poverty were a ping-pong game between the U.S. and Europe, a game in which the poorer nations are not even allowed to enter.

But why? Why should the world’s poorest people be excluded from the process of selecting one of the most important leaders who will affect their lives? Why are the nations most controlled by World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies not allowed to nominate, or even participate in any meaningful way, in the selection of new leadership?

Is Nelson Mandela less qualified to run the World Bank than Paul Wolfowitz? Or how about one of the Brazilians behind the Lula government’s innovative proposal to eliminate hunger by taxing international arms sales? Or, since we know that the most direct route to fighting world poverty is to empower and educate poor women, why not a woman from the South to lead the World Bank, say, Arundhati Roy of India, or Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya, two women who actually know something about helping poor people?

Why not choose representatives from the World Bank from the regions of the world that the World Bank is supposedly designed to serve. As Jesse points out, there are numerous people from those regions who are intelligent, knowledgeable, and dedicated. Furthermore, they would have a vested interest in having the World Banking acutally helping to bring them out of poverty and into something more comfortable, as opposed to exploiting them on behalf of Western countries.

Ten questions for Canadians: my response

2005-03-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

There's a bit of an uproar taking place in blogworld these days. First, Matthew Good asked ten questions of America. Many of them were phrased in a sarcastic manner. Conservative bloggers all over have been springing up to respond to these questions in force. A couple of them have written ten questions for Canadians, and as you can see on Matt's blog, he has responded to one of them. As a proud progressive Canadian, I will take the opportunity to respond as well to these questions.

Jake's Questions for Canadians

1. Why do Canadians put up with high unemployment and high taxes?

The unemployment rate is consistently higher in Canada than it is in the US. However, I wonder what prorportion of jobs are low-end, degrading jobs in the US as compared to Canada. The likely difference between the US in Canada is that the US provides degrading, low-end jobs which keep folks under the poverty line, and Canada provides social assistance (well, not so much anymore, which of course exaserbates the problem of homelessness) to Canadians under the poverty line. The problem in both countries is poverty, which is much higher than it is in Europe. In Sweden, I have heard, they don't even know what a food bank is.

We pay higher taxes so that we can have social programs which protect us economically, especially those of us who are poor,from unforseen catastrophes such as unemployment and sickness. It is something I am proud of and grateful for as a Canadian.

2. Why do Canadians put up with the worst healthcare in the Western World?

Worst according to who? Certainly not the 40 million poor in America who go without health insurance. We have a publicly funded health care system to ensure that no one, not even the poorest in our society, go without health care. The problems that have developed in our society have arisem from a lack of funding, patient's rights protection, and government safeguarding, not from the public nature of the system.

3. Why are there more MRIs in Minneapolis than there is in all of Canada?

As I said, there has been a problem of lack of funding in Canada. Of course, the number of MRIs in Minneapolis does nothing for those without health insurance in Minneapolis.

4. Why do the Canadians allow the government to stop the free flow of information into their country?

There is no problem with the flow of information here, believe me. We are saturated with commercial America trying to hawk their goods to us and telling us what to think.

5. Why don't the Canadians celebrate that 50,000,000 people have the right to vote in the Middle East for the first time

In and of itself, having the right to vote is not a bad thing. But that's not demcracy. Democracy the the right to determine your own future, which the people of Iraq certainly do not have right now, or as long as the US continues to occupy and have their puppet Allawi in power. I think we're also mourning the fact that an estimated 100,000 Iraqis died unnecessarily for this fraud that had nothing to do with Bush's real or even originally stated reasons for going to war. I wish neocons would quit obfuscating the facts with the hopes that people will forgot that it was a war based on lies.

6. Why didn't Canadians object when their government actively worked to stop freedom movements in El Salvador, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Iraq, Iran and Cuba.

Canadians will object when its government opposes a genuine freedom movement, as opposed to a phony one which is constructed by the US military-industrial complex.

7. Why do Canadians allow the French government to have a colony within Canada?

I can't believe this is a serious question.

8. Why can't Canadians win at hockey anymore?

With respect to Canadian NHL teams, it is because the economics of the league are tilted in favour of the large market teams. Let us not forget that Canada has one all major world championships since 2002.

9. Why do terrorists believe that there is nothing worth blowing up in Canada?

Because we don't attack poor, defenseless countries. We're with the rest of the world against a tiny minority of countries which support the Bush administration.

10. Why did the Canadian government cut and run in Rwanda thereby allowing 800,000 Tutsis to be slaughtered by men armed only with machetes?

Nice try. As often happens, right-wingers in the US try to demonize Canada and the UN, conveniently overlooking the fact that the US effectively controls the UN security council, under whose auspices Romeo Dallaire was working. If was the UN security council who refused to classify Rwanda as a genocide.

Watch the documentary "Shake Hands with the Devil." Dallaire pleaded with the security council for extra help in Rwanda, but none was forthcoming.

The legacy of George Kennan

2005-03-22T12:18:00.000-08:00

The death of George Kennan, that great foreign policy analyst, at 101, is worth noting. If his foreign policy advice had been followed over the last 50 years, how different would our current reality be. Here's James Carroll of the Boston Globe, ruminating on that very subject:

The civil war on the Korean peninsula would not have been magnified into a transcendent East-West clash, licensing the permanent Stalinism of the north.

Washington would have seized the diplomatic opportunity offered by the death of Stalin, supporting the emergence of reform-minded leaders in Moscow before the arms race began in earnest.

The United States would have refrained from testing and deploying the hydrogen bomb, with notice to Moscow that such grave escalation to a genocidal weapon would take place only if the Soviets went first.

The revolutionary movements of the Third World would have been seen as rejection of colonialism and normal nationalism instead of as global conspiracy centered in Moscow.

There would have been no American war in Vietnam.

The US crusade for ''freedom" would have been mitigated by a sense of modesty, with respect for the differing political impulses of other cultures.

Washington would have remained faithful to the post-World War II American sponsorship of structures of international cooperation, centered in the United Nations.

How we remember the past determines the shape of the future. If Kennan's life reminds us that there was nothing inevitable about the militarized confrontation of the Cold War, it can also help us see an alternative to the belligerent course now being set by Washington. Here is what a Kennan-like preference for political and diplomatic responses over military ones would mean today:

An aggressive movement away from US dependence on nuclear weapons, which is the best way to check proliferation.

Avoiding the militarization of conflict with China, which can needlessly lead to a new Cold War, complete with a rekindled arms race, only now rushing into space.

A prompt end to the war in Iraq, the first step of which is a withdrawal of American forces, paired with a renunciation of all US military bases in the Middle East.

Depriving terrorists of their raison d'etre by defusing Arab and Islamic resentment of American intrusions in the Middle East.

Meeting the gravest threat to national security, which is the global degradation of the environment, by renewing structures of international cooperation.

Bush administration policies run in an exactly opposite direction from the way shown by the life of George Kennan.

As with communism in the early days of the Cold War, we have made a transcendent enemy for ourselves with ''terrorism," imagining a globally organized, ideologically driven threat that far exceeds what actually exists. We have made an idol of a particular notion of ''freedom," forgetting again that freedom from hunger and disease is what the vast majority of humans long for. Once more, we fail to see the ways in which American-style freedom includes dehumanized elements (violence, prurience, greed) that others might properly resist.

In Iraq, we reenact the perverse American script that saves by destroying. In Korea, once again (Secretary Condoleezza Rice resplendent in a military bunker), we imagine that saber rattling helps. As for international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank, we express our contempt by appointing as representatives their sworn enemies.

George F. Kennan was a good man. Despite himself, he helped launch his nation down a dangerous road. In regretting that, he spent his life calling for another way. The ultimate ''realist," he legitimized the idealist's dream. War is not the answer. America can honor this prophet by heeding him at last.

back in a few

2005-03-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be away for a few days, while I move to Vancouver. I'll need to secure a new internet connection.

Chalmers Johnson on US-China-Taiwan relations

2005-03-17T23:19:00.000-08:00

Here is Chalmers Johnson, author of "Sorrows of Empire", which details the military-industrial complex, and in particular the expansion of US military bases worldwide, talking about US-China relations, particularly as it pertains to Taiwan.

Japan may talk a lot about the dangers of North Korea, but the real objective of its rearmament is China. This has become clear from the ways in which Japan has recently injected itself into the single most delicate and dangerous issue of East Asian international relations -- the problem of Taiwan. Japan invaded China in 1931 and was its wartime tormentor thereafter as well as Taiwan's colonial overlord. Even then, however, Taiwan was viewed as a part of China, as the United States has long recognized. What remains to be resolved are the terms and timing of Taiwan's reintegration with the Chinese mainland. This process was deeply complicated by the fact that in 1987 Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, who had retreated to Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese civil war (and were protected there by the American Seventh Fleet ever after), finally ended martial law on the island. Taiwan has since matured into a vibrant democracy and the Taiwanese are now starting to display their own mixed opinions about their future.

In 2000, the Taiwanese people ended a long monopoly of power by the Nationalists and gave the Democratic Progressive Party, headed by President Chen Shui-bian, an electoral victory. A native Taiwanese (as distinct from the large contingent of mainlanders who came to Taiwan in the baggage train of Chiang's defeated armies), Chen stands for an independent Taiwan, as does his party. By contrast, the Nationalists, together with a powerful mainlander splinter party, the People First Party headed by James Soong (Song Chuyu), hope to see an eventual peaceful unification of Taiwan with China. On March 7, 2005, the Bush administration complicated these delicate relations by nominating John Bolton to be the American ambassador to the United Nations. He is an avowed advocate of Taiwanese independence and was once a paid consultant to the Taiwanese government.

In May 2004, in a very close and contested election, Chen Shui-bian was reelected, and on May 20, the notorious right-wing Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara attended his inauguration in Taipei. (Ishihara believes that Japan's 1937 Rape of Nanking was "a lie made up by the Chinese.") Though Chen won with only 50.1% of the vote, this was still a sizeable increase over his 33.9% in 2000, when the opposition was divided. The Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately appointed Koh Se-kai as its informal ambassador to Japan. Koh has lived in Japan for some 33 years and maintains extensive ties to senior political and academic figures there. China responded that it would "completely annihilate" any moves toward Taiwanese independence -- even if it meant scuttling the 2008 Beijing Olympics and good relations with the United States.

