original
Mar 24, 2006, 07:57
Almost any debate about the problems facing the United States and its faltering government centers on truth - or the lack of it.
Truth is an unneeded commodity in the political system that defines the American government.
Even worse, truth may be a lost cause in American society.
Pollsters often ask Americans if they tell the truth. Assuming they are telling the truth in their answers (and that's a big assumption), Americans admit lying as a natural course of life.
More than half admit lying on employment applications as well as cheating on their income taxes. Sixty-four percent of American men admit cheating on their wives while 53 percent of American women say they have slept around on their husbands.
Sports stars lie about their use of performance-enhancing drugs. Celebrities lie about trouble in their marriages and then announce divorces days later. Defense attorneys lie on behalf of their clients while prosecutors lie about whether or not they have the evidence to convict someone.
Journalists, the ones who are supposed to separate truth from fiction, lie in the name of fame and fortune. Jayson Blair conned The New York Times into publishing stories that he made up while sitting in his apartment. Stephan Glass nearly brought down The New Republic with his lies. An author conned Oprah Winfrey and her publisher into a book about a drug problem he didn't have and it became a best-seller.
Our culture is built around spin, hype and make-believe. We too quickly buy into fantasy because it allows us to avoid the harshness of reality.
As a teenager I lied all the time to young girls in an attempt to get them into the back seat of my 1957 Ford and out of their clothes. During service to my country, Uncle Sam taught me to lie about who I was, where I was going and what I did in the name of truth, justice and the American Way. Even my family didn't know the truth.
After my return to private life, I used my well-honed skills at deception to journalistic advantage, twisting the truth to gain access to forbidden data or coax information out of reluctant sources. It also came in handy to, once again, talk women into bed or, if the need arose, out of one.
Such abilities served me well in politics where truth is an unwelcome complication to the goals of power and success. If any morality got in the way, I quickly drowned it in a bottle -- until a night several years ago when I walked into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and took the first of 12 steps to regain my life and sanity.
AA teaches you to face the truth about yourself and those around you. I began to see the damage that a culture of deception can inflict on society.
But George W. Bush, an admitted alcoholic, never went to AA, never took the pledge, and, I don't believe, ever faced the demons of deception. His words, actions and deeds showcase a man still in denial, incapable of facing the Beast or admitting his own fallibility.
Bush is a product of a culture built on deception. So were many of his predecessors and, unfortunately, most likely will be those who follow him.
A society built on deceit cannot heal itself by changing the political party that controls government or the occupant of the White House until it takes a long, hard look inward and realizes the problem is more widespread than just our elected leaders.
Until we stop lying to ourselves and those around us we can never expect honesty in those who lead us. At this point, we don't deserve it anyway.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Hired guns unaccountable Pentagon releases 400 'serious incident reports' voluntarily filed by security contractors in Iraq
original
March 24, 2006
About 6,000 non-Iraqi security contractors are operating in Iraq. During nine months in 2004-05, contractors reported firing into 61 civilian vehicles; no one was ever prosecuted. Security analysts say it is likely that such incidents are vastly underreported.
Security contractors supporting the U.S. effort in Iraq regularly shoot into civilian cars with little accountability, according to a News & Observer analysis of more than 400 reports contractors filed with the government.
In the documents, which cover nine months of the three-year-old war, contractors reported shooting into 61 vehicles they believed were threatening them. In just seven cases were Iraqis clearly attacking -- showing guns, shooting at contractors or detonating explosives.
There was no way to tell how many civilians were hurt, or how many were innocent: In most cases, the contractors drove away. No contractors have been prosecuted for a mistaken shooting in Iraq.
"What you've done is privatize the fog of war," said Peter W. Singer, an expert on military contracting with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
There are thought to be about 20,000 non-Iraqi civilian contractors supporting a range of U.S. efforts, including about 6,000 security contractors. According to Department of Labor statistics, more than 400 U.S. civilians have died there.
One of the biggest security contractors is Blackwater Security Consulting of Moyock, N.C. The News & Observer began reporting on the industry after four Blackwater men were killed and mutilated in Fallujah in 2004. At least 22 Blackwater contractors have died in Iraq, most in ambushes.
The activities of security contractors have been difficult to quantify, though they are a major force on the ever-changing battlefield. Until now, only a few of their "serious incident reports" to U.S. authorities had been released. The nearly 800 pages that The N&O received this week are the first extensive sampling of contractors' accounts of Iraq's chaos.
The documents include stories of a contractor team shooting at a car in the morning and another in the evening, U.S. forces firing at contractors and contractors shooting at one other.
The government released reports only for nine months ending last April. They detail more than 80 attacks against security contractors that resulted in 48 contractor injuries and 14 deaths. The Pentagon removed the names of the contractors and companies, citing security concerns.
Contractors use standard rules of escalating force for dealing with threats on Iraq's jammed roads:
A gunner in the rearmost vehicle gestures for cars behind him to stop and stay back. If one moves closer, he waves it back again, then points a flashlight. If it keeps coming, warning shots are fired over the top of the suspect vehicle, then into the engine. If that doesn't work, he can shoot to kill.
Here's the narrative from a typical shooting report:
"1 warning shot fired in a safe direction at a black OPEL that refused to adhere to the [private security detail] signals [big torch and hand signals] to stay back. After 1st warning shot car accelerate. When he accelerate we made another 2 warning shots, no reaction from driver we had to open fire directly in to that car using AK[-47 assault rifle] and PKM [machine gun]. The car was stop after we made 23 shots from PKM and 9 shots from AK. Driver ... survived."
Because the reports are voluntary, experts say they probably represent only a fraction of such incidents, and cases in which contractors broke laws or rules are unlikely to be reported.
"If you've got 60 cases where contractors shot into cars, there are probably 600," said James Yeager, a Camden, Tenn., arms trainer whose team shot at cars half a dozen times during his 11 months as a security contractor.
But Doug Brooks, head of the International Peace Operations Association industry group, said he thinks attacks are underreported by perhaps 50 percent.
Whatever the number of shootings, it's likely fewer than similar shootings by U.S. troops. Stars and Stripes reported last week that a military study of an eight-week period late this winter indicated that soldiers killed about 30 Iraqis who drove too close to checkpoints or military convoys.
Hundreds of soldiers in Iraq have been prosecuted under military justice for offenses ranging from drinking to murder. No contractors have been prosecuted for any crimes, Singer and Brooks said.
The advent of civilian security contractors and insurgents who look like civilians has made it hard for anyone on the battlefield to figure out who's who.
The reports paint a picture of such threats as ambushes, suicide car bombers maneuvering to get close, roadside bombs and the possibility of being shot by U.S. troops.
About half the reports involve security contractors. The rest detail incidents involving construction contractors working on projects such as power, water and sewer plants and schools. These list more than 60 kidnappings and 25 murders of Iraqi workers by insurgents trying to stop reconstruction projects.
The difference between living and dying -- for contractors, their clients, insurgents and innocent civilians -- can hinge on decisions that security contractors make in seconds.
"On one side, you've got insurgents who are melting into the civilian population, so you don't know you're being attacked until the actual point of the attack," said Singer, the Brookings expert. "The flip side is, the contractors are often not very well marked, and for the local civilian driving along, sometimes it's very clear they're coming into a contractor convoy; other times it's not."
None of the reports released indicate the rules of escalating force were broken. "You're not going to see those reports," said Yeager, the former contractor. "No one is going to file them."
Yeager said all shootings that he knew of were justified. "The Iraqis knew exactly what cars not to drive up to," he said. "If a guy breaks away from the pack and keeps coming, he knows what's going to happen, and he's either going to try to detonate a bomb, or rake us with gunfire."
Brooks said contracting industry groups are commissioning a radio and newspaper advertising campaign to reinforce to Iraqis what they should do when they see a civilian convoy. The U.S. military is planning a similar campaign, Stars and Stripes reported.
Staff writer Jay Price can be reached at 829-4526 or jprice@newsobserver.com .
March 24, 2006
About 6,000 non-Iraqi security contractors are operating in Iraq. During nine months in 2004-05, contractors reported firing into 61 civilian vehicles; no one was ever prosecuted. Security analysts say it is likely that such incidents are vastly underreported.
Security contractors supporting the U.S. effort in Iraq regularly shoot into civilian cars with little accountability, according to a News & Observer analysis of more than 400 reports contractors filed with the government.
In the documents, which cover nine months of the three-year-old war, contractors reported shooting into 61 vehicles they believed were threatening them. In just seven cases were Iraqis clearly attacking -- showing guns, shooting at contractors or detonating explosives.
There was no way to tell how many civilians were hurt, or how many were innocent: In most cases, the contractors drove away. No contractors have been prosecuted for a mistaken shooting in Iraq.
"What you've done is privatize the fog of war," said Peter W. Singer, an expert on military contracting with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
There are thought to be about 20,000 non-Iraqi civilian contractors supporting a range of U.S. efforts, including about 6,000 security contractors. According to Department of Labor statistics, more than 400 U.S. civilians have died there.
One of the biggest security contractors is Blackwater Security Consulting of Moyock, N.C. The News & Observer began reporting on the industry after four Blackwater men were killed and mutilated in Fallujah in 2004. At least 22 Blackwater contractors have died in Iraq, most in ambushes.
The activities of security contractors have been difficult to quantify, though they are a major force on the ever-changing battlefield. Until now, only a few of their "serious incident reports" to U.S. authorities had been released. The nearly 800 pages that The N&O received this week are the first extensive sampling of contractors' accounts of Iraq's chaos.
The documents include stories of a contractor team shooting at a car in the morning and another in the evening, U.S. forces firing at contractors and contractors shooting at one other.
The government released reports only for nine months ending last April. They detail more than 80 attacks against security contractors that resulted in 48 contractor injuries and 14 deaths. The Pentagon removed the names of the contractors and companies, citing security concerns.
Contractors use standard rules of escalating force for dealing with threats on Iraq's jammed roads:
A gunner in the rearmost vehicle gestures for cars behind him to stop and stay back. If one moves closer, he waves it back again, then points a flashlight. If it keeps coming, warning shots are fired over the top of the suspect vehicle, then into the engine. If that doesn't work, he can shoot to kill.
Here's the narrative from a typical shooting report:
"1 warning shot fired in a safe direction at a black OPEL that refused to adhere to the [private security detail] signals [big torch and hand signals] to stay back. After 1st warning shot car accelerate. When he accelerate we made another 2 warning shots, no reaction from driver we had to open fire directly in to that car using AK[-47 assault rifle] and PKM [machine gun]. The car was stop after we made 23 shots from PKM and 9 shots from AK. Driver ... survived."
Because the reports are voluntary, experts say they probably represent only a fraction of such incidents, and cases in which contractors broke laws or rules are unlikely to be reported.
"If you've got 60 cases where contractors shot into cars, there are probably 600," said James Yeager, a Camden, Tenn., arms trainer whose team shot at cars half a dozen times during his 11 months as a security contractor.
But Doug Brooks, head of the International Peace Operations Association industry group, said he thinks attacks are underreported by perhaps 50 percent.
Whatever the number of shootings, it's likely fewer than similar shootings by U.S. troops. Stars and Stripes reported last week that a military study of an eight-week period late this winter indicated that soldiers killed about 30 Iraqis who drove too close to checkpoints or military convoys.
Hundreds of soldiers in Iraq have been prosecuted under military justice for offenses ranging from drinking to murder. No contractors have been prosecuted for any crimes, Singer and Brooks said.
The advent of civilian security contractors and insurgents who look like civilians has made it hard for anyone on the battlefield to figure out who's who.
The reports paint a picture of such threats as ambushes, suicide car bombers maneuvering to get close, roadside bombs and the possibility of being shot by U.S. troops.
About half the reports involve security contractors. The rest detail incidents involving construction contractors working on projects such as power, water and sewer plants and schools. These list more than 60 kidnappings and 25 murders of Iraqi workers by insurgents trying to stop reconstruction projects.
The difference between living and dying -- for contractors, their clients, insurgents and innocent civilians -- can hinge on decisions that security contractors make in seconds.
"On one side, you've got insurgents who are melting into the civilian population, so you don't know you're being attacked until the actual point of the attack," said Singer, the Brookings expert. "The flip side is, the contractors are often not very well marked, and for the local civilian driving along, sometimes it's very clear they're coming into a contractor convoy; other times it's not."
None of the reports released indicate the rules of escalating force were broken. "You're not going to see those reports," said Yeager, the former contractor. "No one is going to file them."
Yeager said all shootings that he knew of were justified. "The Iraqis knew exactly what cars not to drive up to," he said. "If a guy breaks away from the pack and keeps coming, he knows what's going to happen, and he's either going to try to detonate a bomb, or rake us with gunfire."
Brooks said contracting industry groups are commissioning a radio and newspaper advertising campaign to reinforce to Iraqis what they should do when they see a civilian convoy. The U.S. military is planning a similar campaign, Stars and Stripes reported.
Staff writer Jay Price can be reached at 829-4526 or jprice@newsobserver.com .
Key facts about Israel's election
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Saturday, March 25, 2006 · Last updated 9:30 a.m. PT
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Some facts about Israel's national elections Tuesday:
---
ISRAEL:
Population: 7 million (76 percent Jewish, 20 percent Arab)
Eligible voters: 5,014,622. 2003 turnout: 67.8 percent
---
AT STAKE: The 120-member Knesset, or parliament. Voters choose party lists, not individuals. Seats are allocated according to each party's percentage of the vote.
---
WHO'S RUNNING: Thirty-one parties. Key ones are Kadima, formed in November by Ariel Sharon to set Israel's final borders; Sharon's former Likud, now led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister who takes a hard line against the Palestinians; and Labor, headed by former union chief Amir Peretz, who favors a peace deal with the Palestinians and a more equitable economy.
A party must receive at least 2 percent of votes cast to get in to parliament.
In the 2003 election, 28 parties ran and 13 won seats.
---
FORMING A GOVERNMENT: No party has ever won an outright majority of 61 seats, and the country has always been governed by a coalition. Within seven days of the April 5 publication of official results, the president appoints the person most likely to form a coalition - usually the head of the largest party. That person has six weeks to present a government to parliament and is sworn in as prime minister.
---
KEEPING UP: TV stations are expected to release preliminary results and exit polls immediately after polls close at 3 p.m. EST.
Saturday, March 25, 2006 · Last updated 9:30 a.m. PT
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Some facts about Israel's national elections Tuesday:
---
ISRAEL:
Population: 7 million (76 percent Jewish, 20 percent Arab)
Eligible voters: 5,014,622. 2003 turnout: 67.8 percent
---
AT STAKE: The 120-member Knesset, or parliament. Voters choose party lists, not individuals. Seats are allocated according to each party's percentage of the vote.
---
WHO'S RUNNING: Thirty-one parties. Key ones are Kadima, formed in November by Ariel Sharon to set Israel's final borders; Sharon's former Likud, now led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister who takes a hard line against the Palestinians; and Labor, headed by former union chief Amir Peretz, who favors a peace deal with the Palestinians and a more equitable economy.
A party must receive at least 2 percent of votes cast to get in to parliament.
In the 2003 election, 28 parties ran and 13 won seats.
---
FORMING A GOVERNMENT: No party has ever won an outright majority of 61 seats, and the country has always been governed by a coalition. Within seven days of the April 5 publication of official results, the president appoints the person most likely to form a coalition - usually the head of the largest party. That person has six weeks to present a government to parliament and is sworn in as prime minister.
---
KEEPING UP: TV stations are expected to release preliminary results and exit polls immediately after polls close at 3 p.m. EST.
Gush Shalom - Israeli Peace Bloc--INCITEMENT TO MURDER
Gush Shalom - Israeli Peace Bloc
**when assassination becomes commonplace, no one is safe from it. EG:) **
At an election meeting, the leader of the "Jewish National Front" list, Baruch Marzel, called upon the Israeli army to kill Uri Avnery - this was reported by the right-wing Haaretz reporter, Nadav Shragai on March 21. The story was also published in Maariv, and the day before in all the important on-line papers.
Clearly, the Israeli army was mentioned only in order to disguise the incitement to murder - a criminal offence - as a proposal to the military.
The call came after the official radio, Kol Israel, broadcast remarks made by Avnery to a reporter during a demonstration against the Israeli army attack on the Jericho prison.
The declared aim of this action was to capture the leader of the Palestinian Popular Front, who allegedly ordered the killing of the Israeli minister, Rehav'am Ze'evi, after the killing of the former leader of the Popular Front.
Answering a question, Avnery said that the killing of Ze'evi was a Palestinian 'targeted killing", much like the killing of Palestinian political leaders by the Israeli army.
The radio did not quote his next words: "I am against all assassinations, both by Israelis and Palestinians."
On the day of publication, one of the most popular Israeli TV programs, "Five in the Evening", asked him to take part in a joint interview with Marzel. Avnery refused, of course. But "Channel 10" interviewed Marzel at length, with a huge picture of Avnery in the background. Avnery was not invited.
Marzel's participation in the elections contravenes Israeli law, which prohibits racist lists.
Marzel vows to realize the program of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose election list was prohibited years ago by the Supreme Court.
However, in his election broadcasts, which were confirmed by the chairperson of the Election Committee, there appears a picture of Kahane.
The news of the call for murder was published abroad.
It alerted several peace and human rights organizations, who issued statements of condemnation and sent protest letter to the Israeli embassies.
Especially active was the "AAchen Peace Prize" committee in Germany, which years ago had awarded its prestigious prize to Gush Shalom and Uri Avnery.
It demanded that the German Foreign Ministry and the Israeli ambassador in Berlin intervene in order to induce the Israeli government to indict Marzel for incitement to murder.
**when assassination becomes commonplace, no one is safe from it. EG:) **
At an election meeting, the leader of the "Jewish National Front" list, Baruch Marzel, called upon the Israeli army to kill Uri Avnery - this was reported by the right-wing Haaretz reporter, Nadav Shragai on March 21. The story was also published in Maariv, and the day before in all the important on-line papers.
Clearly, the Israeli army was mentioned only in order to disguise the incitement to murder - a criminal offence - as a proposal to the military.
The call came after the official radio, Kol Israel, broadcast remarks made by Avnery to a reporter during a demonstration against the Israeli army attack on the Jericho prison.
The declared aim of this action was to capture the leader of the Palestinian Popular Front, who allegedly ordered the killing of the Israeli minister, Rehav'am Ze'evi, after the killing of the former leader of the Popular Front.
Answering a question, Avnery said that the killing of Ze'evi was a Palestinian 'targeted killing", much like the killing of Palestinian political leaders by the Israeli army.
The radio did not quote his next words: "I am against all assassinations, both by Israelis and Palestinians."
On the day of publication, one of the most popular Israeli TV programs, "Five in the Evening", asked him to take part in a joint interview with Marzel. Avnery refused, of course. But "Channel 10" interviewed Marzel at length, with a huge picture of Avnery in the background. Avnery was not invited.
Marzel's participation in the elections contravenes Israeli law, which prohibits racist lists.
Marzel vows to realize the program of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose election list was prohibited years ago by the Supreme Court.
However, in his election broadcasts, which were confirmed by the chairperson of the Election Committee, there appears a picture of Kahane.
The news of the call for murder was published abroad.
It alerted several peace and human rights organizations, who issued statements of condemnation and sent protest letter to the Israeli embassies.
Especially active was the "AAchen Peace Prize" committee in Germany, which years ago had awarded its prestigious prize to Gush Shalom and Uri Avnery.
It demanded that the German Foreign Ministry and the Israeli ambassador in Berlin intervene in order to induce the Israeli government to indict Marzel for incitement to murder.
U.S. Plans New Bases in the Middle East
original
William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
**still think the US is going to leave Iraq? It's not going to happen. Oh, they'll call it something else, I'm sure, but the US isn't leaving EG:) **
The U.S. military has developed a ten-year plan for "deep storage" of munitions and equipment in at least six countries in the Middle East and Central Asia to prepare for regional war contingencies.
The plans, revealed in March 2006 contracting documents, call for the continued storage of everything from packaged meals ready to eat (MREs) to missiles in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, as well as the establishment of two new storage hubs, one in a classified Middle Eastern country "west" of Saudi Arabia ("Site 23") and the other in a yet to be decided "central Asian state."
Though President Bush yesterday expressed the view that U.S. forces would stay in Iraq past 2008, the plans to continue to "pre-position" war materiel in the Persian Gulf region leave ambiguous whether the U.S. military foresees the ability to establish a permanent present in Iraq in the long-term.
By 2016, the contracting documents show that the tonnage of air munitions stored at sites outside Iraq will double from current levels.
Central to the U.S. military presence in the Middle East to fight both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been the use of pre-positioned war materiel and the quick establishment of expeditionary bases. At the height of operations in both countries in 2003, the Air Force, for instance, operated from 36 bases in and around the region. That number has since shrunk to 14 today, including four main operating bases in Iraq.
The Department of Defense conducted a Global Posture Review in 2004-2005 focused on the realignment of forward-deployed forces in Europe and Asia in light of the military’s predominant focus on the Middle East.
Under the Review, up to 70,000 troops will be relocated to the continental United States, primarily drawn from forces in Germany and Europe, and the Cold War presence in many parts of the world will end altogether (Washington just announced the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iceland, for instance.)
More central to the review though was the articulation of a basing strategy for those parts of the world - especially the Middle East - where no "permanent" combat forces are assigned. Here the strategy relies on a network of forward operating sites (FOS) capable of supporting rotational forces, as well as a set of more austere cooperative security locations (CSL) used for contingency purposes.
With the elimination of a permanent American presence that includes families and the typical Cold War accoutrements, the United States will not only have greater flexibility, but many political impediments will be eliminated as host countries will also be able to claim that there are no American "bases" on their soil.
**and the US and war apologists will also make the claim that the US doesn't have bases there either EG:) **
Though the United States began to pre-position war material in the Middle East after President Jimmy Carter established the Rapid Deployment Force to operate against a Soviet attack on the Gulf, it was the build-up for the 1990 Gulf War that cemented many of the basing relationships today.
The U.S. withdrew most of its forces from the region in 1991 and established the ability to surge its forces from the United States while continuing to conduct air operations from a half dozen countries in support of the enforcement of the Iraq no-fly zones.
After 9/11, these airbases as well as the continued presence of pre-positioned material in countries like Oman and Qatar became central to the U.S. rapid response in Afghanistan. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, it took the United States five months to forward deploy its forces.
In 2001, existing headquarters and bases were used to run air operations from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, ground operations were directed from a virtual U.S. permanent base in Kuwait, and special operations were centered on Oman. New expeditionary bases were established in places like Pakistan and Uzbekistan(as well as new bases in places like Bulgaria and Romania), but it was the existing web of forward operating locations and contingency facilities that allowed the immediate deployment.
Another factor that began to influence U.S. basing in the Middle East during the 1990's was information technologies that allowed forward operations with reduced manpower. The concept is called "reachback," defined in the Air Force Glossary as "the process of obtaining products, services, and applications or forces, equipment, or material from Air Force organizations that are not forward deployed."
In English, reachback allows much of the support infrastructure of the U.S. military to be deployed outside the region, even in the United States. For example, forward deployed reconnaissance aircraft can transfer their take electronically to analysis center in the continental United States. Similarly, the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Predator has enabled a smaller forward footprint as even pilots and planners are centrally located outside the Middle East.
After the current Iraq war, whenever that is, the Defense Department plans to shift the future U.S. forward presence in the Middle East from the "ever present" posture to one characterized as "enduring access" and "episodic employment."
**whatever the hell that means...smells like a constant state of war to me EG:) **
Pre-positioned materiel and ready-to-use though largely unoccupied bases are central to this strategy. This allows the maintenance of military capabilities without a large or visible U.S. presence, and compensates for the loss of Saudi Arabian bases and infrastructure closed with the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Despite impressive physical facilities in Saudi Arabia, freedom of action from Saudi bases had always been a sticking point between the United States and the Kingdom. Prior to 9/11, the U.S. was already in the process of moving capabilities to Qatar and Kuwait and Air Force aircraft operations shifted to Al Dhafra air base in the United Arab Emirates. Now bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE constitute the permanent basing of the United States, no matter what the new fangled Pentagon labeling. Countries like Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen, and even Saudi Arabia, will continued to be pressured to support episodic operations and clandestine forces, just as they actually are doing today. The bases contract calls for the maintenance of at least a dozen equipment "sets" to establish quick air bases in these countries in the future.
As one looks at the U.S. military presence in the region today, the only real wild card is Iraq. Clearly, the pre-positioning contract indicates the plans of the United States to shift heavy material and supplies out of the country in the long-run. While planning for an Iran war doesn't hinge on Iraqi bases or access, clearly a friendly government to the United Statesand the prospects for "episodic" operations from Iraq changes the calculus of any war. It may also explain the "deterrent" or coercive effect accrued to the United States government in not making it clear what its long-term plans are in the country.
As the United States built up its forces in the region to fight the Afghanistan war, commanders and planners with the big picture saw Iraq in the future. The establishment of bases and headquarters and the communications infrastructure to support a modern military paved the way for the Iraq war. In fact, it can not be overstated the degree to which the forward deployment of U.S. military forces influenced the timing and seductiveness of a follow-on Iraq campaign. Who wanted to send everyone home and start all over with negotiations and access and networks when the capability to accommodate U.S. ground forces was in place and relatively "hot"?
If Iraq wasn't such a mess, the same thinking would be influencing the view of future war with Iran. But when Iraq is finished ... the U.S. military will already be ready. The sun never sets.
William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
**still think the US is going to leave Iraq? It's not going to happen. Oh, they'll call it something else, I'm sure, but the US isn't leaving EG:) **
The U.S. military has developed a ten-year plan for "deep storage" of munitions and equipment in at least six countries in the Middle East and Central Asia to prepare for regional war contingencies.
The plans, revealed in March 2006 contracting documents, call for the continued storage of everything from packaged meals ready to eat (MREs) to missiles in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, as well as the establishment of two new storage hubs, one in a classified Middle Eastern country "west" of Saudi Arabia ("Site 23") and the other in a yet to be decided "central Asian state."
Though President Bush yesterday expressed the view that U.S. forces would stay in Iraq past 2008, the plans to continue to "pre-position" war materiel in the Persian Gulf region leave ambiguous whether the U.S. military foresees the ability to establish a permanent present in Iraq in the long-term.
By 2016, the contracting documents show that the tonnage of air munitions stored at sites outside Iraq will double from current levels.
Central to the U.S. military presence in the Middle East to fight both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been the use of pre-positioned war materiel and the quick establishment of expeditionary bases. At the height of operations in both countries in 2003, the Air Force, for instance, operated from 36 bases in and around the region. That number has since shrunk to 14 today, including four main operating bases in Iraq.
The Department of Defense conducted a Global Posture Review in 2004-2005 focused on the realignment of forward-deployed forces in Europe and Asia in light of the military’s predominant focus on the Middle East.
Under the Review, up to 70,000 troops will be relocated to the continental United States, primarily drawn from forces in Germany and Europe, and the Cold War presence in many parts of the world will end altogether (Washington just announced the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iceland, for instance.)
More central to the review though was the articulation of a basing strategy for those parts of the world - especially the Middle East - where no "permanent" combat forces are assigned. Here the strategy relies on a network of forward operating sites (FOS) capable of supporting rotational forces, as well as a set of more austere cooperative security locations (CSL) used for contingency purposes.
With the elimination of a permanent American presence that includes families and the typical Cold War accoutrements, the United States will not only have greater flexibility, but many political impediments will be eliminated as host countries will also be able to claim that there are no American "bases" on their soil.
**and the US and war apologists will also make the claim that the US doesn't have bases there either EG:) **
Though the United States began to pre-position war material in the Middle East after President Jimmy Carter established the Rapid Deployment Force to operate against a Soviet attack on the Gulf, it was the build-up for the 1990 Gulf War that cemented many of the basing relationships today.
The U.S. withdrew most of its forces from the region in 1991 and established the ability to surge its forces from the United States while continuing to conduct air operations from a half dozen countries in support of the enforcement of the Iraq no-fly zones.
After 9/11, these airbases as well as the continued presence of pre-positioned material in countries like Oman and Qatar became central to the U.S. rapid response in Afghanistan. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, it took the United States five months to forward deploy its forces.
In 2001, existing headquarters and bases were used to run air operations from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, ground operations were directed from a virtual U.S. permanent base in Kuwait, and special operations were centered on Oman. New expeditionary bases were established in places like Pakistan and Uzbekistan(as well as new bases in places like Bulgaria and Romania), but it was the existing web of forward operating locations and contingency facilities that allowed the immediate deployment.
Another factor that began to influence U.S. basing in the Middle East during the 1990's was information technologies that allowed forward operations with reduced manpower. The concept is called "reachback," defined in the Air Force Glossary as "the process of obtaining products, services, and applications or forces, equipment, or material from Air Force organizations that are not forward deployed."
In English, reachback allows much of the support infrastructure of the U.S. military to be deployed outside the region, even in the United States. For example, forward deployed reconnaissance aircraft can transfer their take electronically to analysis center in the continental United States. Similarly, the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Predator has enabled a smaller forward footprint as even pilots and planners are centrally located outside the Middle East.
After the current Iraq war, whenever that is, the Defense Department plans to shift the future U.S. forward presence in the Middle East from the "ever present" posture to one characterized as "enduring access" and "episodic employment."
**whatever the hell that means...smells like a constant state of war to me EG:) **
Pre-positioned materiel and ready-to-use though largely unoccupied bases are central to this strategy. This allows the maintenance of military capabilities without a large or visible U.S. presence, and compensates for the loss of Saudi Arabian bases and infrastructure closed with the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Despite impressive physical facilities in Saudi Arabia, freedom of action from Saudi bases had always been a sticking point between the United States and the Kingdom. Prior to 9/11, the U.S. was already in the process of moving capabilities to Qatar and Kuwait and Air Force aircraft operations shifted to Al Dhafra air base in the United Arab Emirates. Now bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE constitute the permanent basing of the United States, no matter what the new fangled Pentagon labeling. Countries like Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen, and even Saudi Arabia, will continued to be pressured to support episodic operations and clandestine forces, just as they actually are doing today. The bases contract calls for the maintenance of at least a dozen equipment "sets" to establish quick air bases in these countries in the future.
As one looks at the U.S. military presence in the region today, the only real wild card is Iraq. Clearly, the pre-positioning contract indicates the plans of the United States to shift heavy material and supplies out of the country in the long-run. While planning for an Iran war doesn't hinge on Iraqi bases or access, clearly a friendly government to the United Statesand the prospects for "episodic" operations from Iraq changes the calculus of any war. It may also explain the "deterrent" or coercive effect accrued to the United States government in not making it clear what its long-term plans are in the country.
As the United States built up its forces in the region to fight the Afghanistan war, commanders and planners with the big picture saw Iraq in the future. The establishment of bases and headquarters and the communications infrastructure to support a modern military paved the way for the Iraq war. In fact, it can not be overstated the degree to which the forward deployment of U.S. military forces influenced the timing and seductiveness of a follow-on Iraq campaign. Who wanted to send everyone home and start all over with negotiations and access and networks when the capability to accommodate U.S. ground forces was in place and relatively "hot"?
If Iraq wasn't such a mess, the same thinking would be influencing the view of future war with Iran. But when Iraq is finished ... the U.S. military will already be ready. The sun never sets.
Navy Won't File Charges in Iraq Contractor Fracas
original
By Griff Witte and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 25, 2006; A15
Military investigators said yesterday that they will not file any charges after completing their investigation into an incident in Iraq last May in which a group of Marines alleged they had been fired on by U.S. security contractors.
The contractors, in turn, had said they were detained by the Marines for three days in a holding facility normally reserved for suspected insurgents, and subjected to rough treatment. The incident highlighted tension in the field between active-duty military personnel and the burgeoning ranks of private contractors the Defense Department has hired to support the war effort.
But the Naval Criminal Investigative Service said there was not sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution of Marines or employees of North Carolina-based Zapata Engineering.
"There was evidence that shots had been fired by Zapata, but there was no way to connect the dots together in a way that we could go forward with the case," said NCIS spokesman Ed Buice.
The 16 American contractors have never denied that they fired shots on May 28, 2005, as they traveled through Fallujah. But they say their shots -- three in total -- went straight into the ground as they tried to get the attention of a truck driver who was moving precariously close to their convoy.
The Marines told a different story, accusing the contractors of firing indiscriminately at civilians and at a Marine checkpoint. Buice said yesterday that investigators had not been able to verify that conclusion.
"It's a world of relief," said Pete Ginter, one of the contractors who were detained. "We knew from the beginning that we didn't do anything wrong. But we were being penalized for something we didn't do."
Ginter said he and the other contractors involved have been effectively blacklisted since the incident, with many of them having trouble finding work and unable to return to Iraq, where demand for contractors is high.
Mark Schopper, an attorney for four of the detained contractors, said that while he welcomed the NCIS's decision, questions remain. "We're still incensed at what happened to them," Schopper said.
Marine officials at the Pentagon yesterday referred questions on the matter to military spokesmen in Baghdad, who were unable to comment immediately.
The contractors claim they were changing a tire at a Marine checkpoint last May when they were suddenly ordered to report to a nearby base. From there they were taken to a detention facility where they each were handed an orange jumpsuit, a bottle in which to urinate, a Koran and a prayer mat. The contractors, many of whom were ex-Marines, said they received rough treatment, with guards shoving them to the ground and, in Ginter's case, squeezing his testicles.
The men were held for three days in the same facility where the military held suspected insurgents. During that time, they have said, they were refused all requests to contact the Red Cross, their employer or their families. Once released, they were barred from operating in a large area of Iraq. They also lost their jobs with Zapata, which had a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to dispose of ordnance.
Buice, the NCIS spokesman, said investigators never formally looked into the allegations of abuse because the contractors did not go through the proper channels of filing a complaint. He also said the treatment they received appeared to be standard for incoming prisoners. "The fact that you're asked to take off all your clothes and put on an orange jumpsuit, that's not mistreatment," he said.
But Gary Myers, a lawyer representing several of the contractors, said the way the military handled the case was unjust.
"These men did nothing wrong. They were forced out of the country by the Marines who in fact had engaged in conduct that was abusive to our own citizens," Myers said. "I'm pleased that whatever cloud that was hanging over those men is now removed, even if the Marine Corps will not admit it made a mistake."
An estimated 20,000 private security contractors are operating in Iraq. Tension between contractors and active-duty personnel has run high in some cases because the contractors fall outside the normal military chain of command and make considerably higher salaries than their counterparts in the armed forces. In this case, Schopper said the Marines taunted the contractors while they were in custody by asking, "How does it feel to be a rich contractor now?"
Gary Simpler, a 20-year Army veteran who was among the contractors detained, said in an e-mailed response to questions that the Marine Corps was "heavy-handed, abusive to fellow American citizens and should apologize."
By Griff Witte and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 25, 2006; A15
Military investigators said yesterday that they will not file any charges after completing their investigation into an incident in Iraq last May in which a group of Marines alleged they had been fired on by U.S. security contractors.
The contractors, in turn, had said they were detained by the Marines for three days in a holding facility normally reserved for suspected insurgents, and subjected to rough treatment. The incident highlighted tension in the field between active-duty military personnel and the burgeoning ranks of private contractors the Defense Department has hired to support the war effort.
But the Naval Criminal Investigative Service said there was not sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution of Marines or employees of North Carolina-based Zapata Engineering.
"There was evidence that shots had been fired by Zapata, but there was no way to connect the dots together in a way that we could go forward with the case," said NCIS spokesman Ed Buice.
The 16 American contractors have never denied that they fired shots on May 28, 2005, as they traveled through Fallujah. But they say their shots -- three in total -- went straight into the ground as they tried to get the attention of a truck driver who was moving precariously close to their convoy.
The Marines told a different story, accusing the contractors of firing indiscriminately at civilians and at a Marine checkpoint. Buice said yesterday that investigators had not been able to verify that conclusion.
"It's a world of relief," said Pete Ginter, one of the contractors who were detained. "We knew from the beginning that we didn't do anything wrong. But we were being penalized for something we didn't do."
Ginter said he and the other contractors involved have been effectively blacklisted since the incident, with many of them having trouble finding work and unable to return to Iraq, where demand for contractors is high.
Mark Schopper, an attorney for four of the detained contractors, said that while he welcomed the NCIS's decision, questions remain. "We're still incensed at what happened to them," Schopper said.
Marine officials at the Pentagon yesterday referred questions on the matter to military spokesmen in Baghdad, who were unable to comment immediately.
The contractors claim they were changing a tire at a Marine checkpoint last May when they were suddenly ordered to report to a nearby base. From there they were taken to a detention facility where they each were handed an orange jumpsuit, a bottle in which to urinate, a Koran and a prayer mat. The contractors, many of whom were ex-Marines, said they received rough treatment, with guards shoving them to the ground and, in Ginter's case, squeezing his testicles.
The men were held for three days in the same facility where the military held suspected insurgents. During that time, they have said, they were refused all requests to contact the Red Cross, their employer or their families. Once released, they were barred from operating in a large area of Iraq. They also lost their jobs with Zapata, which had a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to dispose of ordnance.
Buice, the NCIS spokesman, said investigators never formally looked into the allegations of abuse because the contractors did not go through the proper channels of filing a complaint. He also said the treatment they received appeared to be standard for incoming prisoners. "The fact that you're asked to take off all your clothes and put on an orange jumpsuit, that's not mistreatment," he said.
But Gary Myers, a lawyer representing several of the contractors, said the way the military handled the case was unjust.
"These men did nothing wrong. They were forced out of the country by the Marines who in fact had engaged in conduct that was abusive to our own citizens," Myers said. "I'm pleased that whatever cloud that was hanging over those men is now removed, even if the Marine Corps will not admit it made a mistake."
An estimated 20,000 private security contractors are operating in Iraq. Tension between contractors and active-duty personnel has run high in some cases because the contractors fall outside the normal military chain of command and make considerably higher salaries than their counterparts in the armed forces. In this case, Schopper said the Marines taunted the contractors while they were in custody by asking, "How does it feel to be a rich contractor now?"
Gary Simpler, a 20-year Army veteran who was among the contractors detained, said in an e-mailed response to questions that the Marine Corps was "heavy-handed, abusive to fellow American citizens and should apologize."
Iran Focus-Iran stages war games near Iraq border - Special Wire - News
Iran Focus-Iran stages war games near Iraq border - Special Wire - News
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Mar. 24 – Islamist militiamen affiliated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have launched military exercises near the Iraqi border to “deal with possible unrest”, Iran’s official news agency IRNA reported.
Members of the paramilitary Bassij force staged military exercises in the western town of Dehloran. The paramilitary forces attacked dummy enemy sites during the operation.
“The objective of the military exercises here is to raise the level of readiness of the Bassij forces”, said Alireza Bazdar, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Dehloran. “Our forces were able to capture the positions taken by the enemy and destroy the enemy forces”.
“This will help us prepare ourselves to deal with possible outbreaks of unrest with force and determination”, Bazdar said.
The Revolutionary Guards and the Bassij have been staging a series of military and security exercises in Tehran and its suburbs since February.
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Mar. 24 – Islamist militiamen affiliated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have launched military exercises near the Iraqi border to “deal with possible unrest”, Iran’s official news agency IRNA reported.
Members of the paramilitary Bassij force staged military exercises in the western town of Dehloran. The paramilitary forces attacked dummy enemy sites during the operation.
“The objective of the military exercises here is to raise the level of readiness of the Bassij forces”, said Alireza Bazdar, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Dehloran. “Our forces were able to capture the positions taken by the enemy and destroy the enemy forces”.
“This will help us prepare ourselves to deal with possible outbreaks of unrest with force and determination”, Bazdar said.
The Revolutionary Guards and the Bassij have been staging a series of military and security exercises in Tehran and its suburbs since February.
Iraq on own to rebuild on Yahoo! News
original
By Thomas Frank, USA TODAYFri Mar 24, 6:43 AM ET
The head of the U.S.-led program to rebuild Iraq said Thursday that the Iraqi government can no longer count on U.S. funds and must rely on its own revenues and other foreign aid, particularly from Gulf nations.
"The Iraqi government needs to build up its capability to do its own capital budget investment," Daniel Speckhard, director of the U.S. Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, told reporters.
The burden of funding reconstruction poses an extraordinary challenge for a country that needs tens of billions of dollars for repairing its infrastructure at the same time it's struggling to pay its bills. Iraq's main revenue source - oil - is hampered by insurgent attacks on production facilities and pipelines, forcing the country to spend $6 billion a year on oil imports.
Iraq's deputy finance minister, Kamal Field al-Basri, said it was "reasonable" for the United States to sharply cut back its reconstruction efforts after spending about $21 billion. "We should be very much dependent on ourselves," al-Basri said in an interview.
Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the U.S. reconstruction effort "a dismal failure. It hasn't met any of its goals. It's left a legacy of half-built projects, built to U.S. standards, which Iraq doesn't have the capability to maintain."
Al-Basri said Iraq needs to increase its capacity to produce oil, which generates 93% of government's revenues.
Insurgent attacks also have hampered efforts to rebuild electrical, sewer and water systems. A report last month by the U.S. inspector general overseeing reconstruction said so much money was being spent on security that most sewer, irrigation and drainage projects have been canceled.
Speckhard said 16% to 22% of each reconstruction dollar went to protect projects and contractors. He noted that Iraq was generating less electricity now than before the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003 and acknowledged that "significant challenges remain" in rebuilding Iraq.
The total rebuilding cost is now $70 billion to $100 billion - up from a $60 billion World Bank estimate in 2003, Speckhard said.
Speckhard said the U.S. aid program sought to "kick-start the economy" and "lay a foundation" that Iraq could build on with its own money, private investment and other international donors, particularly from the Gulf region. "That kick-starting process has occurred," he said, noting that per capita income jumped to $1,200 a year from $500 before the war and that 30,000 new businesses had started in the last year.
Iraq must increase oil exports from their current level of about 1.6 million barrels a day to 2 million barrels a day, Speckhard said.
Al-Basri said Iraq needs foreign investment to lift exports to 3 million barrels - a level last reached by Iraq in the 1980s.
By Thomas Frank, USA TODAYFri Mar 24, 6:43 AM ET
The head of the U.S.-led program to rebuild Iraq said Thursday that the Iraqi government can no longer count on U.S. funds and must rely on its own revenues and other foreign aid, particularly from Gulf nations.
"The Iraqi government needs to build up its capability to do its own capital budget investment," Daniel Speckhard, director of the U.S. Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, told reporters.