Contrary to the machinations of American neo-cons and Japanese rightists, however, the Taiwanese people have revealed themselves to be open to negotiating with China over the timing and terms of reintegration. On August 23, 2004, the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan's parliament) enacted changes in its voting rules to prevent Chen from amending the Constitution to favor independence, as he had promised to do in his reelection campaign. This action drastically lowered the risk of conflict with China. Probably influencing the Legislative Yuan was the warning issued on August 22 by Singapore's new prime minister, Lee Hsien-loong: "If Taiwan goes for independence, Singapore will not recognize it. In fact, no Asian country will recognize it. China will fight. Win or lose, Taiwan will be devastated."

The next important development was parliamentary elections on December 11, 2004. President Chen called his campaign a referendum on his pro-independence policy and asked for a mandate to carry out his reforms. Instead he lost decisively. The opposition Nationalists and the People First Party won 114 seats in the 225-seat parliament, while Chen's DPP and its allies took only 101. (Ten seats went to independents.) The Nationalist leader, Lien Chan, whose party won 79 seats to the DPP's 89, said, "Today we saw extremely clearly that all the people want stability in this country."

Chen's failure to capture control of parliament also meant that a proposed purchase of $19.6 billion worth of arms from the United States was doomed. The deal included guided-missile destroyers, P-3 anti-submarine aircraft, diesel submarines, and advanced Patriot PAC-3 anti-missile systems. The Nationalists and James Soong's supporters regard the price as too high and mostly a financial sop to the Bush administration, which has been pushing the sale since 2001. They also believe the weapons would not improve Taiwan's security.

On December 27, 2004, mainland China issued its fifth Defense White Paper on the goals of the country's national defense efforts. As one long-time observer, Robert Bedeski, notes, "At first glance, the Defense White Paper is a hard-line statement on territorial sovereignty and emphasizes China's determination not to tolerate any moves at secession, independence, or separation. However, the next paragraph . . . indicates a willingness to reduce tensions in the Taiwan Strait: so long as the Taiwan authorities accept the one China principle and stop their separatist activities aimed at ‘Taiwan independence,' cross-strait talks can be held at any time on officially ending the state of hostility between the two sides."

It appears that this is also the way the Taiwanese read the message. On February 24, 2005, President Chen Shui-bian met for the first time since October 2000 with Chairman James Soong of the People First Party. The two leaders, holding diametrically opposed views on relations with the mainland, nonetheless signed a joint statement outlining ten points of consensus. They pledged to try to open full transport and commercial links across the Taiwan Strait, increase trade, and ease the ban on investments in China by many Taiwanese business sectors. The mainland reacted favorably at once. Astonishingly, this led Chen Shui-bian to say that he "would not rule out Taiwan's eventual reunion with China, provided Taiwan's 23 million people accepted it."

If the United States and Japan left China and Taiwan to their own devices, it seems possible that they would work out a modus vivendi. Taiwan has already invested some $150 billion in the mainland, and the two economies are becoming more closely integrated every day. There also seems to be a growing recognition in Taiwan that it would be very difficult to live as an independent Chinese-speaking nation alongside a country with 1.3 billion people, 3.7 million square miles of territory, a rapidly growing $1.4 trillion economy, and aspirations to regional leadership in East Asia. Rather than declaring its independence, Taiwan may try to seek a status somewhat like that of French Canada -- a kind of looser version of a Chinese Quebec under nominal central government control but maintaining separate institutions, laws, and customs.

The mainland would be so relieved by this solution it would probably accept it, particularly if it could be achieved before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China fears that Taiwanese radicals want to declare independence a month or two before those Olympics, betting that China would not attack then because of its huge investment in the forthcoming games. Most observers believe, however, that China would have no choice but to go to war because failure to do so would invite a domestic revolution against the Chinese Communist Party for violating the national integrity of China.

Crying Wolfowitz

2005-03-16T23:13:00.000-08:00

As the World Peace Herald says, both his lack of economic experience and his poor performance as Rumsfeld's undersecretary are strong reasons not to appoint Wolfowitz as World Bank President.

Even before Wolfowitz's nomination was confirmed, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning former chief World Bank economist, warned that Wolfowitz's appointment would be "highly controversial" and ultimately against the interest of both the agency and the United States, especially with his lack of experience in development economics and financial markets.

Meanwhile, many would argue that his record as Donald Rumsfeld's deputy has been far from stellar. The neoconservative scholar headed Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington before his third and latest position at the Pentagon, where he became one of the most vocal proponents for toppling Saddam Hussein's regime, accusing the Middle Eastern dictator of maintaining large caches of weapons of mass destruction and also arguing that U.S. forces would be welcomed by Iraqis as liberators once Saddam was ousted.

"His history in dealing with the Middle East is the most troubling," said one bank staff member, adding that the mood in the institution following the announcement of Wolfowitz's nomination is "like a cemetery."

Certainly, the second-in-command at the Pentagon has more enemies than allies in the Middle East, and his heavy-handed approach to foreign policy in general will be a sore point for the aid agency that depends on consensus-building among its 184 member nations. In fact, while many liberals have criticized Bush's decision to appoint fellow neocon John Bolton as the U.S. representative to the United Nations, Bolton will be in New York as the voice of the Bush administration, while Wolfowitz must act beyond U.S. national interest and strive to bring the diverse range of interest to agreement on policy issues of concern to the World Bank.

Still, the latest nomination may well be a trigger for the international agency to reconsider some of its unwritten rules, including the long-standing tradition of appointing a U.S. national to be its head, while the neighboring International Monetary Fund has always appointed a European national since the two institutions were founded following World War II. The United States remains the single-largest shareholder in both agencies, which has been the reason why, unlike the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions have always limited the nationalities of their respective leaders. As a result, while Wolfowitz's nomination must be approved by the World Bank's board members, it is already safe to assume that his appointment is a done deal.

"How can advice on democratic reforms be taken seriously when the multilateral institutions that offer it do not subscribe to the same standards of openness, transparency and participation they advocate?" asked Stiglitz.

He added that given Wolfowitz's record in Iraq and leaving the United States in a quagmire in the already politically turbulent Middle East, "choosing the wrong (leader for the bank) surely enhances the chances of failure."

Another prominent development economist, Jeffrey Sachs, has also spoken out on this nomination. "It's a very surprising and in many ways an inappropriate nomination," he said.

"Hundreds of millions of people depend for their lives and livelihood on the efforts of professionals to fight extreme poverty," he said, adding that he was speaking as a development expert and not as a United Nations official.

Top 10 Reasons Why Paul Wolfowitz Would Make a Good World Bank Presiden

2005-03-16T23:01:00.000-08:00

It has been announced that neocon and PNAC mastermind Paul Wolofitz is Bush's nominee for President of the World Bank. Fresh from the Institute for Plocy Studies, here are the 10 reasons why Wolfowitz would make a good World Bank president:

(drum roll please)

1. He would follow in the great tradition of World Bank president Robert McNamara, who also helped kill tens of thousands of people in a poor country most Americans couldn’t find on a map before getting the job.
2. It helps to be a good liar when you run an institution with employees who earn over $100,000 a year to pretend to help billions of people who live on less than $1 a day.
3. With all his experience helping U.S. companies grab Iraq ’s oil profits, he's got just the right experience for doling out lucrative World Bank contracts to U.S. businesses.
4. After predecessor James Wolfensohn blew millions of dollars on "consultations" with citizen groups to give the appearance of openness, Wolfowitz's tough-guy style is just what’s needed to rid the World Bank of those irritating activists.
5. Unlike former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, another one of the four leading candidates, at least Wolfowitz hasn't failed at running a Fortune 500 company.
6. Unlike the Treasury Department’s John Taylor, another leading candidate, at least Wolfowitz doesn't want to get rid of the institution he would head.
7. While earning a University of Chicago Ph.D. , he was exposed to the tenets of market fundamentalism that have reigned at the World Bank for decades.
8. He has experience in constructing echo chambers where only the advice he wants to hear is spoken.
9. He knows some efficient private contractors who build echo chambers for only a few hundred billion dollars (cost plus, of course).
10. He can develop a pre-emptive poverty doctrine where the World Bank could invade countries that fail to make themselves safe for U.S. business, modeled on the U.S. pre-emptive war doctrine he helped craft.

Defending Arabs and Muslims

2005-03-14T20:28:00.000-08:00

The problem of anti-Arab and anti-Islam discrimination and violence has surfaced again and again since 9/11 and their is no excuse for it. It is a hate crime. Even worse is the fact that a number of such crimes are perpetuated by officers of the law, whose duty it is to dispense justice fairly to all regardless of race, religion etc. To support the rights of Muslims support CAIR, or CAIR-Canada. To defend Arab rights in America, support the Arab American Institute. In Canada, support the Canadian Arab Federation. Thanks

Bob Geldof: Africa has become a living wound

2005-03-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

Bob Geldof on the plight of Africa, and the UK Commission for Africa's response to it:

Eat your dinner, they told me as a boy, think about the poor starving children in India.

In those far-off days the concern of the adult world was for Asia. It had a huge population and gloomy prospects in the eyes of economists.

The people of Africa were poor, too, but they had riches in the form of gold, diamonds and copper - and ground so fertile that plants grew overnight wherever you dropped a seed the day before. Africans earned double what Asians did. Africa would be all right.

Forty years on and things are not all right. Africa has stagnated while Asia has seen an astonishing turnaround. First the tiger economies of east Asia leapt ahead. Now India and Bangladesh have followed. Today Asians earn double what Africans do. And life expectancy in Africa is now 17 years less than in India. Why has Africa fallen so far behind?

What we have done on the Commission for Africa - as our declaration in The Independent today tells the world - is analyse the situation, define the real problem and come up with a plan for change.

Our report is being launched in the year that Britain is in the chair at two of the world's most powerful economic groupings - the European Union and the G8. Many of those serving on the commission are political leaders in power. That means it offers the chance of real change.

If other nations can be persuaded to adopt Britain's plan then poverty in Africa could be on the way to eradication. Tony Blair has called Africa a "scar on the conscience of the world". But it is not just a scar. It is a living wound - one which causes one in six African children to die before their fifth birthday. And millions more to go to bed hungry every night.

Our report tries to tackle that. The question we set ourselves was simple: why? The answer, we found, is a complex cocktail of causes: war, and a lack of mechanisms to stop conflict which are taken for granted in developed economies; bad government; corruption.

But the most damaging problem is not the most dramatic. It is what, in the opaque jargon of development, is called "lack of capacity". That means poor roads, broken-down lorries, telephones that don't connect and power grids that regularly black out. It means civil servants who do not have the skills, training, money and basic equipment - let alone the computers - to collect data, formulate sound policies and then deliver the services that ordinary people require.

That is not all. Africa's parliaments, newspapers and judges do not have the ability to hold the continent's governments up to proper scrutiny. Crumbling clinics and schools deprive people of health and education - and their nations of a skilled, healthy workforce. It's an economic climate in which companies and individuals are afraid to invest their money to create jobs.

On top of that Africa cannot produce enough goods of the right quality, or - ironically - cheaply enough, to compete on world markets. And what it does sell is subject to scandalous unfair taxes and tariffs imposed by rich nations.

Then there is debt. For every £2 we send them in aid they have to send £1 back in debt repayments - on debts which are odious as well as onerous.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the Commission for Africa has come up with suggestions which can make significant improvements in each of these areas. But it will need strong action from Africa, and strong backing from us in the rich world.

Change has already begun in Africa, though the rest of world has hardly yet noticed. Now industrialised economies must do three things. We must end the furtive and immoral practices which hinder growth in Africa - scrapping subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy and US Farm Bill. We must abolish the tariffs that prevent Africa's products from entering our markets on equal terms. And we must do away with the debt that clings like a heavy parasite to the body of every man turning the soil in his field, every woman carrying a heavy pot of water from the well, and every child who cannot go to school.

When we have stopped doing the things which harm Africa we can work on improving the way we help. We must improve the quality of our aid (the commission's 400-page report suggests in detail how). And we should double the aid we give Africa - from $25bn (£13bn) to $50bn a year within five years - and then, if that has proved effective, treble it to $75bn a year.

We have produced a package which will stretch governments in Africa and the rich world. It is for others to use words like historic. But I have a hunch that if our plan is adopted this could be the decade when, with our help, Africa's fortune turns. The tide of misery can become a tide of opportunity.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have ensured that the issue of Africa will be there on the top table when the world's most powerful men meet at the forthcoming summit at Gleneagles in Scotland in July. The job of the rest of us is to push them to adopt the plan. If they do, the legacy of our times need not be fly-covered children dying on our television screens every night.

Instead we can imagine for the children of Africa the kind of future that every mother and father in this country takes for granted for their own children: that they go healthy and happy to school; in a nation that can feed itself and trade fairly with the world; under a government that makes life better not worse; in a country which is part of a prosperous, safe and secure world. That is the common interest of us all. As Gary Gilmore said: "Let's do it".

THE DECLARATION FROM THE COMMISSION FOR AFRICA

The commission for Africa finds the condition of the lives of the majority of Africans to be intolerable and an affront to the dignity of all mankind. We insist upon an alteration of these conditions through a change of policy in favour of the weak.

Having analysed and costed how this may be achieved, we call for our conclusions to be implemented forthwith in the cause of right and justice and in the name of our shared humanity. On the edge of this new century, in an age of unprecedented wealth and economic progress by all continents, it is unacceptable that Africa drifts further from the rest of the world, unseen in its misery and ignored in its pain.

The commission, its members acting in their capacity as individuals, has assimilated the analysis of years and all extant reports into our findings. These clearly show how things may have been otherwise.

However, we exist in contemporary realities. The world is vastly different to that of 20 years ago when we forcefully acknowledged the pity of the great african famine of 1984-85. The world, then locked into its Cold War political stasis, remained rigid in its competitive ideologies. The breaking of this deadlock, and the increase in global trade that followed, allied to new technologies and cultural shifts, have created a more fluid, less predictive yet more interdependent world.

This world in flux has brought great opportunities along with confusion, change and anxiety. But such change poses great possibilities for us all and especially for Africa, that great giant finally beginning to stir itself from its enforced slumber. We need, then, to seek to understand these newer forces in play about us, attempt to define them and in so doing set the framework for policies that favour the poor.

The great nations of the world, in alliance with their African neighbours, must now move together, in our common interest. How they may proceed will be determined by each nation's needs and desires. But all must immediately begin the journey that leads us to the ultimate common destination of a more equitable world.

Our task was the first step. It is done.

Chinese anti-secession law

2005-03-13T12:40:00.001-08:00

The government of China has passed an anti-secession law which authorizes the use offorce against Taiwan. The law contains two central concepts - 1) that there is only on China, encompassing mainland China and Taiwan, and 2):

In the event that the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur, or that possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Taiwanese government reaction has been expectedly critical. VP Annette Lu points out that the law contradicts US-China understandings that difference with Taiwan ought to be resolved "in a peaceful manner."

From the Tawain News:

We strongly encourage the Chen administration to accurately weigh international reactions and concerns and ensure that any responses or countermeasures to the PRC law are adopted and designed to protect our democracy and are not being made merely for the sake of domestic consumption.

By adhering to the principles of democracy and peace, Taiwan can contrast its principled response with Beijing's unilateral and callous anti-democratic maneuver. Besides correcting our long-distorted image as a "trouble maker" in cross-strait relations, a pragmatic response will show the world that it is Beijing that is actually rocking the boat or "pushing the envelope" in the Taiwan Strait.

Furthermore, Taiwan can take this opportunity to persuade the world that what really "separates" the PRC and Taiwan is not so much the matter of sovereignty but the degree to which democratic values and institutions have taken root and become consolidated.

As a "goodwill response" to Washington's appeal to both sides to "avoid risking igniting a cycle of reaction and counter-reaction," Taiwan should continue to appeal to the universal values of peace and democracy as the most effective tools to garner international support.

President Chen himself must show his leadership by personally addressing the nation on why domestic unity is so necessary now and on how the DPP administration aims to systematically deal with the situation.

Moreover, the DPP administration should launch an intensive international campaign to explain to the world community that the Taiwanese public virtually unanimously objects to the anti-separation law and why.

Since the "anti-secession law" poses a "clear and present" danger and threat not only to the people of Taiwan but also to regional peace and stability, the DPP government should also ask for more explicit support from the international community, especially the U.S. and Japan, to protect our hard-won democracy in the face of Beijing's militarism and unilateralism.

Incorporation of Taiwan into the U.S.-Japan security dialogue and the passage of proactive legislation to safeguard Taiwan's security in the face of this qualitatively new threat are steps that should be fostered.

The success of the March 26 demonstration "for democracy and peace and to protect Taiwan," which will no doubt attract the attention of the world community, is also crucial.

For one million Taiwanese to take to the streets to protest the PRC's provocative and unilateral attempt to undermine our sovereignty and democracy could stand as an even more significant global event than the momentous march by 500,000 Hong Kong residents on July 1, 2003 to object to Beijing's scheme to impose repressive revisions in the Basic Law.

If the Hong Kong people can say "no" to China and force Beijing to back down, scenes of even more Taiwanese "voting with their feet" for democracy and against annexation will be even more embarrassing for PRC leaders in Zhongnanhai.

I have many friends in Taiwan, and am concerned about them. I will be following this story closely.

More on Bolton

2005-03-13T12:40:00.000-08:00

John Bolton

2005-03-13T12:35:00.000-08:00

Jeez. I come back after a couple of weeks away, and I find out that neocon John Bolton is Bush's nominee for ambassador to the UN. Here are some questions that Phyllis Bennis says should be asked at his confirmation hearing:

1. In 1994 you said "There is no United Nations." Do you still believe that the international community, and the world's premiere multilateral organization, are illusions?

2. You also said "When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interest to do so, we will do so. When it does not suit our interests we will not." Do you still believe that the U.S. should approach the United Nations only in a tactical way, treating it as a tool of U.S. foreign policy?

3. Do you think that the United Nations represents a threat to U.S. sovereignty, and therefore do you think we should simply stop paying dues to the UN?

4. The United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both of which the U.S. has signed and ratified, form the cornerstones of international law. Do you believe the U.S. would be better off if it "unsigned" those two treaties?

5. While you were heading the Bush administration's arms control efforts, you fought for the U.S. to withdraw from the ABM treaty. Do you believe that because the U.S. military is so dramatically more powerful than that of any other country or group of countries in the world, that it's easier if we simply dictate to other nations what weapons they can or can't have rather than worrying about complicated multi-lateral agreements?

6. The U.S. was one of the original drafters of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Do you think we have any obligation to fulfill the terms of that treaty regarding the rights of nuclear weapons states, or is it really something that only the non-nuclear signatories are accountable to?

7. Do you think the U.S. should ever sign on to any treaty that holds us accountable to the same limits (of arms, nukes, etc.) as other countries around the world? Do you think we should refuse to sign on to a strengthened global treaty on bio-weapons, for instance, if it required the U.S. to allow the same kind of international inspections that we require of other countries?

8. Was "unsigning" the Rome Treaty creating the International Criminal Court the "happiest moment" of your government service? What other treaties do you think the U.S. should "unsign"?

9. Despite claims to the contrary by numerous intelligence and military officials, do you still think Cuba is producing biological weapons?

10. Former Senator Jesse Helms described you as ''the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon …[at] the final battle between good and evil in this world." Do you see your role at the United Nations as fighting that same battle between good and evil?

teach-ins

2005-03-13T12:30:00.000-08:00

Add one more to the list of ideas as to where the global peace movement must go from here: teach-ins. This speaks to the importance of educating folks not only about the reality in Iraq and the ultimate goals of the Bush crazies, but also to the fear of some about "what if we withdraw?" I would respond by asking, "what if we stay?:

Building A Plan

First, the assembly affirmed that we must broaden and deepen our base to catalyze public sentiment for bringing the troops home to reach a tipping point. According to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken after the Iraq elections, 59 percent of the public believes the United States should pull its troops out of Iraq in the next year. Yet the ranks of those actively demanding that the president produce an exit strategy from Iraq are slim. The peace movement must find fresh ways to stir untapped allies so that, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, our conscience leaves us--no other choice--but to act.

Second, we must support and amplify the pressure coming from within the ranks of the military. Military families and veterans hold the moral authority to successfully communicate with the U.S. public the reality on the ground in Iraq and the disillusion soldiers are facing. Iraq War veterans and military families need help putting a human face on the 1,500 soldiers who have been sent to their graves and the thousands more who are suffering the physical and mental scars of war. It's also crucial to expose how the war has dangerously overextended the U.S. military, the National Guard and our military reserve units.

Third, we must seize on Bush's greatest vulnerability--the war's astronomical cost, set to surpass $200 billion in the coming weeks. Bush's mounting deficit from reckless war spending is already squeezing out community programs that serve millions.

And fourth, we must expose the hypocrisy of Bush's war of liberation and present viable alternatives to promote genuine democracy and economic sovereignty in Iraq.