The burden of funding reconstruction poses an extraordinary challenge for a country that needs tens of billions of dollars for repairing its infrastructure at the same time it's struggling to pay its bills. Iraq's main revenue source - oil - is hampered by insurgent attacks on production facilities and pipelines, forcing the country to spend $6 billion a year on oil imports.
Iraq's deputy finance minister, Kamal Field al-Basri, said it was "reasonable" for the United States to sharply cut back its reconstruction efforts after spending about $21 billion. "We should be very much dependent on ourselves," al-Basri said in an interview.
Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the U.S. reconstruction effort "a dismal failure. It hasn't met any of its goals. It's left a legacy of half-built projects, built to U.S. standards, which Iraq doesn't have the capability to maintain."
Al-Basri said Iraq needs to increase its capacity to produce oil, which generates 93% of government's revenues.
Insurgent attacks also have hampered efforts to rebuild electrical, sewer and water systems. A report last month by the U.S. inspector general overseeing reconstruction said so much money was being spent on security that most sewer, irrigation and drainage projects have been canceled.
Speckhard said 16% to 22% of each reconstruction dollar went to protect projects and contractors. He noted that Iraq was generating less electricity now than before the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003 and acknowledged that "significant challenges remain" in rebuilding Iraq.
The total rebuilding cost is now $70 billion to $100 billion - up from a $60 billion World Bank estimate in 2003, Speckhard said.
Speckhard said the U.S. aid program sought to "kick-start the economy" and "lay a foundation" that Iraq could build on with its own money, private investment and other international donors, particularly from the Gulf region. "That kick-starting process has occurred," he said, noting that per capita income jumped to $1,200 a year from $500 before the war and that 30,000 new businesses had started in the last year.
Iraq must increase oil exports from their current level of about 1.6 million barrels a day to 2 million barrels a day, Speckhard said.
Al-Basri said Iraq needs foreign investment to lift exports to 3 million barrels - a level last reached by Iraq in the 1980s.
Are the Neocons Losing It? - by Pat Buchanan
original
While President Bush appears serenely confident about Iraq, the same cannot be said of the War Party propagandists who were plotting this conflict when Dubya was still a rookie governor of Texas.
William Kristol of The Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the antiwar Right "unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate" America, now calls upon Bush for an "acknowledgement of defeat."
Richard Perle says the administration "got the war right and the aftermath wrong." Self-described "humiliated pundit" Andrew Sullivan confesses to "a sense of shame and sorrow." Michael Ledeen says of Bush's war, "Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place."
Frank ("The End of History") Fukuyama concedes that "Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at."
But it is a March 20 essay in The Wall Street Journal that suggests the neocons may be coming unhinged. Written by Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the piece urges Bush to begin the "rejuvenation of his presidency by shocking the media and political community with a sweeping overhaul of his administration."
The purge Barnes recommends would have caused Stalin to recoil.
Barnes calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John Snow – and Vice President Richard Cheney.
"The trickiest issue is how to handle Karl Rove," says Barnes.
I don't think so, Fred. I think "the trickiest issue" will be how to handle Dick and Lynne when they are told by Dubya they must give up a constitutional office to which Cheney was elected by the nation, vacate the vice presidential mansion and turn the keys over to Condi Rice.
That's right, Barnes urges Bush to appoint Condi vice president and "anoint" her as "presidential successor."
Who would replace Condi at State? Pro-war liberal Joe Lieberman.
I should like to be in earshot when Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hears that he has been passed over for secretary of state by the junior Democratic senator from Connecticut.
"Mr. Cheney would probably be happy to step down and return to Wyoming," Barnes assures us.
Is he sure? Why would Cheney not regard any such attempt by Bush as a stab in the back by a friend to whom he has given years of service? For if Cheney is forced to quit his office, he goes down in history as a failed vice president and, along with Rumsfeld, the Bush-designated scapegoats of the Iraq war.
What, other than poor poll ratings, would be the rationale for removing Cheney, who is infinitely more qualified than Condi Rice by philosophy, experience and knowledge to take over the presidency?
All of Cheney's problems are tied to Iraq. But so are Bush and Condi tied to Iraq. Her failure at the National Security Council to screen the intelligence and ensure that Defense did due diligence for the occupation produced today's crisis. And what has Condi's crusade for democracy produced, other than historic gains for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas on the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Moqtada al-Sadr and the Shia clerics in Iraq?
Exactly what qualifies her to be president?
Well, says Barnes, it would be a "spectacular move."
I'll say. Putting Rice directly in the line of succession to the Oval Office would detonate an explosion far more ruinous to Bush than the Dubai ports deal. It would instantly jump-start the presidential campaign of 2008. Conservatives who consider Condi weak on life and a pro-affirmative-action social liberal would start carving her up before she reached the Senate hearing room.
Did not the firestorm over the Dubai deal wake these Beltway dreamers up?
Would John McCain stand aside for Rice? Would George Allen? Would the evangelical Christians? All would move to block her. And no one would worry about any damage this would do to a George Bush who was so arrogant as to try to impose, as his choice for the 2008 nominee of the GOP, another ex-staffer and spinster like Harriet Miers.
That Bush is in trouble is undeniable. But his people are not Bush's problem. His policies are. It is these policies, not his advisers, that have given us huge deficits and a no-win war that is bleeding our country.
If Bush should follow Barnes' advice and throw his most loyal people to the wolves as a P.R. stunt, he will have earned their lasting contempt, and that of the country. For all will know he was scapegoating them for his own failures – failures that come of having listened to the neocons who are even now slipping out of camp, rehearsing alibis and blaming Bush for not heeding their brilliant advice.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
While President Bush appears serenely confident about Iraq, the same cannot be said of the War Party propagandists who were plotting this conflict when Dubya was still a rookie governor of Texas.
William Kristol of The Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the antiwar Right "unpatriotic conservatives" who "hate" America, now calls upon Bush for an "acknowledgement of defeat."
Richard Perle says the administration "got the war right and the aftermath wrong." Self-described "humiliated pundit" Andrew Sullivan confesses to "a sense of shame and sorrow." Michael Ledeen says of Bush's war, "Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place."
Frank ("The End of History") Fukuyama concedes that "Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at."
But it is a March 20 essay in The Wall Street Journal that suggests the neocons may be coming unhinged. Written by Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the piece urges Bush to begin the "rejuvenation of his presidency by shocking the media and political community with a sweeping overhaul of his administration."
The purge Barnes recommends would have caused Stalin to recoil.
Barnes calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John Snow – and Vice President Richard Cheney.
"The trickiest issue is how to handle Karl Rove," says Barnes.
I don't think so, Fred. I think "the trickiest issue" will be how to handle Dick and Lynne when they are told by Dubya they must give up a constitutional office to which Cheney was elected by the nation, vacate the vice presidential mansion and turn the keys over to Condi Rice.
That's right, Barnes urges Bush to appoint Condi vice president and "anoint" her as "presidential successor."
Who would replace Condi at State? Pro-war liberal Joe Lieberman.
I should like to be in earshot when Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hears that he has been passed over for secretary of state by the junior Democratic senator from Connecticut.
"Mr. Cheney would probably be happy to step down and return to Wyoming," Barnes assures us.
Is he sure? Why would Cheney not regard any such attempt by Bush as a stab in the back by a friend to whom he has given years of service? For if Cheney is forced to quit his office, he goes down in history as a failed vice president and, along with Rumsfeld, the Bush-designated scapegoats of the Iraq war.
What, other than poor poll ratings, would be the rationale for removing Cheney, who is infinitely more qualified than Condi Rice by philosophy, experience and knowledge to take over the presidency?
All of Cheney's problems are tied to Iraq. But so are Bush and Condi tied to Iraq. Her failure at the National Security Council to screen the intelligence and ensure that Defense did due diligence for the occupation produced today's crisis. And what has Condi's crusade for democracy produced, other than historic gains for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas on the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Moqtada al-Sadr and the Shia clerics in Iraq?
Exactly what qualifies her to be president?
Well, says Barnes, it would be a "spectacular move."
I'll say. Putting Rice directly in the line of succession to the Oval Office would detonate an explosion far more ruinous to Bush than the Dubai ports deal. It would instantly jump-start the presidential campaign of 2008. Conservatives who consider Condi weak on life and a pro-affirmative-action social liberal would start carving her up before she reached the Senate hearing room.
Did not the firestorm over the Dubai deal wake these Beltway dreamers up?
Would John McCain stand aside for Rice? Would George Allen? Would the evangelical Christians? All would move to block her. And no one would worry about any damage this would do to a George Bush who was so arrogant as to try to impose, as his choice for the 2008 nominee of the GOP, another ex-staffer and spinster like Harriet Miers.
That Bush is in trouble is undeniable. But his people are not Bush's problem. His policies are. It is these policies, not his advisers, that have given us huge deficits and a no-win war that is bleeding our country.
If Bush should follow Barnes' advice and throw his most loyal people to the wolves as a P.R. stunt, he will have earned their lasting contempt, and that of the country. For all will know he was scapegoating them for his own failures – failures that come of having listened to the neocons who are even now slipping out of camp, rehearsing alibis and blaming Bush for not heeding their brilliant advice.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Apocalyptic president
Even some Republicans are now horrified by the influence Bush has given to the evangelical right
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday March 23, 2006
The Guardian
In his latest PR offensive President Bush came to Cleveland, Ohio, on Monday to answer the paramount question on Iraq that he said was on people's minds: "They wonder what I see that they don't." After mentioning "terror" 54 times and "victory" five, dismissing "civil war" twice and asserting that he is "optimistic", he called on a citizen in the audience, who homed in on the invisible meaning of recent events in the light of two books, American Theocracy, by Kevin Phillips, and the book of Revelation. Phillips, the questioner explained, "makes the point that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe this? And if not, why not?"
Bush's immediate response, as transcribed by CNN, was: "Hmmm." Then he said: "The answer is I haven't really thought of it that way. Here's how I think of it. First, I've heard of that, by the way." The official White House website transcript drops the strategic comma, and so changes the meaning to: "First I've heard of that, by the way."
But it is certainly not the first time Bush has heard of the apocalyptic preoccupation of much of the religious right, having served as evangelical liaison on his father's 1988 presidential campaign. The Rev Jerry Falwell told Newsweek how he brought Tim LaHaye, then an influential rightwing leader, to meet him; LaHaye's Left Behind novels, dramatising the rapture, Armageddon and the second coming, have sold tens of millions.
But it is almost certain that Cleveland was the first time Bush had heard of Phillips's book. He was the visionary strategist for Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign; his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, spelled out the shift of power from the north-east to the south and south-west, which he was early to call "the sunbelt"; he grasped that southern Democrats would react to the civil-rights revolution by becoming southern Republicans; he also understood the resentments of urban ethnic Catholics towards black people on issues such as crime, school integration and jobs. But he never imagined that evangelical religion would transform the coalition he helped to fashion into something that horrifies him.
In American Theocracy, Phillips describes Bush as the founder of "the first American religious party"; September 11 gave him the pretext for "seizing the fundamentalist moment"; he has manipulated a "critical religious geography" to hype issues such as gay marriage. "New forces were being interwoven. These included the institutional rise of the religious right, the intensifying biblical focus on the Middle East, and the deepening of insistence on church-government collaboration within the GOP electorate." It portended a potential "American Disenlightenment," apparent in Bush's hostility to science.
Even Bush's failures have become pretexts for advancing his transformation of government. Exploiting his own disastrous emergency management after Hurricane Katrina, Bush is funneling funds to churches as though they can compensate for governmental breakdown. Last year David Kuo, the White House deputy director for faith-based initiatives, resigned with a statement that "Republicans were indifferent to the poor".
Within hours of its publication, American Theocracy rocketed to No 1 on Amazon. At US cinemas, V for Vendetta - in which an imaginary Britain, ruled by a totalitarian, faith-based regime that rounds up gays, is a metaphor for Bush's America - is the surprise hit. Bush has succeeded in getting American audiences to cheer for terrorism.
· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars
sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com
Democratizing The World - One Torture Victim At A Time
original
By Jason Miller
3-24-6
Analysis of the Long, Repulsive History of the United States Inflicting Torture on Its "Suspected Enemies" (in Conjunction with a Review of A Question of Torture by Alfred W. McCoy)
Psychological torture, sleep deprivation, brutality, severe sexual humiliation, and murder summon visions of a dank dungeon in a remote region of pre-invasion Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, replete with evil inquisitors and hooded executioners. However, those manifestations of horror did not spring forth from the Axis of Evil. They are actually drawn from official post-9/11 US policy. Despite its fabled commitment to human rights, the United States government has been committing and enabling acts of torture for half a century. Not even Superman had the power to snatch "Truth, Justice and the American Way" from the crushing jaws of imperialistic ambition and avarice.
Ironically titled, Albert McCoy's A Question of Torture probes and exposes the extent of "the Land of the Free's" involvement in human torture over the years. Only a mainstream media 90% controlled by five major corporations (whose executives and major stockholders are amongst the de facto rulers of the America's so-called republic) could so effectively maintain the illusion that the United States is the world leader in protecting human rights. Somewhere out there, David Copperfield is burning with envy. Rest easy, David. They are running out of magic. Destroying our Constitution and reversing the humanitarian gains achieved by millions of Americans with a social conscience throughout our nation's history , the Bush Regime is extinguishing the candle of hope America once offered to humanity. Despite the exhaustive efforts of the media handmaidens, people are taking notice.
Painstakingly slow ascent....high velocity decline
From our nation's birth, many fine Americans labored vigorously to attain a higher moral plane by ending slavery and advancing the rights of children, minorities, women, and workers. Contrary to the fairy tale of America's benevolent government "of the people", many amongst the plutocracy and emerging corporatocracy fought the American evolution of human rights tooth and nail. Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and company have taken that resistance to new heights and are plunging the United States into an abyss of evil, at home and abroad. Minority Americans, Native Americans, and citizens of other nations have been aware of this descent for years, even before the Neocon catalyzed acceleration. However, as the ruthlessly brazen disciples of Strauss have fervently attacked human rights, many amongst America's indoctrinated White working class are smelling the coffee, and it is not the best part of waking up.
On March 8, 2006, the US State Department released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2005, in which it detailed human rights abuses occurring in over 190 nations. In an act of supreme hypocrisy, they excluded themselves. As one can readily discern simply from reading McCoy's expose' of human torture committed by the United States since 1950, the United States is far from being a bastion of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".
"Torture is evil, pure and simple," is the powerful lesson Peggy Piel imparted to her son, Alfred McCoy. Having spent a year of her childhood in Nazi Germany, this erudite Jewish American knew a bit about the subject of torture. Despite his mother's moralistic viewpoint, McCoy penned his examination of the history of torture committed and facilitated by the United States in a detached, analytical manner, without imposing a moral judgment. Noting over 30 pages of sources, McCoy meticulously researched his chilling glimpse into America's Heart of Darkness, yet still maintained relative objectivity. No easy task in light of the virtually countless egregious violations of human rights and acts of murder committed by the American Empire and its proxies.
Abu Gharib was simply a sign of a "few bad apples"....or was it?
In 1950, the intelligence organization of the "leader of the free world" began to take a strong interest in research involving psychological torture.
McCoy summarizes:
"From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually-a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind."
While the United States was trumpeting its deep devotion to universal human rights, the CIA was busily developing and funding research to yield "new and improved" torture tactics with which they could extract information from Cold War enemies. Utilizing its unique capacity to wield tremendous power clandestinely, the United States' intelligence juggernaut infiltrated and exploited hospitals, divisions of the military, and universities to enable its research.
Many of the nauseating acts of inhumanity depicted in the Abu Gharib photos reflect the rotten fruits of CIA labors. Years of study and experimentation determined that torture involving physical pain lacked efficacy. The CIA found that strong subjects usually responded by stiffening their resistance and weaker ones often gave false information just to end the pain. Psychological torture, including sensory deprivation, sensory disorientation, assault on personal identity and self-inflicted pain appeared to provide a much richer yield of information. The Abu Gharib photos are a window through which one can view the CIA-created world of psychological torture. Hooding, stress positions, extreme intimidation with ferocious dogs (for which a soldier was convicted on 3/21), and sexual humiliation are recurring images in the Abu Gharib pictures and are powerful examples of CIA torture protocol. Other techniques of psychological torture the US military and CIA have used on detained suspects in the "War on Terror" are sleep deprivation, isolation, and dietary manipulation. As the Command Responsibility report by Human Rights First indicates, 45 detainees in the US "War on Terror" have been murdered or have died as a result of physical abuse. As McCoy argues, there is a fine line between psychological torture and physical torture, and as the American Gulag has demonstrated, torturers usually cross that line.
As an aside, it is important to remember that there are currently over 14,000 "suspected terrorists" or "enemy combatants" in US custody. These individuals have been charged with no crime and have been denied due process. Guilty until proven innocent. Now that is justice the American way. Abu Gharib is only an aberration because the torturers were caught. Inflicting severe psychological and mental anguish on suspected enemies of the Empire is now official policy and has taken place at Bagram Air Base, Camp Cropper, Guantanamo Bay and throughout the American Gulag. As for the McCain Anti-Torture Law, Bush and his fellow war criminals are already inventing ways to circumvent it.
Abu Gharib is simply a public display of the psychological and physical torture the CIA has been implementing and practicing for years. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA sharpened its talons through a federal entity called the Office of Public Safety, a branch of US AID. According to McCoy, the OPS trained one million police officers in 47 countries. Not surprisingly, it was not long before these same law enforcement entities began committing severe human right rights abuses and acts of torture.
"Practice makes perfect"
It was morally repugnant enough that the United States killed three million Vietnamese civilians in their imperialistic escapade into Southeast Asia, euphemistically labeling them as "collateral damage". However, McCoy describes torture policies and techniques which resulted in the murder of tens of thousands more Vietnamese. The Phoenix program was implemented by the CIA to eradicate the Vietcong underground. Under CIA administration and supervision, the PRUs (aka Provincial Interrogation Centers) of the Phoenix program degenerated into a collection of South Vietnamese murderers, thugs and criminals who accepted bribes, presumed guilt based on gossip, and murdered their detainees after they completed their interrogation. Ultimately, (if one is gullible enough to take the word of former CIA director William Colby), the Phoenix program murdered 20,587 "Vietcong". Saigon's government puts the figure at 40,994.
Educating them on the finer points of torture and murder
The CIA also bears responsibility for the creation of SAVAK, the Shah of Iran's ruthless secret police force. SAVAK killed 20,000 Iraqi "dissidents" during the Shah's reign. In the Philippines, CIA instruction resulted in 3,257 murders and 35,000 victims of torture by the Ferdinand Marcos regime.
After its defeat in Vietnam, the United States government infiltrated Latin America with a vengeance (to stop the spread of the "Communist threat"). Project X, represented another CIA endeavor to impart their wisdom in the arts of torture to ruthless US allies Not satisfied with their 1963 torture manual called Kubark, the CIA wrote a sequel in Spanish entitled Handling of Sources, Interrogation, Combat Intelligence, and Terrorism and the Urban Guerilla.
Of the sequel, McCoy writes,
"Apart from these cold-blooded tactics of kidnapping, murder, beatings, and betrayal, the manual evidences, in its 144 single-spaced pages, an amorality, a studied willingness to exploit an ally without restraint or compunction, hardened on the anvil of the Vietnam conflict."
Once located in Panama, an odious US Army institution known as the School of Americas (sometimes called the School of Assassins) bestowed the CIA's torture wisdom upon hundreds of Latin American military officers. The School of Americas fell under the auspices of Project X and provided the "hands on" training to accompany the CIA torture manuals. Interestingly, by 1983 the CIA had begun to re-emphasize the use of psychological over physical torture when it wrote its Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual. A laundry list of CIA-trained Latin American military personnel and dictators murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands thanks to the tutelage of Project X.
Of war crimes, evasion of responsibility and impunity
McCoy notes that the United States took a break and out-sourced torture to its allies throughout the 1990's. Unfortunately for the world, the Bush Regime opportunistically seized 9/11 to begin its PNAC inspired quest for global military dominance. In the process, the administration implemented torture as official United States policy. Desperately attempting to fend off critics and preserve the crumbling façade of moral superiority, America's ruling class has sacrificed several from amongst those near the bottom of the food chain. However, calling the prosecution and conviction of a handful of military personnel justice would be a farce. Those ultimately responsible for America's abject torture continue to act with impunity.
As McCoy has vividly illustrated, America's "grunts" at Abu Gharib and throughout the American Gulag were acting under the orders of the Bush Regime and under the supervision of the CIA:
1. On September 11, 2001, George Bush told Donald Rumsfeld and his staff, "Any barriers in your way, they are gone." When they reminded him of legal constraints, Bush shouted, "I don't care what the international lawyers say; we are going to kick some ass."
2. Six days later, Bush authorized the CIA to begin rendition of terror suspects to nations known to commit torture.
3. On November 13, the President determined that Al Qaeda suspects would be denied access to domestic or international courts.
4. Close to the end of 2001, Bush's Justice Department approved the use of "sleep deprivation and deployment of 'stress factors'" for counter-terror interrogation.
5. Bush decided the Geneva Conventions did not apply to his "War on Terror" on January 8, 2002.
6. On January 9, 2002, John Woo of the Justice Department crafted a memo denying application of the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act to suspected members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whom he characterized as "enemy combatants". Since they were now neither soldier nor citizen, the articles of the Geneva Convention barring "cruel treatment and torture" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" did not apply to them (according to Yoo's perverse logic).
7. As Afghans captured in the "War on Terror" started populating Guantanamo Bay prison on January 11, Donald Rumsfeld stated that those "unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention."
8. On January 18, the man Bush later elevated from White House legal counsel to Attorney General (for his loyalty to the Empire) informed the President that the Justice Department "had issued a formal legal opinion concluding that the Geneva Convention III on the Treatment of Prisoners of War does not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda."
9. The following day, Rumsfeld advised his field commanders that "Al Qaeda and Taliban individuals under the control of the Department of Defense are not entitled to prisoner of war status for purposes of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."
10. January 22, 2002: Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee presented Alberto Gonzales with a 37 page memo which outlined the means to implement "coercive interrogation" without legal consequences, affirming that "neither the federal War Crimes Act nor the Geneva Conventions would apply to the detention conditions of al Qaeda prisoners", and that Bush had the Constitutional power to suspend US treaties with Afghanistan.
11. Behind the scenes, Bush and Rumsfeld approved an SAP or "special-access program" within the CIA. By its very nature, only a handful of top level government officials are aware of the existence of an SAP. This particular SAP endowed the CIA, Navy Seals, and Army Delta Force with the power to assassinate, kidnap and, of course, to torture. Concurrently, the CIA began creating the American Gulag by establishing secret prisons in places like Diego Garcia Island and Thailand.
12. The Bush administration entrusted the CIA with "operational command" of its long coveted "War on Terror", which enabled the United States to abandon FBI and military restrictions on torture.
13. In August of 2002, Bybee, Yoo, and Vice Presidential counsel David Addington created another Justice Department memo "legitimizing" torture. Employing reasoning which defied the laws of reality, this trio determined that federal law and the UN anti-torture conventions only prohibited torture that was "specifically intended to inflict severe pain or suffering, whether mental or physical." They concluded that to be a crime, the torture must "be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Utilizing this memo, the CIA could evade responsibility for torturing "enemy combatants" simply by claiming they were attempting to gain information rather than to inflict pain. The memo also constructed a very strict definition of psychological torture, interpreting many CIA techniques as legal. Most significantly, in defiance of the Supreme Court's decision in Youngstown Sheet and Tube et al vs. Sawyer, Bybee and his cohorts asserted that restraints on Bush's directives to interrogate would "represent an unconstitutional infringement of the President's authority to conduct war."
14. At about the same time as the release of the Bybee memo, the Justice Department gave the CIA classified permission to utilize harsher interrogation tactics than the military, including water boarding, a practice which leads the victim to believe they are drowning.
Bush and his murderous cabal gave the authorization, the CIA provided supervision, and the military carried out the "coercive interrogation". A Question of Torture sheds significant light on the culpability of Generals Miller and Sanchez in implementing the policy of inflicting excruciating psychological and physical pain on "enemy combatants" throughout the military prison system in Iraq, the nation America "rescued" from Saddam Hussein. America's leaders condoned torture and ordered their subordinates to carry it out. In the tradition of monsters like Pol Pot and Idi Amin, they revel in their endless access to money, power, and immunity. Small wonder much of the world hates the American Empire, and its de facto rulers in particular.
Playing with fire
The CIA has repeatedly demonstrated that they are slow learners. Brutality, abuse, and torture, whether physical or psychological, are not only gross violations of a person's inalienable human rights; they are ineffective means of extracting information or modifying behavior. The FBI is one of the few federal law enforcement or military entities not implicated in the web of torture emerging in the "War on Terror" and, according to McCoy's research, its agents' legal, humane interrogation tactics were yielding respectable results before Bush superseded them with the CIA.
Besides lacking value beyond its capacity to satisfy a primal urge for revenge, torture is a double-edged sword which harms both perpetrator and victim. McCoy points out that committing torture intoxicates one with power. Organizations and governments engaging in mass torture deteriorate as the rule of law and respect for humanity disintegrates, breaking down their political and social structures. Objectifying and inflicting suffering upon helpless human beings leaves deep scars upon the souls of the torturers and creates monstrous sociopaths Contrary to the wishful thinking of the Bush Regime, the United States will reap a bitter harvest once the noxious weeds of torture grow to maturity.
Realistically, except in the minds of those who tenaciously cling to their indoctrination from the American Empire, there is no question that the United States egregiously violates human rights on a frequent basis. For a more thorough examination of the cancer of torture ravaging the United States, read A Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy.
_____
Jason Miller is a 39 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
By Jason Miller
3-24-6
Analysis of the Long, Repulsive History of the United States Inflicting Torture on Its "Suspected Enemies" (in Conjunction with a Review of A Question of Torture by Alfred W. McCoy)
Psychological torture, sleep deprivation, brutality, severe sexual humiliation, and murder summon visions of a dank dungeon in a remote region of pre-invasion Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, replete with evil inquisitors and hooded executioners. However, those manifestations of horror did not spring forth from the Axis of Evil. They are actually drawn from official post-9/11 US policy. Despite its fabled commitment to human rights, the United States government has been committing and enabling acts of torture for half a century. Not even Superman had the power to snatch "Truth, Justice and the American Way" from the crushing jaws of imperialistic ambition and avarice.
Ironically titled, Albert McCoy's A Question of Torture probes and exposes the extent of "the Land of the Free's" involvement in human torture over the years. Only a mainstream media 90% controlled by five major corporations (whose executives and major stockholders are amongst the de facto rulers of the America's so-called republic) could so effectively maintain the illusion that the United States is the world leader in protecting human rights. Somewhere out there, David Copperfield is burning with envy. Rest easy, David. They are running out of magic. Destroying our Constitution and reversing the humanitarian gains achieved by millions of Americans with a social conscience throughout our nation's history , the Bush Regime is extinguishing the candle of hope America once offered to humanity. Despite the exhaustive efforts of the media handmaidens, people are taking notice.
Painstakingly slow ascent....high velocity decline
From our nation's birth, many fine Americans labored vigorously to attain a higher moral plane by ending slavery and advancing the rights of children, minorities, women, and workers. Contrary to the fairy tale of America's benevolent government "of the people", many amongst the plutocracy and emerging corporatocracy fought the American evolution of human rights tooth and nail. Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and company have taken that resistance to new heights and are plunging the United States into an abyss of evil, at home and abroad. Minority Americans, Native Americans, and citizens of other nations have been aware of this descent for years, even before the Neocon catalyzed acceleration. However, as the ruthlessly brazen disciples of Strauss have fervently attacked human rights, many amongst America's indoctrinated White working class are smelling the coffee, and it is not the best part of waking up.
On March 8, 2006, the US State Department released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2005, in which it detailed human rights abuses occurring in over 190 nations. In an act of supreme hypocrisy, they excluded themselves. As one can readily discern simply from reading McCoy's expose' of human torture committed by the United States since 1950, the United States is far from being a bastion of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".
"Torture is evil, pure and simple," is the powerful lesson Peggy Piel imparted to her son, Alfred McCoy. Having spent a year of her childhood in Nazi Germany, this erudite Jewish American knew a bit about the subject of torture. Despite his mother's moralistic viewpoint, McCoy penned his examination of the history of torture committed and facilitated by the United States in a detached, analytical manner, without imposing a moral judgment. Noting over 30 pages of sources, McCoy meticulously researched his chilling glimpse into America's Heart of Darkness, yet still maintained relative objectivity. No easy task in light of the virtually countless egregious violations of human rights and acts of murder committed by the American Empire and its proxies.
Abu Gharib was simply a sign of a "few bad apples"....or was it?
In 1950, the intelligence organization of the "leader of the free world" began to take a strong interest in research involving psychological torture.
McCoy summarizes:
"From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually-a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind."
While the United States was trumpeting its deep devotion to universal human rights, the CIA was busily developing and funding research to yield "new and improved" torture tactics with which they could extract information from Cold War enemies. Utilizing its unique capacity to wield tremendous power clandestinely, the United States' intelligence juggernaut infiltrated and exploited hospitals, divisions of the military, and universities to enable its research.
Many of the nauseating acts of inhumanity depicted in the Abu Gharib photos reflect the rotten fruits of CIA labors. Years of study and experimentation determined that torture involving physical pain lacked efficacy. The CIA found that strong subjects usually responded by stiffening their resistance and weaker ones often gave false information just to end the pain. Psychological torture, including sensory deprivation, sensory disorientation, assault on personal identity and self-inflicted pain appeared to provide a much richer yield of information. The Abu Gharib photos are a window through which one can view the CIA-created world of psychological torture. Hooding, stress positions, extreme intimidation with ferocious dogs (for which a soldier was convicted on 3/21), and sexual humiliation are recurring images in the Abu Gharib pictures and are powerful examples of CIA torture protocol. Other techniques of psychological torture the US military and CIA have used on detained suspects in the "War on Terror" are sleep deprivation, isolation, and dietary manipulation. As the Command Responsibility report by Human Rights First indicates, 45 detainees in the US "War on Terror" have been murdered or have died as a result of physical abuse. As McCoy argues, there is a fine line between psychological torture and physical torture, and as the American Gulag has demonstrated, torturers usually cross that line.
As an aside, it is important to remember that there are currently over 14,000 "suspected terrorists" or "enemy combatants" in US custody. These individuals have been charged with no crime and have been denied due process. Guilty until proven innocent. Now that is justice the American way. Abu Gharib is only an aberration because the torturers were caught. Inflicting severe psychological and mental anguish on suspected enemies of the Empire is now official policy and has taken place at Bagram Air Base, Camp Cropper, Guantanamo Bay and throughout the American Gulag. As for the McCain Anti-Torture Law, Bush and his fellow war criminals are already inventing ways to circumvent it.
Abu Gharib is simply a public display of the psychological and physical torture the CIA has been implementing and practicing for years. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA sharpened its talons through a federal entity called the Office of Public Safety, a branch of US AID. According to McCoy, the OPS trained one million police officers in 47 countries. Not surprisingly, it was not long before these same law enforcement entities began committing severe human right rights abuses and acts of torture.
"Practice makes perfect"
It was morally repugnant enough that the United States killed three million Vietnamese civilians in their imperialistic escapade into Southeast Asia, euphemistically labeling them as "collateral damage". However, McCoy describes torture policies and techniques which resulted in the murder of tens of thousands more Vietnamese. The Phoenix program was implemented by the CIA to eradicate the Vietcong underground. Under CIA administration and supervision, the PRUs (aka Provincial Interrogation Centers) of the Phoenix program degenerated into a collection of South Vietnamese murderers, thugs and criminals who accepted bribes, presumed guilt based on gossip, and murdered their detainees after they completed their interrogation. Ultimately, (if one is gullible enough to take the word of former CIA director William Colby), the Phoenix program murdered 20,587 "Vietcong". Saigon's government puts the figure at 40,994.
Educating them on the finer points of torture and murder
The CIA also bears responsibility for the creation of SAVAK, the Shah of Iran's ruthless secret police force. SAVAK killed 20,000 Iraqi "dissidents" during the Shah's reign. In the Philippines, CIA instruction resulted in 3,257 murders and 35,000 victims of torture by the Ferdinand Marcos regime.
After its defeat in Vietnam, the United States government infiltrated Latin America with a vengeance (to stop the spread of the "Communist threat"). Project X, represented another CIA endeavor to impart their wisdom in the arts of torture to ruthless US allies Not satisfied with their 1963 torture manual called Kubark, the CIA wrote a sequel in Spanish entitled Handling of Sources, Interrogation, Combat Intelligence, and Terrorism and the Urban Guerilla.
Of the sequel, McCoy writes,
"Apart from these cold-blooded tactics of kidnapping, murder, beatings, and betrayal, the manual evidences, in its 144 single-spaced pages, an amorality, a studied willingness to exploit an ally without restraint or compunction, hardened on the anvil of the Vietnam conflict."
Once located in Panama, an odious US Army institution known as the School of Americas (sometimes called the School of Assassins) bestowed the CIA's torture wisdom upon hundreds of Latin American military officers. The School of Americas fell under the auspices of Project X and provided the "hands on" training to accompany the CIA torture manuals. Interestingly, by 1983 the CIA had begun to re-emphasize the use of psychological over physical torture when it wrote its Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual. A laundry list of CIA-trained Latin American military personnel and dictators murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands thanks to the tutelage of Project X.
Of war crimes, evasion of responsibility and impunity
McCoy notes that the United States took a break and out-sourced torture to its allies throughout the 1990's. Unfortunately for the world, the Bush Regime opportunistically seized 9/11 to begin its PNAC inspired quest for global military dominance. In the process, the administration implemented torture as official United States policy. Desperately attempting to fend off critics and preserve the crumbling façade of moral superiority, America's ruling class has sacrificed several from amongst those near the bottom of the food chain. However, calling the prosecution and conviction of a handful of military personnel justice would be a farce. Those ultimately responsible for America's abject torture continue to act with impunity.
As McCoy has vividly illustrated, America's "grunts" at Abu Gharib and throughout the American Gulag were acting under the orders of the Bush Regime and under the supervision of the CIA:
1. On September 11, 2001, George Bush told Donald Rumsfeld and his staff, "Any barriers in your way, they are gone." When they reminded him of legal constraints, Bush shouted, "I don't care what the international lawyers say; we are going to kick some ass."
2. Six days later, Bush authorized the CIA to begin rendition of terror suspects to nations known to commit torture.
3. On November 13, the President determined that Al Qaeda suspects would be denied access to domestic or international courts.
4. Close to the end of 2001, Bush's Justice Department approved the use of "sleep deprivation and deployment of 'stress factors'" for counter-terror interrogation.
5. Bush decided the Geneva Conventions did not apply to his "War on Terror" on January 8, 2002.
6. On January 9, 2002, John Woo of the Justice Department crafted a memo denying application of the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act to suspected members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whom he characterized as "enemy combatants". Since they were now neither soldier nor citizen, the articles of the Geneva Convention barring "cruel treatment and torture" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" did not apply to them (according to Yoo's perverse logic).
7. As Afghans captured in the "War on Terror" started populating Guantanamo Bay prison on January 11, Donald Rumsfeld stated that those "unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention."
8. On January 18, the man Bush later elevated from White House legal counsel to Attorney General (for his loyalty to the Empire) informed the President that the Justice Department "had issued a formal legal opinion concluding that the Geneva Convention III on the Treatment of Prisoners of War does not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda."
9. The following day, Rumsfeld advised his field commanders that "Al Qaeda and Taliban individuals under the control of the Department of Defense are not entitled to prisoner of war status for purposes of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."
10. January 22, 2002: Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee presented Alberto Gonzales with a 37 page memo which outlined the means to implement "coercive interrogation" without legal consequences, affirming that "neither the federal War Crimes Act nor the Geneva Conventions would apply to the detention conditions of al Qaeda prisoners", and that Bush had the Constitutional power to suspend US treaties with Afghanistan.
11. Behind the scenes, Bush and Rumsfeld approved an SAP or "special-access program" within the CIA. By its very nature, only a handful of top level government officials are aware of the existence of an SAP. This particular SAP endowed the CIA, Navy Seals, and Army Delta Force with the power to assassinate, kidnap and, of course, to torture. Concurrently, the CIA began creating the American Gulag by establishing secret prisons in places like Diego Garcia Island and Thailand.
12. The Bush administration entrusted the CIA with "operational command" of its long coveted "War on Terror", which enabled the United States to abandon FBI and military restrictions on torture.
13. In August of 2002, Bybee, Yoo, and Vice Presidential counsel David Addington created another Justice Department memo "legitimizing" torture. Employing reasoning which defied the laws of reality, this trio determined that federal law and the UN anti-torture conventions only prohibited torture that was "specifically intended to inflict severe pain or suffering, whether mental or physical." They concluded that to be a crime, the torture must "be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Utilizing this memo, the CIA could evade responsibility for torturing "enemy combatants" simply by claiming they were attempting to gain information rather than to inflict pain. The memo also constructed a very strict definition of psychological torture, interpreting many CIA techniques as legal. Most significantly, in defiance of the Supreme Court's decision in Youngstown Sheet and Tube et al vs. Sawyer, Bybee and his cohorts asserted that restraints on Bush's directives to interrogate would "represent an unconstitutional infringement of the President's authority to conduct war."
14. At about the same time as the release of the Bybee memo, the Justice Department gave the CIA classified permission to utilize harsher interrogation tactics than the military, including water boarding, a practice which leads the victim to believe they are drowning.
Bush and his murderous cabal gave the authorization, the CIA provided supervision, and the military carried out the "coercive interrogation". A Question of Torture sheds significant light on the culpability of Generals Miller and Sanchez in implementing the policy of inflicting excruciating psychological and physical pain on "enemy combatants" throughout the military prison system in Iraq, the nation America "rescued" from Saddam Hussein. America's leaders condoned torture and ordered their subordinates to carry it out. In the tradition of monsters like Pol Pot and Idi Amin, they revel in their endless access to money, power, and immunity. Small wonder much of the world hates the American Empire, and its de facto rulers in particular.
Playing with fire
The CIA has repeatedly demonstrated that they are slow learners. Brutality, abuse, and torture, whether physical or psychological, are not only gross violations of a person's inalienable human rights; they are ineffective means of extracting information or modifying behavior. The FBI is one of the few federal law enforcement or military entities not implicated in the web of torture emerging in the "War on Terror" and, according to McCoy's research, its agents' legal, humane interrogation tactics were yielding respectable results before Bush superseded them with the CIA.
Besides lacking value beyond its capacity to satisfy a primal urge for revenge, torture is a double-edged sword which harms both perpetrator and victim. McCoy points out that committing torture intoxicates one with power. Organizations and governments engaging in mass torture deteriorate as the rule of law and respect for humanity disintegrates, breaking down their political and social structures. Objectifying and inflicting suffering upon helpless human beings leaves deep scars upon the souls of the torturers and creates monstrous sociopaths Contrary to the wishful thinking of the Bush Regime, the United States will reap a bitter harvest once the noxious weeds of torture grow to maturity.
Realistically, except in the minds of those who tenaciously cling to their indoctrination from the American Empire, there is no question that the United States egregiously violates human rights on a frequent basis. For a more thorough examination of the cancer of torture ravaging the United States, read A Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy.
_____
Jason Miller is a 39 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
Dixie Chicks turn death threats to song
original
Oliver Burkeman in New York
Saturday March 25, 2006
The Guardian
Three years is a long time in geopolitics. In 2003 the Dixie Chicks were condemned as traitors in America after telling a London audience they were ashamed that their president came from Texas. Now the group's angry new song addressing that controversy looks set to become a hit.
Not Ready to Make Nice, due to be released in May, refers to death threats the three Texans received after the Guardian reported how they had criticised George Bush during a concert at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," singer Natalie Maines told the audience.
Article continues
Numerous US radio stations removed the group from their playlists. "In my book the Dixie Chicks are traitors," one columnist wrote at the time. "Not only to America but also to everything good that country music stands for."
But that was in a year when Mr Bush, who actually comes from Connecticut, enjoyed approval ratings of up to 70%. This month his rating reached a new low of 36%, according to a CNN/Gallup poll.
The song's lyrics pull no punches: "Forgive, sounds good/Forget, I'm not sure I could/They say time heals everything/ But I'm still waiting ... And how in the world can the words that I said/Send somebody so over the edge/That they'd write me a letter/Sayin' that I better shut up and sing/Or my life will be over?"
Some Texas stations still refuse to air the group's music, but those that have played it say it has been well received, and Billboard Radio Monitor predicts a hit.
Maines describes the album as "pure therapy". "I'm way more at peace now. Writing these songs and saying everything we had to say makes it possible to move on," she says on the Dixie Chicks website.
Oliver Burkeman in New York
Saturday March 25, 2006
The Guardian
Three years is a long time in geopolitics. In 2003 the Dixie Chicks were condemned as traitors in America after telling a London audience they were ashamed that their president came from Texas. Now the group's angry new song addressing that controversy looks set to become a hit.
Not Ready to Make Nice, due to be released in May, refers to death threats the three Texans received after the Guardian reported how they had criticised George Bush during a concert at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," singer Natalie Maines told the audience.
Article continues
Numerous US radio stations removed the group from their playlists. "In my book the Dixie Chicks are traitors," one columnist wrote at the time. "Not only to America but also to everything good that country music stands for."
But that was in a year when Mr Bush, who actually comes from Connecticut, enjoyed approval ratings of up to 70%. This month his rating reached a new low of 36%, according to a CNN/Gallup poll.
The song's lyrics pull no punches: "Forgive, sounds good/Forget, I'm not sure I could/They say time heals everything/ But I'm still waiting ... And how in the world can the words that I said/Send somebody so over the edge/That they'd write me a letter/Sayin' that I better shut up and sing/Or my life will be over?"
Some Texas stations still refuse to air the group's music, but those that have played it say it has been well received, and Billboard Radio Monitor predicts a hit.
Maines describes the album as "pure therapy". "I'm way more at peace now. Writing these songs and saying everything we had to say makes it possible to move on," she says on the Dixie Chicks website.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Pentagon report says Russia gave Iraq intelligence
original
Fri Mar 24, 2006 3:33 PM ET
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia provided intelligence to Iraq's government on U.S. military movements in the opening days of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, a Pentagon report released on Friday said.
The report said an April 2, 2003, document from the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs to President Saddam Hussein stated that Russian intelligence had reported information on American troops plans to the Iraqis through the Russian ambassador.
The intelligence, the document stated, was that the American forces were moving to cut off Baghdad from the south, east and north, that U.S. bombing would concentrate on Baghdad and that the assault on Baghdad would not begin before around April 15. In fact, Baghdad fell about a week before that date.