Back To Movement Roots

Founded in 2002, UFPJ is the glue that will continue to link 1,400 organizations together around these strategies to oppose Bush's Iraq War and its domestic consequences. Since its inception, this diverse and dynamic coalition has mobilized hundreds of thousands of people through global demonstrations like the 'World Says No to War' actions on Feb. 15, 2003, national actions such as the high-profile protests during the Republican National Convention in August 2004, and hundreds of smaller-scale actions that sustained opposition to this war since 2003.

What's ahead for the peace movement? For our part, UFPJ seeks to expand our base through a sustained education campaign set to launch March 24, the 40th anniversary of the first Vietnam teach-in. Simultaneous teach-ins will kickoff the campaign in Washington D.C., California, and at the site of the first Vietnam teach-in in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Our goal is to generate momentum and infrastructure for a long-term education movement that promotes fresh models for reaching beyond the choir to engage clergy, youth, immigrants and others about the real axis of evil—racism, poverty and war—set forth by Martin Luther King in 1967.

Most importantly, the teach-in campaign will speak to the large slice of the 59 percent of the public who thinks the troops should be brought home but are paralyzed with fear about the consequences for Iraq. Our task is to illustrate the facts--the longer the United States occupies Iraq, the more deadly and costly this war will be.

Coupled with the education campaign is a strategy to highlight the domestic consequence of war in our organizing. Missouri taxpayers, who hosted the UFPJ conference, for example, are on the verge of paying $1.1 billion more to fund the Iraq War once Congress passes Bush's requested $82 billion emergency Iraq supplemental funding package. Missouri’s share of the impending budget bill could be directed, instead, to provide health care to more than 485,000 children in the state. With statistics like this in mind, the assembly backed a plan to partner with allies such as poverty groups, education advocates and health care coalitions who are leading fights to save vital programs that are getting burned by Bush’s skyrocketing deficits and budget cuts. This initiative will link the mushrooming number of local fights to save essential public services and the $1.5 billion-a-week sinkhole of Iraq War funding.

Work On The Ground

UFPJ has set in motion a strategy to hold lawmakers’ feet to the fire for their inertia on this failing war. The coalition is both asking Congress to cut the purse strings for military operations in Iraq and developing a nationally coordinated strategy to pressure Congress and other elected officials to bring the troops home immediately. This multi-year Congressional pressure strategy—which will draw lessons from the Vietnam-era campaign around the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment—seeks to expedite the war's end. The campaign is drawing its strength from grassroots organizing and will link street actions with other types of pressure, like direct advocacy, to make ending the war a practical priority for elected officials. With more than 1,400 local member groups from across the country representing hundreds of thousands of people, UFPJ is an untapped political powerhouse.

This muscle will also be channeled into a state-by-state campaign to halt the use and abuse of the U.S. National Guard in Iraq. Just one week after the conference, on March 1, a total of 49 Vermont towns led the charge by passing resolutions asking their state legislators and congressional delegation to investigate the use of the Vermont National Guard in Iraq. The town hall resolutions also called on the president and Congress to "take steps to withdraw American troops from Iraq." The campaign, spearheaded by Military Families Speak Out, will build on the Cities for Peace resolution model that led to 165 'No War' resolutions by the March 2003 invasion.

This amazing victory in Vermont, which had been in the works for months, will inspire hearings in other state legislatures and city councils toward building the political will to pass resolutions to halt the use of National Guard in Iraq. While the short-term goal is to educate local lawmakers and the public about the unfair treatment of the National Guard, the campaign will also expose the overextension of military personnel and the de facto backdoor draft that funnels low-income youth to serve in disproportionately high numbers.

In the short term, UFPJ will continue to build on what it does best: mobilize. The coalition is supporting a mass protest rally near Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C., on March 19 to coincide with the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion. Military families and veterans' groups are leading the effort to organize a powerful action that honors the memories of more than 50 soldiers from that base who have been killed, while demanding that the president stop sending soldiers and civilians to their graves.

On the anniversary, dozens of groups, under the leadership of the Iraq Pledge of Resistance, will urge the American public to join a campaign of 'civil resistance' to ratchet up the significance and types of actions undertaken to end the war--particularly nonviolent civil disobedience.

Chomsky on Nonviolent Resistance

2005-03-13T01:00:00.000-08:00

I'm back. Anyway, I decided to take a look at Noam Chomsky's blog, and found this:

It has been compelled to accept elections, to accept the defeat of its chosen favorite, to allow Iraqis to write a constitution. The state of the outrageous and illegal economic conditions imposed by the CPA is uncertain. A leading plank of the winning Shi’ite alliance was a timetable for withdrawal of the US-UK forces. Both Washington and London flatly refuse, and the US has already announced that its forces will stay into 2007. The elected leadership is under plenty of pressure to accept what the Wall St Journal calls “vague promises” of eventual withdrawal. But it’s uncertain whether the US can sustain it’s long-term plan to keep Iraq under US military control, by means of a dependable client state.

The main factor that has caused the US to back down is mass non-violent resistance, including huge demonstrations, Sistani fatwas, etc. It should be regarded as a triumph of non-violence, I think. The “insurgents” are not a major problem for US planners. The US has such overwhelming reserves of violence that in that arena it will never have much trouble. But nonviolent resistance is a different matter.

What can we do here? Anything we like: educational programs, protests, demonstrations,....—you name it. I don’t know of any situation exactly like this, though there are others that have some similarity, and they have shown that an organized activist public can impose conditions that power simply cannot ignore. The Vietnam war, though a radically different situation, did once again support that conclusion.

During the past year the US has been compelled to back down step by step from its plans for Iraq.

On leave

2005-02-27T01:32:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

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'

2005-02-26T01:32:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-25T16:57:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-24T15:37:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-23T21:38:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-23T16:33:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-23T16:27:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-20T01:59:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-18T21:38:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-18T03:45:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-18T03:01:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-18T02:48:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-16T23:33:00.000-08:00

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"

2005-02-15T22:30:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-14T21:41:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-14T14:13:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-13T00:56:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-13T00:08:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-12T13:54:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-09T13:33:00.000-08:00

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)

2005-02-07T15:11:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-06T17:18:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

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

The coming fascism

2005-02-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-05T19:06:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-04T20:22:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-04T01:30:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-04T01:24:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-01T22:36:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-01T18:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Anti-war vs. Anti-American

2005-01-31T11:54:00.000-08:00

I have heard many times people who are anti-war being labelled anti-American. Indeed, my fellow travellers and I up here in Canada hear that quite a bit as well. I distinctly remember hearing that a lot when I was in the peace movement during the time leading up to the war in 2003.

Of course, it should be obvious to the objective reader that the failure to make a distinction between anti-American and anti-Bush is a gross intellectual one. I can simultaneously love my country and hate what my government is doing.

I think that there are basically two groups of people who make this kind of comment. The first group are those who say it out of just plain ignorance. They are gullible to right-wing propaganda put out there that one necessary equals the other. Their minds, due to either stupidity or intellectual laziness, are either unable or unwilling to make a distinction between the two. The second group are those who know full well that there is a distinction between the two, but have a vested interest, be it ideological, political, economic, or some combination thereof, to blur the distinction in the minds of the larger public.

I would submit that American's who are opposing the Bush administration's war on Iraq and drive for global empire are in fact exemplifying patriotism in its highest form. Let me use an analogy. Martin Luther King, in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," argued that there is a distinction between just and unjust laws, and that those who engaged in civil disobedience with respect to unjust laws were in fact showing the highest regard for the law, because they are upholding the spirit of truth and justice upon which law is based. Likewise, I would argue that those who oppose the war in Iraq and other US foreign policy decisions are in fact displaying the highest form of patriotism, because they are demanding a higher standard from their national goverment, defending the spirit of America as a beacon of truth and justice, and defending the right to free expression by exercising that right.

Naomi Klein on Iraq and the anti-war movement

2005-01-29T19:34:00.000-08:00

I just came across a great interview with Naomi Klein on Alternet. She talks alot about what she thinks is wrong with the anti-war movement, and where it can go from here, what specific issues it can latch onto:

The great error made during the electoral campaign was that the anti-war movement allowed itself to turn into an anti-Bush movement. So as the logic of anyone-but-Bush set in — and there wasn't a candidate speaking on these issues — the war itself disappeared. What I mean by that is that the reality of war itself disappeared. The truth is that we were talking about Iraq in the past tense — not about what was happening on the ground during the campaign. And indeed, I believe that continues to be true to a scandalous degree, especially what we've just seen in recent months in Iraq. I'm worried that we haven't learned from that mistake yet.

We also need to more clearly focus on policy demands. I have been arguing for a long time that the anti-war movement should turn itself into a pro-democracy movement, i.e., support the demands for democracy in Iraq.

As an aside, I want to make a clear distinction between democracy in Iraq and the elections being held right now because they're not the same. The elections are, in fact, being used as a weapon in Iraq at the moment.

One of our great failures was in January of 2004, when there were a hundred thousand people in the streets in Baghdad demanding direct elections and rejecting the idea of an interim government. We didn't mirror those protests, unlike the time when we had protests around the world opposing the war.

This is just an example to make the point that it's not a question of us deciding what the demands are from here. There are clear demands that are coming out of Iraq. And if we care to listen, we can mirror them and bring them home to where the decisions are being made in Washington, in London, and so on. We haven't done much of that.

What we've really done a lot of is proving ourselves right to have even opposed the war in the first place. And I even sometimes get the sense — in some anti-war circles — that we who oppose the war don't have any responsibility to talk about how to improve the situation in Iraq beyond just advocating pulling out the troops.

She also talks about the issue of Iraq's dept, and how the US is playing that to its advantage:

I agree that there's a profound responsibility not to abandon Iraq. But the presence of troops is not the solution, which is why we need to talk about reparations. What we need to talk about is the fact that so little of the reconstruction money has actually made it to the ground. That money is still owed. The reason why this money was approved was because Americans accepted that as part of the invasion they did owe something to Iraq in terms of the reconstruction. But that money hasn't gone to Iraq's reconstruction, and is an ongoing debt. There are programs that could be developed that could bring real hope to Iraq — that can be a real bulwark against civil war.

One of the ways in which the Kerry campaign was morally bankrupt was that it refused to speak about this issue. Bush and Cheney talked about what was owed to Iraq and talked about the responsibility of not to cut and run.

I have heard people on the left in the U.S. say that we don't owe Iraq anything, that they have oil revenue, that our only responsibility is to just pull out. That is wrong. Our responsibility goes far beyond that. Anybody who says that has really not taken a hard look at the level of devastation of that country.

I also just heard recently from some people who said that they don't want another U.S. taxpayer dollar going to Iraq. Barely any U.S. taxpayer dollars have gone to Iraq. In fact, Iraqi money has gone to U.S. companies because it's the Iraqi oil money that's bankrolled their reconstruction contracts.

What's a specific policy or issue that the anti-war movement could rally around?

For me the easiest issue is debt. The Iraqis should not have to inherit Saddam's debt. This is a very simple issue. Now this is something Bush has said and James Baker has said. And that's why we feel we don't have the right to say it. The truth is that when Bush and Baker say it, they're lying. What they've actually done to Iraq instead is reduce the debt just enough to make sure that Iraqis can repay it. It was at a completely unsustainable level and was never going to be repaid previously so it was restructured — so that they could demand that it be repaid. Then it was attached to an IMF structural adjustment program that makes debt forgiveness contingent on adherence to incredibly damaging and dangerous new economic (free market) policies.

We said nothing about this in the anti-war movement when we should have been demanding total debt erasure. We had a window when Bush was using our language, but instead we responded as if we didn't have any responsibility to do so because he was using that language.

Of course, there are some exceptions. There's this great group called Jubilee Iraq that has been working on these issues. I think that these campaigns — which are working on issues that are real practical solidarity — need to be funded better and get more support.

There's another campaign that's evolving around plans to eliminate the food ration program in Iraq — which is just another brilliant idea. Right now, the whole country receives a food basket, and 60 percent of Iraqis depend on them for basic nutrition. But this program is seen as a relic of state socialism by the neocons in charge. So in the middle of this brutal economic recession in Iraq where 70 percent of the country is unemployed, they're proposing eliminating the main source of nutrition for the country and giving people cash instead so they participate in a market economy.

We need to develop an agenda based on the demands coming from Iraq for reparations, for total debt erasure, for complete control over the oil revenues, for a cancellation of the contracts signed under the occupation, and so on. This is what real sovereignty would look like, real self-determination — we know this.

See the full interview here.

Arundhati Roy: Where from here?

2005-01-29T16:46:00.000-08:00

Arundhati Roy, speaking on the World Social Forum, and where resistance to the US Empire must go from here:

This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we - all of us gathered here and a little way away at Mumbai Resistance - need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an over-arching pre-ordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.

If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project of neo-liberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.

Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the U.S. army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler. And that - after a quarter century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.

So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the U.S. occupation and that we believe that the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?

How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old Killer Ba'athists, are they Islamic Fundamentalists?)

We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.

Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the U.S. government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.

I suggest that at a joint closing ceremony of the World Social Forum and Mumbai Resistance, we choose, by some means, two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire to win.

Read the full speech here.

Iraqi election

2005-01-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

The Iraqi farce of an election is taking place tomorrow, and here are some thoughts from a Common Dreams article by Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood which largely reflect my views:

This is an election that U.S. policymakers were forced to accept and now hope can entrench their power, not displace it. They seek not an election that will lead to a U.S. withdrawal, but one that will bolster their ability to make a case for staying indefinitely.

This is crucial for anti-empire activists to keep in mind as the mainstream media begins to give us pictures of long lines at polling places to show how much Iraqis support this election and to repeat the Bush administration line about bringing freedom to a part of the world starved for democracy. Those media reports also will give some space to those critics who remain comfortably within the permissible ideological limits -- that is, those who agree that the U.S. aim is freedom for Iraq and, therefore, are allowed to quibble with a few minor aspects of administration policy.

The task of activists who step outside those limits is to point out a painfully obvious fact, and therefore one that is unspeakable in the mainstream: A real election cannot go on under foreign occupation in which the electoral process is managed by the occupiers who have clear preferences in the outcome.

That’s why the U.S.-funded programs that “nurture” the voting process have to be implemented “discreetly,” in the words of a Washington Post story, to avoid giving the Iraqis who are “well versed in the region’s widely held perception of U.S. hegemony” further reason to mistrust the assumed benevolent intentions of the United States.

Post reporters Karl Vick and Robin Wright quote an Iraqi-born instructor from one of these training programs: “If you walk into a coffee shop and say, ‘Hi, I’m from an American organization and I’m here to help you,’ that’s not going to help. If you say you’re here to encourage democracy, they say you’re here to control the Middle East.”

Perhaps “they” -- those well-versed Iraqis -- say that because it is an accurate assessment of policy in the Bush administration, as well as every other contemporary U.S. administration. “They” dare to suggest that the U.S. goal is effective control over the region’s oil resources. But “we” in the United States are not supposed to think, let alone say, such things; that same Post story asserts, without a hint of sarcasm, that the groups offering political training in Iraq (the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, International Republican Institute, and International Foundation for Election Systems) are “at the ambitious heart of the American effort to make Iraq a model democracy in the Arab world.”

Be still my heart. To fulfill that ambition, U.S. troop strength in Iraq will remain at the current level of about 120,000 for at least two more years, according to the Army’s top operations officer. For the past two years, journalists have reported about U.S. intentions to establish anywhere from four to 14 “enduring” military bases in Iraq. Given that there are about 890 U.S. military installations around the world to provide the capacity to project power in service of the U.S. political and economic agenda, it’s not hard to imagine that planners might be interested in bases in the heart of the world’s most important energy-producing region.

Read the full article here.

"We've Been Taken Over by a Cult" -- Hersh

2005-01-29T14:19:00.000-08:00

Read the transcript of this speech by Seymour Hersh. Here are a couple of excerpts:

About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he’s doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don’t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren’t voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.

It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can’t begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. “They did it to us. We’ve got to do it to them.” That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our government exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with.

and...

On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.

We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, “Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it,” as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, “well, we don't do torture.” We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what’s happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven “bad seeds”, enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They’ve gotten away with it.

Kennedy: Fascist America

2005-01-28T20:52:00.000-08:00

Hi, I'm back. I have a new computer. Yay! Anyway, a few days ago, there was an article that pointed out that Robert Kennedy Junior in his book released last year called "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy" observed that the US is becoming a fascist state:

In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis.

"While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business," he writes. "My American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as 'a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.' Sound familiar?"

He quotes Hitler's propaganda chief Herman Goerring: "It is always simply a matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Kennedy then adds: "The White House has clearly grasped the lesson."

Kennedy also quotes Benito Mussolini's insight that "fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

"The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power," Kennedy told us. "There is vogue in the White House to talk about the threat of big government. But since the beginning of our national history, our most visionary political leaders have warned the American public against the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now. Because so much corporate money is going into politics, the Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball. They just quash discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power on American democracy."

An Appeal to Global Conscience

2005-01-22T14:43:00.000-08:00

An Appeal to Global Conscience

Posted January 15, 2005.

An appeal to the peace and justice movement, calling for a long-term strategy for undermining the foundations of war. We appeal to all peace and justice movements to stand together as a conscience of the world against the Bush administration’s bloody occupation of Iraq and drive towards an American Empire. We may be in for a long war.

We who stand for democracy in the United States should continue and widen our protests especially at local community levels to:

oppose further Congressional funding for war and occupation;

develop public support for military withdrawal;

support local referendums on withdrawal and peace candidates in 2006 and 2008;

build non-partisan peace alliances across all party lines, from left to right;

support dissenting combat veterans, reservists and their families;

call for boycotts and termination of profiteering from war and occupation by American corporations in Iraq;

transition from fossil fuel dependency to renewable resources, conservation and energy efficiency.

A global behemoth can only be fought through global resistance, locally based. We express gratitude to the global peace movement for activating world opinion against collaboration with the U.S. occupation, and call for further efforts, including:

support for asylum in Canada and other nations for U.S. soldiers who refuse for reasons of conscience to fight in occupied Iraq;

demonstrations and political mobilizations in Europe and Latin America against President Bush’s frustrated search for “willing” allies;

continued efforts to force the withdrawal of British, Italian and other foreign troops from the occupation;

opposition to European participation in military training of Iraqi troops for an illegitimate U.S.-dominated regime.

Together we can undermine the foundations of war and occupation, make it impossible for the American government to continue its course, and begin to plant the pillars of peace.

The time has come to recognize that the U.S. occupation is the principal cause of the violent insurgency and growing civil war. We disagree with those who, while admitting that that the war was a mistake based on fabricated evidence, nevertheless claim it would be a bigger mistake to end the occupation and withdraw. We ask the question raised decades ago during another unwinnable war: who can justify sending more Americans to be the last to die for a mistake?

Over 40 million Americans already say we should withdraw from this war. These are not uncaring isolationists, but Americans who know better than to kill and die for a mistake, to throw good money after bad, and to ruin what is left of our good name in the world.

These tens of millions of Americans are completely unrepresented in the political process and media discussion. It is time that their frustration, and that of the majority who consider the war a mistake, be met with more than cowardly silence in the halls of power.

To those who say the war must continue three, five or 10 more years, we demand to know what will be left of the Iraq they claim to be saving? What loss in American and Iraqi lives, what cost in dollars wasted, what level of anti-American hatred in the world, are they willing to bear?

To those who consider the war a mistake but still fear the consequences of military withdrawal, we ask these questions: when will enough be enough? If not now, when?

We further believe the struggle to stop the occupation of Iraq is a first and essential step to unite forces against the U.S. government’s current political designs for global dominance. We oppose any ambitions to create an empire dominated by the United States or global networks of capitalism. Nor do we believe that the issue of terrorism can be addressed by permanent war, increased secrecy and suspensions of democratic liberties, but principally through an all-out effort to bring hope to two billion people now festering in humiliation and poverty.

We stand with those who believe in the reality of a multi-polar and multi-cultural world, and especially with those who believe "another world is possible" through social movements fighting for enforceable standards of human rights, fair trade, social justice and environmental protection, and for new institutions that foster a just distribution of global wealth and power and respect for the dignity of the human spirit. The challenge for us all is to imagine, strive for, and begin to live a better life beyond Empire altogether.