"Significantly, the regime was also receiving intelligence from the Russians that fed suspicions that the attack out of Kuwait was merely a diversion," the report stated.
Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Cucolo of U.S. Joint Forces Command told a briefing he viewed Russia's decision to give intelligence to Saddam's government as "driven by economic interests." The report noted Russian business interests in Iraqi oil.
The revelations were contained in a report by the U.S. military's Joint Forces Command assessing the Iraqi view of events in the opening months of the war, from March to May 2003, based on interviews with senior Iraqi officials and captured documents.
The report said a document sent to Saddam on March 24, 2003, stated, "The information that the Russians have collected from their sources inside the American Central Command in Doha is that the United States is convinced that occupying Iraqi cities are (sic) impossible, and that they have changed their tactic," to avoid entering cities.
The report said this kind of information was "only one of the fog-generators obscuring the minds of Iraq's senior leadership."
The report also dealt with the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. President George W. Bush cited the threat posed by such weapons as the prime justification for the invasion. No such weapons ever were found.
The authors stated that the report was not intended to examine "the technical extent of Saddam's WMD capabilities," noting that other investigators had done so.
"But the tension created by the regime's steadfast refusal to 'come clean' with regard to WMD shaped the actions and interactions of both sides leading up to war," the report stated. "Saddam walked a tightrope with WMD because as he often reminded his close advisors, they lived in a very dangerous global neighborhood where even the perception of weakness drew wolves."
It stated that there were benefits for Saddam to let his enemies believe he had such weapons, even if he did not, while at the same time it was critical to his survival for the United States and the rest of the West to believe he did not have them.
"He had placed himself into a diplomatic and propaganda Catch-22," the report said.
Fri Mar 24, 2006 3:33 PM ET
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia provided intelligence to Iraq's government on U.S. military movements in the opening days of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, a Pentagon report released on Friday said.
The report said an April 2, 2003, document from the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs to President Saddam Hussein stated that Russian intelligence had reported information on American troops plans to the Iraqis through the Russian ambassador.
The intelligence, the document stated, was that the American forces were moving to cut off Baghdad from the south, east and north, that U.S. bombing would concentrate on Baghdad and that the assault on Baghdad would not begin before around April 15. In fact, Baghdad fell about a week before that date.
"Significantly, the regime was also receiving intelligence from the Russians that fed suspicions that the attack out of Kuwait was merely a diversion," the report stated.
Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Cucolo of U.S. Joint Forces Command told a briefing he viewed Russia's decision to give intelligence to Saddam's government as "driven by economic interests." The report noted Russian business interests in Iraqi oil.
The revelations were contained in a report by the U.S. military's Joint Forces Command assessing the Iraqi view of events in the opening months of the war, from March to May 2003, based on interviews with senior Iraqi officials and captured documents.
The report said a document sent to Saddam on March 24, 2003, stated, "The information that the Russians have collected from their sources inside the American Central Command in Doha is that the United States is convinced that occupying Iraqi cities are (sic) impossible, and that they have changed their tactic," to avoid entering cities.
The report said this kind of information was "only one of the fog-generators obscuring the minds of Iraq's senior leadership."
The report also dealt with the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. President George W. Bush cited the threat posed by such weapons as the prime justification for the invasion. No such weapons ever were found.
The authors stated that the report was not intended to examine "the technical extent of Saddam's WMD capabilities," noting that other investigators had done so.
"But the tension created by the regime's steadfast refusal to 'come clean' with regard to WMD shaped the actions and interactions of both sides leading up to war," the report stated. "Saddam walked a tightrope with WMD because as he often reminded his close advisors, they lived in a very dangerous global neighborhood where even the perception of weakness drew wolves."
It stated that there were benefits for Saddam to let his enemies believe he had such weapons, even if he did not, while at the same time it was critical to his survival for the United States and the rest of the West to believe he did not have them.
"He had placed himself into a diplomatic and propaganda Catch-22," the report said.
In 1976 Posada was actively working for the CIA
granma.cu -
WHEN THE CUBAN AIRLINE EXPLODED …
In 1976 Posada was actively working for the CIA
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma International—
LUIS Posada Carriles was actively working for the CIA in February 1976 in Caracas, just a few months before the sabotage of the Cubana Aviation passenger plane, although the agency tried to cover up the relationship by means of a deceptive document.
This was confirmed by a recently declassified document from headquarters of the Venezuelan Intelligence Agency (DISIP) during the Carlos Andrés Pérez government, which describes the terrorist’s activities and clearly defines the level of relationship that he maintained at that time with the U.S. embassy in Caracas.
For now, Posada is to remain detained in the United States, According to a written statement from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency issued on March 22, which does not rule out "removing him to a third country" other than Cuba or Venezuela.
To date, the U.S. authorities have not expressly stated the true status of Posada’s relationship with the CIA at the time of the attack, which led to the death of 73 people, apart from declassifying scant elements of information that were released with the obvious intention of deflecting responsibility for the terrorist act from the Agency.
Dated February 26, 1976, the aforementioned document was written on a form titled AGENT REPORT with the control number 00314.
In the first box is written verbatim:
Subject: LUIS POSADA CARRILES (aka.) EL BAMBI, C.I. 5.304.069
Place: Caracas.
Regarding: INFORMATION ABOUT THE SUBJECT, COPEY AND U.S. AGENT (COPEY is an obvious misspelling of the political party acronym COPEI)
The text is typed and in the bottom corner a box titled "Agent Code," reads "A-12."
DEATH THREATS
The first point of the document explains that the agency "has information" that Posada is carrying out an investigation into the whereabouts of a DISIP Inspector, "specifically in his residence."
It details that "the subject has threatened the life of civilian William Casas for accusing the subject’s employee, civilian Adolfo Reyes Mejias (aka. Hernan), of blackmail and extortion."
According to the text, this Hernan used his job in the National Inspectorate of Identification and Aliens "to facilitate investigations carried out by the agency headed by the subject, which is located at Edificio Majestic, Piso 7, Oficinas-apartamento 78" on the downtown Avenida Libertador.
This document is of course referring to the Commercial and Industrial Investigations Agency (ICICA) that Posada created in June 1975.
In the document’s second point, agent "A-12" defines the subject as having 36 employees who engage in investigations, track individuals, tap telephones, and enter homes with the aid of modern locksmiths’ equipment, etc."
"Much of this equipment was unduly appropriated and is the property of the DISIP. The equipment was stolen by civilian Adolfo Reyes MejÃas", specified the individual who drafted the report.
JOAQUIN CHAFARDET AND HERMES ROJAS
Listed in the third point, among the names of Posada’s collaborators, is JoaquÃn Chaffardet Ramos, the Venezuelan lawyer who was the sole witness for the defense in Luis Posada Carriles’ recent trial before an immigration judge in El Paso, Texas.
Also mentioned is "Hermes José Rojas Peralta, C.I. 3.185.945". Incredibly, up until 2004, Rojas occupied the post of police chief for the state of Miranda, Venezuela and was the right-hand man of coup leader Governor Enrique Mendoza. Fortunately, both were swept away in the 2004 elections.
It has also been revealed, 30 years later, that this character worked under the orders of Luis Posada Carriles during the operations leading to the overthrow and death of Chilean President Salvador Allende.
He currently maintains relations with Venezuelan and Cuba- American terrorist circles in Miami, including Rodolfo Frómeta, who heads the paramilitary group Comandos F4, tolerated by the FBI. Frómeta was one of the most loquacious of the extremists who made a recent statement on Miami television in favor of the use of terrorist violence against Cuba.
CIA AGENT FROM WHEN TO WHEN?
Regarding the clandestine character of Posada’s activities and those of his investigation agency, the declassified DISIP document states in a fourth point:
"We have information that the subject has undertaken special tasks for the U.S. embassy, specifically for the CIA, which has him classified as a mercenary."
And added as a "note" to signal the importance of the reported matter: "Regarding the present report, Inspector (NAME CROSSED OUT) would like to personally discuss other points with the ranking Colonel of the Interior Security Division."
According to another document declassified in May 2005 by the National Security Archives of George Washington University, Luis Posada Carriles was recruited by the CIA when he was in the U.S. army, between 1963 and 1965. However, other sources reveal his ties to the Agency began when he was recruited as a participant in Operation 40, which united a group of specially trained thugs at the same time as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.
The CIA placed Posada Carriles in Venezuela in 1967, as a functionary of DIGEPOL, which later became the DISIP where, under the name Commissioner Basilio, he directed bloody operations of repression.
In the course of 1976, Posada and his investigations agency was linked to a series of violent actions carried out in various countries by the CORU, an organization which he directed in partnership with Orlando Bosch and with the complicity of terrorists such as José Pepe Vázquez Blanco, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Héctor Carbonel Arenas, Francisco Pimentel, Nelly Rojas and Salvador Romanà Orúe, several of whom are still engaging in conspiratorial activities.
The U.S. declassified document tries to place the end of relations between Posada and the CIA in 1974, although it admits to some contact with him as late as June 1976.
The sabotage of the Cuban passenger plane occurred on October 6, 1976. Venezuelans Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano concealed two bombs on the DC-8. All 73 passengers died, including a pregnant woman.
Upon interrogation by the Barbados police, Lugo and Ricardo stated that they had contacts with the CIA – a notebook with the telephone numbers of various officers located in Caracas was taken from them – and they immediately exposed their bosses: Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. The DISIP subsequently arrested both Posada and Bosch and found abundant evidence in Posada Carriles’ office not only of his participation in this crime together with his accomplices, but also of various other crimes.
Oddly, it was through the FBI — and NOT its own agency — that this document was declassified in May 2005. The CIA report dated October 16, 1976 attempts to explain the agency’s relation with Posada just days after the explosion of the aircraft. The author of the declassified text maintained the necessary confusion and did not specify when Posada joined that controversial U.S. intelligence agency.
The text simply says:
The employer in Caracas of both Lugo and Lozano is Luis Posada Carriles, former chief of the counterintelligence division of the DISIP (…). Posada is a former agent of the CIA. He was amicably terminated in July 1967 but contact was reestablished in October 1967. He lost his position with the DISIP in March 1974 as a result of a change in the Venezuelan government and was amicably terminated. We have maintained occasional contact with him. His last reported contact with us was in June 1976 when he unsuccessfully sought assistance regarding a visa problem."
Lies. The facts demonstrate much more clearly the real relationship of Posada and his partner Orlando Bosch with the CIA at that time: only four days after having been arrested, due to the confessions of Lugo and Lozano regarding the sabotage of the plane in Barbados, the U.S. government began maneuvers to extradite both terrorists to the United States for reasons still undisclosed.
Another secret report, written only days after the explosion of the plane and declassified by the Venezuelan Direction of Military Intelligence, literally explains not only the support given by the U.S. State Department to Posada and his agency but also the material aid provided to him precisely by the CIA.
This recently revealed document specifies that "information has been received that the U.S. Department of State, through the CIA, assisted him with technical equipment for the tracking and interception of communications and to set up an Investigations Office."
Posada escaped from the San Carlos Prison in Caracas August 18, 1985, and immediately joined the trafficking of drugs for weapons operation devised by the CIA and managed by Félix RodrÃguez MendigutÃa, operating out of the Salvadorian airport of Ilopango.
What is irrefutable is that in one way or another, with or without a formal contract, U.S. authorities maintained a frequent, close, and constant relationship with their "mercenary" and his investigations agency and that they not only learned of his plans but also could have perfectly known, directed, revised, authorized and even financed them.
And for this reason, they have always protected, in one way or another, Posada, Bosch and other related criminals. Just like they are doing now in the totally manipulated immigration case of Posada, a man who, under the nickname Commissioner Basilio, freely tortured and murdered people in the basement of the DISIP offices for years.
That is why the work of the five Cubans still imprisoned in the United States for having infiltrated the ranks of the Miami mafia is so deserving of respect and why the struggle for their liberation is such a noble one.
WHEN THE CUBAN AIRLINE EXPLODED …
In 1976 Posada was actively working for the CIA
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma International—
LUIS Posada Carriles was actively working for the CIA in February 1976 in Caracas, just a few months before the sabotage of the Cubana Aviation passenger plane, although the agency tried to cover up the relationship by means of a deceptive document.
This was confirmed by a recently declassified document from headquarters of the Venezuelan Intelligence Agency (DISIP) during the Carlos Andrés Pérez government, which describes the terrorist’s activities and clearly defines the level of relationship that he maintained at that time with the U.S. embassy in Caracas.
For now, Posada is to remain detained in the United States, According to a written statement from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency issued on March 22, which does not rule out "removing him to a third country" other than Cuba or Venezuela.
To date, the U.S. authorities have not expressly stated the true status of Posada’s relationship with the CIA at the time of the attack, which led to the death of 73 people, apart from declassifying scant elements of information that were released with the obvious intention of deflecting responsibility for the terrorist act from the Agency.
Dated February 26, 1976, the aforementioned document was written on a form titled AGENT REPORT with the control number 00314.
In the first box is written verbatim:
Subject: LUIS POSADA CARRILES (aka.) EL BAMBI, C.I. 5.304.069
Place: Caracas.
Regarding: INFORMATION ABOUT THE SUBJECT, COPEY AND U.S. AGENT (COPEY is an obvious misspelling of the political party acronym COPEI)
The text is typed and in the bottom corner a box titled "Agent Code," reads "A-12."
DEATH THREATS
The first point of the document explains that the agency "has information" that Posada is carrying out an investigation into the whereabouts of a DISIP Inspector, "specifically in his residence."
It details that "the subject has threatened the life of civilian William Casas for accusing the subject’s employee, civilian Adolfo Reyes Mejias (aka. Hernan), of blackmail and extortion."
According to the text, this Hernan used his job in the National Inspectorate of Identification and Aliens "to facilitate investigations carried out by the agency headed by the subject, which is located at Edificio Majestic, Piso 7, Oficinas-apartamento 78" on the downtown Avenida Libertador.
This document is of course referring to the Commercial and Industrial Investigations Agency (ICICA) that Posada created in June 1975.
In the document’s second point, agent "A-12" defines the subject as having 36 employees who engage in investigations, track individuals, tap telephones, and enter homes with the aid of modern locksmiths’ equipment, etc."
"Much of this equipment was unduly appropriated and is the property of the DISIP. The equipment was stolen by civilian Adolfo Reyes MejÃas", specified the individual who drafted the report.
JOAQUIN CHAFARDET AND HERMES ROJAS
Listed in the third point, among the names of Posada’s collaborators, is JoaquÃn Chaffardet Ramos, the Venezuelan lawyer who was the sole witness for the defense in Luis Posada Carriles’ recent trial before an immigration judge in El Paso, Texas.
Also mentioned is "Hermes José Rojas Peralta, C.I. 3.185.945". Incredibly, up until 2004, Rojas occupied the post of police chief for the state of Miranda, Venezuela and was the right-hand man of coup leader Governor Enrique Mendoza. Fortunately, both were swept away in the 2004 elections.
It has also been revealed, 30 years later, that this character worked under the orders of Luis Posada Carriles during the operations leading to the overthrow and death of Chilean President Salvador Allende.
He currently maintains relations with Venezuelan and Cuba- American terrorist circles in Miami, including Rodolfo Frómeta, who heads the paramilitary group Comandos F4, tolerated by the FBI. Frómeta was one of the most loquacious of the extremists who made a recent statement on Miami television in favor of the use of terrorist violence against Cuba.
CIA AGENT FROM WHEN TO WHEN?
Regarding the clandestine character of Posada’s activities and those of his investigation agency, the declassified DISIP document states in a fourth point:
"We have information that the subject has undertaken special tasks for the U.S. embassy, specifically for the CIA, which has him classified as a mercenary."
And added as a "note" to signal the importance of the reported matter: "Regarding the present report, Inspector (NAME CROSSED OUT) would like to personally discuss other points with the ranking Colonel of the Interior Security Division."
According to another document declassified in May 2005 by the National Security Archives of George Washington University, Luis Posada Carriles was recruited by the CIA when he was in the U.S. army, between 1963 and 1965. However, other sources reveal his ties to the Agency began when he was recruited as a participant in Operation 40, which united a group of specially trained thugs at the same time as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.
The CIA placed Posada Carriles in Venezuela in 1967, as a functionary of DIGEPOL, which later became the DISIP where, under the name Commissioner Basilio, he directed bloody operations of repression.
In the course of 1976, Posada and his investigations agency was linked to a series of violent actions carried out in various countries by the CORU, an organization which he directed in partnership with Orlando Bosch and with the complicity of terrorists such as José Pepe Vázquez Blanco, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Héctor Carbonel Arenas, Francisco Pimentel, Nelly Rojas and Salvador Romanà Orúe, several of whom are still engaging in conspiratorial activities.
The U.S. declassified document tries to place the end of relations between Posada and the CIA in 1974, although it admits to some contact with him as late as June 1976.
The sabotage of the Cuban passenger plane occurred on October 6, 1976. Venezuelans Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano concealed two bombs on the DC-8. All 73 passengers died, including a pregnant woman.
Upon interrogation by the Barbados police, Lugo and Ricardo stated that they had contacts with the CIA – a notebook with the telephone numbers of various officers located in Caracas was taken from them – and they immediately exposed their bosses: Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. The DISIP subsequently arrested both Posada and Bosch and found abundant evidence in Posada Carriles’ office not only of his participation in this crime together with his accomplices, but also of various other crimes.
Oddly, it was through the FBI — and NOT its own agency — that this document was declassified in May 2005. The CIA report dated October 16, 1976 attempts to explain the agency’s relation with Posada just days after the explosion of the aircraft. The author of the declassified text maintained the necessary confusion and did not specify when Posada joined that controversial U.S. intelligence agency.
The text simply says:
The employer in Caracas of both Lugo and Lozano is Luis Posada Carriles, former chief of the counterintelligence division of the DISIP (…). Posada is a former agent of the CIA. He was amicably terminated in July 1967 but contact was reestablished in October 1967. He lost his position with the DISIP in March 1974 as a result of a change in the Venezuelan government and was amicably terminated. We have maintained occasional contact with him. His last reported contact with us was in June 1976 when he unsuccessfully sought assistance regarding a visa problem."
Lies. The facts demonstrate much more clearly the real relationship of Posada and his partner Orlando Bosch with the CIA at that time: only four days after having been arrested, due to the confessions of Lugo and Lozano regarding the sabotage of the plane in Barbados, the U.S. government began maneuvers to extradite both terrorists to the United States for reasons still undisclosed.
Another secret report, written only days after the explosion of the plane and declassified by the Venezuelan Direction of Military Intelligence, literally explains not only the support given by the U.S. State Department to Posada and his agency but also the material aid provided to him precisely by the CIA.
This recently revealed document specifies that "information has been received that the U.S. Department of State, through the CIA, assisted him with technical equipment for the tracking and interception of communications and to set up an Investigations Office."
Posada escaped from the San Carlos Prison in Caracas August 18, 1985, and immediately joined the trafficking of drugs for weapons operation devised by the CIA and managed by Félix RodrÃguez MendigutÃa, operating out of the Salvadorian airport of Ilopango.
What is irrefutable is that in one way or another, with or without a formal contract, U.S. authorities maintained a frequent, close, and constant relationship with their "mercenary" and his investigations agency and that they not only learned of his plans but also could have perfectly known, directed, revised, authorized and even financed them.
And for this reason, they have always protected, in one way or another, Posada, Bosch and other related criminals. Just like they are doing now in the totally manipulated immigration case of Posada, a man who, under the nickname Commissioner Basilio, freely tortured and murdered people in the basement of the DISIP offices for years.
That is why the work of the five Cubans still imprisoned in the United States for having infiltrated the ranks of the Miami mafia is so deserving of respect and why the struggle for their liberation is such a noble one.
Iran Focus-Iran, China discuss Tehran’s nuclear impasse - Special Wire - News
Iran Focus-Iran, China discuss Tehran’s nuclear impasse - Special Wire - News
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Mar. 24 – Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and his Chinese counterpart Li Zhao Xing discussed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program during a telephone conversation on Friday, the government-run news agency Fars reported.
The pair discussed Tehran-Beijing bilateral relations and Iran’s nuclear program, the report said, adding that the conversation was held at the request of the Iranian side.
China and Russia have so far refused to sign up to a statement at the United Nations Security Council condemning Tehran for its non-compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The IAEA has said that it cannot confirm that Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful in nature.
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Mar. 24 – Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and his Chinese counterpart Li Zhao Xing discussed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program during a telephone conversation on Friday, the government-run news agency Fars reported.
The pair discussed Tehran-Beijing bilateral relations and Iran’s nuclear program, the report said, adding that the conversation was held at the request of the Iranian side.
China and Russia have so far refused to sign up to a statement at the United Nations Security Council condemning Tehran for its non-compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The IAEA has said that it cannot confirm that Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful in nature.
John W. Dean | Bush's Defiance of the Law
John W. Dean | Bush's Defiance of the Law
An Update on President Bush's NSA Program:
The Historical Context, Specter's Recent Bill and Feingold's Censure Motion
By John W. Dean
FindLaw
Friday 24 March 2006
President George Bush continues to openly and defiantly ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) - the 1978 statute prohibiting electronic inspection of Americans' telephone and email communications with people outside the United States without a court-authorized warrant. (According to US News & World Report, the President may also have authorized warrantless break-ins and other physical surveillance, such as opening regular mail, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.)
Bush's position is that he does not need Congressional approval for his measures. Even he does not claim that Congress gave him express power to undertake them, but he does claim that Congress indirectly approved such measures when it authorized the use of force to go after those involved in the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States. He also argues that, in any event, approval was not necessary - for he argues that he has such authority under Article II of the Constitution, as the chief executive, and Commander in Chief, charged with faithfully executing the laws of the land and protecting the Constitution.
These arguments are hauntingly familiar to this observer.
The Nixon Precedent
No one can question President Bush's goal: Protecting Americans from further terror attacks. But every American should question his means: Openly defying a longstanding statute that prohibits the very actions he insists on undertaking, when done in the very manner he insists upon doing them.
In some two hundred and seventeen years of the American presidency, there has been only one President who provides a precedent for Bush's stunning, in-your-face, conduct: Richard Nixon. Like Bush, Nixon claimed he was acting to protect the nation's security. Like Bush, Nixon broke the law - authorizing, among other things, illegal wiretaps.
Ironically, a stronger case might be made for Nixon's warrantless wiretaps, than for Bush's. Nixon's were installed to track leaks of national security information relating to the war in Vietnam. (He never found the leaker.) He pursued domestic intelligence by illegal means because he believed - based on information from President Lyndon Johnson - that communists had infiltrated the anti-war movement. (No such evidence was ever found.) In addition, he believed that extreme measures were necessary to deal with domestic terrorists, who were responsible for hundreds of deadly bombings. (This is the same argument Bush makes today.)
Nixon also claimed he was only doing what his predecessors had done. That was not untrue - but what had, in the past, been the exception to the rule became standard operating procedure under Nixon.
Bush, however, can only claim one predecessor for his actions: Nixon. And, of course, he has not made this claim - for Nixon was forced from office because of his defiance of the law.
Prior Presidents Have Always Gone to Congress
Bush has admitted he is ignoring FISA. His Attorney General has offered lame and loose legal justifications that he ought not to dare attempt in any court of law. Only blind partisan followers buy the president's bogus legal arguments. The US Supreme Court's prescient discussion of presidential powers reveals how weak these arguments really are.
In May 1952, President Truman directed his Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer, to take charge of the nation's steel mills, rather than permit a strike by steelworkers - and intransigent management - from hampering national security. The nation was at war in Korea, and without steel, the war effort would be in jeopardy. Truman informed Congress of his actions, but rather than asked for emergency legislation, he proceeded by executive order.
The owners of the steel mills immediately sought an injunction, which was granted by a federal district court judge, and the government appealed directly to the US Supreme Court. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court, in Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, held that Truman's attempted takeover of the steel mills was unconstitutional. Truman then asked Congress for emergency legislation, but Congress turned him down too.
As the strong dissent in Youngstown notes, the "diversity of views expressed in the six opinions of the majority, the lack of reference to authoritative precedent, the repeated reliance upon prior dissenting opinions, the complete disregard of the uncontroverted facts showing the gravity of the emergency and the temporary nature of the taking all serve to demonstrate how far afield one must go to" deny Truman this power. It seems Bush believes he can ride on that dissent. But in the end, the dissent not only is not the law; it is not persuasive.
Truman's actions were not unprecedented: President Lincoln had seized rail and telegraph lines during the Civil War; President Theodore Roosevelt was ready to seize Pennsylvania coal mines if a strike created shortages; President Wilson seized industrial plants and railroads during World War I; and six months before Peal Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt seized a California aviation plant when a strike occurred. These presidents, however, went to Congress - as Truman also eventually did. Only Bush (like Nixon) refuses to do so.
As Donald McCoy's study of the Truman presidency (for the University Press of Kansas) points out, "Truman had sought not only to resolve the steel crisis but also substantially to expand the president's power in a single action that matched his sense of gravity of the emergency that was confronting the nation. He had gambled badly, and he had lost badly." The same could be said of Nixon, who lost even worse because he - like Bush, and unlike Truman - was acting secretly.
Bush, once it was learned what he was doing, could have asked Congress to grant him the authority that he believed he needed. Instead, he has taken the Nixon approach, and wants to do what he wants to do - the Congress be damned.
Will he succeed? What if he does? What if he doesn't?
Bush's Gambling With Presidential Powers
Like Nixon, Bush has wrapped himself in the American flag, national security, his high office, and a claim to be the defender of America - the man who can show terrorists not to mess with the USA. His critics are attacked as being soft on fighting terrorism, or being knee-jerk partisans, when all they want is for their president to stay within the law.
If the issue stays out of court - and continues to be debated by many as if it were purely a policy issue, and FISA does not exist - Bush may prevail; it will be up to the voters in this Fall's election to judge him, and to decide whether to sweep out of office those legislators who are preventing a full investigation of this matter.
But if this issue goes to court, Bush should worry. Even Republican-appointed judges would have to comprise their judicial integrity to rule in his favor.
One reason it may stay out of court, though, is the difficulty of finding a plaintiff with proper standing: someone who has been illegally harmed by reason of Bush's surveillance. The ACLU has looked for such plaintiffs and then filed a lawsuit but its chances are not strong.
Another reason it might stay out of court is if legislation moots the issue. Senators Dewine, Graham, Hagel and Snowe have sponsored legislation, S. 2455, that would retroactively (as well as prospectively) legalize the president's refusal to seek FISA warrants. The bill provides for nominal oversight by the Senate and House Select Intelligence Committees. And this approach, which has in the past, usually been requested by presidents, rather than simply granted by Congress, has been a satisfactory remedy.
But Bush does not want this retroactive approval by Congress. Instead, he wants to keep on breaking the law to try to set a precedent - enlarging his presidential powers (and those of subsequent presidents) permanently, to the detriment of Congress.
Another possible solution, and probably the most thoughtful and intelligent to be offered, is the legislation proposed by Senator Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Specter - who was once considered by Nixon for a seat on the US Supreme Court, even before he had been elected to the Senate - is now one of the Senate's best legal minds. But I suspect the Bush White House will fight Senator Specter's proposal because under it, they may lose.
Senator Specter's Proposed "National Security Surveillance Act of 2006"
On March 16, Senator Specter introduced his proposed legislation, following hearings in which his Judiciary Committee quizzed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for seven hours about the legality of the president's action. Neither Gonzales nor anyone on the panel of legal experts that followed, made anything approaching a compelling case that this was legal activity, although several were highly persuasive that it was transparently illegal.
Implicit in Chairman Specter's proposal, S. 2453, is the fact that the president's actions are, indeed, not legal. Although Specter does not so state, his bill would appropriately place the question of the legality of Bush's actions before the FISA Court, where that court could judge it. No doubt he knows how, in fact, they would judge the matter: They would likely find that the President's bypassing their statutorily-granted authority was, and continues to be, illegal.
Specter recognizes the seriousness of the dilemma here: We are a nation at war, yet also a nation that believes in the rule of law. To have it both ways, he has drawn from a recommendation made decades ago by former Attorney General Edward Levi - a staunch defender of the executive powers: Turn the matter over the FISA Court, where it can, if the Administration presents a solid case (of need balanced against the invasion of civil liberties), rule in the President's favor, but can also reject the President's actions if the balance cuts the other way.
Specter's is a great solution. It preserves secrecy: The FISA Court has shown itself capable of keeping secrets, and while the bill requires bi-annual reports to Congress, they would not reveal secrets. Most importantly, whereas the President claims he is protecting liberties by reviewing the program every forty-five days, Specter's bill imposes a similar requirement.
No doubt the Bush Administration will fight Specter's bill - for the simple reason that it does not want to be tested by a court, for it wants neither checks nor balances, but simple the unilateral exercise of executive power. And even if Specter can get the bill through the Senate, Bush's soldiers in the monocratic House will kill it.
Feingold's Motion for Censure
While Specter's bill may be the best idea yet as to how to deal with Bush's behavior, the approach that has received the most media attention is Senator Russ Feingold's resolution calling for censure of President Bush. The resolution condemns Bush's actions in authorizing the illegal wiretapping program of Americans as part of his war on terror, and then misleading the country about the existence and legality of the program.
Even though nearly half of Americans favor censure, it too is a long shot. Yet is probably the most damning of the documents before Congress.
Feingold's preamble points out that Bush openly lied to Americans about his secret wiretapping, on repeated occasions: On April 20, 2004, Bush said, "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."; on July 14, 2004, he claimed that "the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order"; and on June 9, 2005, he said, "Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools."
All this was untrue. Bush had authorized these very law enforcement officials to bypass federal judges, and proceed without warrants. Why he engaged in such bald-faced lies, in circumstances where it was not necessary, is unclear.
Senator Feingold's proposal has no chance of being adopted in a GOP-controlled Senate - one that includes, as well, more than a few spineless Democrats. Still, he has made his point. As Feingold told the New York Observer, "What [the Republicans had] succeeded in doing, [since this issue has arisen] was to sweep the illegality under the rug." Feingold added, "I decided it was time to include that on the record and came up with the censure proposal, to bring accountability back into the discussion. And I succeeded in doing that. That's been achieved."
Election 2006 Is the Key
In the end, this issue is going to be resolved by the 2006 midterm election. If Republicans lose control of either the House or Senate, the investigations of the Bush/Cheney White House will begin. It won't be pretty. It will make dealing with lying about sex look like High School hazing. It will even make Richard Nixon look like a piker when it comes to staying within the law.
If the early polls are half correct, independent swing voters have had it with Bush. Democrats want no part of him. Moderate Republicans are keeping their distance; they are no longer willing to hold their noses and vote for him.
The big question is whether there will be an "October Surprise" - a dramatic event that will bump up Bush's currently dismal polling numbers, and help his party. Right now, Republican friends tell me they are doing all they can to keep the mid-terms from being a referendum on Bush. They know they have a better chance if they focus on local races - absent an October Surprise. If you have any knowledge of how White Houses operate, you can be sure they are working night and day to pull off such a surprise.
If they do it, Bush will get away with his lawlessness. If not, he and Cheney are in for two very bad years. They have earned them.
John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.
-------
An Update on President Bush's NSA Program:
The Historical Context, Specter's Recent Bill and Feingold's Censure Motion
By John W. Dean
FindLaw
Friday 24 March 2006
President George Bush continues to openly and defiantly ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) - the 1978 statute prohibiting electronic inspection of Americans' telephone and email communications with people outside the United States without a court-authorized warrant. (According to US News & World Report, the President may also have authorized warrantless break-ins and other physical surveillance, such as opening regular mail, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.)
Bush's position is that he does not need Congressional approval for his measures. Even he does not claim that Congress gave him express power to undertake them, but he does claim that Congress indirectly approved such measures when it authorized the use of force to go after those involved in the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States. He also argues that, in any event, approval was not necessary - for he argues that he has such authority under Article II of the Constitution, as the chief executive, and Commander in Chief, charged with faithfully executing the laws of the land and protecting the Constitution.
These arguments are hauntingly familiar to this observer.
The Nixon Precedent
No one can question President Bush's goal: Protecting Americans from further terror attacks. But every American should question his means: Openly defying a longstanding statute that prohibits the very actions he insists on undertaking, when done in the very manner he insists upon doing them.
In some two hundred and seventeen years of the American presidency, there has been only one President who provides a precedent for Bush's stunning, in-your-face, conduct: Richard Nixon. Like Bush, Nixon claimed he was acting to protect the nation's security. Like Bush, Nixon broke the law - authorizing, among other things, illegal wiretaps.
Ironically, a stronger case might be made for Nixon's warrantless wiretaps, than for Bush's. Nixon's were installed to track leaks of national security information relating to the war in Vietnam. (He never found the leaker.) He pursued domestic intelligence by illegal means because he believed - based on information from President Lyndon Johnson - that communists had infiltrated the anti-war movement. (No such evidence was ever found.) In addition, he believed that extreme measures were necessary to deal with domestic terrorists, who were responsible for hundreds of deadly bombings. (This is the same argument Bush makes today.)
Nixon also claimed he was only doing what his predecessors had done. That was not untrue - but what had, in the past, been the exception to the rule became standard operating procedure under Nixon.
Bush, however, can only claim one predecessor for his actions: Nixon. And, of course, he has not made this claim - for Nixon was forced from office because of his defiance of the law.
Prior Presidents Have Always Gone to Congress
Bush has admitted he is ignoring FISA. His Attorney General has offered lame and loose legal justifications that he ought not to dare attempt in any court of law. Only blind partisan followers buy the president's bogus legal arguments. The US Supreme Court's prescient discussion of presidential powers reveals how weak these arguments really are.
In May 1952, President Truman directed his Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer, to take charge of the nation's steel mills, rather than permit a strike by steelworkers - and intransigent management - from hampering national security. The nation was at war in Korea, and without steel, the war effort would be in jeopardy. Truman informed Congress of his actions, but rather than asked for emergency legislation, he proceeded by executive order.
The owners of the steel mills immediately sought an injunction, which was granted by a federal district court judge, and the government appealed directly to the US Supreme Court. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court, in Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, held that Truman's attempted takeover of the steel mills was unconstitutional. Truman then asked Congress for emergency legislation, but Congress turned him down too.
As the strong dissent in Youngstown notes, the "diversity of views expressed in the six opinions of the majority, the lack of reference to authoritative precedent, the repeated reliance upon prior dissenting opinions, the complete disregard of the uncontroverted facts showing the gravity of the emergency and the temporary nature of the taking all serve to demonstrate how far afield one must go to" deny Truman this power. It seems Bush believes he can ride on that dissent. But in the end, the dissent not only is not the law; it is not persuasive.
Truman's actions were not unprecedented: President Lincoln had seized rail and telegraph lines during the Civil War; President Theodore Roosevelt was ready to seize Pennsylvania coal mines if a strike created shortages; President Wilson seized industrial plants and railroads during World War I; and six months before Peal Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt seized a California aviation plant when a strike occurred. These presidents, however, went to Congress - as Truman also eventually did. Only Bush (like Nixon) refuses to do so.
As Donald McCoy's study of the Truman presidency (for the University Press of Kansas) points out, "Truman had sought not only to resolve the steel crisis but also substantially to expand the president's power in a single action that matched his sense of gravity of the emergency that was confronting the nation. He had gambled badly, and he had lost badly." The same could be said of Nixon, who lost even worse because he - like Bush, and unlike Truman - was acting secretly.
Bush, once it was learned what he was doing, could have asked Congress to grant him the authority that he believed he needed. Instead, he has taken the Nixon approach, and wants to do what he wants to do - the Congress be damned.
Will he succeed? What if he does? What if he doesn't?
Bush's Gambling With Presidential Powers
Like Nixon, Bush has wrapped himself in the American flag, national security, his high office, and a claim to be the defender of America - the man who can show terrorists not to mess with the USA. His critics are attacked as being soft on fighting terrorism, or being knee-jerk partisans, when all they want is for their president to stay within the law.
If the issue stays out of court - and continues to be debated by many as if it were purely a policy issue, and FISA does not exist - Bush may prevail; it will be up to the voters in this Fall's election to judge him, and to decide whether to sweep out of office those legislators who are preventing a full investigation of this matter.
But if this issue goes to court, Bush should worry. Even Republican-appointed judges would have to comprise their judicial integrity to rule in his favor.
One reason it may stay out of court, though, is the difficulty of finding a plaintiff with proper standing: someone who has been illegally harmed by reason of Bush's surveillance. The ACLU has looked for such plaintiffs and then filed a lawsuit but its chances are not strong.
Another reason it might stay out of court is if legislation moots the issue. Senators Dewine, Graham, Hagel and Snowe have sponsored legislation, S. 2455, that would retroactively (as well as prospectively) legalize the president's refusal to seek FISA warrants. The bill provides for nominal oversight by the Senate and House Select Intelligence Committees. And this approach, which has in the past, usually been requested by presidents, rather than simply granted by Congress, has been a satisfactory remedy.
But Bush does not want this retroactive approval by Congress. Instead, he wants to keep on breaking the law to try to set a precedent - enlarging his presidential powers (and those of subsequent presidents) permanently, to the detriment of Congress.
Another possible solution, and probably the most thoughtful and intelligent to be offered, is the legislation proposed by Senator Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Specter - who was once considered by Nixon for a seat on the US Supreme Court, even before he had been elected to the Senate - is now one of the Senate's best legal minds. But I suspect the Bush White House will fight Senator Specter's proposal because under it, they may lose.
Senator Specter's Proposed "National Security Surveillance Act of 2006"
On March 16, Senator Specter introduced his proposed legislation, following hearings in which his Judiciary Committee quizzed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for seven hours about the legality of the president's action. Neither Gonzales nor anyone on the panel of legal experts that followed, made anything approaching a compelling case that this was legal activity, although several were highly persuasive that it was transparently illegal.
Implicit in Chairman Specter's proposal, S. 2453, is the fact that the president's actions are, indeed, not legal. Although Specter does not so state, his bill would appropriately place the question of the legality of Bush's actions before the FISA Court, where that court could judge it. No doubt he knows how, in fact, they would judge the matter: They would likely find that the President's bypassing their statutorily-granted authority was, and continues to be, illegal.
Specter recognizes the seriousness of the dilemma here: We are a nation at war, yet also a nation that believes in the rule of law. To have it both ways, he has drawn from a recommendation made decades ago by former Attorney General Edward Levi - a staunch defender of the executive powers: Turn the matter over the FISA Court, where it can, if the Administration presents a solid case (of need balanced against the invasion of civil liberties), rule in the President's favor, but can also reject the President's actions if the balance cuts the other way.
Specter's is a great solution. It preserves secrecy: The FISA Court has shown itself capable of keeping secrets, and while the bill requires bi-annual reports to Congress, they would not reveal secrets. Most importantly, whereas the President claims he is protecting liberties by reviewing the program every forty-five days, Specter's bill imposes a similar requirement.
No doubt the Bush Administration will fight Specter's bill - for the simple reason that it does not want to be tested by a court, for it wants neither checks nor balances, but simple the unilateral exercise of executive power. And even if Specter can get the bill through the Senate, Bush's soldiers in the monocratic House will kill it.
Feingold's Motion for Censure
While Specter's bill may be the best idea yet as to how to deal with Bush's behavior, the approach that has received the most media attention is Senator Russ Feingold's resolution calling for censure of President Bush. The resolution condemns Bush's actions in authorizing the illegal wiretapping program of Americans as part of his war on terror, and then misleading the country about the existence and legality of the program.
Even though nearly half of Americans favor censure, it too is a long shot. Yet is probably the most damning of the documents before Congress.
Feingold's preamble points out that Bush openly lied to Americans about his secret wiretapping, on repeated occasions: On April 20, 2004, Bush said, "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."; on July 14, 2004, he claimed that "the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order"; and on June 9, 2005, he said, "Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools."
All this was untrue. Bush had authorized these very law enforcement officials to bypass federal judges, and proceed without warrants. Why he engaged in such bald-faced lies, in circumstances where it was not necessary, is unclear.
Senator Feingold's proposal has no chance of being adopted in a GOP-controlled Senate - one that includes, as well, more than a few spineless Democrats. Still, he has made his point. As Feingold told the New York Observer, "What [the Republicans had] succeeded in doing, [since this issue has arisen] was to sweep the illegality under the rug." Feingold added, "I decided it was time to include that on the record and came up with the censure proposal, to bring accountability back into the discussion. And I succeeded in doing that. That's been achieved."
Election 2006 Is the Key
In the end, this issue is going to be resolved by the 2006 midterm election. If Republicans lose control of either the House or Senate, the investigations of the Bush/Cheney White House will begin. It won't be pretty. It will make dealing with lying about sex look like High School hazing. It will even make Richard Nixon look like a piker when it comes to staying within the law.
If the early polls are half correct, independent swing voters have had it with Bush. Democrats want no part of him. Moderate Republicans are keeping their distance; they are no longer willing to hold their noses and vote for him.
The big question is whether there will be an "October Surprise" - a dramatic event that will bump up Bush's currently dismal polling numbers, and help his party. Right now, Republican friends tell me they are doing all they can to keep the mid-terms from being a referendum on Bush. They know they have a better chance if they focus on local races - absent an October Surprise. If you have any knowledge of how White Houses operate, you can be sure they are working night and day to pull off such a surprise.
If they do it, Bush will get away with his lawlessness. If not, he and Cheney are in for two very bad years. They have earned them.
John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.
-------
Capitol Hill Blue: Wiccan vets want gravesite recognition
original
By LISA HOFFMAN
Mar 23, 2006, 21:04
While President Bush laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, a self-declared witch embarked on a clandestine mission to mark a grave most dear to her.
It was 2003, and neo-pagan high priestess Rosemary Kooiman, 75, was determined that the gravesite of her recently departed husband, Abraham, bear a Pentacle as the symbol of the Wiccan faith the two shared.
Unlike thousands of headstones bearing a Christian cross, Jewish Star of David, Islamic Crescent and Star, or other religious emblems, Abraham Kooiman's had none because the Department of Veterans Affairs does not permit symbols of Wicca and related pagan sects to be depicted on government-issued stones or markers.
Taking advantage of the attention turned elsewhere that day, Rosemary Kooiman affixed a vinyl Pentacle _ a five-pointed star within a circle _ to the gravesite of her husband, a decorated World War II combat veteran.
That guerrilla action by Kooiman came as part of a decade-long battle by those of her faith to bring recognition to troops and veterans who are Wiccans and believers in other "nature" religions.
Long wrongfully tagged by the misinformed as being Satan worshippers or the casters of evil spells, they say their ancient religion is a peaceful, benign one centered on celebrating nature through rituals, meditations and other spiritual practices.
Why then, they ask, has their religion been snubbed when more than 30 others _ including such relatively obscure ones as Seicho-No-Ie, Eckankar, Sufism and Humanism _ are permitted? Even atheists have their own approved symbol, which features an atom and the letter "A" in the center.
"These people served their country. Isn't America about freedom of religion? They fought for that freedom," said the Rev. Selena Fox, a senior minister and frequent spokeswoman for her neo-pagan faith, as well as a prime mover in the effort for government recognition.
That crusade may be nearing an end. The Veterans department said this week that it is nearing a decision on several requests for memorial markers adorned with Pentacles, including one from the widow of a National Guardsman killed in a helicopter attack in Afghanistan.
"We expect a decision soon," said Jo Schuda, a VA spokeswoman.
In a step interpreted as partially smoothing the way for Pentacle approval, the VA's National Cemetery Administration amended a rule last October that had been a bureaucratic roadblock. Until then, applicants had to submit a letter from a "recognized central head" of the faith attesting to the fact that the requested symbol in fact represented the religion.
But because the Wiccan faith and its related sects are substantially decentralized, that requirement was essentially impossible to meet. Now, the National Cemetery Administration asks for a letter from "a recognized leader."
No one is quite sure how many Wiccans there are in the ranks of military veterans and active-duty troops. Estimates by the Pentagon's chaplains' board put the number of Wiccans at under 2,000, out of the 1.4 million troops in uniform.
Fox, whose Wisconsin-based Circle Sanctuary church claims nearly 54,000 U.S. members, thinks the number of Wiccans in uniform is substantially higher than the Pentagon estimate. Many more likely remain in the religious closet, concerned that they would be tainted by misconceptions about the faith, she said.
But for nearly a decade, the armed services have made it a point to be tolerant of Wiccans and other faiths outside the mainstream. Military chaplains, who are trained to meet the needs of all faiths, held their first Wiccan service in 1997 at Fort Hood, Texas. Today, it is not uncommon to find listings for Wicca rituals on many military base coming-events announcements.
One soldier who was open about his Wiccan faith was Nevada National Guard Sgt. Patrick Stewart, who was killed last September along with four other U.S. troops when the Chinook helicopter carrying them was shot down in Afghanistan. His widow, Roberta Stewart, vowed to push the VA to accept the Wiccan faith and allow a Pentacle on her husband's plaque hung on a memorial wall at the Northern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery.
Her cause got a substantial boost when Nevada GOP Rep. Jim Gibbons spoke out in her behalf this month. So, too, did Lt. Col. Robert Harington, battalion commander of Patrick Stewart's Guard unit.
"Every family should have the ability to honor their fallen loved ones who made the ultimate sacrifice in defending freedom and this nation," Gibbons, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, said in a statement. "It is my hope that the VA will act expeditiously to resolve this matter."
Whatever the resolution, one who will not be around to see it _ at least in her incarnation as Abraham's wife, mother of three, government safety officer, and founder of the Wiccan Nomadic Chantry of the Gramarye _ is Rosemary Kooiman. She died of a heart attack at her home in Laurel, Md., on March 5.
"I'm sad that she wasn't able to see this approved before she died," Fox said.
(Contact Lisa Hoffman at HoffmanL(at)shns.com)
By LISA HOFFMAN
Mar 23, 2006, 21:04
While President Bush laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, a self-declared witch embarked on a clandestine mission to mark a grave most dear to her.
It was 2003, and neo-pagan high priestess Rosemary Kooiman, 75, was determined that the gravesite of her recently departed husband, Abraham, bear a Pentacle as the symbol of the Wiccan faith the two shared.
Unlike thousands of headstones bearing a Christian cross, Jewish Star of David, Islamic Crescent and Star, or other religious emblems, Abraham Kooiman's had none because the Department of Veterans Affairs does not permit symbols of Wicca and related pagan sects to be depicted on government-issued stones or markers.
Taking advantage of the attention turned elsewhere that day, Rosemary Kooiman affixed a vinyl Pentacle _ a five-pointed star within a circle _ to the gravesite of her husband, a decorated World War II combat veteran.
That guerrilla action by Kooiman came as part of a decade-long battle by those of her faith to bring recognition to troops and veterans who are Wiccans and believers in other "nature" religions.
Long wrongfully tagged by the misinformed as being Satan worshippers or the casters of evil spells, they say their ancient religion is a peaceful, benign one centered on celebrating nature through rituals, meditations and other spiritual practices.
Why then, they ask, has their religion been snubbed when more than 30 others _ including such relatively obscure ones as Seicho-No-Ie, Eckankar, Sufism and Humanism _ are permitted? Even atheists have their own approved symbol, which features an atom and the letter "A" in the center.
"These people served their country. Isn't America about freedom of religion? They fought for that freedom," said the Rev. Selena Fox, a senior minister and frequent spokeswoman for her neo-pagan faith, as well as a prime mover in the effort for government recognition.
That crusade may be nearing an end. The Veterans department said this week that it is nearing a decision on several requests for memorial markers adorned with Pentacles, including one from the widow of a National Guardsman killed in a helicopter attack in Afghanistan.
"We expect a decision soon," said Jo Schuda, a VA spokeswoman.
In a step interpreted as partially smoothing the way for Pentacle approval, the VA's National Cemetery Administration amended a rule last October that had been a bureaucratic roadblock. Until then, applicants had to submit a letter from a "recognized central head" of the faith attesting to the fact that the requested symbol in fact represented the religion.
But because the Wiccan faith and its related sects are substantially decentralized, that requirement was essentially impossible to meet. Now, the National Cemetery Administration asks for a letter from "a recognized leader."
No one is quite sure how many Wiccans there are in the ranks of military veterans and active-duty troops. Estimates by the Pentagon's chaplains' board put the number of Wiccans at under 2,000, out of the 1.4 million troops in uniform.
Fox, whose Wisconsin-based Circle Sanctuary church claims nearly 54,000 U.S. members, thinks the number of Wiccans in uniform is substantially higher than the Pentagon estimate. Many more likely remain in the religious closet, concerned that they would be tainted by misconceptions about the faith, she said.
But for nearly a decade, the armed services have made it a point to be tolerant of Wiccans and other faiths outside the mainstream. Military chaplains, who are trained to meet the needs of all faiths, held their first Wiccan service in 1997 at Fort Hood, Texas. Today, it is not uncommon to find listings for Wicca rituals on many military base coming-events announcements.
One soldier who was open about his Wiccan faith was Nevada National Guard Sgt. Patrick Stewart, who was killed last September along with four other U.S. troops when the Chinook helicopter carrying them was shot down in Afghanistan. His widow, Roberta Stewart, vowed to push the VA to accept the Wiccan faith and allow a Pentacle on her husband's plaque hung on a memorial wall at the Northern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery.
Her cause got a substantial boost when Nevada GOP Rep. Jim Gibbons spoke out in her behalf this month. So, too, did Lt. Col. Robert Harington, battalion commander of Patrick Stewart's Guard unit.
"Every family should have the ability to honor their fallen loved ones who made the ultimate sacrifice in defending freedom and this nation," Gibbons, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, said in a statement. "It is my hope that the VA will act expeditiously to resolve this matter."
Whatever the resolution, one who will not be around to see it _ at least in her incarnation as Abraham's wife, mother of three, government safety officer, and founder of the Wiccan Nomadic Chantry of the Gramarye _ is Rosemary Kooiman. She died of a heart attack at her home in Laurel, Md., on March 5.
"I'm sad that she wasn't able to see this approved before she died," Fox said.
(Contact Lisa Hoffman at HoffmanL(at)shns.com)
Scientist discovers that evolution is missing from Arkansas classrooms.
original
Jason R. Wiles
Updated: 3/23/2006
In the fall of 2004, I received an e-mail from an old friend back in Arkansas, where I was raised. She was concerned about a problem her father was having at work. “Bob” is a geologist and a teacher at a science education institution that serves several Arkansas public school districts. My friend did not know the details of Bob’s problem, only that it had to do with geology education. This was enough to arouse my interest, so I invited Bob to tell me about what was going on.
He responded with an e-mail. Teachers at his facility are forbidden to use the “e-word” (evolution)
with the kids. They are permitted to use the word “adaptation” but only to refer to a current characteristic of an organism, not as a product of evolutionary change via natural selection. They cannot even use the term “natural selection.” Bob feared that not being able to use evolutionary terms and ideas to answer his students’ questions would lead to reinforcement of their misconceptions.
But Bob’s personal issue was more specific, and the prohibition more insidious. In his words, “I am instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD ... but I am NOT to say that these rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old.”
As a person with a geology background, Bob found this restriction hard to justify, especially since the new Arkansas educational benchmarks for 5th grade include introduction of the concept of the 4.5-billion-year age of the earth. Bob’s facility is supposed to be meeting or exceeding those benchmarks.
The explanation that had been given to Bob by his supervisors was that their science facility is in a delicate position and must avoid irritating some religious fundamentalists who may have their fingers on the purse strings of various school districts. Apparently his supervisors feared that teachers or parents might be offended if Bob taught their children about the age of rocks and that it would result in another school district pulling out of their program. He closed his explanatory message with these lines:
“So my situation here is tenuous. I am under censure for mentioning numbers. … I find that my ‘fire’ for this place is fading if we’re going to dissemble about such a basic factor of modern science. I mean ... the Scopes trial was how long ago now??? I thought we had fought this battle ... and still it goes on.”
I immediately referred Bob to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). They responded with excellent advice. Bob was able to use their suggestions along with some of the position statements of numerous scientific societies and science teacher organizations listed by the NCSE’s Voices for Evolution Project in defense of his continued push to teach the science he felt obligated to present to his students. Nevertheless, his supervisors remained firm in their policy of steering clear of specifically mentioning evolution or “deep time” chronology.
I was going to be in Arkansas in that December anyway, so I decided to investigate Bob’s issue in person. He was happy for the support, but even more excited to show me around the facility. Bob is infectiously enthusiastic about nature and science education. He is just the kind of person we want to see working with students. He had arranged for me to meet with the directors of the facility, but he wanted to give me a guided tour of the place first.
Self-censorship in defense of science?
I would like to describe the grounds of the facility in more detail, but I must honor the request of all parties involved to not be identified. It was, however, a beautiful place, and the students, fifth-graders that day, seemed more engaged in their learning than most I had ever seen. To be sure, the facility does a fantastic job of teaching science, but I was there to find out about what it was not teaching. Bob and I toured the grounds for quite some time, including a hike to a cave he had recently discovered nearby, and when we returned I was shown to my interview with the program director and executive director.
Both of the directors welcomed me warmly and were very forthcoming in their answers to my questions. They were, however, quite firm in their insistence that they and their facility be kept strictly anonymous if I was to write a story about Bob’s issue. We talked for over an hour about the site’s mission, their classes, and Bob’s situation specifically. Both directors agreed that “in a perfect world” they could, and would, teach evolution and deep time. However, back in the real world, they defended their stance on the prohibition of the “e-word,” reasoning that it would take too long to teach the concept of evolution effectively (especially if they had to defuse any objections) and expressing concern for the well-being of their facility. Their program depends upon public support and continued patronage of the region’s school districts, which they felt could be threatened by any political blowback from an unwanted evolution controversy.
With regard to Bob’s geologic time scale issue, the program director likened it to a game of Russian roulette. He admitted that probably very few students would have a real problem with a discussion about time on the order of millions of years, but that it might only take one child’s parents to cause major problems. He spun a scenario of a student’s returning home with stories beginning with “Millions of years ago …” that could set a fundamentalist parent on a veritable witch hunt, first gathering support of like-minded parents and then showing up at school board meetings until the district pulled out of the science program to avoid conflict. He added that this might cause a ripple effect, other districts following suit, leading to the demise of the program.
Essentially, they are not allowing Bob to teach a certain set of scientific data in order to protect their ability to provide students the good science curriculum they do teach. The directors are not alone in their opinion that discussions of deep time and the “e-word” could be detrimental to the program’s existence. They have polled teachers in the districts they serve and have heard from them more than enough times that teaching evolution would be “political suicide.”
Bob’s last communication indicated that he had signed up with NCSE and was leaning towards the “grin and bear it” approach, which, given his position and the position of the institution, may be the best option. I was a bit disheartened, but still impressed with all the good that is going on at Bob’s facility. I was also curious about other educational institutions, so I decided to ask some questions where I could.
The first place I happened to find, purely by accident, was a privately run science museum for kids. As with Bob’s facility, the museum requested not to be referred to by name. I was only there for a short time, but I’m not quite sure what to make of what happened there. I looked around the museum and found a few biological exhibits, but nothing dealing with evolution. I introduced myself to one of the museum’s employees as a science educator (I am indeed a science educator) and asked her if they had any exhibits on evolution. She said that they used to, but several parents — some of whom home-schooled their children, some of whom are associated with Christian schools — had been offended by the exhibit and complained. They had said either that they would not be back until it was removed or that they would not be using that part of the museum if they returned. “It was right over there,” she said, pointing to an area that was being used at that time for a kind of holiday display.
Later that evening, I had a visit with the coordinator of gifted and talented education at one of Arkansas’s larger public school districts. As before, she has requested that she and her school system be kept anonymous, so I will call her “Susan.” Susan told me she had overheard a teacher explaining the “balanced treatment” given to creationism in her classroom. This was not just any classroom, but an Advanced Placement biology classroom. This was important to Susan, not only because of the subject and level of the class, but also because it fell under her supervision. Was she obliged to do something about this? She knew quite well that the “balanced treatment” being taught had been found by a federal court to violate the Constitution’s establishment clause — perhaps there is no greater irony than that two of the most significant cases decided by federal courts against teaching creationism were Epperson v. Arkansas and McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education.
Susan sincerely wanted to do something about it, but she decided to let it go. Her reasoning was that this particular teacher is probably in her final year of service. To Susan, making an issue out of this just was not worth the strife it would have caused in the school and in the community.
As the discussion progressed that evening, I learned that omission was the method of dealing with evolution in another of Arkansas’s largest, most quickly growing, and wealthiest school districts — an omission that was apparently strongly suggested by the administration. I tried to check on this, but made little progress, receiving the cold shoulder from the administration and the science department at that school. However, I spoke with a person who works for a private science education facility that does contract work for this district: “Helen” — she, like the other people I had visited, requested that she and her employers not be identified. I asked Helen about her experiences with the district’s teachers. Her story was that in preparation for teaching the students from that district, she had asked some of the teachers how they approached the state benchmarks for those items dealing with evolution. She said, “Oh, I later got in trouble for even asking,” but went on to describe their answers. Most teachers said that they did not know enough about evolution to teach it themselves, but one of them, after looking around to make sure they were safely out of anyone’s earshot, explained that the teachers are told by school administrators that it would be “good for their careers” not to mention such topics in their classes.
Inadequate science education
How often does this kind of thing happen? How many teachers are deleting the most fundamental principle of the biological sciences from their classes due to school and community pressure or due to lack of knowledge? How many are disregarding Supreme Court decisions and state curriculum guidelines? These are good questions, and I have been given relevant data from a person currently working in Arkansas. We will call this science teacher Randy. I was introduced to him through the NCSE. He made it clear that his identity must be protected.
Randy runs professional development science education workshops for public school teachers. He’s been doing it for a while now, and he has been taking information on the teachers in his workshops via a survey. He shared some data with me.
According to his survey, about 20 percent are trying to teach evolution and think they are doing a good job; 10 percent are teaching creationism, even though during the workshop he discusses the legally shaky ground on which they stand. Another 20 percent attempt to teach something but feel they just do not understand evolution. The remaining 50 percent avoid it because of community pressure. On an e-mail to members of a list he keeps of people interested in evolution, Randy reported that the latter 50 percent do not cover evolution because they felt intimidated, saw no need to teach it, or might lose their jobs.
By their own description of their classroom practices, 80 percent of the teachers surveyed are not adequately teaching evolutionary science. Remember that these are just the teachers who are in a professional development workshop in science education! What is more disturbing is what Randy went on to say about the aftermath of these workshops. “After one of my workshops at a [state] education cooperative, it was asked that I not come back because I spent too much time on evolution. One of the teachers sent a letter to the governor stating that I was mandating that teachers had to teach evolution, and that I have to be an atheist, and would he do something.”
Of course it’s false to suggest “you’re either an anti-evolutionist or you’re an atheist.” Many scientists who understand and accept evolution are also quite religious, and many people of faith also understand and accept evolution. But here was a public school teacher appealing to the governor to “do something” about this guy teaching teachers to teach evolution. Given that evolutionary science is prescribed in the state curriculum guidelines, and given that two of the most important legal cases regarding evolution education originated in Arkansas, how exactly would we expect the governor to respond? I am not sure whether Gov. Mike Huckabee responded to this letter, but I have seen him address the subject on “Arkansans Ask,” his regular show on the Arkansas Educational Television Network. I’ve seen two episodes on which students expressed their frustration about the lack of evolution education in their public schools. Both times, Huckabee advocated the teaching of creationism in public schools. Here is an excerpt from one of these broadcasts, from July 2004:
Student: Many schools in Arkansas are failing to teach students about evolution according to the educational standards of our state. Since it is against these standards to teach creationism, how would you go about helping our state educate students more sufficiently for this?
Huckabee: Are you saying some students are not getting exposure to the various theories of creation?
Student (stunned): No, of evol … well, of evolution specifically. It’s a biological study that should be educated [taught], but is generally not.
Moderator: Schools are dodging Darwinism? Is that what you …?
Student: Yes.
Huckabee: I’m not familiar that they’re dodging it. Maybe they are. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution. And I think that what I’d be concerned with is that it should be taught as one of the views that’s held by people. But it’s not the only view that’s held. And any time you teach one thing as that it’s the only thing, then I think that has a real problem to it.
Huckabee’s answer was laced with important misconceptions about science. Perhaps the most insidious problem with his response is that it plays on our sense of democracy and free expression. But several court decisions have concluded that fairness and free expression are not violated when public school teachers are required to teach the approved curriculum. These decisions recognized that teaching creationism is little more than thinly veiled religious advocacy.
Furthermore, Huckabee claimed not to be aware of the omission of evolution from Arkansas classrooms. From my limited visit, it is clear that this omission is widespread. But it’s certain Huckabee had heard about the omission before. This is from the July 2003 broadcast of “Arkansans Ask”:
Student: Goal 2.04 of the Biology Benchmark Goals published by the Arkansas Department of Education in May of 2002 indicates that students should examine the development of the theory of biological evolution. Yet many students in Arkansas that I have met … have not been exposed to this idea. What do you believe is the appropriate role of the state in mandating the curriculum of a given course?
Huckabee: I think that the state ought to give students exposure to all points of view. And I would hope that that would be all points of view and not only evolution. I think that they also should be given exposure to the theories not only of evolution but to the basis of those who believe in creationism …
The governor goes on for a bit and finishes his sentiment, but the moderator keeps the conversation going:
Moderator (to student): You’ve encountered a number of students who have not received evolutionary biology?
Student: Yes, I’ve found that quite a few people’s high schools simply prefer to ignore the topic. I think that they’re a bit afraid of the controversy.
Huckabee: I think it’s something kids ought to be exposed to. I do not necessarily buy into the traditional Darwinian theory, personally. But that does not mean that I’m afraid that somebody might find out what it is…
Sisyphean Challenges
How are teachers like “Bob,” administrators like “Susan,” and teacher trainers like “Randy” supposed to ensure proper science education if politicians like the governor consistently advocate the teaching of non-science?
It is telling that none of the people I spoke with were willing to be identified or to allow me to reveal their respective institutions. In the case of “Bob” and his facility’s directors, they were concerned about criticism from both sides. They did not want to lose students by offending fundamentalists or lose credibility in the eyes of the scientific community for omitting evolution.
The shortcomings of evolution instruction in Arkansas don’t end at the state’s borders. But we seldom realize the wider influence our local politicians might have. For instance, the Educational Commission of the States is an important and powerful organization that shapes educational policy in all 50 states. Forty state governors have served as the chair of the ECS, and Governor Huckabee currently holds this position.
Because anti-evolutionists have been quite successful in placing members of their ranks and sympathizers in local legislatures and school boards, it is imperative that we point out the danger that these people pose to adequate science education. The science literacy of our future leaders may depend on it. Although each school, each museum, or each science center may seem to be an isolated case, answering to — and, perhaps trying to keep peace with — its local constituency, the examples suggest that evolution is being squeezed out of education systematically and broadly. Anti-evolutionists have been successful by keeping the struggle focused on the local level. The fallout is widespread ignorance of the tools and methods of science for generations to come.
The author, Jason R. Wiles, is co-manager of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University in Montreal. The center’s mission is to advance the teaching and learning of evolution through research. Wiles, an Arkansas native, has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harding University (with a minor in Bible) and a master’s degree from Portland State University. He’s currently a Ph.D. candidate in science education at McGill.
A slightly different version of the article was originally published in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education, a peer-reviewed journal.
Jason R. Wiles
Updated: 3/23/2006
In the fall of 2004, I received an e-mail from an old friend back in Arkansas, where I was raised. She was concerned about a problem her father was having at work. “Bob” is a geologist and a teacher at a science education institution that serves several Arkansas public school districts. My friend did not know the details of Bob’s problem, only that it had to do with geology education. This was enough to arouse my interest, so I invited Bob to tell me about what was going on.
He responded with an e-mail. Teachers at his facility are forbidden to use the “e-word” (evolution)
with the kids. They are permitted to use the word “adaptation” but only to refer to a current characteristic of an organism, not as a product of evolutionary change via natural selection. They cannot even use the term “natural selection.” Bob feared that not being able to use evolutionary terms and ideas to answer his students’ questions would lead to reinforcement of their misconceptions.
But Bob’s personal issue was more specific, and the prohibition more insidious. In his words, “I am instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD ... but I am NOT to say that these rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old.”
As a person with a geology background, Bob found this restriction hard to justify, especially since the new Arkansas educational benchmarks for 5th grade include introduction of the concept of the 4.5-billion-year age of the earth. Bob’s facility is supposed to be meeting or exceeding those benchmarks.
The explanation that had been given to Bob by his supervisors was that their science facility is in a delicate position and must avoid irritating some religious fundamentalists who may have their fingers on the purse strings of various school districts. Apparently his supervisors feared that teachers or parents might be offended if Bob taught their children about the age of rocks and that it would result in another school district pulling out of their program. He closed his explanatory message with these lines:
“So my situation here is tenuous. I am under censure for mentioning numbers. … I find that my ‘fire’ for this place is fading if we’re going to dissemble about such a basic factor of modern science. I mean ... the Scopes trial was how long ago now??? I thought we had fought this battle ... and still it goes on.”
I immediately referred Bob to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). They responded with excellent advice. Bob was able to use their suggestions along with some of the position statements of numerous scientific societies and science teacher organizations listed by the NCSE’s Voices for Evolution Project in defense of his continued push to teach the science he felt obligated to present to his students. Nevertheless, his supervisors remained firm in their policy of steering clear of specifically mentioning evolution or “deep time” chronology.
I was going to be in Arkansas in that December anyway, so I decided to investigate Bob’s issue in person. He was happy for the support, but even more excited to show me around the facility. Bob is infectiously enthusiastic about nature and science education. He is just the kind of person we want to see working with students. He had arranged for me to meet with the directors of the facility, but he wanted to give me a guided tour of the place first.
Self-censorship in defense of science?
I would like to describe the grounds of the facility in more detail, but I must honor the request of all parties involved to not be identified. It was, however, a beautiful place, and the students, fifth-graders that day, seemed more engaged in their learning than most I had ever seen. To be sure, the facility does a fantastic job of teaching science, but I was there to find out about what it was not teaching. Bob and I toured the grounds for quite some time, including a hike to a cave he had recently discovered nearby, and when we returned I was shown to my interview with the program director and executive director.
Both of the directors welcomed me warmly and were very forthcoming in their answers to my questions. They were, however, quite firm in their insistence that they and their facility be kept strictly anonymous if I was to write a story about Bob’s issue. We talked for over an hour about the site’s mission, their classes, and Bob’s situation specifically. Both directors agreed that “in a perfect world” they could, and would, teach evolution and deep time. However, back in the real world, they defended their stance on the prohibition of the “e-word,” reasoning that it would take too long to teach the concept of evolution effectively (especially if they had to defuse any objections) and expressing concern for the well-being of their facility. Their program depends upon public support and continued patronage of the region’s school districts, which they felt could be threatened by any political blowback from an unwanted evolution controversy.
With regard to Bob’s geologic time scale issue, the program director likened it to a game of Russian roulette. He admitted that probably very few students would have a real problem with a discussion about time on the order of millions of years, but that it might only take one child’s parents to cause major problems. He spun a scenario of a student’s returning home with stories beginning with “Millions of years ago …” that could set a fundamentalist parent on a veritable witch hunt, first gathering support of like-minded parents and then showing up at school board meetings until the district pulled out of the science program to avoid conflict. He added that this might cause a ripple effect, other districts following suit, leading to the demise of the program.
Essentially, they are not allowing Bob to teach a certain set of scientific data in order to protect their ability to provide students the good science curriculum they do teach. The directors are not alone in their opinion that discussions of deep time and the “e-word” could be detrimental to the program’s existence. They have polled teachers in the districts they serve and have heard from them more than enough times that teaching evolution would be “political suicide.”
Bob’s last communication indicated that he had signed up with NCSE and was leaning towards the “grin and bear it” approach, which, given his position and the position of the institution, may be the best option. I was a bit disheartened, but still impressed with all the good that is going on at Bob’s facility. I was also curious about other educational institutions, so I decided to ask some questions where I could.
The first place I happened to find, purely by accident, was a privately run science museum for kids. As with Bob’s facility, the museum requested not to be referred to by name. I was only there for a short time, but I’m not quite sure what to make of what happened there. I looked around the museum and found a few biological exhibits, but nothing dealing with evolution. I introduced myself to one of the museum’s employees as a science educator (I am indeed a science educator) and asked her if they had any exhibits on evolution. She said that they used to, but several parents — some of whom home-schooled their children, some of whom are associated with Christian schools — had been offended by the exhibit and complained. They had said either that they would not be back until it was removed or that they would not be using that part of the museum if they returned. “It was right over there,” she said, pointing to an area that was being used at that time for a kind of holiday display.
Later that evening, I had a visit with the coordinator of gifted and talented education at one of Arkansas’s larger public school districts. As before, she has requested that she and her school system be kept anonymous, so I will call her “Susan.” Susan told me she had overheard a teacher explaining the “balanced treatment” given to creationism in her classroom. This was not just any classroom, but an Advanced Placement biology classroom. This was important to Susan, not only because of the subject and level of the class, but also because it fell under her supervision. Was she obliged to do something about this? She knew quite well that the “balanced treatment” being taught had been found by a federal court to violate the Constitution’s establishment clause — perhaps there is no greater irony than that two of the most significant cases decided by federal courts against teaching creationism were Epperson v. Arkansas and McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education.
Susan sincerely wanted to do something about it, but she decided to let it go. Her reasoning was that this particular teacher is probably in her final year of service. To Susan, making an issue out of this just was not worth the strife it would have caused in the school and in the community.
As the discussion progressed that evening, I learned that omission was the method of dealing with evolution in another of Arkansas’s largest, most quickly growing, and wealthiest school districts — an omission that was apparently strongly suggested by the administration. I tried to check on this, but made little progress, receiving the cold shoulder from the administration and the science department at that school. However, I spoke with a person who works for a private science education facility that does contract work for this district: “Helen” — she, like the other people I had visited, requested that she and her employers not be identified. I asked Helen about her experiences with the district’s teachers. Her story was that in preparation for teaching the students from that district, she had asked some of the teachers how they approached the state benchmarks for those items dealing with evolution. She said, “Oh, I later got in trouble for even asking,” but went on to describe their answers. Most teachers said that they did not know enough about evolution to teach it themselves, but one of them, after looking around to make sure they were safely out of anyone’s earshot, explained that the teachers are told by school administrators that it would be “good for their careers” not to mention such topics in their classes.
Inadequate science education
How often does this kind of thing happen? How many teachers are deleting the most fundamental principle of the biological sciences from their classes due to school and community pressure or due to lack of knowledge? How many are disregarding Supreme Court decisions and state curriculum guidelines? These are good questions, and I have been given relevant data from a person currently working in Arkansas. We will call this science teacher Randy. I was introduced to him through the NCSE. He made it clear that his identity must be protected.
Randy runs professional development science education workshops for public school teachers. He’s been doing it for a while now, and he has been taking information on the teachers in his workshops via a survey. He shared some data with me.
According to his survey, about 20 percent are trying to teach evolution and think they are doing a good job; 10 percent are teaching creationism, even though during the workshop he discusses the legally shaky ground on which they stand. Another 20 percent attempt to teach something but feel they just do not understand evolution. The remaining 50 percent avoid it because of community pressure. On an e-mail to members of a list he keeps of people interested in evolution, Randy reported that the latter 50 percent do not cover evolution because they felt intimidated, saw no need to teach it, or might lose their jobs.
By their own description of their classroom practices, 80 percent of the teachers surveyed are not adequately teaching evolutionary science. Remember that these are just the teachers who are in a professional development workshop in science education! What is more disturbing is what Randy went on to say about the aftermath of these workshops. “After one of my workshops at a [state] education cooperative, it was asked that I not come back because I spent too much time on evolution. One of the teachers sent a letter to the governor stating that I was mandating that teachers had to teach evolution, and that I have to be an atheist, and would he do something.”
Of course it’s false to suggest “you’re either an anti-evolutionist or you’re an atheist.” Many scientists who understand and accept evolution are also quite religious, and many people of faith also understand and accept evolution. But here was a public school teacher appealing to the governor to “do something” about this guy teaching teachers to teach evolution. Given that evolutionary science is prescribed in the state curriculum guidelines, and given that two of the most important legal cases regarding evolution education originated in Arkansas, how exactly would we expect the governor to respond? I am not sure whether Gov. Mike Huckabee responded to this letter, but I have seen him address the subject on “Arkansans Ask,” his regular show on the Arkansas Educational Television Network. I’ve seen two episodes on which students expressed their frustration about the lack of evolution education in their public schools. Both times, Huckabee advocated the teaching of creationism in public schools. Here is an excerpt from one of these broadcasts, from July 2004:
Student: Many schools in Arkansas are failing to teach students about evolution according to the educational standards of our state. Since it is against these standards to teach creationism, how would you go about helping our state educate students more sufficiently for this?
Huckabee: Are you saying some students are not getting exposure to the various theories of creation?
Student (stunned): No, of evol … well, of evolution specifically. It’s a biological study that should be educated [taught], but is generally not.
Moderator: Schools are dodging Darwinism? Is that what you …?
Student: Yes.
Huckabee: I’m not familiar that they’re dodging it. Maybe they are. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution. And I think that what I’d be concerned with is that it should be taught as one of the views that’s held by people. But it’s not the only view that’s held. And any time you teach one thing as that it’s the only thing, then I think that has a real problem to it.
Huckabee’s answer was laced with important misconceptions about science. Perhaps the most insidious problem with his response is that it plays on our sense of democracy and free expression. But several court decisions have concluded that fairness and free expression are not violated when public school teachers are required to teach the approved curriculum. These decisions recognized that teaching creationism is little more than thinly veiled religious advocacy.
Furthermore, Huckabee claimed not to be aware of the omission of evolution from Arkansas classrooms. From my limited visit, it is clear that this omission is widespread. But it’s certain Huckabee had heard about the omission before. This is from the July 2003 broadcast of “Arkansans Ask”:
Student: Goal 2.04 of the Biology Benchmark Goals published by the Arkansas Department of Education in May of 2002 indicates that students should examine the development of the theory of biological evolution. Yet many students in Arkansas that I have met … have not been exposed to this idea. What do you believe is the appropriate role of the state in mandating the curriculum of a given course?
Huckabee: I think that the state ought to give students exposure to all points of view. And I would hope that that would be all points of view and not only evolution. I think that they also should be given exposure to the theories not only of evolution but to the basis of those who believe in creationism …
The governor goes on for a bit and finishes his sentiment, but the moderator keeps the conversation going:
Moderator (to student): You’ve encountered a number of students who have not received evolutionary biology?
Student: Yes, I’ve found that quite a few people’s high schools simply prefer to ignore the topic. I think that they’re a bit afraid of the controversy.
Huckabee: I think it’s something kids ought to be exposed to. I do not necessarily buy into the traditional Darwinian theory, personally. But that does not mean that I’m afraid that somebody might find out what it is…
Sisyphean Challenges
How are teachers like “Bob,” administrators like “Susan,” and teacher trainers like “Randy” supposed to ensure proper science education if politicians like the governor consistently advocate the teaching of non-science?
It is telling that none of the people I spoke with were willing to be identified or to allow me to reveal their respective institutions. In the case of “Bob” and his facility’s directors, they were concerned about criticism from both sides. They did not want to lose students by offending fundamentalists or lose credibility in the eyes of the scientific community for omitting evolution.
The shortcomings of evolution instruction in Arkansas don’t end at the state’s borders. But we seldom realize the wider influence our local politicians might have. For instance, the Educational Commission of the States is an important and powerful organization that shapes educational policy in all 50 states. Forty state governors have served as the chair of the ECS, and Governor Huckabee currently holds this position.
Because anti-evolutionists have been quite successful in placing members of their ranks and sympathizers in local legislatures and school boards, it is imperative that we point out the danger that these people pose to adequate science education. The science literacy of our future leaders may depend on it. Although each school, each museum, or each science center may seem to be an isolated case, answering to — and, perhaps trying to keep peace with — its local constituency, the examples suggest that evolution is being squeezed out of education systematically and broadly. Anti-evolutionists have been successful by keeping the struggle focused on the local level. The fallout is widespread ignorance of the tools and methods of science for generations to come.
The author, Jason R. Wiles, is co-manager of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University in Montreal. The center’s mission is to advance the teaching and learning of evolution through research. Wiles, an Arkansas native, has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harding University (with a minor in Bible) and a master’s degree from Portland State University. He’s currently a Ph.D. candidate in science education at McGill.
A slightly different version of the article was originally published in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education, a peer-reviewed journal.
Bush Says He's Above the Law Again
original
Bush Shuns Patriot Act Requirement
By Charlie Savage
The Boston Globe
Friday 24 March 2006
Washington - When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.
The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.
Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it "a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a "signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.
In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would "impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."
Bush wrote: "The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "
The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law.
After The New York Times disclosed in December that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.
And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.
Past presidents occasionally used such signing statements to describe their interpretations of laws, but Bush has expanded the practice. He has also been more assertive in claiming the authority to override provisions he thinks intrude on his power, legal scholars said.
Bush's expansive claims of the power to bypass laws have provoked increased grumbling in Congress. Members of both parties have pointed out that the Constitution gives the legislative branch the power to write the laws and the executive branch the duty to "faithfully execute" them.
Several senators have proposed bills to bring the warrantless surveillance program under the law. One Democrat, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, has gone so far as to propose censuring Bush, saying he has broken the wiretapping law.
Bush's signing statement on the USA Patriot Act nearly went unnoticed.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, inserted a statement into the record of the Senate Judiciary Committee objecting to Bush's interpretation of the Patriot Act, but neither the signing statement nor Leahy's objection received coverage from in the mainstream news media, Leahy's office said.
Yesterday, Leahy said Bush's assertion that he could ignore the new provisions of the Patriot Act - provisions that were the subject of intense negotiations in Congress - represented "nothing short of a radical effort to manipulate the constitutional separation of powers and evade accountability and responsibility for following the law."
"The president's signing statements are not the law, and Congress should not allow them to be the last word," Leahy said in a prepared statement. "The president's constitutional duty is to faithfully execute the laws as written by the Congress, not cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow. It is our duty to ensure, by means of congressional oversight, that he does so."
The White House dismissed Leahy's concerns, saying Bush's signing statement was simply "very standard language" that is "used consistently with provisions like these where legislation is requiring reports from the executive branch or where disclosure of information is going to be required."
"The signing statement makes clear that the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "The president has welcomed at least seven Inspector General reports on the Patriot Act since it was first passed, and there has not been one verified abuse of civil liberties using the Patriot Act."
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the statement may simply be "bluster" and does not necessarily mean that the administration will conceal information about its use of the Patriot Act.
But, he said, the statement illustrates the administration's "mind-bogglingly expansive conception" of executive power, and its low regard for legislative power.
"On the one hand, they deny that Congress even has the authority to pass laws on these subjects like torture and eavesdropping, and in addition to that, they say that Congress is not even entitled to get information about anything to do with the war on terrorism," Golove said.
-------
Bush Shuns Patriot Act Requirement
By Charlie Savage
The Boston Globe
Friday 24 March 2006
Washington - When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.
The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.
Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it "a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a "signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.
In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would "impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."
Bush wrote: "The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "
The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law.
After The New York Times disclosed in December that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.
And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.
Past presidents occasionally used such signing statements to describe their interpretations of laws, but Bush has expanded the practice. He has also been more assertive in claiming the authority to override provisions he thinks intrude on his power, legal scholars said.
Bush's expansive claims of the power to bypass laws have provoked increased grumbling in Congress. Members of both parties have pointed out that the Constitution gives the legislative branch the power to write the laws and the executive branch the duty to "faithfully execute" them.
Several senators have proposed bills to bring the warrantless surveillance program under the law. One Democrat, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, has gone so far as to propose censuring Bush, saying he has broken the wiretapping law.
Bush's signing statement on the USA Patriot Act nearly went unnoticed.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, inserted a statement into the record of the Senate Judiciary Committee objecting to Bush's interpretation of the Patriot Act, but neither the signing statement nor Leahy's objection received coverage from in the mainstream news media, Leahy's office said.
Yesterday, Leahy said Bush's assertion that he could ignore the new provisions of the Patriot Act - provisions that were the subject of intense negotiations in Congress - represented "nothing short of a radical effort to manipulate the constitutional separation of powers and evade accountability and responsibility for following the law."
"The president's signing statements are not the law, and Congress should not allow them to be the last word," Leahy said in a prepared statement. "The president's constitutional duty is to faithfully execute the laws as written by the Congress, not cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow. It is our duty to ensure, by means of congressional oversight, that he does so."
The White House dismissed Leahy's concerns, saying Bush's signing statement was simply "very standard language" that is "used consistently with provisions like these where legislation is requiring reports from the executive branch or where disclosure of information is going to be required."
"The signing statement makes clear that the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "The president has welcomed at least seven Inspector General reports on the Patriot Act since it was first passed, and there has not been one verified abuse of civil liberties using the Patriot Act."
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said the statement may simply be "bluster" and does not necessarily mean that the administration will conceal information about its use of the Patriot Act.
But, he said, the statement illustrates the administration's "mind-bogglingly expansive conception" of executive power, and its low regard for legislative power.
"On the one hand, they deny that Congress even has the authority to pass laws on these subjects like torture and eavesdropping, and in addition to that, they say that Congress is not even entitled to get information about anything to do with the war on terrorism," Golove said.
-------
Israeli warplanes illegally overfly tense Lebanon border on Yahoo! News
original
Thu Mar 23, 10:48 AM ET
A total of 16 Israeli warplanes violated Lebanese airspace amid continued tensions along the border between the two countries, the Lebanese army said in a statement.
Six Israeli fighter-bombers overflew the disputed Shebaa Farms area where the Lebanese, Israeli and Syrian borders meet while another 10 overflew the capital Beirut and other coastal areas before flying home.
"Army units have been instructed to stay on maximum alert in readiness for any aggression," it said.
The Israeli army fired dozens of illumination flares over the Shebaa Farms overnight Wednesday, in an area where Shiite fundamentalist group Hezbollah continues to harass Israeli forces, Lebanese police said.
The Israeli army said earlier this month it had gone into a "maximum" state of alert on the Lebanese border to thwart any new offensive from the Lebanese militia ahead of the Jewish state's March 28 election.
Last week, UN chief Kofi Annan urged the leaders of Syria, Israel and Lebanon to do their utmost to prevent a new flare-up of violence, warning them of a possible "major confrontation" along Israel's northern border.
Beirut has filed repeated complaints to the United Nations -- which has in turn called for Israel to halt violations of Lebanese airspace -- following the May 2000 Israeli troop pullout from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation.
Thu Mar 23, 10:48 AM ET
A total of 16 Israeli warplanes violated Lebanese airspace amid continued tensions along the border between the two countries, the Lebanese army said in a statement.
Six Israeli fighter-bombers overflew the disputed Shebaa Farms area where the Lebanese, Israeli and Syrian borders meet while another 10 overflew the capital Beirut and other coastal areas before flying home.
"Army units have been instructed to stay on maximum alert in readiness for any aggression," it said.
The Israeli army fired dozens of illumination flares over the Shebaa Farms overnight Wednesday, in an area where Shiite fundamentalist group Hezbollah continues to harass Israeli forces, Lebanese police said.
The Israeli army said earlier this month it had gone into a "maximum" state of alert on the Lebanese border to thwart any new offensive from the Lebanese militia ahead of the Jewish state's March 28 election.
Last week, UN chief Kofi Annan urged the leaders of Syria, Israel and Lebanon to do their utmost to prevent a new flare-up of violence, warning them of a possible "major confrontation" along Israel's northern border.
Beirut has filed repeated complaints to the United Nations -- which has in turn called for Israel to halt violations of Lebanese airspace -- following the May 2000 Israeli troop pullout from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation.
William Rivers Pitt: The Mouse That Roared
original
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 24 March 2006
When I walked into the headquarters of the Christine Cegelis for Congress campaign, I was immediately struck by the bustling energy in the hallways and offices. Campaign headquarters was on the third floor of a cookie-cutter building on Highland Street, a nice space with all the amenities. There was a body at every phone, groups gathered in conference rooms to pour over maps and walking sheets, and volunteers banging through the glass doors on their way to work the precincts.
The frenetic energy within campaign headquarters reflected the overall mood of the race itself. This was no ordinary primary. It had turned into a David v. Goliath brawl within the Democratic party, a challenge to see just how far a grassroots organization could carry the fight against a well-funded campaign that was supported by some of the leading lights of the Democratic establishment.
The story of the race for the Illinois 6th District House seat, which encompasses portions of both Cook County and DuPage County, shakes out like this. In 2004, Christine Cegelis, a mother of two who worked in the technology sector, challenged Henry Hyde for the seat. Hyde had been an institution in the 6th to this point, holding the seat for sixteen terms in a district that had been reliably Republican for decades. Hyde, as well as many others, were quite surprised when Cegelis managed to get 44.2% of the vote after stomping her primary opponent by nearly a 2-1 margin.