TOM HAYDEN (drafter)
IRA ARLOOK
ANTHONY ARNOVE
REV. ED BACON, rector, All Saints Church, Pasadena
GIOCONDA BELLI, poet and author
MEDEA BENJAMIN, Global Exchange
LARRY BENSKY, Pacifica Radio
NORMAN BIRNBAUM, author
REV. RICHARD BUNCE, Progressive Christians Uniting
LESLIE CAGAN, United for Peace and Justice
TIM CARPENTER, Progressive Democrats of America
JEFF COHEN, media critic
REV. JAMES CONN, United Methodist Urban Ministry
DAVID CORTWRIGHT
HARVEY COX, professor, Harvard Divinity School
PETER DREIER, professor, director, Urban and Environmental Studies, Occidental College
JODIE EVANS, Code Pink
CHELLIS GLENDENNING, psychologist, author
ROBERT GOTTLIEB, professor, UEPI, Occidental College
ROBERT GREENWALD, filmmaker
RICHARD FALK, professor, global studies, UC Santa Barbara
RABBI STEVEN JACOBS, Temple Kol Tikva
MIMI KENNEDY, actress
REV. PETER LAARMAN, director, Progressive Christians Uniting
SAUL LANDAU, author, professor, CSU Pomona
ROBERT J. LIFTON, Harvard Seminar on Mass Violence
STAUGHTON LYND, historian
ANURADHA MITTAL, founder, Oakland Institute
SARAH PILLSBURY, producer
LUIS RODRIGUEZ, author
JOAN SEKLER, filmmaker
RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW, Shalom Institute
LEONARD WEINGLASS, attorney
PAULA WEINSTEIN, producer
GAIL ZAPPA
HOWARD ZINN, historian

Amnesty International letter to Bush

2005-01-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

Amnesty International has sent a letter to President Bush on the event of his inauguration. Bush has been proclaiming a respect for human rights and the rule of law. Amnesty is pointing out that his own government and military has been responsible for numerous human rights violations, and outlines the government orders that have been behind these abuses:

The struggle against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment requires a government’s one hundred per cent commitment and constant vigilance. It requires stringent adherence to safeguards and an absolute rejection of loopholes. It demands a policy of zero tolerance. Mr President, your administration has manifestly failed in this regard. At best, it set the conditions for torture and ill-treatment by lowering safeguards and failing to respond adequately to allegations of abuse raised by Amnesty International and others from early on in the "war on terror". At worst, it has authorized interrogation techniques and detainee transfers which have flouted the country’s international obligation to reject torture and ill-treatment under any circumstances and at all times.

Amnesty International takes this opportunity to list some of the detention or interrogation techniques that are alleged to have been authorized or used by the USA during the "war on terror". Some of the techniques appear to have been tailored to specific cultural or religious sensitivities of the detainees, thereby introducing a discriminatory element to the abuse. Neither gender nor age has offered protection. Children, the elderly, women and men are reported to have been among the subjects of torture or ill-treatment. The following list does not claim to be exhaustive:

Abduction
Death threats
Dietary manipulation
Dogs used to threaten and intimidate
Dousing in cold water
Electric shocks, threats of electric shocks
Excessive and cruel use of shackles and handcuffs, including "short shackling"
Excessive or humiliating use of strip searches
Exposure to weather and temperature extremes
"False flag", ie making a detainee think his interrogators are not US agents
Forced shaving, ie of head, body or facial hair
Forcible injections
Forced physical exercise
Hooding and blindfolding
Humiliation, eg forced crawling, forced to make animal noises, etc.
Immersion in water to induce perception of drowning
Incommunicado detention
Induced perception of suffocation or asyphxiation
Isolation for prolonged periods, eg months or more than a year
Light deprivation
Loud music, noise, yelling
Photography as humiliation
Physical assault, eg beating, punching, kicking
Prolonged interrogations, eg 20 hours
Racial and religious taunts, humiliation
Religious intolerance, eg disrespect for Koran, religious rituals
Secret detention
Sensory deprivation
Sexual humiliation
Sexual assault
Sleep adjustment
Sleep deprivation
Stress positions, eg prolonged forced kneeling and standing
Stripping
Strobe lighting
Threats of reprisals against relatives
Threat of transfer to third country to inspire fear of torture or death
Threat of transfer to Guantánamo
Threats of torture or ill-treatment
Twenty-four hour lighting
Withdrawal of "comfort items"
Withholding of medication
Withholding of food and water
Withholding of toilet facilities, leading to defecation and urination in clothing

As the Pentagon’s April 2003 Working Group report states, interrogation techniques are "usually used in combination". This can be illustrated by the recently revealed observations of FBI agents in Guantánamo. One reported seeing a detainee "sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing". Another wrote:
"On a couple of occassions (sic), I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated (sic) on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occassion (sic), the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs what was going on , I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occassion (sic), the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occassion (sic), not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor".

Secretary Rumsfeld authorized interrogation techniques including stripping, environmental manipulation, sensory deprivation, stress positions, isolation, hooding, and the use of dogs to inspire fear. A number of detainees have alleged that they were subjected to such treatment in Guantánamo. An FBI agent also tells of having witnessed the use of a dog to intimidate a Guantánamo detainee, who was also subjected to three months of isolation in cell with 24-hour illumination. The detainee was later witnessed to be displaying conduct "consistent with extreme psychological trauma. Secretary Rumsfeld has also admitted to authorizing the exclusion of at least one detainee in Iraq from any prison register. Amnesty International has yet to see a satisfactory explanation of what appears to have been Secretary Rumsfeld’s participation in a "disappearance", which is a crime under international law.

Mr President, Amnesty International also notes that on 17 September 2001 you reportedly signed a Memorandum of Notification granting "exceptional authorities" to the CIA in the "war on terror". Amnesty International is further concerned by reports that you authorized the CIA to set up secret detention facilities outside the USA and to use harsh interrogation techniques. As noted further below, it appears that you have granted an exemption to the CIA and other non-military personnel from a 7 February 2002 directive stating that detainees in US custody would be treated humanely. If so, the ultimate responsibility for any resulting torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment would lie squarely at your door. In addition, an FBI agent’s email sent from Iraq, recently made public, refers to an Executive Order signed by you which authorizes interrogation techniques which should be considered contrary to international law and standards. Amnesty International is aware that the administration has denied the existence of such an order.

The problem with such rebuttals is that previous denials have been shown to be inaccurate. The stock response of US officials during the "war on terror" to allegations of torture or ill-treatment – namely that all detainees in US custody are treated humanely and with respect for human dignity – can now be seen either to have been a stock falsehood or else an indication that your administration’s view of what constitutes humane treatment and respect for human dignity differs markedly from wider understandings of such terminology. With this in mind, the following assertion may be instructive:

"Of course, our values as a Nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment" (emphasis added).

No detainee can fall outside the prohibition on torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. To suggest otherwise, as this line does, points to a serious gap in a government’s understanding of international law and indicates that it views fundamental human rights as privileges that can be granted, and therefore taken away, by the state. The sentence in question was in your memorandum, dated 7 February 2002, classified as secret for 10 years, and distributed to the main office-holders in your administration.

At the 22 June 2004 press briefing at which a selection of administration documents was made public, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales referred to your 7 February 2002 memorandum as the "most important" from among them. He repeated aloud to the assembled media your central holding – that the USA would treat detainees humanely, "including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment" – without any apparent recognition of the disturbing message contained in it. Earlier this month, Judge Gonzales’ responses to questions from Senators as your nominee for the post of Attorney General left a similarly troubling impression. Two examples will suffice:
Senator Patrick Leahy: "Do you think that other world leaders would have authority to authorize the torture of US citizens, if they deemed it necessary for their national security?"

Judge Gonzales: "Senator, I don’t know what laws other world leaders would be bound by… I’m not in a position to answer that question".

Senator Richard Durbin: "Can US personnel legally engage in torture under any circumstances?... Of course that would include military as well as intelligence personnel or others who are under the auspices of our government".

Judge Gonzales: "I don’t believe so, but I’d want to get back to you on that and make sure I don’t provide a misleading answer."

As with your 7 February 2002 memorandum, Judge Gonzales’ inability to respond with an immediate and simple "no" to either of the above questions fuels concern that your administration’s commitment to the international prohibition on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment remains less than absolute. Amnesty International urges you to withdraw the 7 February 2002 memorandum and to replace it with an unequivocal public directive against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It must contain this full-spectrum phrase and not be limited to torture alone. The directive must apply to all officials, all agencies and all circumstances, including international detainee transfers. For example, as Amnesty International pointed out in its October 2004 report (see below), the existing memorandum only applies to the US Armed Forces – it did not include the CIA or those working with them, and omitted any reference to persons "rendered" to states that use torture for interrogation. In his just-released written responses to questions from Senators at his nomination hearing, Judge Gonzales has reportedly confirmed that officers of the CIA and other non-military personnel are outside the bounds of your 7 February 2002 memorandum.

Your administration recently replaced the now notorious 1 August 2002 memorandum on torture from the Justice Department to the White House Counsel. This had reportedly been drafted following a request by the CIA for legal protections for its interrogators engaged in the "war on terror". Its contents were shocking, and presumably would still represent the administration’s position if it had not been forced to reassess it by the furore that accompanied its leaking and subsequent official release. The 1 August 2002 memorandum drew, inter alia, the following three erroneous conclusions:
that interrogators could cause a great deal of pain before crossing the threshold to torture. Specifically, it suggested that torture would only occur if the pain caused rose to the level "that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions";
that even though US law makes it a criminal offence for anyone in an official position to commit or attempt to commit torture against a detainee outside the USA, and even though the USA has ratified treaties prohibiting torture, the US President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief could override these laws;
even if interrogators were prosecuted for torture, there were defences available to them by which they could escape criminal liability, such as "necessity" or "self-defence".
At his nomination hearing earlier this month, the White House Counsel stated that the 1 August 2002 memorandum "represented the position of the executive branch at the time it was issued", and presumably this remained the case for the next two years.
The revised version of the 1 August 2002 memorandum, dated 30 December 2004, is undeniably an improvement on its infamous predecessor, and Amnesty International broadly welcomes it as far as it goes. It nevertheless leaves a number of questions unanswered. For example, although it says that it "supersedes the August 2002 Memorandum in its entirety", it sidesteps the question of the President’s Commander-in-Chief power to authorize torture and immunize a US agent from criminal liability for torture. The new memorandum claims that an analysis of this issue is "unnecessary" as you have directed that US personnel will not engage in torture. The 30 December 2004 memorandum gives as an example of this "unequivocal directive" your June 2004 statement against torture quoted at the beginning of this letter. Yet as already pointed out, you made a similarly unequivocal statement asserting the USA’s leadership of the struggle against torture in June 2003, at a time when the then still secret August 2002 memorandum presumably "represented the position of the executive branch". To coin a phrase, one is either against torture or, de facto, one is for it. One cannot have it one way in public and one way in private. Your statements against torture and ill-treatment must be unambiguous, consistent, and matched by actions.

In any event, the spirit of the August 2002 memorandum lives on. Much of it is repeated in the April 2003 final report of the Pentagon’s Working Group on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism. For example, the latter states that "[i]n order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, [the US law prohibiting torture]... must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority". The Working Group report is believed to remain in force, and its recommendations were adopted by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, whose memorandum of 16 April 2003 doe not rule out any interrogation method that goes beyond those promoted in the report, as long as he authorizes it personally on a case-by-case basis. Amnesty International urges you to ensure that the Working Group report is also withdrawn.

Amnesty also recommends that the Bush administration adopt a 12 point plan to prevent torture. In summary, they are:

1. Condemn torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
2. Ensure access to prisoners
3. No secret detention
4. Provide safeguards during detention and interrogation
5. Prohibit torture in law
6. Investigate
7. Prosecute
8. No use of statements extracted under torture
9. Provide effective training
10. Provide reparation
11. Ratify international treaties
12. Exercise international responsibility

If the Bush administration does nothing else, could they at least pay head to this long-standing nonpartisan nonideological international human rights organization that is beyond disrepute, and promptly implement its recommendations?

Anti-inauguration protests

2005-01-21T01:59:00.000-08:00

The inauguration of Gerore Bush for a second term is nopthing to celebrate. He is the worst president ever, a man who has lied to his people, and is responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocents. That said, it is good to hear that there were numerous protests in Washington, DC, in response to the Bush inauguration.

Jonathan Schell on torture

2005-01-21T01:48:00.000-08:00

Here is Jonathan Schell, in an article that will appear in The Nation, on why torture is wrong:

Torture is not wrong because someone else thinks it is wrong or because others, in retaliation for torture by Americans, may torture Americans. It is the torture that is wrong. Torture is wrong because it inflicts unspeakable pain upon the body of a fellow human being who is entirely at our mercy. The tortured person is bound and helpless. The torturer stands over him with his instruments. There is no question of "unilateral disarmament," because the victim bears no arms, lacking even the use of the two arms he was born with. The inequality is total. To abuse or kill a person in such a circumstance is as radical a denial of common humanity as is possible. It is repugnant to learn that one's country's military forces are engaging in torture. It is worse to learn that the torture is widespread. It is worse still to learn that the torture was rationalized and sanctioned in long memorandums written by people at the highest level of the government. But worst of all would be ratification of this record by a vote to confirm one of its chief authors to the highest legal office in the executive branch of the government.

Torture destroys the soul of the torturer even as it destroys the body of his victim. The boundary between humane treatment of prisoners and torture is perhaps the clearest boundary in existence between civilization and barbarism. Whether the elected representatives of the people of the United States are now ready to cross that line is the deepest question before the Senate as it votes on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales.

Pentagon may infilitrate Iranian rebel group

2005-01-20T01:22:00.000-08:00

Here is more evidence, revealed in a Guardian article, that the US has its sights set on Iran. Read this excerpt:

Lawrence DiRita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday: "Mr Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed."

However, the Guardian has learned the Pentagon was recently contemplating the infiltration of members of the Iranian rebel group, Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) over the Iraq-Iran border, to collect intelligence. The group, based at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad, was under the protection of Saddam Hussein, and is under US guard while Washington decides on its strategy.

The MEK has been declared a terrorist group by the state department, but a former Farsi-speaking CIA officer said he had been asked by neo-conservatives in the Pentagon to travel to Iraq to oversee "MEK cross-border operations". He refused, and does not know if those operations have begun.

"They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from the Reagan and Iran-contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside the government to write up policy papers on Iran," the former officer said.

He said the policy discussion was being overseen by Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defence for policy who was one of the principal advocates of the Iraq war. The Pentagon did not return calls for comment on the issue yesterday. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Mr Feith's Office of Special Plans also used like-minded experts on contract from outside the government, to serve as consultants helping the Pentagon counter the more cautious positions of the state department and the CIA.

Crazy

"They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the facilities and destabilise the government. They believe they can get rid of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans, all the world's problems are solved. I think it's delusional," the former CIA officer said.

conscientious objectors

2005-01-17T13:17:00.000-08:00

I think conscientious objectors are great. I would like it even better if there were no wars for them to dissent from in the first place. That said, I am grateful to them for the stand that they make. I think they add a unique character to the peace movement.
There are a couple of conscientious objectors, Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, applying for refugee status up here in Canada right now. Prime Minister Paul Martin has said that his government is willing to accept conscientious objectors.

Jeremy and Brandon both have websitges to which you can go, learn more about their reasons, and offer support. I would strongly encourage you to check them out.

Seymour Hersh: Iran's next

2005-01-17T11:24:00.000-08:00

Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article is on the web now. Here are a few excerpts:

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

and...

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.

Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.

and...

The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

finally...

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”

US operatives in Iran

2005-01-16T18:52:00.000-08:00

Seymour Hersh has reported that US operatives have been in Iran, collecting information on nuclear weapons sites for the purpose of targeting them. I will post the original Hersh article when it is available.

Recalling a 'Drum Major for Peace'

2005-01-16T16:54:00.000-08:00

From Common Dreams:

Published on Sunday, January 16, 2005 by New York Newsday (Long Island)
Recalling 'A Drum Major for Peace'
by Les Payne

The birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. is a fine time to weigh the cost of war.

His worst detractors all this time later still judge him a man of peace. His nonviolent war-mongering at home saw him opposing most wars waged abroad. King especially opposed those wars of suppression so favored by the techno-military complex that came into flower after Korea. These usually featured a hand-off from a European colonial power that swore the enemy was trapped at home and ripe for U.S. plucking.

The Vietnamese were a bitter fruit, more dangerous than America had imagined. King came out against the war in 1967 not because the United States could not win but because it was not her war to fight. The cost was too high at home.

Even King's closest aides during the Jim Crow wars missed his hankering for a campaign broader still. Some claimed it was the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize that turned King's head toward the Vietnam War. I doubt it. Like most such August awards, the Swedish medallion has a record of banking more fires than it lights.

What mountains left to conquer could still tempt the middle-aged over-achievers who customarily win the Nobel?

In King's case, the unsuspected laureate, who won the prize at 35, had many more arrows in his quiver. His rights agenda was graduated to the Vietnam War, I suspect, more by the young Turks gobbling up the civil-rights turf he had dominated for a decade. And then there was Malcolm X, the acerbic, avenging angel, thumbing through King's dossier and noting contradictions. "How can you be nonviolent in Mississippi," Malcolm charged black men under King's swoon, "as violent as you were in Korea?" He chided them for bleeding "when the white man says bleed," but when it came to defending blacks' rights at home, "you haven't got any blood."

King was increasingly confronted with watered-down versions of Malcolm's sharp critique. At any rate, King's riveting April, 1967, speech at the Riverside Church in Manhattan, came out forthrightly against the Vietnam War.

Criticism of his dramatic anti-war stance was acidic and relentless, and it issued from friends and foes alike. Much of it was condescending, critics demanding to know what right did a black civil-rights leader have to question U.S. foreign policy on matters of war. This, despite the disproportionate number of African-Americans who were dying in the highlands and rice patties of Vietnam.

One of the sharpest critiques came from Carl Rowan, who had covered King's campaign in the South. The former chief of U.S. information agencies, Rowan was something of a former-day Armstrong Williams - that is, a dagger hired to draw black blood. In his column, Rowan accused King of caring little about blacks or the Vietnamese and, in a Reader's Digest piece, he said King was laboring under the influence of Communists.

King stuck to his anti-war guns to the end. But his chief legacy was ridding the nation its Jim Crow laws. The white majority, he maintained, deprived blacks of their liberty, happiness and - all too often - their lives, by cracking heads, drafting laws and shutting Negroes out of the economy. This tyranny of the majority had declared a needless war in Vietnam and was sending black men to fight it who did not share equal rights at home.

As President George W. Bush imposes his brand of democracy upon Iraq, this tyranny of the majority is raising its head as a threat to the Sunni minority. Under the U.S.-imposed electoral system, the Sunni minority has expressed grave concerns about what would happen to their rights and quality of life under an almost certain victory at the polls for the 60-percent Shiite majority. It does not help matters, of course, that as head of the Sunni minority, Saddam Hussein cracked down murderously on the Shia majority in his quarter-century in power.

Were he alive, King would likely oppose the war. The unwillingness of the United States to learn from the mistakes of Vietnam he might find quite baffling; that is, until he discovers what little contact the draft evaders who planned the Iraq invasion actually had with that earlier war.

Though we observe King's birthday, it would do well to recall the words he left us about his legacy: "If any of you are around when I meet that day, I don't want a long funeral. If you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Prize, that isn't important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards. . . . I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King tried to give his life helping others. I want you to say that I tried to be right on the war question. . . .

"Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice, that I was a drum major for peace."

Martin Luther King Day (US)

2005-01-16T01:27:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King was a pivotal influence in my life. Yeah, I know, I never met the man. However, when I was goin g through a period of intellectual transformation toward the progressive side, I read a biography of MLK, and it resounded within me on a very deep level. I think he is still relevant today, and more than ever, in these dangerous times whithin which we live, we must recall his messages of justice, especially is lesser known anti-war message. Here is an article form Paul Rockwell on Alternet, in its entirety.

More Than a Dreamer

By Paul Rockwell, AlterNet. Posted January 15, 2005.

Dr. Martin Luther King's oft-quoted "I have a dream" speech was not about far-off visions, it was a call to action. Every year, millions of Americans pay tribute to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King. We often forget, however, that King was the object of derision when he was alive. At key moments in his quest for civil rights and world peace, the corporate media treated King with hostility. Dr. King's march for open housing in Chicago, when the civil rights movement entered the North, caused a negative, you've-gone-too-far reaction in the Northern press. And Dr. King's stand on peace and international law, especially his support for the self-determination of third world peoples, caused an outcry and backlash in the predominantly white press.

In his prophetic anti-war speech at Riverside Church in 1967 (recorded and filmed for posterity but rarely quoted in today's press), King emphasized four points: 1) that American militarism would destroy the war on poverty; 2) that American jingoism breeds violence, despair, and contempt for law within the United States; 3) the use of people of color to fight against people of color abroad is a "cruel manipulation of the poor"; 4) human rights should be measured by one yardstick everywhere.