Hyde chose to retire in 2005, making the Illinois 6th an open seat for the first time since the Carter administration. The work done by the Cegelis campaign in 2004 essentially established, for the first time in a long time, a serious Democratic presence in the district. Cegelis chose to continue campaigning even after the '04 election, and had been working ever since towards a run in 2006. She had established a ground game and name recognition among the constituents she hoped to represent, and based her campaign on the need to bring jobs back to the area.
Enter Rahm Emmanuel and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Emmanuel, himself a congressman from a neighboring district, has been a kingmaker with the DCCC as chairman. He saw the open seat in the 6th as an excellent opportunity to cut into the GOP majority in the House, and made the race for that seat a central priority of the DCCC. For whatever reasons, however, Emmanuel chose to ignore Christine Cegelis and the work she had done, and instead endeavored to pull a different candidate into the race.
Emmanuel spent eleven months searching for an alternative to Cegelis. He started with an Illinois state senator, who turned Emmanuel down for personal reasons. He next approached Peter O'Malley, a lawyer who works with the Illinois Mediation Service. O'Malley got into the race, but finding his campaign unable to raise any money to challenge Cegelis, dropped out in the summer. Emmanuel next approached Brian McPartlin, Chief of Administration of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, who did not want to leave his job and turned the offer down. A local businesswoman was approached after McPartlin refused the job, but the campaign never materialized. It appeared, for a time, that Christine Cegelis was going to weather this inter-party storm and stand as the candidate.
After a long and fruitless search, Emmanuel finally located a candidate willing to challenge Cegelis. Tammy Duckworth was an Army Major and an Iraq War veteran who had lost both legs when her helicopter was attacked. Duckworth was not a resident of the district, and has a voting record that is only two years old. Emmanuel and the DCCC, however, believed her status as a veteran would be a boon to fundraising efforts, and would be attractive to moderates and conservatives who swoon over anyone who has worn a uniform. The running of Iraq veterans is a DCCC plan being enacted in a variety of other districts across the country.
During Emmanuel's long search, a third candidate for the Democratic primary in the 6th district emerged. Lindy Scott, an evangelican Christian college professor, jumped into the race with the belief that he could bring religiously-oriented voters back into the party. Throughout the primary, Scott polled in the low teens, but would wind up having a significant effect on the overall outcome.
The Cegelis campaign, meanwhile, was sailing through rough waters of its own. The campaign manager managed to spend $250,000 on nothing, putting the campaign into a deep financial hole. The ground network established since 2004 was left fallow. Six weeks before the primary, Cegelis fired her campaign manager, along with virtually her entire staff, and brought in a man named Kevin Spidel. Spidel, who was at the time serving as Deputy National Director for Progressive Democrats of America, took a leave of absence from PDA to take over as campaign manager. He organized a whole new staff, took a look at the money they had on hand, and engineered a whole new plan based on the ground network that had once been the main strength of Cegelis' run.
The challenge was daunting. Emmanuel brought in Senators Durbin, Obama and Kerry, along with a variety of other leading lights, to do vigorous fundraising for Duckworth. He reached out to David Axelrod, a powerful campaign and media consultant in Chicago, to help with a media blitz. By the end of the campaign, the Duckworth crew had sent eleven different pieces of direct mail to voters in the district, covered the airwaves with commercials, and had spent close to $1,000,000.
The Cegelis crew, however, was not interested in quitting. First of all, their candidate's stand on a variety of local and national issues was far clearer than those of Duckworth, especially on the issue of the Iraq occupation. They believed their candidate to be more than a match for the GOP opponent they would face in November, a far-right DeLay clone named Peter Roskam.
More than anything, however, was a sense of outrage directed at Emmanuel, the DCCC and the Democratic party establishment in general. Where did they get off bringing in an outsider with no local support? Where did they get off trying to poach the hard work Cegelis had done over the previous two years to establish a Democratic presence in a district that had not known of such a thing for decades? All the money in the world, and all the endorsements from Democratic worthies, could not change the essence of their beliefs.
And so, last Tuesday, the primary to determine the Democratic challenger for the 6th District went down. Cegelis lead by a whisker throughout the night, until the results from Cook County began trickling in. The campaign had expected to do poorly in Cook, and their expectations were met. By the time the clock wound past midnight, the slim advantage Cegelis had enjoyed in DuPage County also began to bleed away. Thanks to the mayhem that took place in Cook County's election stations that night, a winner in the race for the 6th was not declared until the wee hours of the morning. It was Duckworth by a nose.
The final numbers are telling. Duckworth got 43.8% of the vote to Cegelis' 40.4%. The margin of victory for Duckworth was exactly 1080 votes. The 6th District has 512 precincts, which means Duckworth's margin of victory was 2.1 votes per district. Given the fact that her campaign spent nearly a million dollars to win this race, the price tag on those 2.1 votes per district is staggering.
It was that close. Had Spidel been brought in a few weeks earlier, and had the previous campaign manager not spent a quarter of a million dollars worth of campaign funds on shadows and dust, the outcome probably would have been much different. The Lindy Scott factor likewise cannot be ignored. In the end, he got nearly 8,000 votes, amounting to somewhere around 16%. It is telling, when thinking of Scott, to see the blog post he made days before the election, in which he bragged that a majority of the votes he expected to get would come from erstwhile Cegelis voters.
The "If" factor cannot alter the outcome, but there is a significant lesson for the Democratic party establishment to learn here. Tammy Duckworth, Rahm Emmanuel, the DCCC and all those big-time endorsers got brought down to the wire by a grassroots campaign with a tenth of the money, and in the end came within an eyelash of losing. Conventional wisdom says Cegelis should not have made it that close. She didn't have the cash, the endorsers, or the media team Duckworth had. It should have been an easy win, but it wasn't.
The next time the Democratic establishment decides to come barnstorming into a district to force an outsider candidate upon a grassroots network that has been working day and night for an already-established and campaign-seasoned candidate, they will look at what happened in the Illinois 6th and, perhaps, think twice. The next time a grassroots organization in a district looks at a big-money primary challenger and sees no chance to succeed, they will look at the Illinois 6th and, perhaps, think twice.
In the meantime, many Cegelis supporters have begun the process of swallowing the bitterness of defeat in order to organize for the defeat of Peter Roskam. They do this not because they suddenly like Tammy Duckworth, but because of the larger issues at hand. Kevin Spidel noted in the aftermath of the election that the point is not to elect Duckworth in November simply for the sake of electing Duckworth. The point is to win the November race in order to take one step closer to ending the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The point, Spidel will tell you, is to see Rep. John Conyers Jr. sitting as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when all is said and done.
That, Spidel says, is the worthiest and most progressive-minded goal he could possibly imagine.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 24 March 2006
When I walked into the headquarters of the Christine Cegelis for Congress campaign, I was immediately struck by the bustling energy in the hallways and offices. Campaign headquarters was on the third floor of a cookie-cutter building on Highland Street, a nice space with all the amenities. There was a body at every phone, groups gathered in conference rooms to pour over maps and walking sheets, and volunteers banging through the glass doors on their way to work the precincts.
The frenetic energy within campaign headquarters reflected the overall mood of the race itself. This was no ordinary primary. It had turned into a David v. Goliath brawl within the Democratic party, a challenge to see just how far a grassroots organization could carry the fight against a well-funded campaign that was supported by some of the leading lights of the Democratic establishment.
The story of the race for the Illinois 6th District House seat, which encompasses portions of both Cook County and DuPage County, shakes out like this. In 2004, Christine Cegelis, a mother of two who worked in the technology sector, challenged Henry Hyde for the seat. Hyde had been an institution in the 6th to this point, holding the seat for sixteen terms in a district that had been reliably Republican for decades. Hyde, as well as many others, were quite surprised when Cegelis managed to get 44.2% of the vote after stomping her primary opponent by nearly a 2-1 margin.
Hyde chose to retire in 2005, making the Illinois 6th an open seat for the first time since the Carter administration. The work done by the Cegelis campaign in 2004 essentially established, for the first time in a long time, a serious Democratic presence in the district. Cegelis chose to continue campaigning even after the '04 election, and had been working ever since towards a run in 2006. She had established a ground game and name recognition among the constituents she hoped to represent, and based her campaign on the need to bring jobs back to the area.
Enter Rahm Emmanuel and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Emmanuel, himself a congressman from a neighboring district, has been a kingmaker with the DCCC as chairman. He saw the open seat in the 6th as an excellent opportunity to cut into the GOP majority in the House, and made the race for that seat a central priority of the DCCC. For whatever reasons, however, Emmanuel chose to ignore Christine Cegelis and the work she had done, and instead endeavored to pull a different candidate into the race.
Emmanuel spent eleven months searching for an alternative to Cegelis. He started with an Illinois state senator, who turned Emmanuel down for personal reasons. He next approached Peter O'Malley, a lawyer who works with the Illinois Mediation Service. O'Malley got into the race, but finding his campaign unable to raise any money to challenge Cegelis, dropped out in the summer. Emmanuel next approached Brian McPartlin, Chief of Administration of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, who did not want to leave his job and turned the offer down. A local businesswoman was approached after McPartlin refused the job, but the campaign never materialized. It appeared, for a time, that Christine Cegelis was going to weather this inter-party storm and stand as the candidate.
After a long and fruitless search, Emmanuel finally located a candidate willing to challenge Cegelis. Tammy Duckworth was an Army Major and an Iraq War veteran who had lost both legs when her helicopter was attacked. Duckworth was not a resident of the district, and has a voting record that is only two years old. Emmanuel and the DCCC, however, believed her status as a veteran would be a boon to fundraising efforts, and would be attractive to moderates and conservatives who swoon over anyone who has worn a uniform. The running of Iraq veterans is a DCCC plan being enacted in a variety of other districts across the country.
During Emmanuel's long search, a third candidate for the Democratic primary in the 6th district emerged. Lindy Scott, an evangelican Christian college professor, jumped into the race with the belief that he could bring religiously-oriented voters back into the party. Throughout the primary, Scott polled in the low teens, but would wind up having a significant effect on the overall outcome.
The Cegelis campaign, meanwhile, was sailing through rough waters of its own. The campaign manager managed to spend $250,000 on nothing, putting the campaign into a deep financial hole. The ground network established since 2004 was left fallow. Six weeks before the primary, Cegelis fired her campaign manager, along with virtually her entire staff, and brought in a man named Kevin Spidel. Spidel, who was at the time serving as Deputy National Director for Progressive Democrats of America, took a leave of absence from PDA to take over as campaign manager. He organized a whole new staff, took a look at the money they had on hand, and engineered a whole new plan based on the ground network that had once been the main strength of Cegelis' run.
The challenge was daunting. Emmanuel brought in Senators Durbin, Obama and Kerry, along with a variety of other leading lights, to do vigorous fundraising for Duckworth. He reached out to David Axelrod, a powerful campaign and media consultant in Chicago, to help with a media blitz. By the end of the campaign, the Duckworth crew had sent eleven different pieces of direct mail to voters in the district, covered the airwaves with commercials, and had spent close to $1,000,000.
The Cegelis crew, however, was not interested in quitting. First of all, their candidate's stand on a variety of local and national issues was far clearer than those of Duckworth, especially on the issue of the Iraq occupation. They believed their candidate to be more than a match for the GOP opponent they would face in November, a far-right DeLay clone named Peter Roskam.
More than anything, however, was a sense of outrage directed at Emmanuel, the DCCC and the Democratic party establishment in general. Where did they get off bringing in an outsider with no local support? Where did they get off trying to poach the hard work Cegelis had done over the previous two years to establish a Democratic presence in a district that had not known of such a thing for decades? All the money in the world, and all the endorsements from Democratic worthies, could not change the essence of their beliefs.
And so, last Tuesday, the primary to determine the Democratic challenger for the 6th District went down. Cegelis lead by a whisker throughout the night, until the results from Cook County began trickling in. The campaign had expected to do poorly in Cook, and their expectations were met. By the time the clock wound past midnight, the slim advantage Cegelis had enjoyed in DuPage County also began to bleed away. Thanks to the mayhem that took place in Cook County's election stations that night, a winner in the race for the 6th was not declared until the wee hours of the morning. It was Duckworth by a nose.
The final numbers are telling. Duckworth got 43.8% of the vote to Cegelis' 40.4%. The margin of victory for Duckworth was exactly 1080 votes. The 6th District has 512 precincts, which means Duckworth's margin of victory was 2.1 votes per district. Given the fact that her campaign spent nearly a million dollars to win this race, the price tag on those 2.1 votes per district is staggering.
It was that close. Had Spidel been brought in a few weeks earlier, and had the previous campaign manager not spent a quarter of a million dollars worth of campaign funds on shadows and dust, the outcome probably would have been much different. The Lindy Scott factor likewise cannot be ignored. In the end, he got nearly 8,000 votes, amounting to somewhere around 16%. It is telling, when thinking of Scott, to see the blog post he made days before the election, in which he bragged that a majority of the votes he expected to get would come from erstwhile Cegelis voters.
The "If" factor cannot alter the outcome, but there is a significant lesson for the Democratic party establishment to learn here. Tammy Duckworth, Rahm Emmanuel, the DCCC and all those big-time endorsers got brought down to the wire by a grassroots campaign with a tenth of the money, and in the end came within an eyelash of losing. Conventional wisdom says Cegelis should not have made it that close. She didn't have the cash, the endorsers, or the media team Duckworth had. It should have been an easy win, but it wasn't.
The next time the Democratic establishment decides to come barnstorming into a district to force an outsider candidate upon a grassroots network that has been working day and night for an already-established and campaign-seasoned candidate, they will look at what happened in the Illinois 6th and, perhaps, think twice. The next time a grassroots organization in a district looks at a big-money primary challenger and sees no chance to succeed, they will look at the Illinois 6th and, perhaps, think twice.
In the meantime, many Cegelis supporters have begun the process of swallowing the bitterness of defeat in order to organize for the defeat of Peter Roskam. They do this not because they suddenly like Tammy Duckworth, but because of the larger issues at hand. Kevin Spidel noted in the aftermath of the election that the point is not to elect Duckworth in November simply for the sake of electing Duckworth. The point is to win the November race in order to take one step closer to ending the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The point, Spidel will tell you, is to see Rep. John Conyers Jr. sitting as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when all is said and done.
That, Spidel says, is the worthiest and most progressive-minded goal he could possibly imagine.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
Britain is 'likely base for son of Star Wars'
original
By Alec Russell in Washington
(Filed: 24/03/2006)
Britain has been named as a prime candidate to host missiles for America's controversial "son of Star Wars" defence system, a senior US general has revealed.
The disclosure risked infuriating Left-wing Labour MPs and prompting a fresh examination of transatlantic links and the relationship between Tony Blair and President George W Bush.
Lt Gen Trey Obering, head of the US Missile Defence Agency, said Britain was one of three candidates to be the European host of interceptors designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles.
British officials were startled by the disclosure, insisting that, as far as they were concerned, nothing had changed since Geoff Hoon, then the defence secretary, told parliament in 2004 that a decision to base interceptors in Britain would be "open to scrutiny and debate in the normal way".
**I had always wondered when the price would come, and what it would be, for the UK...EG:)**
"No one asked us the question [whether Britain was now ready to be a formal candidate]," a British Embassy spokesman said.
Previously, it was privately acknowledged that Britain is a strong candidate but it has never been formally identified as being in the running.
The revelation came in a PowerPoint presentation to a military conference earlier this week when Lt Gen Obering identified Britain, Poland and the Czech Republic as the three candidates, Britain seeming to have replaced Hungary on the final shortlist.
The Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence denied there had been any formal discussions over a missile defence site in the UK.
"There has been no planning, no approach no request and no invitation," a Pentagon spokesman said.
"America has not yet decided to place interceptors in Europe, has not yet asked for further British participation and the government has not yet decided whether or not to pursue missile defence for the UK," an MoD spokesman said.
Britain already plays a key part in American plans for a global defensive shield through the radar station at Fylingdales on the North York moors.
The planned missile defence shield, intended to protect America and its allies, has been dubbed "son of Star Wars", in a reference to the nickname for the Reagan-era defence system.
The Bush administration is now heading for a decision on where to put its third base of interceptors. The other two are in Alaska and California.
Sources close to Lt Gen Obering played down the impact of the disclosure saying Britain had two just brief mentions in his presentation.
He told the 4th Annual US Missile Defence Conference on Monday that the system which is to integrate land sea and air-based defences is making swift progress.
"It's a very daunting challenge but one that I think the men and women of the Missile Defence Agency, the army, navy and air force are pulling together and are now achieving," he said.
"A lot of people wonder if this is going to work and is it worth the investment," he added. "The testing we've conducted shows the technology is valid and viable."
He cited Iran and North Korea as potential threats but added that America and its allies must be ready to confront terrorist networks and future rogue states.
"Pakistan, one of our key allies today, tomorrow could have a fundamentalist Islamic government controlling their nuclear-tipped missiles," he said.
16 January 2003: Labour anger at decision to back 'son of star wars'
13 January 2003: Britain ready to accept US missile defence
1 May 2001: Bush pushes ahead with Star Wars laser shield
Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright
By Alec Russell in Washington
(Filed: 24/03/2006)
Britain has been named as a prime candidate to host missiles for America's controversial "son of Star Wars" defence system, a senior US general has revealed.
The disclosure risked infuriating Left-wing Labour MPs and prompting a fresh examination of transatlantic links and the relationship between Tony Blair and President George W Bush.
Lt Gen Trey Obering, head of the US Missile Defence Agency, said Britain was one of three candidates to be the European host of interceptors designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles.
British officials were startled by the disclosure, insisting that, as far as they were concerned, nothing had changed since Geoff Hoon, then the defence secretary, told parliament in 2004 that a decision to base interceptors in Britain would be "open to scrutiny and debate in the normal way".
**I had always wondered when the price would come, and what it would be, for the UK...EG:)**
"No one asked us the question [whether Britain was now ready to be a formal candidate]," a British Embassy spokesman said.
Previously, it was privately acknowledged that Britain is a strong candidate but it has never been formally identified as being in the running.
The revelation came in a PowerPoint presentation to a military conference earlier this week when Lt Gen Obering identified Britain, Poland and the Czech Republic as the three candidates, Britain seeming to have replaced Hungary on the final shortlist.
The Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence denied there had been any formal discussions over a missile defence site in the UK.
"There has been no planning, no approach no request and no invitation," a Pentagon spokesman said.
"America has not yet decided to place interceptors in Europe, has not yet asked for further British participation and the government has not yet decided whether or not to pursue missile defence for the UK," an MoD spokesman said.
Britain already plays a key part in American plans for a global defensive shield through the radar station at Fylingdales on the North York moors.
The planned missile defence shield, intended to protect America and its allies, has been dubbed "son of Star Wars", in a reference to the nickname for the Reagan-era defence system.
The Bush administration is now heading for a decision on where to put its third base of interceptors. The other two are in Alaska and California.
Sources close to Lt Gen Obering played down the impact of the disclosure saying Britain had two just brief mentions in his presentation.
He told the 4th Annual US Missile Defence Conference on Monday that the system which is to integrate land sea and air-based defences is making swift progress.
"It's a very daunting challenge but one that I think the men and women of the Missile Defence Agency, the army, navy and air force are pulling together and are now achieving," he said.
"A lot of people wonder if this is going to work and is it worth the investment," he added. "The testing we've conducted shows the technology is valid and viable."
He cited Iran and North Korea as potential threats but added that America and its allies must be ready to confront terrorist networks and future rogue states.
"Pakistan, one of our key allies today, tomorrow could have a fundamentalist Islamic government controlling their nuclear-tipped missiles," he said.
16 January 2003: Labour anger at decision to back 'son of star wars'
13 January 2003: Britain ready to accept US missile defence
1 May 2001: Bush pushes ahead with Star Wars laser shield
Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright
Syria: Woman named as vice president
original
For the first time, Syria has named a female to the post of vice president. Dr. Najah al-Attar SyriaSANA reported Thursday that former minister, Dr. Najah al-Attar took the oath of office before President Bashar al-Assad at the People's Palace.
According to the report, President Assad wished Dr. Attar good luck and success in her new mission. Earlier, President Assad issued a decree nominating Najah al-Attar as Vice President.
The decree authorized Dr. Attar to follow up the implementation of the cultural policy within the frame work of President Assad's directives.
© 2006 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
For the first time, Syria has named a female to the post of vice president. Dr. Najah al-Attar SyriaSANA reported Thursday that former minister, Dr. Najah al-Attar took the oath of office before President Bashar al-Assad at the People's Palace.
According to the report, President Assad wished Dr. Attar good luck and success in her new mission. Earlier, President Assad issued a decree nominating Najah al-Attar as Vice President.
The decree authorized Dr. Attar to follow up the implementation of the cultural policy within the frame work of President Assad's directives.
© 2006 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
Police state files
original
Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com
03.20.06 - Two releases of local law enforcement files in recent days have shed new light on just how far the Bush administration, federal, and local law enforcement are going to suppress political dissent in the aftermath of 9-11.
The first case was in Pittsburgh, where a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union yielded the revelation that from 2002, when opposition to an invasion of Iraq began in earnest, right through at least until the final, heavily redacted document from 2005, law enforcement officials investigated, monitored, harassed, and infiltrated activists from Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center. Merton was a renowned Catholic theologian and pacifist who fiercely opposed the Vietnam War and all wars, and his namesake descendants apply the same beliefs to Iraq.
As the released documents make clear, that, and only that, was why they became targets: because they opposed the war in Iraq. An FBI document from 2002 notes that the center is "a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism." Pacifism! Egads! Aside from the fact that pacifism is a set of personal moral beliefs -- not a "political cause" -- is pacifism, in our militarized 21st Century America, the new Red Scare? Seems so. Just ask the Quakers.
Or maybe, instead, pacifism is simply terrorism. Because the outfit investigating the Thomas Merton Center wasn't the Pentagon TALON program, which was the tool used to go after the Lake Worth (Florida) Quakers and hundreds (at least) of other domestic peace groups. It wasn't even an NSA monitoring program. The Merton Center caught the attention of the Pittsburgh version of a Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force, a program set up in dozens of cities across the U.S. to combine the efforts of the FBI and other federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies to combat the alleged threat of "domestic terrorism." With only so many domestic terrorists to go around, there's got to be something handy to keep all those task forces busy and their budget dollars flowing. Now, we have a better idea of what that "something" might be: investigating ordinary, law-abiding citizens who oppose Bush administration policies. That's now considered terrorism. Of course, it's the far right that has engaged in "domestic terrorism" in our recent history (remember Oklahoma City), but for some reason that's not who these task forces are concerned about.
Apparently, in nearly three years of probing, the terrorism most frequently engaged in by the Mertonites was the handing out of leaflets. A February 2003 FBI report titled "International Terrorism Matters" detailed a schedule that the center posted on its web site of anti-war rallies in Pittsburgh, New York, and elsewhere. From Bush on down, the word "terrorism" is being slung around awfully loosely these days.
Still, the FBI defends the investigations, calling them, in a statement, "appropriate." And that raises the question of whether such investigations are still going on (probably), and whether they're being carried out by a local Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force near you (probably), and whether the main target is your local anti-war group or coalition (probably).
The second set of documents came from yet another source: the court-ordered release, as part of an ongoing lawsuit, of five internal NYPD memos detailing and analyzing -- mostly with gleeful satisfaction -- steps taken to disrupt and minimize New York City demonstrations in 2002, particularly the World Economic Forum protest that was the first, and virtually the last, major anti-summit demonstration after 9-11.
What the memos for the first time detail are police tactics that have been used widely across the U.S. against such demonstrations ever since law enforcement was embarrassed by the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Anyone who has been to these demonstrations knows the playbook: massive presence of police in riot gear, heavily armed mostly with chemical weapons and batons; tanks, visible police vans and buses, and a widespread use of undercover cops; corralling protesters into tightly controlled spaces with no access available for the public to enter or leave; a constant shifting of police lines, including provocative forays into the crowd; and the preemptive arrests of any protestors the police don't happen to like or find inconvenient, with the understanding that they'll be held until the summit or convention or whatever leaves town and then released, with charges (if any) later dropped or dismissed. One of the NYPD memos notes, for example, the arrest of about 30 masked demonstrators (doubtless black bloc anarchists) for the "crime" of being "obvious potential rioters."
The last I checked, the Constitution doesn't allow for arresting people for what they might potentially do. But that, along with the rest of these tactics, with minor variations, is pretty much what's happened at every major post-Seattle U.S. protest of the war or the international corporate regime, in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, and so on. The black bloc property destruction in Seattle, and the media overhype it provoked, allowed law enforcement to sell such tactics as necessary; in every one of these cities, a major protest has been preceded by a local media hysteria over the potential for "another Seattle," local city councils passed restrictive new anti-protest measures, and law enforcement got lots of pricey new crowd control toys.
Now, such protesters are not only "obvious potential rioters," but "terrorists." The recent reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, passed with widespread bipartisan support, included a new "anti-terrorist" provision allowing police to establish anti-protester "exclusion zones" at any event of "national significance." (In Seattle, where this idea was first used and then legitimized by the courts, it was more honestly called a "no-protest zone," an egregious violation of the First Amendment.)
The idea of all these harsh tactics is both to scare potentially sympathetic members of the public, who don't necessarily want to be caught in a riot (police or otherwise), away from attending; and at the same time to legitimize whatever forms of police and jail abuse are inflicted on the protesters who do attend, in hopes they'll think better of it next time. It's worked, and in six years, as the crackdown grows ever-harsher, activists have yet to devise effective counter-measures.
What does any of this have to do with protecting the country from terrorist attack? Not a damn thing, of course. But it's exactly the sort of rationale dictatorships and totalitarian states throughout history have used to scare the public, rationalize domestic state violence, and suppress, marginalize, and eventually silence political dissent. According to your high school civics class, America doesn't go for that sort of thing.
But then, that book seems to have been thrown out.
(c) 2006, WorkingForChange.com
Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com
03.20.06 - Two releases of local law enforcement files in recent days have shed new light on just how far the Bush administration, federal, and local law enforcement are going to suppress political dissent in the aftermath of 9-11.
The first case was in Pittsburgh, where a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union yielded the revelation that from 2002, when opposition to an invasion of Iraq began in earnest, right through at least until the final, heavily redacted document from 2005, law enforcement officials investigated, monitored, harassed, and infiltrated activists from Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center. Merton was a renowned Catholic theologian and pacifist who fiercely opposed the Vietnam War and all wars, and his namesake descendants apply the same beliefs to Iraq.
As the released documents make clear, that, and only that, was why they became targets: because they opposed the war in Iraq. An FBI document from 2002 notes that the center is "a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism." Pacifism! Egads! Aside from the fact that pacifism is a set of personal moral beliefs -- not a "political cause" -- is pacifism, in our militarized 21st Century America, the new Red Scare? Seems so. Just ask the Quakers.
Or maybe, instead, pacifism is simply terrorism. Because the outfit investigating the Thomas Merton Center wasn't the Pentagon TALON program, which was the tool used to go after the Lake Worth (Florida) Quakers and hundreds (at least) of other domestic peace groups. It wasn't even an NSA monitoring program. The Merton Center caught the attention of the Pittsburgh version of a Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force, a program set up in dozens of cities across the U.S. to combine the efforts of the FBI and other federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies to combat the alleged threat of "domestic terrorism." With only so many domestic terrorists to go around, there's got to be something handy to keep all those task forces busy and their budget dollars flowing. Now, we have a better idea of what that "something" might be: investigating ordinary, law-abiding citizens who oppose Bush administration policies. That's now considered terrorism. Of course, it's the far right that has engaged in "domestic terrorism" in our recent history (remember Oklahoma City), but for some reason that's not who these task forces are concerned about.
Apparently, in nearly three years of probing, the terrorism most frequently engaged in by the Mertonites was the handing out of leaflets. A February 2003 FBI report titled "International Terrorism Matters" detailed a schedule that the center posted on its web site of anti-war rallies in Pittsburgh, New York, and elsewhere. From Bush on down, the word "terrorism" is being slung around awfully loosely these days.
Still, the FBI defends the investigations, calling them, in a statement, "appropriate." And that raises the question of whether such investigations are still going on (probably), and whether they're being carried out by a local Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force near you (probably), and whether the main target is your local anti-war group or coalition (probably).
The second set of documents came from yet another source: the court-ordered release, as part of an ongoing lawsuit, of five internal NYPD memos detailing and analyzing -- mostly with gleeful satisfaction -- steps taken to disrupt and minimize New York City demonstrations in 2002, particularly the World Economic Forum protest that was the first, and virtually the last, major anti-summit demonstration after 9-11.
What the memos for the first time detail are police tactics that have been used widely across the U.S. against such demonstrations ever since law enforcement was embarrassed by the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Anyone who has been to these demonstrations knows the playbook: massive presence of police in riot gear, heavily armed mostly with chemical weapons and batons; tanks, visible police vans and buses, and a widespread use of undercover cops; corralling protesters into tightly controlled spaces with no access available for the public to enter or leave; a constant shifting of police lines, including provocative forays into the crowd; and the preemptive arrests of any protestors the police don't happen to like or find inconvenient, with the understanding that they'll be held until the summit or convention or whatever leaves town and then released, with charges (if any) later dropped or dismissed. One of the NYPD memos notes, for example, the arrest of about 30 masked demonstrators (doubtless black bloc anarchists) for the "crime" of being "obvious potential rioters."
The last I checked, the Constitution doesn't allow for arresting people for what they might potentially do. But that, along with the rest of these tactics, with minor variations, is pretty much what's happened at every major post-Seattle U.S. protest of the war or the international corporate regime, in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, and so on. The black bloc property destruction in Seattle, and the media overhype it provoked, allowed law enforcement to sell such tactics as necessary; in every one of these cities, a major protest has been preceded by a local media hysteria over the potential for "another Seattle," local city councils passed restrictive new anti-protest measures, and law enforcement got lots of pricey new crowd control toys.
Now, such protesters are not only "obvious potential rioters," but "terrorists." The recent reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, passed with widespread bipartisan support, included a new "anti-terrorist" provision allowing police to establish anti-protester "exclusion zones" at any event of "national significance." (In Seattle, where this idea was first used and then legitimized by the courts, it was more honestly called a "no-protest zone," an egregious violation of the First Amendment.)
The idea of all these harsh tactics is both to scare potentially sympathetic members of the public, who don't necessarily want to be caught in a riot (police or otherwise), away from attending; and at the same time to legitimize whatever forms of police and jail abuse are inflicted on the protesters who do attend, in hopes they'll think better of it next time. It's worked, and in six years, as the crackdown grows ever-harsher, activists have yet to devise effective counter-measures.
What does any of this have to do with protecting the country from terrorist attack? Not a damn thing, of course. But it's exactly the sort of rationale dictatorships and totalitarian states throughout history have used to scare the public, rationalize domestic state violence, and suppress, marginalize, and eventually silence political dissent. According to your high school civics class, America doesn't go for that sort of thing.
But then, that book seems to have been thrown out.
(c) 2006, WorkingForChange.com
The Patriot Act and Attention Deficit Democracy
original
by James Bovard, March 22, 2006
The American political system failed when Congress and the media recently rolled over in favor of extending the most onerous provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. Despite stark evidence of both the law’s abuses and widespread popular opposition, Bush got a rubber-stamp extension of a law that has come to symbolize boundless government intrusions since 9/11.
The reenactment of the Patriot Act symbolizes how America is becoming an “attention deficit democracy” — characterized by pervasive negligence and ignorance throughout society and much of the government. Most Americans appear to no longer care whether there is any leash on government power.
Many Americans did try to stop this juggernaut. More than 400 cities and communities have passed resolutions condemning or opposing the Patriot Act. Yet Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), an opponent of the bill, perfectly captured what Congress did: “What we are seeing is quite simply a capitulation to the intransigent and misleading rhetoric of a White House that sees any effort to protect civil liberties as a sign of weakness.”
The Founding Fathers intended Congress to be a vigorous check on and balance to executive power. But Congress has never done anything more than concoct fig leafs for itself in response to public outrage over the Patriot Act. In late 2004, Congress mandated the creation of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. But the board is totally controlled by the branch of government committing the abuses. The president appoints all five board members, and the board is located in the White House. Bush dallied before announcing his picks, and then appointed as chairman the former co-chair of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney. The board never bothered to hold a single meeting.
With the Patriot Act renewal, Congress made what Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) described as “cosmetic changes” — and then congratulated themselves for defending civil liberties.
With the revised Patriot Act, it will be more difficult for the feds to seize public library records with a Section 215 search warrant (approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court). But the feds will still be able to seize library records by invoking other provisions in the law.
Businesses, nonprofit groups, and other organizations hit by Section 215 search warrants are prohibited from disclosing that they have been compelled to surrender customers’ information and other data to the feds. The new, improved Patriot Act will allow individuals and organizations hit by such searches to publicly complain about the intrusion — but only after they wait a year after they have been searched, and only if they can persuade a federal judge that the G-men acted in bad faith. A 365-day waiting period is Congress’s notion of due process and fair play for American citizens.
The biggest Patriot Act bombshell of recent times detonated last November when the Washington Post revealed that the FBI is issuing 30,000 National Security Letters (NSLs) a year. The Patriot Act made it far easier for the FBI to use NSLs to compel private citizens, banks, nonprofits, and other entities to surrender information upon demand. These subpoenas, like Section 215 searches, are accompanied by a gag order: Anyone who discloses receiving such a “letter” can be sent to prison. FBI field offices issue NSLs on their own in cases that they claim involve international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.
NSLs empower the FBI to seize records on people’s earning, spending, travels, web searches, emails, and telephone calls. Each NSL can lasso the records of thousands of people. Federal judge Victor Marrero ruled that the Patriot Act’s NSL provision “has the effect of authorizing coercive searches effectively immune from any judicial process.” (The Bush administration is appealing the ruling).
The White House hyped the Patriot Act renewal as a political triumph. The Associated Press reported, “Republicans declared victory as they sought to polish their national security credentials this midterm election year.” Republicans prattled on about how the revised Patriot Act provides “safeguards.” Apparently, a “safeguard” is anything that a government official can mention when asked about possible abuses of federal powers.
If enough Americans comprehend this “patriot” charade, it will become far more difficult for the White House and Congress to pull off similar infringements on freedom in the future. At the very least, citizens can still make it hot for anyone in Washington who betrays his oath to uphold the Constitution.
James Bovard is author of The Bush Betrayal as well as Lost Rights (1994) and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.
by James Bovard, March 22, 2006
The American political system failed when Congress and the media recently rolled over in favor of extending the most onerous provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. Despite stark evidence of both the law’s abuses and widespread popular opposition, Bush got a rubber-stamp extension of a law that has come to symbolize boundless government intrusions since 9/11.
The reenactment of the Patriot Act symbolizes how America is becoming an “attention deficit democracy” — characterized by pervasive negligence and ignorance throughout society and much of the government. Most Americans appear to no longer care whether there is any leash on government power.
Many Americans did try to stop this juggernaut. More than 400 cities and communities have passed resolutions condemning or opposing the Patriot Act. Yet Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), an opponent of the bill, perfectly captured what Congress did: “What we are seeing is quite simply a capitulation to the intransigent and misleading rhetoric of a White House that sees any effort to protect civil liberties as a sign of weakness.”
The Founding Fathers intended Congress to be a vigorous check on and balance to executive power. But Congress has never done anything more than concoct fig leafs for itself in response to public outrage over the Patriot Act. In late 2004, Congress mandated the creation of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. But the board is totally controlled by the branch of government committing the abuses. The president appoints all five board members, and the board is located in the White House. Bush dallied before announcing his picks, and then appointed as chairman the former co-chair of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney. The board never bothered to hold a single meeting.
With the Patriot Act renewal, Congress made what Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) described as “cosmetic changes” — and then congratulated themselves for defending civil liberties.
With the revised Patriot Act, it will be more difficult for the feds to seize public library records with a Section 215 search warrant (approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court). But the feds will still be able to seize library records by invoking other provisions in the law.
Businesses, nonprofit groups, and other organizations hit by Section 215 search warrants are prohibited from disclosing that they have been compelled to surrender customers’ information and other data to the feds. The new, improved Patriot Act will allow individuals and organizations hit by such searches to publicly complain about the intrusion — but only after they wait a year after they have been searched, and only if they can persuade a federal judge that the G-men acted in bad faith. A 365-day waiting period is Congress’s notion of due process and fair play for American citizens.
The biggest Patriot Act bombshell of recent times detonated last November when the Washington Post revealed that the FBI is issuing 30,000 National Security Letters (NSLs) a year. The Patriot Act made it far easier for the FBI to use NSLs to compel private citizens, banks, nonprofits, and other entities to surrender information upon demand. These subpoenas, like Section 215 searches, are accompanied by a gag order: Anyone who discloses receiving such a “letter” can be sent to prison. FBI field offices issue NSLs on their own in cases that they claim involve international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.
NSLs empower the FBI to seize records on people’s earning, spending, travels, web searches, emails, and telephone calls. Each NSL can lasso the records of thousands of people. Federal judge Victor Marrero ruled that the Patriot Act’s NSL provision “has the effect of authorizing coercive searches effectively immune from any judicial process.” (The Bush administration is appealing the ruling).
The White House hyped the Patriot Act renewal as a political triumph. The Associated Press reported, “Republicans declared victory as they sought to polish their national security credentials this midterm election year.” Republicans prattled on about how the revised Patriot Act provides “safeguards.” Apparently, a “safeguard” is anything that a government official can mention when asked about possible abuses of federal powers.
If enough Americans comprehend this “patriot” charade, it will become far more difficult for the White House and Congress to pull off similar infringements on freedom in the future. At the very least, citizens can still make it hot for anyone in Washington who betrays his oath to uphold the Constitution.
James Bovard is author of The Bush Betrayal as well as Lost Rights (1994) and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.
Are US Intentions More 'Base' Than Honorable? - by Jim Lobe
original- by Jim Lobe
President George W. Bush has long assured the world that his intentions in Iraq are strictly honorable – to set the country on a clear and stable path toward democracy and withdraw U.S. troops as soon as Iraqi forces can take control, "and not one day more."
But more recent statements by top U.S. officials, including Bush himself, have cast the latter intent into some doubt, heightening the belief among both Iraqis and U.S. citizens, according to recent polls, that Washington actually intends to establish permanent military bases in Iraq.
And the description by U.S. reporters of what are being called "super-bases" that have already been built in Iraq only adds to the impression that the Pentagon has no intention of passing up an opportunity – if it can be sustained – of embedding itself deeply into heart of the oil- and gas-rich Middle East and Gulf regions for permanent strategic advantage over any possible rival.
At al-Asad base in Iraq's western desert, wrote Charles Hanley of the Associated Press earlier this week, "the 17,000 troops and workers come and go in a kind of bustling American town, with a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, and a car dealership, stop signs, traffic regulations, and young bikers clogging the roads."
"I think we'll be here forever," Hanley quotes one airman, at yet another mega-base called Anaconda at Balad, as telling him in an article entitled "Huge Bases Raise Question: Is U.S. in Iraq to Stay?" The article notes that Washington has authorized or proposed one billion dollars for U.S. military construction in Iraq this year.
The administration has long denied that it intends to build "permanent bases" in Iraq, although Pentagon briefers have talked about "enduring" bases without clarifying the difference.
As early as April 2003 – that is, less than a month after the U.S. invasion – The New York Times reported that the administration was planning to establish and maintain as many as four military bases in Iraq for an extended period of time.
Later that year, Tom Donnelly, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the new editor of the influential Armed Forces Journal, took Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld to task in the neoconservative Weekly Standard for not "fess[ing] up" to the fact that bases in Iraq were entirely consistent with the changes Rumsfeld was trying to effect in Washington's global military posture.
Iraqi airfields in particular, he wrote, "are ideally located for deployments throughout the region. … There's plenty of space, not only for installations but for training," he wrote, adding, "And they are enough removed from Mesopotamia that they would not be 'imperial' irritants to the majority of Iraqis."
That, of course, was in the early days of the Sunni-dominated insurgency when the neoconservative theorists who assured the public before the war that U.S. forces would be greeted with "flowers and sweets" by grateful Iraqis were still riding high in the administration and Congress. As the insurgency has gained strength, the neocons have steadily lost influence.
Yet there is little evidence that the basic strategic goal of establishing at the very least "permanent access" to Iraqi bases has changed.
In some ways, that has always been implicit in the administration's repeated comparisons between Iraq and the occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II. Those precedents have been cited with increasing frequency by Bush and other top officials in recent months as public disaffection with the war has grown.
While Bush and his aides have cited the two Axis powers as evidence of their contention that Washington could successfully transform previously authoritarian or even totalitarian states into democracies over time, critics noted that that evolution was achieved in the context of a large U.S. military presence that persists to this day.
In fact, the postwar "status of forces" agreement with Japan was put forth as a model for a similar accord with the Iraqi Governing Council in 2004 by a Washington law firm that also represented the Iraqi National Congress.
In addition, the Pentagon has become increasingly concerned about its military position in the region, according to Middle East expert Gordon Robinson, who cited the effective expulsion of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan and growing anti-U.S. feeling in Turkey as important setbacks. He described Washington's hopes of acquiring bases in Iraq as "the elephant in the room."
Despite repeated appeals by independent analysts, including some, like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who initially supported the war, for the administration to solemnly forswear permanent bases or anything resembling a permanent military presence as a way to reduce anti-U.S. sentiment in Iraq and thus weaken the insurgency, top officials have generally avoided doing so.
The one exception has been Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who during his confirmation hearings late last year repeatedly stressed the importance of reassuring Iraqis that Washington really did want to leave Iraq, permanently, as soon as possible.
His advice has been taken to heart by a growing number of lawmakers, Democrat and Republican alike. Indeed, in a potentially significant move last week, the House of Representatives approved a measure by voice vote to bar the Pentagon from using any funds in the most recent appropriations bill for the purpose of "enter[ing] into a basing rights agreement between the United States and Iraq."
That vote came on the heels, however, of the most explicit statement by a responsible official to date about long-term U.S. military intentions in Iraq, one that appeared to confirm that one of the original motivations for going to war there was precisely to establish a permanent military presence.
In testimony before a House committee, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, insisted that it "would be premature for me to predict" whether Washington would indeed gain permanent access to military bases in Iraq. He then proceeded to state some of the reasons why such access might serve specific U.S. interests in the future.
He cited the "need to be able to deter ambitions of an expansionistic Iran," ensure the "free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our nation and everybody else in the world depend," and prosecute the "global war on terror" in the region among possible reasons.
"Clearly, our long-term vision for a military presence in the region requires a robust counter-terrorist capability," he said. "No doubt there is a need for some presence in the region over time primarily to help people to help themselves through this period of extremists versus moderates."
Bush himself added to the speculation during his press conference Wednesday when he was asked whether there would come a day when there would be no U.S. forces left in Iraq. In a departure from his "not-one-day-more" mantra, he insisted that was "an objective," but added, "And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." Bush's term ends in January 2009.
But recent opinions polls both here and in Iraq show the idea of retaining permanent bases is deeply unpopular in both countries.
Seventy-one percent of U.S. respondents, including 60 percent of Republicans, in a recent survey by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), said they opposed the creation of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.
Even greater cynicism about Bush's "not-one-day-more" promises reigns in Iraq, according to a PIPA poll released at the end of January [.pdf]. It found that 80 percent of Iraqis believe Washington intends to maintain bases there.
(Inter Press Service)
President George W. Bush has long assured the world that his intentions in Iraq are strictly honorable – to set the country on a clear and stable path toward democracy and withdraw U.S. troops as soon as Iraqi forces can take control, "and not one day more."
But more recent statements by top U.S. officials, including Bush himself, have cast the latter intent into some doubt, heightening the belief among both Iraqis and U.S. citizens, according to recent polls, that Washington actually intends to establish permanent military bases in Iraq.
And the description by U.S. reporters of what are being called "super-bases" that have already been built in Iraq only adds to the impression that the Pentagon has no intention of passing up an opportunity – if it can be sustained – of embedding itself deeply into heart of the oil- and gas-rich Middle East and Gulf regions for permanent strategic advantage over any possible rival.
At al-Asad base in Iraq's western desert, wrote Charles Hanley of the Associated Press earlier this week, "the 17,000 troops and workers come and go in a kind of bustling American town, with a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, and a car dealership, stop signs, traffic regulations, and young bikers clogging the roads."
"I think we'll be here forever," Hanley quotes one airman, at yet another mega-base called Anaconda at Balad, as telling him in an article entitled "Huge Bases Raise Question: Is U.S. in Iraq to Stay?" The article notes that Washington has authorized or proposed one billion dollars for U.S. military construction in Iraq this year.
The administration has long denied that it intends to build "permanent bases" in Iraq, although Pentagon briefers have talked about "enduring" bases without clarifying the difference.
As early as April 2003 – that is, less than a month after the U.S. invasion – The New York Times reported that the administration was planning to establish and maintain as many as four military bases in Iraq for an extended period of time.
Later that year, Tom Donnelly, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the new editor of the influential Armed Forces Journal, took Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld to task in the neoconservative Weekly Standard for not "fess[ing] up" to the fact that bases in Iraq were entirely consistent with the changes Rumsfeld was trying to effect in Washington's global military posture.
Iraqi airfields in particular, he wrote, "are ideally located for deployments throughout the region. … There's plenty of space, not only for installations but for training," he wrote, adding, "And they are enough removed from Mesopotamia that they would not be 'imperial' irritants to the majority of Iraqis."
That, of course, was in the early days of the Sunni-dominated insurgency when the neoconservative theorists who assured the public before the war that U.S. forces would be greeted with "flowers and sweets" by grateful Iraqis were still riding high in the administration and Congress. As the insurgency has gained strength, the neocons have steadily lost influence.
Yet there is little evidence that the basic strategic goal of establishing at the very least "permanent access" to Iraqi bases has changed.
In some ways, that has always been implicit in the administration's repeated comparisons between Iraq and the occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II. Those precedents have been cited with increasing frequency by Bush and other top officials in recent months as public disaffection with the war has grown.
While Bush and his aides have cited the two Axis powers as evidence of their contention that Washington could successfully transform previously authoritarian or even totalitarian states into democracies over time, critics noted that that evolution was achieved in the context of a large U.S. military presence that persists to this day.
In fact, the postwar "status of forces" agreement with Japan was put forth as a model for a similar accord with the Iraqi Governing Council in 2004 by a Washington law firm that also represented the Iraqi National Congress.
In addition, the Pentagon has become increasingly concerned about its military position in the region, according to Middle East expert Gordon Robinson, who cited the effective expulsion of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan and growing anti-U.S. feeling in Turkey as important setbacks. He described Washington's hopes of acquiring bases in Iraq as "the elephant in the room."
Despite repeated appeals by independent analysts, including some, like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who initially supported the war, for the administration to solemnly forswear permanent bases or anything resembling a permanent military presence as a way to reduce anti-U.S. sentiment in Iraq and thus weaken the insurgency, top officials have generally avoided doing so.
The one exception has been Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who during his confirmation hearings late last year repeatedly stressed the importance of reassuring Iraqis that Washington really did want to leave Iraq, permanently, as soon as possible.
His advice has been taken to heart by a growing number of lawmakers, Democrat and Republican alike. Indeed, in a potentially significant move last week, the House of Representatives approved a measure by voice vote to bar the Pentagon from using any funds in the most recent appropriations bill for the purpose of "enter[ing] into a basing rights agreement between the United States and Iraq."
That vote came on the heels, however, of the most explicit statement by a responsible official to date about long-term U.S. military intentions in Iraq, one that appeared to confirm that one of the original motivations for going to war there was precisely to establish a permanent military presence.
In testimony before a House committee, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, insisted that it "would be premature for me to predict" whether Washington would indeed gain permanent access to military bases in Iraq. He then proceeded to state some of the reasons why such access might serve specific U.S. interests in the future.
He cited the "need to be able to deter ambitions of an expansionistic Iran," ensure the "free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our nation and everybody else in the world depend," and prosecute the "global war on terror" in the region among possible reasons.
"Clearly, our long-term vision for a military presence in the region requires a robust counter-terrorist capability," he said. "No doubt there is a need for some presence in the region over time primarily to help people to help themselves through this period of extremists versus moderates."
Bush himself added to the speculation during his press conference Wednesday when he was asked whether there would come a day when there would be no U.S. forces left in Iraq. In a departure from his "not-one-day-more" mantra, he insisted that was "an objective," but added, "And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." Bush's term ends in January 2009.
But recent opinions polls both here and in Iraq show the idea of retaining permanent bases is deeply unpopular in both countries.
Seventy-one percent of U.S. respondents, including 60 percent of Republicans, in a recent survey by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), said they opposed the creation of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.
Even greater cynicism about Bush's "not-one-day-more" promises reigns in Iraq, according to a PIPA poll released at the end of January [.pdf]. It found that 80 percent of Iraqis believe Washington intends to maintain bases there.
(Inter Press Service)
Blaming the Media for Bad War News - by Norman Solomon
original
by Norman Solomon
Top officials in the Bush administration have often complained that news coverage of Iraq focuses on negative events too much and fails to devote enough attention to positive developments. Yet the White House has rarely picked direct fights with U.S. media outlets during this war. For the most part, President Bush leaves it to others to scapegoat the media.
Karl Rove's spin strategy is heavily reliant on surrogates. They're likely to escalate blame-the-media efforts as this year goes on.
A revealing moment – dramatizing the pro-war division of labor – came on Wednesday, during Bush's nationally televised appearance in Wheeling, West Virginia. On the surface, the format resembled a town hall, but the orchestration was closer to war rally. (According to White House spokesperson Scott McClellan, the local Chamber of Commerce had distributed 2,000 tickets while a newspaper in the community gave out 100.) It fell to a woman who identified herself as being from Columbus, Ohio, to give the Wheeling event an anti-media jolt.
Her husband – who was an Army officer in Iraq, where "his job while serving was as a broadcast journalist" – "has returned from a 13-month tour in Tikrit," she said. And then came the populist punch: "He has brought back several DVDs full of wonderful footage of reconstruction, of medical things going on. And I ask you this from the bottom of my heart for a solution to this, because it seems that our major media networks don't want to portray the good."
She added: "They just want to focus … on another car bomb or they just want to focus on some more bloodshed or they just want to focus on how they don't agree with you and what you're doing, when they don't even probably know how you're doing what you're doing anyway. But what can we do to get that footage on CNN, on Fox, to get it on Headline News, to get it on the local news? … It portrays the good. And if people could see that, if the American people could see it, there would never be another negative word about this conflict."
The audience punctuated the woman's statement with very strong applause and then a standing ovation. But rather than pile on, Bush adopted an air of restraint.
"Just got to keep talking," he advised. "Word of mouth, there's blogs, there's Internet, there's all kinds of ways to communicate, which is literally changing the way people are getting their information. And so if you're concerned, I would suggest that you reach out to some of the groups that are supporting the troops, that have gotten Internet sites, and just keep the word moving. And that's one way to deal with an issue without suppressing a free press. We will never do that in America."
In effect, Bush is holding the coat of those who go after the news media on his behalf. Many pro-war voices constantly accuse the media of antiwar and anti-Bush biases – with the accusations routinely amplified in mass-media echo chambers. Cranking up the volume are powerhouse outlets like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Post, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, legions of high-profile loyalist pundits, and literally hundreds of radio talk-show hosts across the country who have political outlooks similar to Rush Limbaugh's.
With the current war less popular than ever, it's never been more important for war backers to blame the media.
During the last several years of the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration went public with a much more heavy-handed approach, deploying Vice President Spiro Agnew to make a series of speeches that denounced critical news coverage.
In 1969, Agnew started out by blasting American TV networks (which could be counted on one hand at the time). Television news, he said, came from a "tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men."
Then the vice president turned his ire on certain newspapers, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post. He warned against "the trend toward the monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands." But Agnew had nothing bad to say about big pro-Nixon newspaper chains like Hearst and Newhouse. Nor did he utter any complaints against the huge-circulation magazines Parade and Reader's Digest, which kept cheering on the war effort.
Often using syncopated language, Agnew conflated journalists who were reporting inconvenient facts and protesters who were trying to stop the war. He said that they were "nattering nabobs of negativism," an "effete corps of impudent snobs," and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history" – all worthy of wrath from an administration determined to continue the war in Southeast Asia.
Contortions of populism that embrace war, like the kind of sentiments on display during President Bush's travel blitz in recent days, chronically invert the realities of power. While the president and his corporate backers wield enormous media power, they pose as intrepid and besieged underdogs.
Unlike progressive media critics, who scarcely have a toehold in mainstream media, the political Right has both feet firmly planted inside the dominant corporate media structures.
The myth of the liberal media is an umbrella canard that shelters the corollary myth of antiwar media. From the time that the New York Times splashed stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on front pages before the invasion of Iraq, a cross-section of the U.S. media has remained way behind the curve of what could be credibly reported about gaping holes in White House claims. But even a lapdog press corps is apt to start growling when it has been leashed to lies too many times.
With its war policies unraveling in Iraq – and in the domestic political arena of the United States – the administration may continue to avoid directly attacking the press. But, with winks and nods from the White House, some of the president's boosters will be eager to blame news media for Republican difficulties as the midterm congressional elections loom larger on the horizon.
by Norman Solomon
Top officials in the Bush administration have often complained that news coverage of Iraq focuses on negative events too much and fails to devote enough attention to positive developments. Yet the White House has rarely picked direct fights with U.S. media outlets during this war. For the most part, President Bush leaves it to others to scapegoat the media.
Karl Rove's spin strategy is heavily reliant on surrogates. They're likely to escalate blame-the-media efforts as this year goes on.
A revealing moment – dramatizing the pro-war division of labor – came on Wednesday, during Bush's nationally televised appearance in Wheeling, West Virginia. On the surface, the format resembled a town hall, but the orchestration was closer to war rally. (According to White House spokesperson Scott McClellan, the local Chamber of Commerce had distributed 2,000 tickets while a newspaper in the community gave out 100.) It fell to a woman who identified herself as being from Columbus, Ohio, to give the Wheeling event an anti-media jolt.
Her husband – who was an Army officer in Iraq, where "his job while serving was as a broadcast journalist" – "has returned from a 13-month tour in Tikrit," she said. And then came the populist punch: "He has brought back several DVDs full of wonderful footage of reconstruction, of medical things going on. And I ask you this from the bottom of my heart for a solution to this, because it seems that our major media networks don't want to portray the good."
She added: "They just want to focus … on another car bomb or they just want to focus on some more bloodshed or they just want to focus on how they don't agree with you and what you're doing, when they don't even probably know how you're doing what you're doing anyway. But what can we do to get that footage on CNN, on Fox, to get it on Headline News, to get it on the local news? … It portrays the good. And if people could see that, if the American people could see it, there would never be another negative word about this conflict."
The audience punctuated the woman's statement with very strong applause and then a standing ovation. But rather than pile on, Bush adopted an air of restraint.
"Just got to keep talking," he advised. "Word of mouth, there's blogs, there's Internet, there's all kinds of ways to communicate, which is literally changing the way people are getting their information. And so if you're concerned, I would suggest that you reach out to some of the groups that are supporting the troops, that have gotten Internet sites, and just keep the word moving. And that's one way to deal with an issue without suppressing a free press. We will never do that in America."
In effect, Bush is holding the coat of those who go after the news media on his behalf. Many pro-war voices constantly accuse the media of antiwar and anti-Bush biases – with the accusations routinely amplified in mass-media echo chambers. Cranking up the volume are powerhouse outlets like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Post, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, legions of high-profile loyalist pundits, and literally hundreds of radio talk-show hosts across the country who have political outlooks similar to Rush Limbaugh's.
With the current war less popular than ever, it's never been more important for war backers to blame the media.
During the last several years of the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration went public with a much more heavy-handed approach, deploying Vice President Spiro Agnew to make a series of speeches that denounced critical news coverage.
In 1969, Agnew started out by blasting American TV networks (which could be counted on one hand at the time). Television news, he said, came from a "tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men."
Then the vice president turned his ire on certain newspapers, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post. He warned against "the trend toward the monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands." But Agnew had nothing bad to say about big pro-Nixon newspaper chains like Hearst and Newhouse. Nor did he utter any complaints against the huge-circulation magazines Parade and Reader's Digest, which kept cheering on the war effort.
Often using syncopated language, Agnew conflated journalists who were reporting inconvenient facts and protesters who were trying to stop the war. He said that they were "nattering nabobs of negativism," an "effete corps of impudent snobs," and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history" – all worthy of wrath from an administration determined to continue the war in Southeast Asia.
Contortions of populism that embrace war, like the kind of sentiments on display during President Bush's travel blitz in recent days, chronically invert the realities of power. While the president and his corporate backers wield enormous media power, they pose as intrepid and besieged underdogs.
Unlike progressive media critics, who scarcely have a toehold in mainstream media, the political Right has both feet firmly planted inside the dominant corporate media structures.
The myth of the liberal media is an umbrella canard that shelters the corollary myth of antiwar media. From the time that the New York Times splashed stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on front pages before the invasion of Iraq, a cross-section of the U.S. media has remained way behind the curve of what could be credibly reported about gaping holes in White House claims. But even a lapdog press corps is apt to start growling when it has been leashed to lies too many times.
With its war policies unraveling in Iraq – and in the domestic political arena of the United States – the administration may continue to avoid directly attacking the press. But, with winks and nods from the White House, some of the president's boosters will be eager to blame news media for Republican difficulties as the midterm congressional elections loom larger on the horizon.
Commentary Torture Blame Game
original
Commentary Torture Blame Game
by Arnaud De Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
Washington (UPI) Mar 24, 2006
When a colonel testifies "under grant of immunity" against a sergeant who sicced dogs on prisoners at Abu Ghraib, it strikes the average onlooker as a miscarriage of military justice. Shouldn't it be the other way round? Or the sergeant being granted immunity to testify about a superior whose wink and a nod stained the country's honor, as it hadn't been in living memory?
Commentary Torture Blame Game
 File photo: US Marines inside Abu Ghraib Jail. |
UPI Editor at Large
Washington (UPI) Mar 24, 2006
When a colonel testifies "under grant of immunity" against a sergeant who sicced dogs on prisoners at Abu Ghraib, it strikes the average onlooker as a miscarriage of military justice. Shouldn't it be the other way round? Or the sergeant being granted immunity to testify about a superior whose wink and a nod stained the country's honor, as it hadn't been in living memory?
Franz Kafka seemed to have joined the defense team when lawyers for dog handler Sgt. Michael Smith at the Abu Ghraib prison scandal trial suddenly dropped their request that an Army general involved in the affair be called to testify. Army Captain Mary McCarthy told the military judge at the Washington's Navy Yard she no longer needed Army Maj.Gen. Geoffrey Miller to take the witness stand.
The closed door, pre-trial hearings wreaked of rank pulling. Miller, a central figure in the detainee torture scandal, invoked his right not to incriminate himself in court-martial proceedings. That was Article 31 of the Military Code of Justice - the equivalent of a civilian pleading the Fifth Amendment.
Sgt. Smith faced up to 29 � years in prison if convicted on all 13 counts.
The legal gambit by Miller - who once supervised the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and also helped organize operations at Abu Ghraib - was the first indication the general gave that he might have information that could implicate him. Lawyers for the dog handlers have argued all along their clients were following orders when the animals were used to make prisoners talk.
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the commanding officer at Abu Ghraib, was given immunity so he could testify why the dogs were used and who ordered them to be used.
Miller has long been the focus of the Abu Ghraib torture investigations because he was transferred there in August 2003 to streamline intelligence gathering questioning of prisoners by using his Guantanamo Bay experience as a model. Miller also transferred "Tiger Teams" from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to train the interrogators already there.
Even though dogs were first used at Gitmo, Miller says he never ordered Pappas to use animals when questioning prisoners. But Pappas already admitted in administrative hearings he improperly ordered the use of dogs. And it's an open secret among defense lawyers that Miller didn't put anything in writing. The cock of an eyebrow can be interpreted either way. Col. Pappas, according to lawyers, is convinced Gen. Miller got a wink, a nod or a hand signal from someone above his pay grade, most probably a civilian in the Pentagon.
Sgt. Smith's lawyers didn't press for Miller's appearance at the court martial because he had invoked his constitutional right to remain silent, and the Army sergeant was found guilty on six counts, including conspiring with another Army dog handler to scare prisoners into soiling themselves. Prosecutors argued for a three-year sentence for Smith who had been hailed as a hero for saving the lives of other U.S. soldiers during a mortar attack. An army jury of peers disagreed. They gave him a rap on the knuckles - six months and a dishonorable discharge. It was a tacit recognition the guilty parties were sheltering near the top of the military food chain. Smith said he wished he had gotten his orders in writing.
There is little question Gen. Miller's call for tough, command-wide interrogation policies led to Pappas' decision to authorize a dozen different techniques beyond those authorized in the Army Field Manual. Miller claims he discussed the use of dogs to help detainee custody and control. But Pappas counter-claims Miller told him dogs were helpful at Gitmo by producing the right atmosphere (of fear) for interrogations.
Whatever happened at the higher level, Smith and fellow dog-handler Sgt. Santos Cardona, faced separate courts-martial on a slew of charges of cruelty, maltreatment, aggravated assault, and making false statements. Cardonna's trial begins next month. Last Jan. 15, a jury of soldiers sentenced ringleader Specialist Charles Graner Jr. to ten years in prison. Lynndie England, a 23-year-old reservist who was photographed giving a thumbs-up in front of a pile of naked prisoners, is serving a three-year sentence. Of the seven soldiers charged, three entered guilty pleas and three faced courts-martial.
The Statue of Liberty as the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner, electrodes tied to the wrists, swaying precariously on a pedestal, is found on walls and in cartoons the world over. It has been Al Qaeda's most effective poster for jihadis in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
Long before the pictures surfaced, high-ranking officers in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) expressed their deep concern that civilian officials at the Pentagon were undermining the military's traditional detention rules and regulations, ignoring interrogation procedures, and specific cases of torture.
The Pentagon's civilian leadership was alerted in the fall of 2003. The former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who had been assigned post-war planning in Iraq, was quoted by subordinates in a 110-page report by the New York City Bar Association saying "the Geneva Accords" on the treatment of prisoners are laws "in the service of terrorists." Hardly surprising that the National Guard prison guards knew squat about international treaty obligations.
JAG officers, quoted in the same Bar report, said Feith had "significantly weakened" the military's rules and regulations governing prisoners of war. And America's image on the human rights front continues tarnished.
Former Irish president and former U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson deplored the way some democracies are "losing the moral high ground." In the U.S. in particular, she said, "the ambivalence about torture, the use of extraordinary rendition and the extension of presidential powers have all had a powerful 'knock on' effect around the world, often in countries that lack the checks and balances of independent courts, a free press and vigorous non-governmental organizations and academic communities."
Source: United Press International
Related Links
Bush's Requests for Iraqi Base Funding Make Some Wary of Extended Stay - Los Angeles Times
original
By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
March 24, 2006
WASHINGTON —
Even as military planners look to withdraw significant numbers of American troops from Iraq in the coming year, the Bush administration continues to request hundreds of millions of dollars for large bases there, raising concerns over whether they are intended as permanent sites for U.S. forces.
Questions on Capitol Hill about the future of the bases have been prompted by the new emergency spending bill for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives last week with $67.6 billion in funding for the war effort, including the base money.
Although the House approved the measure, lawmakers are demanding that the Pentagon explain its plans for the bases, and they unanimously passed a provision blocking the use of funds for base agreements with the Iraqi government.
"It's the kind of thing that incites terrorism," Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said of long-term or permanent U.S. bases in countries such as Iraq.
Paul, a critic of the war, is co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill that would make it official policy not to maintain such bases in Iraq. He noted that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden cited U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia as grounds for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The debate in Congress comes as concerns grow over how long the U.S. intends to keep forces in Iraq, a worry amplified when President Bush earlier this week said that a complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq would not occur during his term.
Long-term U.S. bases in Iraq would also be problematic in the Middle East, where they could lend credence to charges that the U.S. motive for the invasion was to seize land and oil. And they could also feed debate about the appropriate U.S. relationship with Iraq after Baghdad's new government fully assumes control.
State Department and Pentagon officials have insisted that the bases being constructed in Iraq will eventually be handed over to the Iraqi government.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Baghdad, said on Iraqi television last week that the U.S. had "no goal of establishing permanent bases in Iraq."
And Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable said, "We're building permanent bases in Iraq for Iraqis."
But the seemingly definitive administration statements mask a semantic distinction: Although officials say they are not building permanent U.S. bases, they decline to say whether they will seek a deal with the new Iraqi government to allow long-term troop deployments.
Asked at a congressional hearing last week whether he could "make an unequivocal commitment" that the U.S. officials would not seek to establish permanent bases in Iraq, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander in charge of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, replied, "The policy on long-term presence in Iraq hasn't been formulated." Venable, the Pentagon spokesman, said it was "premature and speculative" to discuss long-term base agreements before the permanent Iraqi government had been put in place.
All told, the United States has set up 110 forward operating bases in Iraq, and the Pentagon says about 34 of them already have been turned over to the Iraqi government, part of an ongoing effort to gradually strengthen Iraqi security forces.
Bush is under political pressure to reduce the number of U.S. troops before midterm congressional elections, and the Pentagon is expected to decide soon whether the next major deployment will reflect a significant reduction in forces.
But despite the potential force reductions and the base handovers, the spending has continued.
Dov Zakheim, who oversaw the Pentagon's emergency spending requests as the department's budget chief until 2004, said critics might be reading too much into the costly emergency spending, needed to protect U.S. forces from insurgent attacks and provide better conditions for deployed troops.
The spending "doesn't necessarily connote permanence," Zakheim said. "God knows it's a tough enough environment anyway."
The bulk of the Pentagon's emergency spending for military construction over the last three years in Iraq has focused on three or four large-scale air and logistics bases that dot the center of the country.
The administration is seeking $348 million for base construction as part of its 2006 emergency war funding bill. The Senate has not yet acted on the request.
By far the most funding has gone to a mammoth facility north of Baghdad in Balad, which includes an air base and a logistics center. The U.S. Central Command said it intended to use the base as the military's primary hub in the region as it gradually hands off Baghdad airport to civilian authorities.
Through the end last year, the administration spent about $230 million in emergency funds on the Balad base, and its new request includes $17.8 million for new roads that can accommodate hulking military vehicles and a 12.4-mile-long, 13-foot-high security fence.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service noted in a report last year that many of the funds already spent, including for the facilities at Balad, suggested a longer-term U.S. presence.
Projects at the base include an $18-million aircraft parking ramp and a $15-million airfield lighting system that has allowed commanders to make Balad a strategic air center for the region; a $2.9-million Special Operations compound, isolated from the rest of the base and complete with landing pads for helicopters and airplanes, where classified payloads can be delivered; and a $7-million mail distribution building.
Other bases also are being developed in ways that could lend them to permanent use.
This year's request also includes $110 million for Tallil air base outside the southeastern city of Nasiriya, a sprawling facility in the shadow of the ruins of the biblical city of Ur. Only $11 million has been spent so far, but the administration's new request appears to envision Tallil as another major transportation hub, with new roads, a new dining hall for 6,000 troops — about two Army brigades — and a new center to organize and support large supply convoys.
The administration also has spent $50 million for Camp Taji, an Army base north of Baghdad, and $46.3 million on Al Asad air base in the western desert.
These large bases are being built at the same time that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on separate bases for the growing Iraqi military. According to the U.S. Central Command and data obtained from the Army Corps of Engineers, for example, about $165 million has been spent to build an Iraqi base near the southern town of Numaniya and more than $150 million for a northern base at the old Iraqi army's Al Kasik facility.
The big numbers have begun to cause consternation in congressional appropriations committees, which are demanding more accountability from Pentagon officials on military construction in the region.
The House Appropriations Committee approved the president's newest funding bill this month with a strongly worded warning. In a report accompanying the legislation, the committee noted that it had already approved about $1.3 billion in emergency spending for war-related construction, but that the recently declared "long war" on terrorism should allow more oversight of plans for bases in the region.
It "has become clear in recent years that these expeditionary operations can result in substantial military construction expenditures of a magnitude normally associated with permanent bases," the committee reported.
Rep. James T. Walsh (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees military construction, said his panel was concerned that money the Pentagon was ostensibly seeking for short-term emergency needs actually was going to projects that were not urgent but long-term in nature.
Walsh pointed to a $167-million request to build a series of roads in Iraq that bypass major cities, a proposal the administration said was needed to decrease the convoys' exposure to roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Walsh's subcommittee cut the budget for the project to $60 million. He said the project sounded "more like road construction" than it did a strategy to protect troops from IEDs.
The Appropriations Committee also inserted a ban on spending any of the new money on facilities in Iraq until the U.S. Central Command submitted a master plan for bases in the region. Abizaid, in congressional testimony last week, said such a plan was in the process of getting final Pentagon approval for release to the committee. But he noted: "The master plan is fairly clear on everything except for Iraq and Afghanistan, which I don't have policy guidance for long term."
Without such detail, it might prove impossible for congressional appropriators to get a firm idea of how the administration views the future of the U.S. presence on big bases in Iraq.
In any event, said Zakheim, the former Pentagon budget officer, projects that expand bases' ability to handle American cargo and warplanes will eventually be of use to the Iraqi government.
"Just because the Iraqis don't have an air force now doesn't mean they won't have it several years down the road," he said.
But critics said it was all the more reason for the administration to stop being vague about the future.
"The Iraqis believe we came for their oil and we're going to put bases on top of their oil," said Rep. Tom Allen (D-Maine), a critic of the administration's approach. "As long as the vast majority of Iraqis believe we want to be there indefinitely, those who are opposed to us are going to fight harder and those who are with us are going to be less enthusiastic."
Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
On the rise
Here are four of the bases in Iraq for which the Bush administration has planned upgrades. Money spent through 2005 was granted through emergency spending bills since 2003:
1. Al Asad air base
By some accounts the second largest military air center in Iraq and the main supply base for troops in Al Anbar Province, which includes the insurgent strongholds of Fallouja and Ramadi. It houses about 17,000 troops, including a large contingent of Marines.
Spending: Unknown*
Bush 2006 request: $46.3 million
2. Balad air base
The U.S. military's main air transportation and supply hub in Iraq, with two giant runways. Also known as Camp Anaconda, it is the largest support base in the country, with about 22,500 troops and several thousand contractors.
Spending: $228.7 million*
Bush 2006 request: $17.8 million.
3. Camp Taji
One of the largest facilities for U.S. ground forces in Iraq, the base also serves as home to about 15,000 Iraqi security forces. It has the largest military shopping center (PX) in the country.
Spending: $49.6 million*
Bush 2006 request: None
4. Tallil air base
An increasingly important air and transportation hub, with a growing population of coalition troops and contractors. It has become a key stopping point for supply convoys moving north from Kuwait and is close to one of the Iraqi army's main training facilities.
Spending: $10.8 million*
Bush 2006 request: $110.3 million
*Through 2005
--
Sources: U.S. Central Command, Congressional Research Service, Global Security.org
By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
March 24, 2006
WASHINGTON —
Even as military planners look to withdraw significant numbers of American troops from Iraq in the coming year, the Bush administration continues to request hundreds of millions of dollars for large bases there, raising concerns over whether they are intended as permanent sites for U.S. forces.
Questions on Capitol Hill about the future of the bases have been prompted by the new emergency spending bill for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives last week with $67.6 billion in funding for the war effort, including the base money.
Although the House approved the measure, lawmakers are demanding that the Pentagon explain its plans for the bases, and they unanimously passed a provision blocking the use of funds for base agreements with the Iraqi government.
"It's the kind of thing that incites terrorism," Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said of long-term or permanent U.S. bases in countries such as Iraq.
Paul, a critic of the war, is co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill that would make it official policy not to maintain such bases in Iraq. He noted that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden cited U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia as grounds for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The debate in Congress comes as concerns grow over how long the U.S. intends to keep forces in Iraq, a worry amplified when President Bush earlier this week said that a complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq would not occur during his term.
Long-term U.S. bases in Iraq would also be problematic in the Middle East, where they could lend credence to charges that the U.S. motive for the invasion was to seize land and oil. And they could also feed debate about the appropriate U.S. relationship with Iraq after Baghdad's new government fully assumes control.
State Department and Pentagon officials have insisted that the bases being constructed in Iraq will eventually be handed over to the Iraqi government.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Baghdad, said on Iraqi television last week that the U.S. had "no goal of establishing permanent bases in Iraq."
And Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable said, "We're building permanent bases in Iraq for Iraqis."
But the seemingly definitive administration statements mask a semantic distinction: Although officials say they are not building permanent U.S. bases, they decline to say whether they will seek a deal with the new Iraqi government to allow long-term troop deployments.
Asked at a congressional hearing last week whether he could "make an unequivocal commitment" that the U.S. officials would not seek to establish permanent bases in Iraq, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander in charge of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, replied, "The policy on long-term presence in Iraq hasn't been formulated." Venable, the Pentagon spokesman, said it was "premature and speculative" to discuss long-term base agreements before the permanent Iraqi government had been put in place.
All told, the United States has set up 110 forward operating bases in Iraq, and the Pentagon says about 34 of them already have been turned over to the Iraqi government, part of an ongoing effort to gradually strengthen Iraqi security forces.
Bush is under political pressure to reduce the number of U.S. troops before midterm congressional elections, and the Pentagon is expected to decide soon whether the next major deployment will reflect a significant reduction in forces.
But despite the potential force reductions and the base handovers, the spending has continued.
Dov Zakheim, who oversaw the Pentagon's emergency spending requests as the department's budget chief until 2004, said critics might be reading too much into the costly emergency spending, needed to protect U.S. forces from insurgent attacks and provide better conditions for deployed troops.
The spending "doesn't necessarily connote permanence," Zakheim said. "God knows it's a tough enough environment anyway."
The bulk of the Pentagon's emergency spending for military construction over the last three years in Iraq has focused on three or four large-scale air and logistics bases that dot the center of the country.
The administration is seeking $348 million for base construction as part of its 2006 emergency war funding bill. The Senate has not yet acted on the request.
By far the most funding has gone to a mammoth facility north of Baghdad in Balad, which includes an air base and a logistics center. The U.S. Central Command said it intended to use the base as the military's primary hub in the region as it gradually hands off Baghdad airport to civilian authorities.
Through the end last year, the administration spent about $230 million in emergency funds on the Balad base, and its new request includes $17.8 million for new roads that can accommodate hulking military vehicles and a 12.4-mile-long, 13-foot-high security fence.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service noted in a report last year that many of the funds already spent, including for the facilities at Balad, suggested a longer-term U.S. presence.
Projects at the base include an $18-million aircraft parking ramp and a $15-million airfield lighting system that has allowed commanders to make Balad a strategic air center for the region; a $2.9-million Special Operations compound, isolated from the rest of the base and complete with landing pads for helicopters and airplanes, where classified payloads can be delivered; and a $7-million mail distribution building.
Other bases also are being developed in ways that could lend them to permanent use.
This year's request also includes $110 million for Tallil air base outside the southeastern city of Nasiriya, a sprawling facility in the shadow of the ruins of the biblical city of Ur. Only $11 million has been spent so far, but the administration's new request appears to envision Tallil as another major transportation hub, with new roads, a new dining hall for 6,000 troops — about two Army brigades — and a new center to organize and support large supply convoys.
The administration also has spent $50 million for Camp Taji, an Army base north of Baghdad, and $46.3 million on Al Asad air base in the western desert.
These large bases are being built at the same time that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on separate bases for the growing Iraqi military. According to the U.S. Central Command and data obtained from the Army Corps of Engineers, for example, about $165 million has been spent to build an Iraqi base near the southern town of Numaniya and more than $150 million for a northern base at the old Iraqi army's Al Kasik facility.
The big numbers have begun to cause consternation in congressional appropriations committees, which are demanding more accountability from Pentagon officials on military construction in the region.
The House Appropriations Committee approved the president's newest funding bill this month with a strongly worded warning. In a report accompanying the legislation, the committee noted that it had already approved about $1.3 billion in emergency spending for war-related construction, but that the recently declared "long war" on terrorism should allow more oversight of plans for bases in the region.
It "has become clear in recent years that these expeditionary operations can result in substantial military construction expenditures of a magnitude normally associated with permanent bases," the committee reported.
Rep. James T. Walsh (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees military construction, said his panel was concerned that money the Pentagon was ostensibly seeking for short-term emergency needs actually was going to projects that were not urgent but long-term in nature.
Walsh pointed to a $167-million request to build a series of roads in Iraq that bypass major cities, a proposal the administration said was needed to decrease the convoys' exposure to roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Walsh's subcommittee cut the budget for the project to $60 million. He said the project sounded "more like road construction" than it did a strategy to protect troops from IEDs.
The Appropriations Committee also inserted a ban on spending any of the new money on facilities in Iraq until the U.S. Central Command submitted a master plan for bases in the region. Abizaid, in congressional testimony last week, said such a plan was in the process of getting final Pentagon approval for release to the committee. But he noted: "The master plan is fairly clear on everything except for Iraq and Afghanistan, which I don't have policy guidance for long term."
Without such detail, it might prove impossible for congressional appropriators to get a firm idea of how the administration views the future of the U.S. presence on big bases in Iraq.
In any event, said Zakheim, the former Pentagon budget officer, projects that expand bases' ability to handle American cargo and warplanes will eventually be of use to the Iraqi government.
"Just because the Iraqis don't have an air force now doesn't mean they won't have it several years down the road," he said.
But critics said it was all the more reason for the administration to stop being vague about the future.
"The Iraqis believe we came for their oil and we're going to put bases on top of their oil," said Rep. Tom Allen (D-Maine), a critic of the administration's approach. "As long as the vast majority of Iraqis believe we want to be there indefinitely, those who are opposed to us are going to fight harder and those who are with us are going to be less enthusiastic."
Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.
*
(INFOBOX BELOW)
On the rise
Here are four of the bases in Iraq for which the Bush administration has planned upgrades. Money spent through 2005 was granted through emergency spending bills since 2003:
1. Al Asad air base
By some accounts the second largest military air center in Iraq and the main supply base for troops in Al Anbar Province, which includes the insurgent strongholds of Fallouja and Ramadi. It houses about 17,000 troops, including a large contingent of Marines.
Spending: Unknown*
Bush 2006 request: $46.3 million
2. Balad air base
The U.S. military's main air transportation and supply hub in Iraq, with two giant runways. Also known as Camp Anaconda, it is the largest support base in the country, with about 22,500 troops and several thousand contractors.
Spending: $228.7 million*
Bush 2006 request: $17.8 million.
3. Camp Taji
One of the largest facilities for U.S. ground forces in Iraq, the base also serves as home to about 15,000 Iraqi security forces. It has the largest military shopping center (PX) in the country.
Spending: $49.6 million*
Bush 2006 request: None
4. Tallil air base
An increasingly important air and transportation hub, with a growing population of coalition troops and contractors. It has become a key stopping point for supply convoys moving north from Kuwait and is close to one of the Iraqi army's main training facilities.
Spending: $10.8 million*
Bush 2006 request: $110.3 million
*Through 2005
--
Sources: U.S. Central Command, Congressional Research Service, Global Security.org
Thursday, March 23, 2006
"U.S. Authorities Say..."--All the News That's Fit to Slant
CounterPunch: "America's Best Political Newsletter"
"U.S. Authorities Say..."
All the News That's Fit to Slant
By ROBERT FISK
It is a bright winter morning and I am sipping my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a radar beam over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that dominates the minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In post-invasion, post-Judith Miller mode, the U.S. press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war. So the story beneath the headline "In a Battle of Wits, Iraq's Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of U.S." deserves to be read. Or does it?
Datelined Washington -- an odd city in which to learn about Iraq -- its opening paragraph reads: "Despite the recent arrest of one of his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq, insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, U.S. authorities say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering operation than they do."
Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis -- along with myself -- have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that al-Qaida's Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of "insurgency mastermind," the words that caught my eye were "U.S. authorities say." And as I read through the report, I note how the Times sources this extraordinary tale. I thought U.S. reporters no longer trusted the U.S. administration, not after the mythical WMD and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the international crimes against humanity of 9/11. Of course, I was wrong.
Here are the sources -- on pages 1 and 10 for the yarn spun by reporters Josh Meyer and Mark Mazzetti: "U.S. officials said," "said one U.S. Justice Department counter-terrorism official," "Officials ... said," "those officials said," "the officials confirmed," "American officials complained," "the U.S. officials stressed," "U.S. authorities believe," "said one senior U.S. intelligence official," "U.S. officials said," "Jordanian officials ... said" -- here, at least is some light relief -- "several U.S. officials said," "the U.S. officials said," "American officials said," "officials say," "say U.S. officials," "U.S. officials said," "one U.S. counter-terrorism official said."
I do truly treasure this story. It proves my point that the Los Angeles Times -- along with the big East Coast dailies -- should all be called U.S. OFFICIALS SAY. But it's not just this fawning on political power that makes me despair. Let's move to a more recent example of what I can only call institutionalized racism in U.S. reporting of Iraq. I have to thank reader Andrew Gorman for this gem, a January Associated Press report about the killing of an Iraqi prisoner under interrogation by U.S. Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr.
Welshofer, it was reported in court, had stuffed Iraqi Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush headfirst into a sleeping bag and sat on his chest, an action that -- not surprising -- caused the general to expire. The military jury ordered a reprimand for Welshofer, a forfeiture of $6,000 of his salary and confinement to barracks for 60 days. But what caught my eye was the sympathetic detail.
Welshofer's wife's Barbara, the AP told us, "testified that she was worried about providing for their three children if her husband was sentenced to prison. " 'I love him more for fighting this,' she said, tears welling up in her eyes. 'He's always said that you need to do the right thing, and sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do.' "
But the real scandal about these reports is we're not told anything about the general's family. Didn't he have a wife? I imagine the tears were "welling up in her eyes" when she was told her husband had been done to death. Didn't the general have children? Or parents? Or any loved ones who "fought back tears" when told of this vile deed? Not in the AP report he didn't. Mowhoush comes across as an object, a dehumanized creature that wouldn't let the Americans "break the back" of the insurgency after being stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag.
Now let's praise the AP. On an equally bright summer's morning in Australia a few days ago, I open the Sydney Morning Herald. It tells me, on page 6, that the news agency, using the Freedom of Information Act, has forced U.S. authorities to turn over 5,000 pages of transcripts of hearings at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. One of them records the trial of since-released British prisoner Feroz Abbasi, in which Abbasi vainly pleads with his judge, a U.S. air force colonel, to reveal the evidence against him, something he says he has a right to hear under international law.
And here is what the U.S. colonel replied: "Mr. Abbasi, your conduct is unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I do not care about international law. I do not want to hear the words international law. We are not concerned about international law."
Alas, those words -- which symbolize the very end of the American dream -- are buried in the story.
I am now in Wellington, New Zealand, watching on CNN Saddam Hussein's attack on the Baghdad court trying him. And suddenly, the ghastly Saddam disappears from my screen. The hearing will now proceed in secret, turning this drumhead court into even more of a farce. It is a disgrace. And what does CNN respectfully tell us? That the judge has "suspended media coverage." If only, I say to myself, CNN -- along with the U.S. press -- would do the same.
Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.
"U.S. Authorities Say..."
All the News That's Fit to Slant
By ROBERT FISK
It is a bright winter morning and I am sipping my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a radar beam over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that dominates the minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In post-invasion, post-Judith Miller mode, the U.S. press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war. So the story beneath the headline "In a Battle of Wits, Iraq's Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of U.S." deserves to be read. Or does it?
Datelined Washington -- an odd city in which to learn about Iraq -- its opening paragraph reads: "Despite the recent arrest of one of his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq, insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, U.S. authorities say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering operation than they do."
Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis -- along with myself -- have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that al-Qaida's Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of "insurgency mastermind," the words that caught my eye were "U.S. authorities say." And as I read through the report, I note how the Times sources this extraordinary tale. I thought U.S. reporters no longer trusted the U.S. administration, not after the mythical WMD and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the international crimes against humanity of 9/11. Of course, I was wrong.
Here are the sources -- on pages 1 and 10 for the yarn spun by reporters Josh Meyer and Mark Mazzetti: "U.S. officials said," "said one U.S. Justice Department counter-terrorism official," "Officials ... said," "those officials said," "the officials confirmed," "American officials complained," "the U.S. officials stressed," "U.S. authorities believe," "said one senior U.S. intelligence official," "U.S. officials said," "Jordanian officials ... said" -- here, at least is some light relief -- "several U.S. officials said," "the U.S. officials said," "American officials said," "officials say," "say U.S. officials," "U.S. officials said," "one U.S. counter-terrorism official said."