The Washington Post denounced King's anti-war position, and said King was "irresponsible." In an editorial entitled "Dr. King's error," The New York Times chastised King for going beyond the allotted domain of black leaders – civil rights. TIME called King's anti-war stand "demogogic slander ... a script for Radio Hanoi." The media responses to Dr. King's calls for peace were so venomous that King's two recent biographers – Stephen Oates and David Garrow – devoted whole chapters to the media blitz against King's internationalism.

Dr. King may be an icon within the media today, but there is still something upsetting about the way his birthday is observed. Four words – "I have a dream" – are often parrotted out of context every January 15th.

King, however, was not a dreamer – at least not the teary-eyed, mystic projected in the media. True, he was a visionary, but he specialized in applied ethics. He even called himself "a drum major for justice," and his mission, as he described it, was, "to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed." In fact, the oft-quoted "I have a dream" speech was not about far-off visions. In his speech in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963, Dr. King confronted the poverty, injustice, and "nightmare conditions" of American cities. In its totality, the "I have a dream" speech was about the right of oppressed and poor Americans to cash their promissary note in our time. It was a call to action.

In 1986, Jesse Jackson wrote an essay on how Americans can protect the legacy of Dr. King. Jackson's essay on the trivialization, distortion and emasculation of King's memory is one of the clearest, most relevant appreciations in print of Dr. King's work. Jackson wrote: "We must resist this the media's weak and anemic memory of a great man. To think of Dr. King only as a dreamer is to do injustice to his memory and to the dream itself. Why is it that so many politicians today want to emphasize that King was a dreamer? Is it because they want us to believe that his dreams have become reality, and that therefore, we should celebrate rather than continue to fight? There is a struggle today to preserve the substance and the integrity of Dr. King's legacy."

Today, the media often ignores the range and breadth of King's teachings. His speeches – on economlc justice, on our potential to end poverty, on the power of organized mass action, his criticism of the hostile media, his opposition to U.S. imperialism (a word he dared to use) – are rarely quoted, much less discussed with understanding. In fact, successors to Dr. King who raise the same concerns today are again treated with sneers, and their "ulterior motives" are questioned. A genuine appreciation of Dr. King requires respect for the totality of his work and an ongoing commitment to struggle for peace and justice today.

Paul Rockwell, formerly assistant professor of philsophy at Midwestern University, is a writer who lives in Oakland, California.

Here also is King's "Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam," presented by King in 1967.

WMD lies

2005-01-14T20:19:00.000-08:00

George W.Bush awarded Geroge Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom. According to Randy Scholield in Common Dreams, the person who really should have received it was Scott Ritter, the former chief UN weapons inspector who was sayiikng all along that there were no WMDs in Iraq:

He was adamant: Saddam Hussein had no WMDs -- at least none of any consequence or that posed an imminent danger to the United States. Certainly nothing that would warrant a rushed invasion. "We can't go to war based on rhetoric and speculation," he told the crowd. "We'd better make sure there is a threat out there worth fighting."

He argued that 90 percent to 95 percent of Saddam's WMDs had been dismantled by the U.N. inspection team in which he served from 1991 to 1998. And that Saddam was otherwise well-contained by U.S. forces.

Now we know: He was right.

You've probably heard that the Bush administration this week quietly called off the weapons search.

There aren't any WMD stockpiles. As in none. Zip. And, no, they weren't moved to Syria.

The weapons didn't exist.

And thusly, the US has closed down its search for WMDs after two years of futile "searhing.". Not only that, but misleading the American people is a serious offense. By doing so in claiming that Iraq had WMDs, he committted a criminal offense. Matthew Good said that at minimum, Bush should be impeached, and at best, he should be tried for war crimes.

Frank McKenna

2005-01-11T15:45:00.000-08:00

I remember Frank McKenna from the 80s. I was a teenage, and he was the New Brunswick Liberal leader who swept New Brunswick, literally. No seats for the opposition. He was so impressive in the way he carried himself. Though he was the Liberal leader, he did not appear beholden to the federal leader of the time by grovelling and so forth.

Well, after being out of political for quite a few years, he's back in the headlines, as Canada's new Ambassador to the United States.. Upon first hearing thijsx, I thought, well, OK. That should be a good choice, with his reputation for integrity. Problem is, it has surfaced that he has connections with the Carlyle Group. For those who don't know, the Carlyle Group is a US investment firm controlled by a number of Republicans, including James Baker III, and US Ambassador to Canada James Carlucci. Furhtermore, they are a key member of the US military-industrial complex that has put considerable money into the companies that are complicit in the war on Iraq. This all clearly places McKenna in a conflict of interest.

So, Frank McKenna is our new Ambassador to the US. His connections to Carlyle don't mean necessarily that he will be a bad ambassador, or that we shouldn't give him the opportunity to display his impartiality. However, it does mean that we should watch him very closely.

Abbas wins election

2005-01-10T11:01:00.000-08:00

I think that this is hopefully good news, Mahmoud Abbas winning the Palestinian election. He obviously has developed a following amongst rank and file Palestinians. He has spoken out against violence, and wants to resume negotiations with Israel for the creation of a Palestinian state. Of course, the line from the Israelis and the US conservatives is "now, without Arafat, there's a better chance for peace." Maybe, maybe not. But what I can tell you is that peace is completely up to the Israelis. They need to admit that the creation of a Palestinian state is necessary for peace, because it is. And a fair deal, one that gives the Palestinians real power. Arafat was right to reject the Clinton-Barak deal in 2000, because it left the Israeli's in control of many of the resources and services. Let us hope that Abbas, while rightfully opposing violence, stands firm on the principle of a Palestinian state, and that Sharon recognizes that the only solution is a completely autonomous Palestinian state.

Tsunami

2005-01-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

Well, close too about 200,000 are probably dead from the tsunami in Asia by now, and god knows how many more will fall from disease or other afteraffests. I can't imagine what the folks over there are going through.

There are benefit concerts coming up in Vancouver and Calgary, with funds going to different aid groups. Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, Chantal Kraviavchuk, Raine Maida, Bruce Cockburn, Tom Cochrane, Barenaked Ladies and others will be there.

To donate, please give to one or more of the following organizations:
Red Cross
Oxfam
Doctors Without Borders
CARE
UNICEF

Alberto "what Geneva Convention?" Gonzales

2005-01-06T10:53:00.000-08:00

From WorkingForChange.com, on the comfirmation process for US Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales:

Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
01.05.05

Backing Gonzales is backing torture
Is there bipartisan congressional support for torture?

Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee begins hearings on the confirmation of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales as the next attorney general of the United States. At stake is whether Congress wants to conveniently absolve Gonzales of his clear attempt to have the president subvert U.S. law in order to whitewash barbaric practices performed by U.S. interrogators in the name of national security.
Gonzales ignored the objections of State Department and military lawyers to strongly endorse the determination of Justice Department lawyers that neither the Geneva Convention nor corresponding U.S. laws on prisoner protections should be applied in the "war on terror."

"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," Gonzales wrote in a legal memo to President Bush on Jan. 25, 2002. Declaring the war-on-terror prisoners exempt from the Geneva Convention, he argued, "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."

Acting like a sleazy attorney advising a client on how not to be convicted of an ongoing crime, Gonzales was apparently not worried about irrational foreign courts or high-minded jurists in The Hague, but rather U.S. prosecutors who might enforce federal laws that ban torture of foreign prisoners of war. Indeed, Gonzales made the case for a legal end run around the 1996 War Crimes Act, which mandates criminal penalties, including the death sentence, for any U.S. military or other personnel who engage in crimes of torture.

"It is difficult to predict the motives of [U.S.] prosecutors and [U.S.] independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441" of the act, Gonzales wrote. "Your determination [that Geneva protections are not applicable] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."

In light of what we have learned since about the rationalization and use of torture by U.S. interrogators over the last three years, it is difficult to ignore the possibility that Gonzales already had knowledge that such violations had occurred and expected more.

Read the full article here.

true patriotism

2005-01-03T14:25:00.000-08:00

"The most un-American acts have never been committed by radicals, but by those anxious critics who have attempted to stigmatize and suppress them. And those people were always sure to call themselves patriots." -- Richard Bradley, in Sizing Up Sontag

Stephen's Peace and Human Rights Blog

this is an archive

referral

The fix was in

more links

Editors come to senses

links for Downing Street Memo

The Downing Stree Memo: Impeach Bush

Vacalv Havel on Nonviolence (1986)

AI attacked by the Bushies

Torture's Dirty Secret: It Works

starting a new blog

Bono after Martin for backing down on.7%

Bolton nomination in jeopardy

Carl Ford on John Bolton

Disaster Capitalism

John Bolton on the UN

Thoughts on Zahra Kazemi

Because the Bible Tells Me So

War Resisters

The Hypocrisy of Natan Sharansky

Disparity in Wealth

Reinstating the Draft?

The Pope Has Died

Amnesty International Criticizes US Report

Zahra Kazemi

Child Hunger in Iraq; The State of the Planet

Interview with Scott Ritter

Nationl Defense Strategy

"Looking South"

Ten questions for Canadians: my response

The legacy of George Kennan

back in a few

Chalmers Johnson on US-China-Taiwan relations

Crying Wolfowitz

Top 10 Reasons Why Paul Wolfowitz Would Make a Good World Bank Presiden

Defending Arabs and Muslims

Bob Geldof: Africa has become a living wound

Chinese anti-secession law

More on Bolton

John Bolton

teach-ins

Chomsky on Nonviolent Resistance

On leave

Amnesty International founder dies

Paul Martin says 'No'

Counter-recruitment in New York City

Letter from Ralph Nader

Scott Ritter on nuclear proliferation

Bush in Europe

Hunter S. Thompson

Israel fails moral test

US continues to oppose ICC for Darfur

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

Shelter Under the Anti-war Umbrella

John Negroponte

Democracy According to Elliot Abrams

The US Constitution is Godless

Arthur Miller: Why I Wrote "The Crucible"

Bill Maher

Nuclear Industry Rejuvenation

The Four Freedoms

Make Poverty History

MLK: Revolution of Values

Christian Fascism in America

peace talks

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

will vote for food; Woolsey

PNAC at it again

Bush speech critique

The coming fascism

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

Gorbachev on the Iraqi elections

Rumsfeld faces war crimes arrest in Germany

The Future of Iraq and US Occupation

Bush's speech

US urged to support ICC for Dafur's sake

UN report on Sudan

Anti-war vs. Anti-American

Naomi Klein on Iraq and the anti-war movement