I do truly treasure this story. It proves my point that the Los Angeles Times -- along with the big East Coast dailies -- should all be called U.S. OFFICIALS SAY. But it's not just this fawning on political power that makes me despair. Let's move to a more recent example of what I can only call institutionalized racism in U.S. reporting of Iraq. I have to thank reader Andrew Gorman for this gem, a January Associated Press report about the killing of an Iraqi prisoner under interrogation by U.S. Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr.
Welshofer, it was reported in court, had stuffed Iraqi Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush headfirst into a sleeping bag and sat on his chest, an action that -- not surprising -- caused the general to expire. The military jury ordered a reprimand for Welshofer, a forfeiture of $6,000 of his salary and confinement to barracks for 60 days. But what caught my eye was the sympathetic detail.
Welshofer's wife's Barbara, the AP told us, "testified that she was worried about providing for their three children if her husband was sentenced to prison. " 'I love him more for fighting this,' she said, tears welling up in her eyes. 'He's always said that you need to do the right thing, and sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do.' "
But the real scandal about these reports is we're not told anything about the general's family. Didn't he have a wife? I imagine the tears were "welling up in her eyes" when she was told her husband had been done to death. Didn't the general have children? Or parents? Or any loved ones who "fought back tears" when told of this vile deed? Not in the AP report he didn't. Mowhoush comes across as an object, a dehumanized creature that wouldn't let the Americans "break the back" of the insurgency after being stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag.
Now let's praise the AP. On an equally bright summer's morning in Australia a few days ago, I open the Sydney Morning Herald. It tells me, on page 6, that the news agency, using the Freedom of Information Act, has forced U.S. authorities to turn over 5,000 pages of transcripts of hearings at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. One of them records the trial of since-released British prisoner Feroz Abbasi, in which Abbasi vainly pleads with his judge, a U.S. air force colonel, to reveal the evidence against him, something he says he has a right to hear under international law.
And here is what the U.S. colonel replied: "Mr. Abbasi, your conduct is unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I do not care about international law. I do not want to hear the words international law. We are not concerned about international law."
Alas, those words -- which symbolize the very end of the American dream -- are buried in the story.
I am now in Wellington, New Zealand, watching on CNN Saddam Hussein's attack on the Baghdad court trying him. And suddenly, the ghastly Saddam disappears from my screen. The hearing will now proceed in secret, turning this drumhead court into even more of a farce. It is a disgrace. And what does CNN respectfully tell us? That the judge has "suspended media coverage." If only, I say to myself, CNN -- along with the U.S. press -- would do the same.
Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.
Finding drunks in a bar -- what are the chances?
Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com
Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:02 AM ET
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said on Wednesday.
The first sting operation was conducted recently in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication, said the commission's Carolyn Beck.
Being in a bar does not exempt one from the state laws against public drunkeness, Beck said.
The goal, she said, was to detain drunks before they leave a bar and go do something dangerous like drive a car.
"We feel that the only way we're going to get at the drunk driving problem and the problem of people hurting each other while drunk is by crackdowns like this," she said.
"There are a lot of dangerous and stupid things people do when they're intoxicated, other than get behind the wheel of a car," Beck said. "People walk out into traffic and get run over, people jump off of balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss."
She said the sting operations would continue throughout the state.
Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:02 AM ET
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said on Wednesday.
The first sting operation was conducted recently in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication, said the commission's Carolyn Beck.
Being in a bar does not exempt one from the state laws against public drunkeness, Beck said.
The goal, she said, was to detain drunks before they leave a bar and go do something dangerous like drive a car.
"We feel that the only way we're going to get at the drunk driving problem and the problem of people hurting each other while drunk is by crackdowns like this," she said.
"There are a lot of dangerous and stupid things people do when they're intoxicated, other than get behind the wheel of a car," Beck said. "People walk out into traffic and get run over, people jump off of balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss."
She said the sting operations would continue throughout the state.
White House downplays Bush remark on Iraq troop pullout - Yahoo! News
White House downplays Bush remark on Iraq troop pullout - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House downplayed
President George W. Bush's suggestion that US troops would still be in
Iraq when his term ends in January 2009.
Bush answered a question at a news conference Tuesday by saying the decision to withdraw US troops from Iraq would be made "by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."
He refused, meanwhile, to specify a date after which US troops would no longer be on Iraqi soil.
Despite his refusal to set a deadline, Bush's reference to "future presidents" seemed the clearest indication of his thoughts about the duration of the US deployment in Iraq.
"The question was ... when will there be zero or no American troops in Iraq," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "So he was referring to that specific question."
The president did not mean that a strong military presence would be remain nearly six years after the US-led invasion, but merely was addressing a theoretical question about when the troops will be withdrawn, McClellan told reporters.
The United States has 133,000 troops in Iraq. With more than 2,300 killed there since the March 2003 invasion, the daily spectacle of violence and the exorbitant cost of the war, the majority of Americans favor either a partial or total withdrawal.
Bush continued Wednesday to press his case for the war in Iraq. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, the president reiterated that the decision on the troop level would take into account the recommendations of military commanders on the ground and growing effectiveness of Iraqi security forces.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House downplayed
President George W. Bush's suggestion that US troops would still be in
Iraq when his term ends in January 2009.
Bush answered a question at a news conference Tuesday by saying the decision to withdraw US troops from Iraq would be made "by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."
He refused, meanwhile, to specify a date after which US troops would no longer be on Iraqi soil.
Despite his refusal to set a deadline, Bush's reference to "future presidents" seemed the clearest indication of his thoughts about the duration of the US deployment in Iraq.
"The question was ... when will there be zero or no American troops in Iraq," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "So he was referring to that specific question."
The president did not mean that a strong military presence would be remain nearly six years after the US-led invasion, but merely was addressing a theoretical question about when the troops will be withdrawn, McClellan told reporters.
The United States has 133,000 troops in Iraq. With more than 2,300 killed there since the March 2003 invasion, the daily spectacle of violence and the exorbitant cost of the war, the majority of Americans favor either a partial or total withdrawal.
Bush continued Wednesday to press his case for the war in Iraq. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, the president reiterated that the decision on the troop level would take into account the recommendations of military commanders on the ground and growing effectiveness of Iraqi security forces.
The War Lovers - by John Pilger
The War Lovers - by John Pilger
The War Lovers
by John Pilger
The war lovers I have known in real wars have usually been harmless, except to themselves. They were attracted to Vietnam and Cambodia, where drugs were plentiful. Bosnia, with its roulette of death, was another favorite. A few would say they were there "to tell the world"; the honest ones would say they loved it. "War is fun!" one of them had scratched on his arm. He stood on a land mine.
I sometimes remember these almost endearing fools when I find myself faced with another kind of war lover – the kind that has not seen war and has often done everything possible not to see it. The passion of these war lovers is a phenomenon; it never dims, regardless of the distance from the object of their desire. Pick up the Sunday papers and there they are, egocentrics of little harsh experience, other than a Saturday in Sainsbury's. Turn on the television and there they are again, night after night, intoning not so much their love of war as their sales pitch for it on behalf of the court to which they are assigned. "There's no doubt," said Matt Frei, the BBC's man in America, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power."
Frei said that on April 13, 2003, after George W. Bush had launched "Shock and Awe" on a defenseless Iraq. Two years later, after a rampant, racist, woefully trained, and ill-disciplined army of occupation had brought "American values" of sectarianism, death squads, chemical attacks, attacks with uranium-tipped shells and cluster bombs, Frei described the notorious 82nd Airborne as "the heroes of Tikrit."
Last year, he lauded Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the slaughter in Iraq, as "an intellectual" who "believes passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development." As for Iran, Frei was well ahead of the story. In June 2003, he told BBC viewers: "There may be a case for regime change in Iran, too."
How many men, women, and children will be killed, maimed, or sent mad if Bush attacks Iran? The prospect of an attack is especially exciting for those war lovers understandably disappointed by the turn of events in Iraq. "The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth," wrote Gerard Baker in the Times last month, "is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran. … If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik revolution and the coming of Hitler." Sound familiar? In February 2003, Baker wrote that "victory [in Iraq] will quickly vindicate U.S. and British claims about the scale of the threat Saddam poses."
The "coming of Hitler" is a rallying cry of war lovers. It was heard before NATO's "moral crusade to save Kosovo" (Blair) in 1999, a model for the invasion of Iraq. In the attack on Serbia, 2 percent of NATO's missiles hit military targets; the rest hit hospitals, schools, factories, churches, and broadcasting studios. Echoing Blair and a clutch of Clinton officials, a massed media chorus declared that "we" had to stop "something approaching genocide" in Kosovo, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote in 2002 in the Guardian. "Echoes of the Holocaust," said the front pages of the Daily Mirror and the Sun. The Observer warned of a "Balkan Final Solution."
The recent death of Slobodan Milosevic took the war lovers and war sellers down memory lane. Curiously, "genocide" and "Holocaust" and the "coming of Hitler" were now missing – for the very good reason that, like the drumbeat leading to the invasion of Iraq and the drumbeat now leading to an attack on Iran, it was all bullsh*t. Not misinterpretation. Not a mistake. Not blunders. Bullsh*t.
The "mass graves" in Kosovo would justify it all, they said. When the bombing was over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history." Several weeks later, having found not a single mass grave, the FBI and other forensic teams went home.
In 2000, the International War Crimes Tribunal announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included Serbs, Roma, and those killed by "our" allies, the Kosovo Liberation Front. It meant that the justification for the attack on Serbia ("225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 are missing, presumed dead," the U.S. ambassador-at-large David Scheffer had claimed) was an invention. To my knowledge, only the Wall Street Journal admitted this. A former senior NATO planner, Michael McGwire, wrote that "to describe the bombing as 'humanitarian intervention' [is] really grotesque." In fact, the NATO "crusade" was the final, calculated act of a long war of attrition aimed at wiping out the very idea of Yugoslavia.
For me, one of the more odious characteristics of Blair, and Bush, and Clinton, and their eager or gulled journalistic court, is the enthusiasm of sedentary, effete men (and women) for bloodshed they never see, bits of body they never have to retch over, stacked morgues they will never have to visit, searching for a loved one. Their role is to enforce parallel worlds of unspoken truth and public lies. That Milosevic was a minnow compared with industrial-scale killers such as Bush and Blair belongs to the former.
The War Lovers
by John Pilger
The war lovers I have known in real wars have usually been harmless, except to themselves. They were attracted to Vietnam and Cambodia, where drugs were plentiful. Bosnia, with its roulette of death, was another favorite. A few would say they were there "to tell the world"; the honest ones would say they loved it. "War is fun!" one of them had scratched on his arm. He stood on a land mine.
I sometimes remember these almost endearing fools when I find myself faced with another kind of war lover – the kind that has not seen war and has often done everything possible not to see it. The passion of these war lovers is a phenomenon; it never dims, regardless of the distance from the object of their desire. Pick up the Sunday papers and there they are, egocentrics of little harsh experience, other than a Saturday in Sainsbury's. Turn on the television and there they are again, night after night, intoning not so much their love of war as their sales pitch for it on behalf of the court to which they are assigned. "There's no doubt," said Matt Frei, the BBC's man in America, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power."
Frei said that on April 13, 2003, after George W. Bush had launched "Shock and Awe" on a defenseless Iraq. Two years later, after a rampant, racist, woefully trained, and ill-disciplined army of occupation had brought "American values" of sectarianism, death squads, chemical attacks, attacks with uranium-tipped shells and cluster bombs, Frei described the notorious 82nd Airborne as "the heroes of Tikrit."
Last year, he lauded Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the slaughter in Iraq, as "an intellectual" who "believes passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development." As for Iran, Frei was well ahead of the story. In June 2003, he told BBC viewers: "There may be a case for regime change in Iran, too."
How many men, women, and children will be killed, maimed, or sent mad if Bush attacks Iran? The prospect of an attack is especially exciting for those war lovers understandably disappointed by the turn of events in Iraq. "The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth," wrote Gerard Baker in the Times last month, "is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran. … If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik revolution and the coming of Hitler." Sound familiar? In February 2003, Baker wrote that "victory [in Iraq] will quickly vindicate U.S. and British claims about the scale of the threat Saddam poses."
The "coming of Hitler" is a rallying cry of war lovers. It was heard before NATO's "moral crusade to save Kosovo" (Blair) in 1999, a model for the invasion of Iraq. In the attack on Serbia, 2 percent of NATO's missiles hit military targets; the rest hit hospitals, schools, factories, churches, and broadcasting studios. Echoing Blair and a clutch of Clinton officials, a massed media chorus declared that "we" had to stop "something approaching genocide" in Kosovo, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote in 2002 in the Guardian. "Echoes of the Holocaust," said the front pages of the Daily Mirror and the Sun. The Observer warned of a "Balkan Final Solution."
The recent death of Slobodan Milosevic took the war lovers and war sellers down memory lane. Curiously, "genocide" and "Holocaust" and the "coming of Hitler" were now missing – for the very good reason that, like the drumbeat leading to the invasion of Iraq and the drumbeat now leading to an attack on Iran, it was all bullsh*t. Not misinterpretation. Not a mistake. Not blunders. Bullsh*t.
The "mass graves" in Kosovo would justify it all, they said. When the bombing was over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history." Several weeks later, having found not a single mass grave, the FBI and other forensic teams went home.
In 2000, the International War Crimes Tribunal announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included Serbs, Roma, and those killed by "our" allies, the Kosovo Liberation Front. It meant that the justification for the attack on Serbia ("225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 are missing, presumed dead," the U.S. ambassador-at-large David Scheffer had claimed) was an invention. To my knowledge, only the Wall Street Journal admitted this. A former senior NATO planner, Michael McGwire, wrote that "to describe the bombing as 'humanitarian intervention' [is] really grotesque." In fact, the NATO "crusade" was the final, calculated act of a long war of attrition aimed at wiping out the very idea of Yugoslavia.
For me, one of the more odious characteristics of Blair, and Bush, and Clinton, and their eager or gulled journalistic court, is the enthusiasm of sedentary, effete men (and women) for bloodshed they never see, bits of body they never have to retch over, stacked morgues they will never have to visit, searching for a loved one. Their role is to enforce parallel worlds of unspoken truth and public lies. That Milosevic was a minnow compared with industrial-scale killers such as Bush and Blair belongs to the former.
Pentagon orders 'flying wing' development
United Press International - Security & Terrorism - Pentagon orders 'flying wing' development
EL SEGUNDO, Calif., March 23 (UPI) --
**how long do you think they've been testing it already?**
The United States has selected Northrop Grumman to design a supersonic "flying wing" aircraft that will be unmatched in flight efficiency.
The Oblique Flying Wing program will produce a tailless plane that has an eerie resemblance to a flying saucer but should offer the military a high degree of performance at both low and mach speeds.
An "X" version of the flying wing is tentatively scheduled for flight testing in 2010 or 2011, Northrop said in a news release Thursday.
The project is being run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and will advance new designs that could be incorporated in future warplane designs.
"We look forward to working with DARPA and its government team to make aviation history," said Charlie Guthrie of Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems.
The aircraft's prime attribute will be a variable-sweep wing designed to change positions depending on the plane's airspeed. The idea is to make the plane as efficient as possible whether it is operating in a high-altitude, high-speed environment or flying low and slow.
"The supersonic design envisioned by the OFW program offers potential benefits for missions requiring rapid deployment, long range and long endurance," the company said in its release. "In theory, an oblique flying wing could maximize its performance in every flight regime."
soaring high above the desert near Edwards Air Force Base or, perhaps, Nevada's legendary Area 51.
EL SEGUNDO, Calif., March 23 (UPI) --
**how long do you think they've been testing it already?**
The United States has selected Northrop Grumman to design a supersonic "flying wing" aircraft that will be unmatched in flight efficiency.
The Oblique Flying Wing program will produce a tailless plane that has an eerie resemblance to a flying saucer but should offer the military a high degree of performance at both low and mach speeds.
An "X" version of the flying wing is tentatively scheduled for flight testing in 2010 or 2011, Northrop said in a news release Thursday.
The project is being run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and will advance new designs that could be incorporated in future warplane designs.
"We look forward to working with DARPA and its government team to make aviation history," said Charlie Guthrie of Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems.
The aircraft's prime attribute will be a variable-sweep wing designed to change positions depending on the plane's airspeed. The idea is to make the plane as efficient as possible whether it is operating in a high-altitude, high-speed environment or flying low and slow.
"The supersonic design envisioned by the OFW program offers potential benefits for missions requiring rapid deployment, long range and long endurance," the company said in its release. "In theory, an oblique flying wing could maximize its performance in every flight regime."
soaring high above the desert near Edwards Air Force Base or, perhaps, Nevada's legendary Area 51.
Pentagon to review policy on planting news stories
World News Article | Reuters.co.uk
Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:55 PM GMT
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon will review whether it is proper for the military to pay news organisations to publish positive stories secretly written by U.S. forces, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday.
During a briefing, Rumsfeld refused to give his opinion on the propriety of the practice.
Asked if he agreed with comments by Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the military should disclose when it pays for a story, Rumsfeld said, "No, I said we would take it under advisement and take a look at it. I'm not going to make a judgement off the top of my head."
Following a report in the Los Angeles Times in November, the U.S. military acknowledged that troops in an "information operations" task force were writing articles with positive messages about the mission in Iraq that were translated into Arabic and planted in Iraqi newspapers in return for money.
The stories were planted with the help of Lincoln Group, a Washington-based defence contractor, officials said.
Army Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said on March 3 that an investigation he ordered by a Navy admiral into the practice "found that we were operating within our authorities and responsibilities." Casey said at the time that the military had not discontinued the practice.
"General Casey did ask for a study of what took place, and that it's finished but he hasn't reviewed it and it's not been sent here, and that the rumour is that it does not find anything that was done outside of policy because the policy is silent on that issue (of paying to plant stories), as I understand it," Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld said that any articles that were planted were "truthful," but he added, "I am not going to defend it, because I don't have sufficient knowledge about what actually was done at what level by whom and for what purpose. And I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth."
Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:55 PM GMT
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon will review whether it is proper for the military to pay news organisations to publish positive stories secretly written by U.S. forces, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday.
During a briefing, Rumsfeld refused to give his opinion on the propriety of the practice.
Asked if he agreed with comments by Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the military should disclose when it pays for a story, Rumsfeld said, "No, I said we would take it under advisement and take a look at it. I'm not going to make a judgement off the top of my head."
Following a report in the Los Angeles Times in November, the U.S. military acknowledged that troops in an "information operations" task force were writing articles with positive messages about the mission in Iraq that were translated into Arabic and planted in Iraqi newspapers in return for money.
The stories were planted with the help of Lincoln Group, a Washington-based defence contractor, officials said.
Army Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said on March 3 that an investigation he ordered by a Navy admiral into the practice "found that we were operating within our authorities and responsibilities." Casey said at the time that the military had not discontinued the practice.
"General Casey did ask for a study of what took place, and that it's finished but he hasn't reviewed it and it's not been sent here, and that the rumour is that it does not find anything that was done outside of policy because the policy is silent on that issue (of paying to plant stories), as I understand it," Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld said that any articles that were planted were "truthful," but he added, "I am not going to defend it, because I don't have sufficient knowledge about what actually was done at what level by whom and for what purpose. And I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth."
Iraqi Official, Paid by CIA, Gave Account of Weapons
Iraqi Official, Paid by CIA, Gave Account of Weapons
By Scott Shane
The New York Times
Wednesday 22 March 2006
Washington -
Saddam Hussein's foreign minister was paid for information he supplied to the Central Intelligence Agency, through the French intelligence agency, that raised questions about the scale of Iraq's weapons programs, former intelligence officials said Tuesday.
The role of Naji Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister from 2001 until the America-led invasion began in 2003, was first described publicly in a 2004 speech by George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, but Mr. Tenet did not give the Iraqi's name.
NBC News reported on Monday night that Mr. Sabri had been the man Mr. Tenet described as "a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle," and two former intelligence officials confirmed the identification.
Mr. Sabri did not meet directly with CIA officers, but spoke with intermediaries in meetings arranged by the French intelligence agency, which passed the information on, the officials said.
One official said Mr. Sabri may not have known for certain that his information was going to the United States government or that the money he received - reported by NBC as more than $100,000 - came from the CIA.
The officials were granted anonymity because of the importance of the secret intelligence relationship they had described. Mr. Sabri, who is teaching at a university in the Middle East outside Iraq, declined to discuss the report, NBC reported. A CIA spokesman declined to comment Tuesday.
According to Mr. Tenet's account, which is generally in accord with that of NBC and the former intelligence officials, the source now identified as Mr. Sabri gave a mixed account of Iraq's weapons programs when he spoke with French intelligence officers in the fall of 2002.
Mr. Tenet said in his speech, at Georgetown University in February 2004, that a source who had direct access to Mr. Hussein had said that Iraq had no nuclear weapons but was "aggressively and covertly" seeking to develop them. Mr. Tenet said the source had also reported that the Hussein government was "dabbling" with biological weapons but had no "real weapons program."
By comparison, an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, representing the views of American intelligence agencies, said Iraq had "reconstituted its nuclear weapons program" and it had an active biological weapons program that had produced some germ weapons.
On chemical arms, Mr. Sabri's information seems to be closer to the American estimate, which had said Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons. Mr. Sabri told French intelligence officers that Iraq had stockpiled chemical weapons and might use them against invading troops or Israel, according to Mr. Tenet.
Extensive searches by American troops and weapons specialists after the fall of Mr. Hussein found no unconventional weapons of any kind.
A worldly diplomat and former editor of an English-language Iraqi newspaper, Mr. Sabri was recalled from the Iraqi Embassy in London in 1980 after his two brothers were arrested by Mr. Hussein's agents and jailed on conspiracy charges. They were tortured, and one died in prison, while the other was freed after six years, according to a biography of Mr. Sabri compiled by the BBC.
Mr. Sabri lived quietly as an editor and literary translator for a decade before being given a new government post at the time of the Persian Gulf war in 1991. He worked at the Ministry of Information, as an adviser to Mr. Hussein and as ambassador to Austria before becoming foreign minister in April 2001.
In September 2002, in a speech to the United Nations, Mr. Sabri declared that "Iraq is free of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons."
The Bush administration has been accused by some former officials and members of Congress of deliberately skewing prewar intelligence to make the case for war.
Last month, Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA official who oversaw intelligence assessments on the Middle East before the war, charged in an article in Foreign Affairs that "intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions that had already been made."
-------
By Scott Shane
The New York Times
Wednesday 22 March 2006
Washington -
Saddam Hussein's foreign minister was paid for information he supplied to the Central Intelligence Agency, through the French intelligence agency, that raised questions about the scale of Iraq's weapons programs, former intelligence officials said Tuesday.
The role of Naji Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister from 2001 until the America-led invasion began in 2003, was first described publicly in a 2004 speech by George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, but Mr. Tenet did not give the Iraqi's name.
NBC News reported on Monday night that Mr. Sabri had been the man Mr. Tenet described as "a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle," and two former intelligence officials confirmed the identification.
Mr. Sabri did not meet directly with CIA officers, but spoke with intermediaries in meetings arranged by the French intelligence agency, which passed the information on, the officials said.
One official said Mr. Sabri may not have known for certain that his information was going to the United States government or that the money he received - reported by NBC as more than $100,000 - came from the CIA.
The officials were granted anonymity because of the importance of the secret intelligence relationship they had described. Mr. Sabri, who is teaching at a university in the Middle East outside Iraq, declined to discuss the report, NBC reported. A CIA spokesman declined to comment Tuesday.
According to Mr. Tenet's account, which is generally in accord with that of NBC and the former intelligence officials, the source now identified as Mr. Sabri gave a mixed account of Iraq's weapons programs when he spoke with French intelligence officers in the fall of 2002.
Mr. Tenet said in his speech, at Georgetown University in February 2004, that a source who had direct access to Mr. Hussein had said that Iraq had no nuclear weapons but was "aggressively and covertly" seeking to develop them. Mr. Tenet said the source had also reported that the Hussein government was "dabbling" with biological weapons but had no "real weapons program."
By comparison, an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, representing the views of American intelligence agencies, said Iraq had "reconstituted its nuclear weapons program" and it had an active biological weapons program that had produced some germ weapons.
On chemical arms, Mr. Sabri's information seems to be closer to the American estimate, which had said Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons. Mr. Sabri told French intelligence officers that Iraq had stockpiled chemical weapons and might use them against invading troops or Israel, according to Mr. Tenet.
Extensive searches by American troops and weapons specialists after the fall of Mr. Hussein found no unconventional weapons of any kind.
A worldly diplomat and former editor of an English-language Iraqi newspaper, Mr. Sabri was recalled from the Iraqi Embassy in London in 1980 after his two brothers were arrested by Mr. Hussein's agents and jailed on conspiracy charges. They were tortured, and one died in prison, while the other was freed after six years, according to a biography of Mr. Sabri compiled by the BBC.
Mr. Sabri lived quietly as an editor and literary translator for a decade before being given a new government post at the time of the Persian Gulf war in 1991. He worked at the Ministry of Information, as an adviser to Mr. Hussein and as ambassador to Austria before becoming foreign minister in April 2001.
In September 2002, in a speech to the United Nations, Mr. Sabri declared that "Iraq is free of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons."
The Bush administration has been accused by some former officials and members of Congress of deliberately skewing prewar intelligence to make the case for war.
Last month, Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA official who oversaw intelligence assessments on the Middle East before the war, charged in an article in Foreign Affairs that "intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions that had already been made."
-------
Iraqi Civilian Deaths Shrouded in Secrecy
Iraqi Civilian Deaths Shrouded in Secrecy
By David Gritten
BBC News
Wednesday 22 March 2006
Recent figures from the campaign group Iraq Body Count put the minimum number of civilians killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion three years ago at between 33,710 and 37,832.
Although many of those deaths were caused by insurgent attacks, multi-national forces stationed in Iraq ostensibly to protect the population have been responsible for a significant number post-invasion.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed during major offensives by US-led forces against insurgents in cities such as Fallujah, and many others have died after lethal force was used at military checkpoints.
Military commanders have said those killed were "collateral damage" or the unfortunate victims of "crossfire" between their troops and militants.
But the announcement that US military investigators have flown to Iraq to study allegations that their troops deliberately shot dead at least 15 civilians in Anbar Province in November has cast doubt on some of those claims.
'Riddled With Bullets'
A US statement at the time said the civilians, including seven women and three children, died in a roadside bomb explosion that also killed a marine in the western town of Haditha.
But survivors and those who saw the bodies said the account was not true.
"Their bodies were riddled with bullets, there was evidence that there had been gunfire inside their homes, there were blood spatters inside their homes," Bobby Ghosh, a journalist who took up the case for Time magazine, told the BBC.
"It was quite clear that these people were killed indoors, which couldn't possibly have happened if they'd been involved in a roadside blast."
An initial military inquiry found the two families had indeed been shot dead in their homes by the marines, but it described the deaths as "collateral damage".
The report has now prompted the US Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) to determine the motives behind the killing.
The NCIS will have to decide whether the civilians were killed by accident or were targeted by the marines as an act of revenge in a potential war crime.
Several American veterans of the war in Iraq have told the BBC's Newsnight program that the marines' reaction to the roadside bomb attack in Haditha was not an isolated incident.
Specialist Michael Blake, who served in Balad, said it was common practice to "shoot up the landscape or anything that moved" after an explosion.
'Common Practice'
Another veteran, Specialist Jody Casey, who was a scout sniper in Baquba, said he had also seen innocent civilians being killed.
Bombs "go off and you just zap any farmer that's close to you", he said.
Mr. Casey said he did not take part in any atrocities himself, but was advised to always carry a shovel. He could then plant this on any civilian victims to make it look as though they were digging roadside bombs.
The US and British governments say the fact the allegations are being investigated at all shows that progress has been made in Iraq.
UK International Development Minister Hilary Benn welcomed the inquiry and said it was important that the perpetrators were being brought to justice.
"The big difference between now and the 30 years that people endured under Saddam is that when things happened nobody was called to account, there was no due process," he said.
**thirty years ago, they were done under Saddam, who has never claimed to be a saint. Now they're being done by the US and UK. EG:) **
'Secrecy'
Although human rights groups have also welcomed the launch of the inquiry, they are quick to point out that the multi-national forces have investigated only a minority of the reports alleging the unlawful or deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians.
Nicole Choueiry, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, told the BBC News website that those investigations which had taken place had often been inadequate and shrouded in secrecy.
The victims' families are also often unaware of how to apply for compensation.
There are no governmental or judicial bodies in Iraq to investigate human rights violations and the activities of international groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have been limited by the deteriorating security situation.
Ms. Choueiry believes an official body needs to be set up to ensure multi-national troops fulfil their mission while abiding by international humanitarian and human rights law.
"Whether the investigations are civilian or led by the judiciary, the most important thing is for them to be independent, impartial and transparent," she said.
Immunity
But the effectiveness of such an organization would be severely restricted by an order originally issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and renewed by the Iraqi government in 2004, that grants foreign forces immunity from Iraqi criminal and civil law.
Instead, the troops remain subject solely to the jurisdiction of their own states.
The US and UK have been accused of limiting the number and power of criminal prosecutions - in January, a US officer was punished with a reprimand and a $6,000 fine for killing a captured Iraqi general - or simply not undertaking them at all.
No prosecution was launched after a US marine was filmed shooting dead an incapacitated insurgent in a mosque in Fallujah in November 2004.
Phil Shiner, a solicitor representing several Iraqi families taking the British government to court over human rights violations, told the BBC News website the small chance of anything being investigated effectively makes redundant the fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians in times of war or under occupation by a foreign power.
"The protection of the fourth Geneva Convention means nothing if the military does not investigate the crime," he said.
Mr. Shiner has challenged the immunity of British troops in Iraq and their right to run their own investigations by arguing that European human rights law applied during their operations.
The UK High Court ruled in December that the British government would have to hold an "independent and effective" inquiry into the death of a man from Basra, Baha Mousa, because he died while in British custody.
Although the High Court also said it would be "premature" to conclude the British government was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights before the outcome of the ministry's own investigation was known, such a ruling could have profound consequences for the armed forces.
It has considerably strengthened the case for the prosecution of soldiers found to have acted unlawfully.
-------
By David Gritten
BBC News
Wednesday 22 March 2006
Recent figures from the campaign group Iraq Body Count put the minimum number of civilians killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion three years ago at between 33,710 and 37,832.
Although many of those deaths were caused by insurgent attacks, multi-national forces stationed in Iraq ostensibly to protect the population have been responsible for a significant number post-invasion.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed during major offensives by US-led forces against insurgents in cities such as Fallujah, and many others have died after lethal force was used at military checkpoints.
Military commanders have said those killed were "collateral damage" or the unfortunate victims of "crossfire" between their troops and militants.
But the announcement that US military investigators have flown to Iraq to study allegations that their troops deliberately shot dead at least 15 civilians in Anbar Province in November has cast doubt on some of those claims.
'Riddled With Bullets'
A US statement at the time said the civilians, including seven women and three children, died in a roadside bomb explosion that also killed a marine in the western town of Haditha.
But survivors and those who saw the bodies said the account was not true.
"Their bodies were riddled with bullets, there was evidence that there had been gunfire inside their homes, there were blood spatters inside their homes," Bobby Ghosh, a journalist who took up the case for Time magazine, told the BBC.
"It was quite clear that these people were killed indoors, which couldn't possibly have happened if they'd been involved in a roadside blast."
An initial military inquiry found the two families had indeed been shot dead in their homes by the marines, but it described the deaths as "collateral damage".
The report has now prompted the US Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) to determine the motives behind the killing.
The NCIS will have to decide whether the civilians were killed by accident or were targeted by the marines as an act of revenge in a potential war crime.
Several American veterans of the war in Iraq have told the BBC's Newsnight program that the marines' reaction to the roadside bomb attack in Haditha was not an isolated incident.
Specialist Michael Blake, who served in Balad, said it was common practice to "shoot up the landscape or anything that moved" after an explosion.
'Common Practice'
Another veteran, Specialist Jody Casey, who was a scout sniper in Baquba, said he had also seen innocent civilians being killed.
Bombs "go off and you just zap any farmer that's close to you", he said.
Mr. Casey said he did not take part in any atrocities himself, but was advised to always carry a shovel. He could then plant this on any civilian victims to make it look as though they were digging roadside bombs.
The US and British governments say the fact the allegations are being investigated at all shows that progress has been made in Iraq.
UK International Development Minister Hilary Benn welcomed the inquiry and said it was important that the perpetrators were being brought to justice.
"The big difference between now and the 30 years that people endured under Saddam is that when things happened nobody was called to account, there was no due process," he said.
**thirty years ago, they were done under Saddam, who has never claimed to be a saint. Now they're being done by the US and UK. EG:) **
'Secrecy'
Although human rights groups have also welcomed the launch of the inquiry, they are quick to point out that the multi-national forces have investigated only a minority of the reports alleging the unlawful or deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians.
Nicole Choueiry, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, told the BBC News website that those investigations which had taken place had often been inadequate and shrouded in secrecy.
The victims' families are also often unaware of how to apply for compensation.
There are no governmental or judicial bodies in Iraq to investigate human rights violations and the activities of international groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have been limited by the deteriorating security situation.
Ms. Choueiry believes an official body needs to be set up to ensure multi-national troops fulfil their mission while abiding by international humanitarian and human rights law.
"Whether the investigations are civilian or led by the judiciary, the most important thing is for them to be independent, impartial and transparent," she said.
Immunity
But the effectiveness of such an organization would be severely restricted by an order originally issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and renewed by the Iraqi government in 2004, that grants foreign forces immunity from Iraqi criminal and civil law.
Instead, the troops remain subject solely to the jurisdiction of their own states.
The US and UK have been accused of limiting the number and power of criminal prosecutions - in January, a US officer was punished with a reprimand and a $6,000 fine for killing a captured Iraqi general - or simply not undertaking them at all.
No prosecution was launched after a US marine was filmed shooting dead an incapacitated insurgent in a mosque in Fallujah in November 2004.
Phil Shiner, a solicitor representing several Iraqi families taking the British government to court over human rights violations, told the BBC News website the small chance of anything being investigated effectively makes redundant the fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians in times of war or under occupation by a foreign power.
"The protection of the fourth Geneva Convention means nothing if the military does not investigate the crime," he said.
Mr. Shiner has challenged the immunity of British troops in Iraq and their right to run their own investigations by arguing that European human rights law applied during their operations.
The UK High Court ruled in December that the British government would have to hold an "independent and effective" inquiry into the death of a man from Basra, Baha Mousa, because he died while in British custody.
Although the High Court also said it would be "premature" to conclude the British government was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights before the outcome of the ministry's own investigation was known, such a ruling could have profound consequences for the armed forces.
It has considerably strengthened the case for the prosecution of soldiers found to have acted unlawfully.
-------
Iraq Abuse Trial Is Again Limited to Lower Ranks
Iraq Abuse Trial Is Again Limited to Lower Ranks
By Eric Schmitt
The New York Times
Thursday 23 March 2006
With the conviction on Tuesday of an Army dog handler, the military has now tried and found guilty another low-ranking soldier in connection with the pattern of abuses that first surfaced two years ago at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
But once again, an attempt by defense lawyers to point a finger of responsibility at higher-ranking officers failed in the latest case to convince a military jury that ultimate responsibility for the abuses lay farther up the chain of command.
Some military experts said one reason there had not been attempts to pursue charges up the military chain of command was that the military does not have anything tantamount to a district attorney's office, run by commanders with the authority to go after the cases.
"The real question is, who is the independent prosecutor who is liberated to pursue these cases," said Eugene Fidell, a specialist in military law. "There is no central prosecution office run by commanders. So you don't have a D.A. thinking, I'm going to follow this wherever it leads."
Among all the abuse cases that have reached military courts, the trial of the dog handler, Sgt. Michael J. Smith, had appeared to hold the greatest potential to assign accountability to high-ranking military and perhaps even civilian officials in Washington. Some military experts had thought the trial might finally explore the origins of the harsh interrogation techniques that were used at Abu Ghraib; at the Bagram detention center in Afghanistan; and at other sites where abuses occurred.
Sergeant Smith, who was convicted Tuesday for abusing detainees in Iraq with his black Belgian shepherd, had said he was merely following interrogation procedures approved by the chief intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas M. Pappas. In turn, Colonel Pappas had said he had been following guidance from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commander of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who in September 2003 visited Iraq to discuss ways to "set the conditions" for enhancing prison interrogations, as well as from superiors in Baghdad.
General Miller had been dispatched to Guantánamo Bay by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to improve the interrogation procedures and the quality of intelligence at the compound in Cuba.
But in Sergeant Smith's trial, General Miller was never called to testify. Colonel Pappas acknowledged that he had mistakenly authorized a one-time use of muzzled dogs to keep prisoners in order outside their cells, but he said that he had no idea that dog handlers were using unmuzzled dogs to terrorize detainees as part of the interrogation process. Colonel Pappas had previously been reprimanded and relieved of his command, but was permitted to testify under a grant of immunity.
Previous defendants who have tried and failed to win approval from military judges to summon high-ranking officers to explain their own role in abuse cases include Charles A. Graner Jr. and Lynndie R. England, two of the Army reservists who were convicted in 2005 for their misconduct at Abu Ghraib. In denying defense requests for testimony from witnesses including Mr. Rumsfeld and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top American commander in Iraq, an Army judge, Col. James Pohl, ruled that their actions did not have any direct bearing on the reservists' conduct.
In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Maj. Wayne Marotto, an Army spokesman, said that more than 600 accusations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001 had been investigated, and that 251 officers and enlisted soldiers had been punished in some way for misconduct related to prisoners. To date, the highest-ranking officer convicted in relation to the abuses is Capt. Shawn Martin of the Army, who was found guilty last March of kicking detainees and staging the mock execution of a prisoner. He was sentenced to 45 days in jail and fined $12,000.
Sergeant Smith had faced a maximum sentence of eight and a half years, but on Wednesday was sentenced to just under six months (179 days) in prison.
"A mere tap on the wrist for abusing prisoners gives the appearance that once again that the United States is not serious about its responsibility to discipline those convicted of human rights violations," Curt Goering, Amnesty International's senior deputy executive director for policy and programs, said in a statement.
Sergeant Smith will also be demoted to private, fined $2,250 and will be released from the Army with a bad-conduct discharge after serving his sentence.
Several generals and colonels have received career-ending reprimands and have been stripped of their commands, but there is no indication that other senior-level officers and civilian officials will ever be held accountable for the detainee abuses that took place in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The toughest official criticism Mr. Rumsfeld has faced was a relatively mild admonishment in August 2004 from a panel led by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, which faulted Mr. Rumsfeld for not exercising sufficient oversight.
But when Mr. Schlesinger was asked at the time if Mr. Rumsfeld or other high-ranking officials should resign in an ultimate act of accountability, he said that the secretary's "resignation would be a boon for all of America's enemies." President Bush later declined to accept Mr. Rumsfeld's two offers to resign.
Congress has largely retreated from any meaningful effort to hold senior officials accountable. Last year, Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, vowed to hold hearings on senior-level accountability. But Mr. Warner later backed off his promise, saying it would have to wait until judicial and nonjudicial proceedings were exhausted, a process that could take several more months.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has delayed General Miller's scheduled retirement, and Mr. Warner said in an interview on Tuesday that he would call both Colonel Pappas and General Miller to testify before the committee once all court proceedings that could involve them are complete.
Two other cases may yield new information. Army officials are still reviewing a possible criminal case against Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, another former senior intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib.
The trial of a second dog handler, Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, is scheduled to begin on May 22, and it may offer another occasion for defense lawyers to try to direct blame at higher levels. Sergeant Cardona's lawyer, Harvey Volzer, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that his defense would include information not revealed in Sergeant Smith's trial. Mr. Volzer said he would seek to have Mr. Rumsfeld, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Mideast, and General Sanchez all testify at Sergeant Cardona's trial.
The New York Times | The Joy of Being Blameless
The New York Times | The Joy of Being Blameless
Thursday 23 March 2006
The contrast could not have been more stark, nor the message more clear. On the day that a court-martial imposed justice on a 24-year-old Army sergeant for tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib with his dog, President Bush said once again that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose benighted policies and managerial incompetence led to the prisoner abuse scandal, was doing a "fine job" and should stay at his post.
We've seen this sorry pattern for nearly two years now, since the Abu Ghraib horrors first shocked the world: President Bush has clung to the fiction that the abuse of prisoners was just the work of a few rotten apples, despite report after report after report demonstrating that it was organized and systematic, and flowed from policies written by top officials in his administration.
Just this week, Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall provided a bloodcurdling account in the Times of how a Special Operations unit converted an Iraqi military base into a torture chamber, even using prisoners as paintball targets, in its frenzy to counter a widely predicted insurgency for which Mr. Rumsfeld had refused to prepare. In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of a terrorist network was arrested and beaten repeatedly. Another man said he had been forced to strip, punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. His crime? His father had worked for Saddam Hussein.
These accounts are tragically familiar. The names and dates change, but the basic pattern is the same, including the fact that this bestiality produced little or no useful intelligence. The Bush administration decided to go outside the law to deal with prisoners, and soldiers carried out that policy. Those who committed these atrocities deserve the punishment they are getting, but virtually all high-ranking soldiers have escaped unscathed. And not a single policy maker has been called to account.
Col. Thomas Pappas, the former intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, testified at the dog handler's trial that the use of dogs had grown out of conversations he had had with military jailers from Guantánamo Bay led by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been sent to Iraq to instruct soldiers there in the interrogation techniques refined at Gitmo under Mr. Rumsfeld's torture-is-legal policy. Colonel Pappas said General Miller had explained how to use the "Arab fear of dogs" to set up interrogations.
What of General Miller? He invoked his right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying, and Time magazine reported this week that he was exonerated by an Army whitewash. Apparently he was not responsible for the actions of soldiers operating under rules he put in place.
About the only high-ranking officer whose career has suffered over Abu Ghraib is Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the commander in Iraq at the time. General Sanchez should certainly take responsibility, but he was also a victim of administration blunders.
General Sanchez was vaulted inappropriately from head of the First Armored Division to overall commander because Mr. Bush declared "mission accomplished": the war's over. He was then denied the staff, soldiers and equipment he needed to deal with the insurgency that quickly broke out and produced thousands of prisoners.
Mr. Bush has refused to hold himself or any of his top political appointees accountable for those catastrophic errors. Indeed, he has promoted many of them. And this is not an isolated problem. It's just one example, among many, of how this president's men run no risk of being blamed for anything that happens, not matter how egregious.
Thursday 23 March 2006
The contrast could not have been more stark, nor the message more clear. On the day that a court-martial imposed justice on a 24-year-old Army sergeant for tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib with his dog, President Bush said once again that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose benighted policies and managerial incompetence led to the prisoner abuse scandal, was doing a "fine job" and should stay at his post.
We've seen this sorry pattern for nearly two years now, since the Abu Ghraib horrors first shocked the world: President Bush has clung to the fiction that the abuse of prisoners was just the work of a few rotten apples, despite report after report after report demonstrating that it was organized and systematic, and flowed from policies written by top officials in his administration.
Just this week, Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall provided a bloodcurdling account in the Times of how a Special Operations unit converted an Iraqi military base into a torture chamber, even using prisoners as paintball targets, in its frenzy to counter a widely predicted insurgency for which Mr. Rumsfeld had refused to prepare. In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of a terrorist network was arrested and beaten repeatedly. Another man said he had been forced to strip, punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. His crime? His father had worked for Saddam Hussein.
These accounts are tragically familiar. The names and dates change, but the basic pattern is the same, including the fact that this bestiality produced little or no useful intelligence. The Bush administration decided to go outside the law to deal with prisoners, and soldiers carried out that policy. Those who committed these atrocities deserve the punishment they are getting, but virtually all high-ranking soldiers have escaped unscathed. And not a single policy maker has been called to account.
Col. Thomas Pappas, the former intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, testified at the dog handler's trial that the use of dogs had grown out of conversations he had had with military jailers from Guantánamo Bay led by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been sent to Iraq to instruct soldiers there in the interrogation techniques refined at Gitmo under Mr. Rumsfeld's torture-is-legal policy. Colonel Pappas said General Miller had explained how to use the "Arab fear of dogs" to set up interrogations.
What of General Miller? He invoked his right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying, and Time magazine reported this week that he was exonerated by an Army whitewash. Apparently he was not responsible for the actions of soldiers operating under rules he put in place.
About the only high-ranking officer whose career has suffered over Abu Ghraib is Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the commander in Iraq at the time. General Sanchez should certainly take responsibility, but he was also a victim of administration blunders.
General Sanchez was vaulted inappropriately from head of the First Armored Division to overall commander because Mr. Bush declared "mission accomplished": the war's over. He was then denied the staff, soldiers and equipment he needed to deal with the insurgency that quickly broke out and produced thousands of prisoners.
Mr. Bush has refused to hold himself or any of his top political appointees accountable for those catastrophic errors. Indeed, he has promoted many of them. And this is not an isolated problem. It's just one example, among many, of how this president's men run no risk of being blamed for anything that happens, not matter how egregious.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll - A New Generation of Conspiracy Theorists are at Work on the Secret History of 9/11 -- New York Magazine
The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll - A New Generation of Conspiracy Theorists are at Work on the Secret History of 9/11 -- New York Magazine
The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll
A new generation of conspiracy theorists is at work on a secret history of New York’s most terrible day.
* By Mark Jacobson
Free fall: The speed at which the towers came down—they were almost in free fall—suggests controlled demolition rather than catastrophic collapse.
AP)
1. 11/22 and 9/11
They keep telling us 9/11 changed everything. But even in this Photoshopped age of unreliable narrators, much remains the same. The assassination of President John Kennedy, the Crime of the Last Century, occurred in plain sight, in front of thousands—yet exactly what happened remains in dispute. The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald, fellow traveler of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, shot Kennedy with a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. The commission found that Oswald, who two days later would be murdered by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, acted alone.
Yet, as with so many such events, there is the sanctioned history and the secret history—players hidden from view. In the Kennedy murder, the involvement of shadowy organizations like the Mafia and the CIA came into question. This way of thinking came to challenge the official narrative put forth by the Warren Commission. It is not exactly clear when the grassy knoll supplanted the sixth-floor window in the popular mind-set. But now, four decades after Dallas, it is difficult to find anyone who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.
But if Oswald didn’t kill the president, who did? So 11/22 remains an open case, an open wound.
Now here we are again, contemplating the seemingly unthinkable events of September 11. An official explanation has been offered up: The nation was attacked by the forces of radical Islam led by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda jihadists. Again, this narrative has been accepted by many.
But not all.
2.War Without End
“Just your average wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy nuts,” Father Frank Morales told me as he surveyed the 200 or so graying beatniks and neighborhood anarchist punks sporting IS IT FASCISM YET? buttons who had assembled in the basement of St. Mark’s Church for the weekly Sunday-night meeting of the New York 9/11 Truth Movement to hear a lecture by Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.
Saying he was in New York “to debunk the outrageous myth . . . the absurd fairy tale” that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, were the work of nineteen fanatics with box cutters sent by a bearded man in a cave, the 60-year-old Tarpley projected a slide designated “State-Sponsored False Flag Terrorism,” depicting a Venn diagram of three interconnected circles.
Circle one was labeled patsies, comprising “dupes,” “useful idiots,” “fanatics,” “provocateurs,” and “Oswalds.” Included here were the demonized bin Laden and alleged lead hijacker Mohammad Atta. The second ring, marked MOLES, contained “government officials loyal to the invisible government,” such as Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and, of course, George W. Bush. The third circle, PROFESSIONAL KILLERS, encompassed “technicians,” “CIA special forces,” “old boys”—the unnamed ones who did the dirty work and kept their mouths shut.
September 11 was the true face of corporatized terror, said Tarpley, graduate of Flushing High School, class of 1962 (also Princeton), and author of an “unauthorized” biography of George Herbert Walker Bush. The book paints the Bush-family patriarch, Senator Prescott Bush, as knowingly profiting from Hitler’s Third Reich in his role as a director of the Union Banking Corporation, where, Tarpley’s book says, the Nazis kept their money.
According to Tarpley, this, roughly, is how it went down on September 11: Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Pet Goat–engrossed president played their assigned roles enabling the strange events of the day, including the wholesale “stand-down” of the multi-trillion-dollar American air-defense system. Cued by fellow mole Richard Clarke, the main players made sure the CIA-owned-and-operated Osama and his alleged 72-virgin-craving crew got the blame, the towers collapsing not from fire, as reported by the brainwashed mainstream media, but thanks to a well-planned “controlled demolition.”
Laying out his scenario, Tarpley touched on many of the “unanswered questions” that make up the core of the 9/11 Truth critique of the so-called Official Story.
Like: How, if no steel-frame building had ever collapsed from fire, did three such edifices fall that day, including 7 World Trade Center, which was not hit by any airplane?
And why, if hydrocarbon-fueled fire maxes out at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,700 degrees, did the towers weaken sufficiently to fall in such a short time—only 56 minutes in the case of the South Tower?
And why, if the impact destroyed the planes’ supposedly crash-proof flight-recorder black boxes, was the FBI able to find, in perfect condition, the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged American Airlines Flight 11 hijackers?
And how to explain the nonperformance of the FAA and NORAD?
How could they, an hour after the first World Trade Center crash, allow an obviously hostile airplane to smash into the Pentagon, headquarters of the entire military-industrial complex, for chrissakes? And why did the Defense Department choose to stage an extraordinary number of military exercises on 9/11—occupying matériel and spreading confusion about who was who on that day?
Sky commander: The fact that Bush spent much of 9/11 in the air while Cheney was in de facto control in the White House leads some to suggest the VP was ringleader.
AP)
And why was it so important, as decreed by Mayor Giuliani, to clear away the debris, before all the bodies were recovered?
And what about the short-selling spree on American and United airlines stock in the days before the attacks? Betting on the stocks to go down—was this real sicko Wall Street insider trading?
There were so many questions. But when it came to the big “why” of 9/11, there was only the classic conspiratorial query: “Who benefits?”
For Tarpley and others, this was a slam dunk: September 11 was a holocaust-as-ordered by the neocon cabal Project for the New American Century, which, like its Svengali, Leo Strauss, recognized the U.S. masses to be meth-addled, postliterate, post-logical lard-asses, a race of “sheeple” that would never rise to inherit the mantle of post–Cold War world-dominators without “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” In other words, a new Pearl Harbor like the old Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt was supposed to have known about and used as an excuse to get us into World War II.
Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire, take your pick. What mattered was that 3,000 human beings were dead, freeing Manchurian Candidate Bush to decree his fraudulent War on Terror, a Social Darwinian/Hobbesian/with-us-or-against-us struggle to corner the planet’s dwindling bounty—a global conflict without end in which only the strong, the white, and the Republican would survive.
3.Your “HOP” Level
In his paper “What Is Your ‘HOP’ Level?” Nick Levis, who co-coordinates the N.Y. 9/11 Truth meetings with Father Morales and Les Jamieson, categorizes the basic narrative theories about September 11. The options essentially boil down to four.
(A) The Official Story (a.k.a. “The Official Conspiracy Theory”). The received Bushian line: Osama, nineteen freedom-haters with box cutters, etc. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, there was “no warning.”
(B) The Incompetence Theory (also the Stupidity, Arrogance, “Reno Wall” Theory). Accepts the Official Story, adds failure by the White House, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. to heed ample warnings. This line was advanced, with much ass-covering compensation, in The 9/11 Commission Report.
(C) LIHOP (or “Let It Happen on Purpose”). Many variations, but primarily that elements of the U.S. government and the private sector were aware of the hijackers’ plans and, recognizing that 9/11 suited their policy goals, did nothing to stop it.
(D) MIHOP (“Made It Happen on Purpose”). The U.S. government or private forces planned and executed the attacks.
Tarpley’s conception of a far-flung, supragovernmental alliance of intelligence agencies (he reserves a key spot for Britain’s MI6) and military forces is only one of many MIHOPs floating around 9/11 Truth circles. Popular are various configurations of a Cheney-Bush MIHOP, with most asserting that the vice-president, who appeared to be in charge on 9/11, was the main actor in the plot. Also ambient is the ecodoomsday Peak Oil MIHOP, the idea that the “peaking” of petroleum reserves required a false provocation to start an “oil war” in the Middle East.
More controversial is Mossad MIHOP: the conjecture that Israeli intelligence (and kowtowing by the U.S. to the “Israel lobby”) played a crucial role, attempting to draw the U.S. into a prolonged struggle with Israel’s enemies. Notable in this is the “white van” story: Five men observed filming the attacks from Liberty State Park were later pulled over by cops near Giants Stadium. One man was found to have $4,700 in his sock. “We are Israelis,” the men reportedly told the cops. “We are not your problem.” The men were quickly deported to Israel, after which the Forward claimed that the company that owned the van, Urban Moving Systems, was a Mossad front.
Mossad MIHOP dovetails with the baseless rumor, widely believed in Arab countries, that 4,000 Jewish World Trade Center workers were told to stay home that day, showing that conspiracy theory can be tricky terrain. Mossad MIHOP easily morphs into Zionist MIHOP or Jewish MIHOP, leading to the charges of anti-Semitism that have dogged the 9/11 Truth movement. “Do I believe Israel has undue influence over U.S. foreign policy?” asks one activist. “Absolutely. But there are people in this movement who are fucking Nazis. You have to draw the line at Holocaust denial.”
Deeper into late-night-talk-radio, Da Vinci Code territory are numerous incarnations of the New World Order MIHOP, defined by Nick Levis as the work of “a global ruling elite seeking greater control of the world Zeitgeist.” Ever elastic, NWO MIHOPs often date back to secret societies like the Knights Templar, founded in 1118 during the First Crusade. (Bush’s alleged slip of calling the terror war a “crusade” was a key hint to the real, if surreal, agenda.) The continuity is clear to any student of the hidden history. The Templars begat the Freemasons (look at the pyramid-meeting-the-eye on every dollar in your pocket, fool!), from whom emerged the nefarious Illuminati, and onward to current standard-bearers like Yale’s Skull and Bones society (both Bushes are Bonesmen; John Kerry, too), the Council on Foreign Relations, and the blue-helmeted armies of the United Nations.
Cave man: Fundamental to the theorists’ worldview is that bin Laden, living in primitive conditions half a world away, could not have orchestrated such a complex plot.
AP)
Less-cited scenarios include Sino MIHOP, claiming the attack was a first strike in the inevitable conflict between China and the West. Scientologists have suggested a Shrink MIHOP, imagining evil Thetan psychologists as culprits. In the postmodern battle of paranoid narratives, we get to choose our terror dream, identify our own evil genius.
4.Inevitable MIHOP
“For me, MIHOP was inevitable, because the more you know, the more you know,” says Les Jamieson, a friendly, eminently reasonable 51-year-old from Brooklyn who remembers the moment the scales of Official Story hallucination fell from his eyes.
“I read a story in Newsweek, which said these generals were told earlier that week not to fly. Obviously, someone knew. My reaction was, ‘Holy shit.’ This process has been one holy shit after another.”
Father Frank Morales’s conversion was more dramatic. Raised in the Jacob Riis Projects, Morales, who if not for his priest collar could be mistaken for an East Village hipster, is a longtime Lower East Side hero, primarily for his work with local squatter communities. The day after 9/11, the diocese asked if he’d go to ground zero to perform last rites. “They said be prepared, because ‘we’re not talking bodies, Frank, we’re talking body parts.’ ”
“I could feel myself getting madder and madder, not the way a priest is supposed to feel,” says Morales. Sitting with a fireman, Morales called out, “If I had somebody in this mess, I’d wanna get those motherfuckers.” It was then, Morales says, that the fireman whispered, “Hey, that’s not it. You wanna know something? Bush and bin Laden have the same banker.”
It was everything that happened afterward, the Patriot Act and Iraq, that turned him into a 9/11 Truth activist, says Morales, who likewise sees little alternative to MIHOP.
“To me,” Morales says, “this is about history. History and truth, the nature of truth in a not particularly truthful age.”
“We’re like the minutemen of Revolutionary times, prosecutors in the discovery phase for a trial that is sure to come,” says Jamieson, who on Saturday afternoons can often be found at ground zero holding up a banner proclaiming that 9/11 was AN INSIDE JOB.
As 9/11 Truth advocates know well, the veracity they seek is unlikely to meet the ontological standards of Saint Anselm. They’ve got people on their side like the “WebFairy,” who runs a site “proving” the towers were not hit by planes but holograms, or “ghost planes.” Still, the truth movement wields one irrefutably puissant weapon in its struggle. As Nick Levis says, “Would you believe anything George W. Bush told you?”
5.A Fast-Moving Meme
Google “911 conspiracy” and the bytes bury you. The first great conspiracy theory of the Internet Age—imagine JFK assassinationology with the Web!—9/11 Truth is a fast-moving meme. The thicket of “truth” sites is myriad. There is “911truth.org,” 911forthetruth.com,” “911truthla.org,” “nakedfor911truth.com,” “911truthemergence.com,” “911citizenswatch.org,” “911research.wtc7.net,” “911review.com,” and hundreds more.
It can be argued that a whole new kind of politics is being waged in the 9/11 Truth assault. Apocalyptical survivalists and extreme Bush-haters are equally attracted to the movement’s blanket J’accuse. Be you a Starbucks-window breaker or John Bircher, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way Thomas L. Friedman and his globalist windbaggery blows.
This is not a movement that takes its Nagra tape recorders to document Dealey Plaza acoustics to ascertain which bullet came from what angle. When 9/11 Truth “researchers” cite “the physical evidence,” they usually mean the referred reality of photographs or videos posted on the Net. Paul Thompson, whose 9/11 timeline has become the undisputed gold standard of Truth research, does all his work on the Net. “I don’t have to be any particular place to do this,” says Thompson, who for a while moved to New Zealand so it would be easier for him to concentrate.
Yet it is difficult to deny the allure of this movement. The conspiracist has always relied on a degree of magical thinking. As Marshall McLuhan would swear if he weren’t dead, there has never been a more conspiracy-ready medium than the Net. It is an exhilarating serendipity that every surfer has felt: the glorious synchronicity in the way one link handshakes the next, the sensation of not knowing how you got there but being sure this is the right place. Such miraculous methodology cannot simply be random. For the moment, it feels like Truth.
Coincidences are rife. What is to be made of reports that prior to September 11, parties unknown purchased the domain names “nycterrorstrike.com,” “horrorinnewyork.com,” and “tradetowerstrike.com.” Was this Mohammad Atta’s idea of a cyberjoke?
Consider Pammy Wynant, protagonist of the novel Players, by Don DeLillo. Published in 1977, the book describes how Pammy, working for a firm called Grief Management Council, which has its offices in the World Trade Center, at first thought the WTC was “an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?” Later, DeLillo writes, “to Pammy the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.”
Mystery Plane: The plane that hit the Pentagon isn’t seen in any photographs. Some ask if it existed at all.
Even dismissing numerological smut—like how 9+1+1=11 and there are eleven letters in both George W. Bush and The Pentagon, for which ground was broken September 11, 1941, exactly 155 (=11) years after the Masonic-dominated Founding Fathers opened the Constitutional Convention on September 11, 1786, not to mention, for CIA MIHOP fans, that Kissinger and the Langley boys chose September 11, 1973, to overthrow Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende—we appear to have entered the realm of the precognitively strange.
Does it matter that the pilot for the conspiracy-themed Lone Gunmen (a short-lived Fox knockoff of The X-Files), which aired on March 4, 2001, tells the story of a U.S. government agency’s plot to crash a remote-controlled 727 into the World Trade Center as an excuse to raise the military budget and then blame the attack on a “tin-pot dictator” who was “begging to be smart-bombed”?
And why does every 9-year-old know how to fold a $20 bill so it forms a likeness of the burning Pentagon on one side and the Trade Center on the back? (See clydelewis.com/twenty.html.)
German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen may have been roundly chastised for calling 9/11 “the greatest work of art ever.” Yet what is the conspiracist’s obsessive attempt to make sense where there is no sense but a kind of (paranoid) art? No wonder Jungian shrinks, who churn out copious papers on the topic, are so crazy about 9/11. It’s got so much archetype. Perhaps one of these learned men will pen a monograph on mandala-like smoke patterns (wwnet.fi/users/veijone/satan.htm) in the burning South Tower, which seem to form a likeness of Lucifer?
6.Inside the Truth Vacuum
“People are always coming up with stuff about holograms and planes shooting pods. That’s what happens when the truth is systematically suppressed,” says Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, was killed in the attacks.
Monica, who describes herself as being “a completely normal housewife paying my taxes, raising my children” before 9/11 and who now lives on Long Island “with my dog, my alarm, and some plants,” testified before the 9/11 Commission. She ended her statement saying she hoped “this commission understands the need to leave a legacy of truth, accountability, and reform as a tribute to all of the innocent victims . . . We look to you for leadership.”
Asked if she ever expected to get a “legacy of truth,” Monica, who manifests an endearingly New Yorkish manner, laughs. “I must be an idiot because, yeah, I did. I was brought up to believe in things like the U.S. government. But we got screwed. The commission was whitewash, a stonewall. Maybe 3,000 people dead wasn’t enough to do the right thing. Did they need 5,000, or 10,000?
“They had these people come in, made them promise to do better next time, and gave them medals. Rich was dead, and nobody was at fault. To me, that’s a sin . . . With them, everything is fake. The government gave out ceremonial urns to the victims’ families. It had beach sand inside. From Coney Island or somewhere. They could have at least used the dust from the Trade Center. Something real.”
Asked about 9/11 Truth, Monica laughs again. “You want tinfoil-hat-wearing nutters? I get these e-mails from this woman. She’s nice, supportive. Then she says to be careful because ‘our thoughts, feelings, and bodily functions are being controlled 100,000 percent by electromagnetic waves.’ But I write back. I know she means well. Everyone needs a friend.”
“Conspiracy theories,” says Lorie Van Auken with a sigh. She’s one of the “Jersey girls” who pushed the Bush administration to convene the 9/11 Commission. Her husband, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, was killed in the North Tower. She says, “That’s why we demanded the commission, so there wouldn’t be any conspiracy theories.
“Now, when I hear Philip Zelikow [the 9/11 Commission’s executive director] wrote a book with Condi Rice or was seen with Karl Rove, it drives me crazy. I feel like I’m trapped in a truth vacuum.”
One thing that has changed over Lorie’s “career as a 9/11 widow” is that she’s come to appreciate “these conspiracy nuts, or whatever you want to call them.
“At first, we widows didn’t want to be seen with conspiracy people. But they kept showing up. They cared more than those supposedly doing the investigating. If you ask me, they’re just Americans, looking for the truth, which is supposed to be our right.”
7.Why 7 WTC Fell
Talking to these women was not unlike watching the Zapruder film, I thought. The famous 8-mm. movie shot by ladies’-garment manufacturer Abraham Zapruder has been used to justify any number of Kennedy-assassination theories. Think the driver of the limo was the actual shooter, as a few nutbags have postulated? It’s in the Zapruder film, if you’re stoned and squint enough.
Hot Zone: The fact that people, like the woman in this picture, could survive near the impact zone suggests the fires weren’t hot enough to melt structural steel.
AP)
However, you always get to the part where the president’s head explodes in a flash and shower of blood. It remains a horrible, frozen moment. One look and I am back in geometry class at Francis Lewis High School, the principal’s voice on the loudspeaker saying that the president had been shot, that he was “dead.”
Speaking with the widows, or simply walking by a firehouse, was a teleportation back to the raw unspun brutality of the Day. This isn’t as much of a stretch as it sounds, since I was there on September 11.
I’d just walked right into what would come to be called ground zero. No one stopped me. I knew the towers had fallen, seen it on TV. Still, I didn’t expect things that big to totally disappear, as if the ground had swallowed them up.
“Where are the towers?” I asked a fireman. “Under your foot” was the reply.
Hours later, I sat down beside another, impossibly weary firefighter. Covered with dust, he was drinking a bottle of Poland Spring water. Half his squad was missing. They’d gone into the South Tower and never come out. Then, almost as a non sequitur, the fireman indicated the building in front of us, maybe 400 yards away.
“That building is coming down,” he said with a drained casualness.
“Really?” I asked. At 47 stories, it would be a skyscraper in most cities, centerpiece of the horizon. But in New York, it was nothing but a nondescript box with fire coming out of the windows. “When?”
“Tonight . . . Maybe tomorrow morning.”
This was around 5:15 p.m. I know because five minutes later, at 5:20, the building, 7 World Trade Center, crumbled.
“Shit!” I screamed, unsure which way to run, because who knows which way these things fall. As it turned out, I wasn’t in any danger, since 7 WTC appeared to drop straight down. I still have dreams about the moment. Even then, the event is oddly undramatic, just a building falling.
Now the 9/11 Truth movement tells me I saw much more. According to Jim Hoffman, a software engineer and physicist from Alameda, California, where he authors the site 911research.wtc7.net, what I saw was a “classic controlled demolition.” This was why, Hoffman contends, 7 WTC dropped so rapidly (in about 6.6 seconds, or almost at the speed of a free-falling object) and so neatly, into its “own footprint.”
For 7 WTC to collapse unaided at that speed, Hoffman says, would mean “its 58 perimeter columns and 25 central columns of structural steel would have to have been shattered at almost the same instant, so unlikely as to be impossible.”
What happened at 7 WTC might be the key to the entire mystery of September 11, contends Hoffman. The $500 million insurance profit made by Larry Silverstein is a garden-variety motive, but the list of 7 WTC tenants sets conspiracy heads spinning.
To wit: The IRS, the Department of Defense, and the CIA kept offices on the 25th floor. The Secret Service occupied the ninth and tenth. The Securities and Exchange Commission (home to vast records of bank transactions) was on floors 11 through 13. The 23rd floor was home to Rudy Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, his crisis center. If this wasn’t enough, the mortgage of 7 WTC was held by the Blackstone Group, headed by Pete Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, stalwart players in any NWO MIHOP.
In the 9/11 Truth cosmology, the destruction of 7 World Trade Center is akin to Jack Ruby’s shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Seven WTC was the home of secrets. It had to go. Central to the scenario is a comment made by Silverstein in a 2002 PBS documentary.
“We’ve had such a terrible loss of life,” he quotes himself as saying on 9/11. “Maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.”
“Pull it,” as Truth people never tire of repeating, is the term usually used for controlled demolition.
These were vexing questions, especially since 7 WTC is not even mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report. Nor is the building given much shrift in the subsequent “Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Towers,” compiled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
And there I was, thinking all I saw was a building falling down.
8.The Magician and the Expert
A few days after the St. Mark’s meeting, I went to a Community Board No. 1 forum where the NIST report would be discussed. The meeting was in the Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest structure when it was completed in 1913. Since it was still standing, it seemed a good place to talk about the only former world’s tallest building(s) to fall down. I was with William Rodriguez, who, as he always does, brought along his video camera, “so they know I’m watching them.”
Smoke Bomb: Could this puff of smoke be evidence of an internal explosion consistent with controlled demolition?
AP)
As a boy shining shoes in Puerto Rico, William dreamed of being wrapped in a straitjacket and suspended upside down from a flaming rope. “That was going to be my big trick. It was my goal to become a magician, the greatest illusionist in the Caribbean basin.”
Later, Rodriguez met James Randi, a.k.a. the Amazing Randi, the magician best known as a debunker of supernatural claims, offering the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anyone able to demonstrate verifiable evidence of psychic powers.
“Randi was my mentor,” said William. “I admired him for his tricks but also because he never said they were anything but tricks. He separated the truth from the phony.”
William moved to New York, but beyond some gigs at Mostly Magic, his career did not take off. He started working for a cleaning company in the World Trade Center. He’d stay there twenty years.
On 9/11, William was late. Instead of mopping the stairwells on the 110th floor, where he almost certainly would have died, he was chatting with the maintenance crew on level B-1 in the basement. “I heard this massive explosion below, on level B-2 or 3. I saw this guy come up the stairs. The skin on his arms was peeled away . . . hanging. Then I heard another explosion, from above. That was the first plane, hitting the building.”
In possession of one of the few master keys in the building, William led firemen up the stairwells. He was responsible for getting at least a dozen people out of the towers. Trying to escape as the North Tower fell, he found himself beneath a half-buried fire engine.
“I told myself this is going to be a slow death, but I should make it last as long as I could. My training as an escape artist helped me. I knew to be calm. They found me just in time. I understood my whole life had been pointing to this moment.”
Acclaimed as “the last man pulled from the rubble,” William became a hero of 9/11. “I was at the White House. They took my picture with President Bush.”
Four years later, after repeatedly being rebuffed in his attempts to tell officials his story about the basement explosion, William is suing the U.S. government under the rico statute, legislation drafted to prosecute Mafia families. The suit reads like an Air America wet dream, with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, George Tenet, Karl Rove, and others (the Diebold Company is thrown in for good measure) listed as defendants.
“They say I’m a conspiracy theorist; I call them conspirators, too,” William says.
“It is like Randi said. There’s reality, and there’s illusion. When illusion becomes reality, that’s a problem. Nine-eleven is a giant illusion. Besides, what can they do to me? I’m a national hero, Bush told me so himself.”
“That’s him, the NIST guy,” William said, indicating Dr. S. Shyam Sunder, head of the institute’s Trade Center report.
An elegantly attired man in his fifties, Dr. Sunder, holder of degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and MIT, took his seat beside Carl Galioto, a partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects of the new $700 million replacement for 7 WTC. Behind them was a slide of “the new downtown skyline,” dominated by another Skidmore project, the Freedom Tower, which, at an iconic 1,776 feet, is next in line to be the world’s tallest building. Like the new 7 WTC, which Galioto said featured a “two-foot-thick vertical core encasing the elevators, utility infrastructure, and exit stairs,” the Freedom Tower will be “among the safest buildings ever built.” This was important, the architect said, because “constantly building and rebuilding” was what New York was all about.
After Dr. Sunder’s presentation (planes and fire did it), a woman from N.Y. 9/11 Truth stood up and said she hadn’t been able “to sleep at night” since her best friend had died at the WTC. She had hoped NIST would clear up doubts, but this was not the case. “I have here a report which contradicts much of what you say.”
The woman put a paper by Steven E. Jones, a physics professor from Brigham Young University, in front of Dr. Sunder. Jones makes the case for controlled demolition, claiming the persistence of “molten metal” at ground zero indicates the likely presence of “high-temperature cutter-charges . . . routinely used to melt/cut/demolish steel.”
“I hope you read this; perhaps it will enable you to see things a different way,” the woman said.
“Actually, I have read it,” Dr. Sunder said with a sigh.
Later, asked if such outbursts were common, Dr. Sunder said, “Yes. I am sympathetic. But our report . . . it is extensive. We consulted 80 public-sector experts and 125 private-sector experts. It is a Who’s Who of experts. People look for other solutions. As scientists, we can’t worry about that. Facts are facts.”
Brother Act: One of many eerie 9/11 coincidences is that Marvin Bush, the president’s brother, worked for a firm that handled security for the WTC, and United and American airlines.
AP)
I asked Dr. Sunder about 7 WTC. Why was the fate of the building barely mentioned in the final report?
This was a matter of staffing and budget, Sunder said. He hoped to release something on 7 WTC by the end of the year.
NIST did have some “preliminary hypotheses” on 7 WTC, Dr. Sunder said. “We are studying the horizontal movement east to west, internal to the structure, on the fifth to seventh floors.”
Then Dr. Sunder paused. “But truthfully, I don’t really know. We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.”
9.Can 49.3 Percent of the People Be Crazy?
Late in the summer of 2004, as the Republicans in Madison Square Garden extolled George Bush’s staunch protection of the homeland, a Zogby poll asked New Yorkers if they believed that “some of our leaders knew in advance attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and consciously failed to act.”
Of city residents, 49.3 percent said yes.
A year and a half later, doubt had increased, at least according to my own informal canvassing. Per Nick Levis’s “HOP” paper, I offered four choices: (A) the Official Story; (B) the Official Story plus incompetence; (C) LIHOP; (D) MIHOP.
Of the 56 respondents, 28 said C, 23 picked B, with 4 (including two Muslim cabdrivers) opting for MIHOP.
Almost every white person with a straight job said B. Many disliked Bush but said they couldn’t bring themselves to believe the U.S. government would take part in the death of 3,000 of its countrymen.
Typical was the opinion offered by an investment banker at a downtown bar. “I can see them wishing it would happen, secretly happy it did. But on purpose? Look at the way they’ve managed Iraq. They’re boobs. They couldn’t have pulled off 9/11 without getting caught. Not possible.”
Uptown, responses were different. “Yeah, they knew,” said a retired transit worker on 116th Street, one of the 17 of 22 black people questioned who picked C. He said he’d heard Marvin Bush, the president’s younger brother, was a director of Securacom, a firm that on 9/11 was in charge of security not only at the World Trade Center but also for United and American airlines as well as at Dulles airport, where Flight 77 took off.
“That true?” he asked.
Yeah, I said. That’s what I heard.
“There anywhere he ain’t got no brother?”
“Bush’s cousin, Wirt Walker III, worked there, too.”
“Wirt? The third? You’re shitting me.”
This was pretty much the opinion. If Katrina proved the government was willing to let people die, right there on TV, why should 9/11 have been any different? Only one person picked A, the official story. This was a fireman, who was smoking a cigarette outside a downtown engine company. Truth be told, I wasn’t keen on quizzing firemen about 9/11 Truth, but I knew the guy’s brother from high school.
“Not answering that,” he said, warning not to ask others in the company, which had lost men on 9/11. This didn’t mean he wasn’t of the opinion that if he lived to be a million he’d never “see anything as corrupt, bullshit, and sad as what happened at the WTC.
“They got their gold and shipped us to Fresh Kills,” he said. Call it one more conspiracy theory, but many uniformed firefighters believe the powers that be cared more about finding the gold reserves held in vaults beneath the Trade Center than the bodies of their fallen brothers.
Still, the fireman said, if he had to pick a letter in my poll, it would be A.
“Osama fucking bin Laden, like Bush says. If I thought it was someone else, then I’d have to do something about it. And I don’t want to think about what I’d do.”
10.Disinformation
It weighs on you, thinking about 9/11, the day and the unremitting aftermath. Being a supposedly unflappable New Yorker offers little solace. The wound remains unhealed, emotions close to the surface.
Certainly there was an urgency as activists gathered at the Veselka restaurant after the Tarpley meeting.
With all the saber-rattling about Iran, this was no time to decrease vigilance, said Nick Levis, proposing a toast: “That in 2006, we will crack the Official Story so we can stop being 9/11-heads and return to normality.” A classically hermetic New York conversation ensued, quickly moving from snickers about bin Laden’s supposed CIA code name, “Tim Osmond . . . as in Donny and Marie,” to speculation about the role of Jerry Hauer, Giuliani’s former OEM guy, in the post-9/11 anthrax threats.
Talk came to a halt, however, with the mention of whether it was American Airlines Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon on 9/11.
For New York Magazine)
Broached in 2002 by Thierry Meyssan in his French best-seller L’Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Fraud), the idea that the Pentagon was struck by a missile instead of a 757 is the most controversial tenet of 9/11 Truth–iana. The claim is based on Meyssan’s reading of photographs (“Hunt the Boeing” at asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm) supposedly showing the hole in the building to be no more than fifteen to eighteen feet wide—far too small to fit a plane with a 125-foot wingspan.
But there are problems, such as the many eyewitnesses who saw a plane flying low near the Pentagon shortly before impact. Disputing the no-crash theory, Jim Hoffman has argued, “This is just the sort of wackiness defenders of the Official Story harp on to show how gullible and incompetent we conspiracy theorists are supposed to be.” In other words, Meyssan and other no-plane believers were either wrong, unknowing dupes or spreaders of disinformation.
The D-word is nothing to take lightly in conspiracy circles. For, as Thomas Pynchon notes in his “Proverbs for Paranoids,” if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
At Veselka, the question was, if Flight 77 did not crash, what happened to the 56 people on the plane? This query did not sit well with Nico Haupt, a thin, black-clad man from Cologne, Germany, compiler of the 9/11 Encyclopedia (911review.org/Wiki/Sept11Topics.shtml).
“Gassed,” he hissed. “Have you ever heard of gassing? It is very easy. You open the door of the plane, and it spreads.”
“You think they gassed them?” Would even the Illuminati stoop this low?
Haupt cast a withering look. “That, or some other method of murder. Assholes!”
“Nico, calm down,” said Tarpley. “This is tactics. There’s no reason to make an enormous moral issue out of everything.”
But Haupt was past consoling. “You are motherfuckers. Stupid motherfuckers.” Slamming the tabletop, he gathered his things and stormed out.
“Nico is so emotional,” said one activist, returning to her plate of pierogi.
11. 250 Greenwich Street
After dinner, I stopped at ground zero. Before the towers were built, my father took me here when the area was called Radio Row and sold tubes cheap. After 9/11, I spent many nights watching the great plume of water, shining in the vapor lamps, raining onto the smoking pit.
Now I was in front of the replacement for 7 WTC, Silverstein’s $700 million baby, a nifty parallelogram with a stainless-steel finish like a Viking stove in a Soho loft. According to the Web brochure, 7 WTC collapsed “probably” as a result of “the ignition of Con Edison diesel stored in the base.” To “avoid this hazard in the new building, the diesel is stored under the new plaza across from the reopened Greenwich Street.”
Another change is the offering of an alternative address, 250 Greenwich Street. Apparently, Silverstein felt this would play better in “the trendy Tribeca neighborhood.” Call it real-estate MIHOP.
When the new 7 WTC opens, N.Y. 9/11 Truth plans a demonstration here. Now, however, it being late Sunday night, the place looked like a neutron-bomb landscape, lights on in the finished lobby, gleaming card-reading security gates in place, but no sign of humanity anywhere.
A giant LCD screen scrolled various alphabetical fonts, one after another. It was numbing watching this, thinking that time was moving on, new fortunes would be made here, and like 11/22, it would never be known who did what on 9/11.
A cop car pulled up. They wanted me to move on. Cops always want you to move on. Not that I was in any hurry. Larry Silverstein didn’t own the sidewalk. I had as much right to the disaster as anyone.
Then I remembered one more factoid. David Cohen, who headed the CIA office at 7 WTC on September 11, was the same guy hired by Ray Kelly as deputy commissioner of Intelligence. It was Cohen who instituted the subway bag search, one more chimera of security in the post-9/11 world. Who knew what a guy like that might be up to? So I moved on. Can’t trust anyone nowadays.
The Plane Truth
9/11 conspiracy theories, from nuts to soup.
Mossad Did It
A common theory, especially in the Arab world, holds that Israel orchestrated the attacks in order to bring the U.S. into conflict with Israel’s enemies. Evidence cited ranges from the arly spurious and deeply anti-Semitic (the oft-heard, oft-refuted canard that Jews were told to leave the towers before the attacks) to the apparently true but unexplainable. (Five men who were seen filming the attacks in Liberty Park were later apprehended and found by the Forward to have ties to Mossad.)
Oilmen Did It
A theory based on the idea that worldwide oil production, having reached its peak, is beginning a long decline, leading to surging energy prices and global economic collapse. The 9/11 attacks, goes this scenario, were orchestrated by Cheney, Bush, and their friends in the oil industry and government, in order to begin a process that would secure further reserves in Iraq and increase the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.
Bush and Cheney Did it
The most basic of conspiracy theories. Bush and Cheney orchestrated the attacks, for much the same reason Roosevelt was sometimes said to have orchestrated Pearl Harbor: in order to begin the conflict that would allow them to realize their global ambitions.
The New World Order Did It
After winning a long struggle against the old Kissingerian pragmatists and balance-of-power devotees, neocon idealists centered at the Council on Foreign Relations initiated the conflict in order to establish the United States as the sole global power.
A Rogue Network Did It
A secret government used Bush and Cheney as patsies in carrying out the attacks. Bush was kept on the run in Air Force One (code-named “Angel”) by an anonymous call saying, “Angel is next.” Bin Laden and his henchmen were CIA plants and double agents. Britain’s MI6 intelligence service was involved. The towers were blown up from inside, by teams of secret government assassins. Even Bush and Cheney are in the dark about why the attacks took place.
Shrinks Did It
Scientologists believe that psychiatry (through a mechanism that remains murky) helped give birth to the suicide attackers “through drugs and psycho-political methods.”
–Reported by Janelle Nanos
Find this article at:
http://www.nymag.com/news/features/16464/index.html
The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll
A new generation of conspiracy theorists is at work on a secret history of New York’s most terrible day.
* By Mark Jacobson
Free fall: The speed at which the towers came down—they were almost in free fall—suggests controlled demolition rather than catastrophic collapse.
AP)
1. 11/22 and 9/11
They keep telling us 9/11 changed everything. But even in this Photoshopped age of unreliable narrators, much remains the same. The assassination of President John Kennedy, the Crime of the Last Century, occurred in plain sight, in front of thousands—yet exactly what happened remains in dispute. The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald, fellow traveler of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, shot Kennedy with a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. The commission found that Oswald, who two days later would be murdered by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, acted alone.
Yet, as with so many such events, there is the sanctioned history and the secret history—players hidden from view. In the Kennedy murder, the involvement of shadowy organizations like the Mafia and the CIA came into question. This way of thinking came to challenge the official narrative put forth by the Warren Commission. It is not exactly clear when the grassy knoll supplanted the sixth-floor window in the popular mind-set. But now, four decades after Dallas, it is difficult to find anyone who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.
But if Oswald didn’t kill the president, who did? So 11/22 remains an open case, an open wound.
Now here we are again, contemplating the seemingly unthinkable events of September 11. An official explanation has been offered up: The nation was attacked by the forces of radical Islam led by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda jihadists. Again, this narrative has been accepted by many.
But not all.
2.War Without End
“Just your average wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy nuts,” Father Frank Morales told me as he surveyed the 200 or so graying beatniks and neighborhood anarchist punks sporting IS IT FASCISM YET? buttons who had assembled in the basement of St. Mark’s Church for the weekly Sunday-night meeting of the New York 9/11 Truth Movement to hear a lecture by Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.
Saying he was in New York “to debunk the outrageous myth . . . the absurd fairy tale” that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, were the work of nineteen fanatics with box cutters sent by a bearded man in a cave, the 60-year-old Tarpley projected a slide designated “State-Sponsored False Flag Terrorism,” depicting a Venn diagram of three interconnected circles.
Circle one was labeled patsies, comprising “dupes,” “useful idiots,” “fanatics,” “provocateurs,” and “Oswalds.” Included here were the demonized bin Laden and alleged lead hijacker Mohammad Atta. The second ring, marked MOLES, contained “government officials loyal to the invisible government,” such as Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and, of course, George W. Bush. The third circle, PROFESSIONAL KILLERS, encompassed “technicians,” “CIA special forces,” “old boys”—the unnamed ones who did the dirty work and kept their mouths shut.
September 11 was the true face of corporatized terror, said Tarpley, graduate of Flushing High School, class of 1962 (also Princeton), and author of an “unauthorized” biography of George Herbert Walker Bush. The book paints the Bush-family patriarch, Senator Prescott Bush, as knowingly profiting from Hitler’s Third Reich in his role as a director of the Union Banking Corporation, where, Tarpley’s book says, the Nazis kept their money.
According to Tarpley, this, roughly, is how it went down on September 11: Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Pet Goat–engrossed president played their assigned roles enabling the strange events of the day, including the wholesale “stand-down” of the multi-trillion-dollar American air-defense system. Cued by fellow mole Richard Clarke, the main players made sure the CIA-owned-and-operated Osama and his alleged 72-virgin-craving crew got the blame, the towers collapsing not from fire, as reported by the brainwashed mainstream media, but thanks to a well-planned “controlled demolition.”
Laying out his scenario, Tarpley touched on many of the “unanswered questions” that make up the core of the 9/11 Truth critique of the so-called Official Story.
Like: How, if no steel-frame building had ever collapsed from fire, did three such edifices fall that day, including 7 World Trade Center, which was not hit by any airplane?
And why, if hydrocarbon-fueled fire maxes out at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,700 degrees, did the towers weaken sufficiently to fall in such a short time—only 56 minutes in the case of the South Tower?
And why, if the impact destroyed the planes’ supposedly crash-proof flight-recorder black boxes, was the FBI able to find, in perfect condition, the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged American Airlines Flight 11 hijackers?
And how to explain the nonperformance of the FAA and NORAD?
How could they, an hour after the first World Trade Center crash, allow an obviously hostile airplane to smash into the Pentagon, headquarters of the entire military-industrial complex, for chrissakes? And why did the Defense Department choose to stage an extraordinary number of military exercises on 9/11—occupying matériel and spreading confusion about who was who on that day?
Sky commander: The fact that Bush spent much of 9/11 in the air while Cheney was in de facto control in the White House leads some to suggest the VP was ringleader.
AP)
And why was it so important, as decreed by Mayor Giuliani, to clear away the debris, before all the bodies were recovered?
And what about the short-selling spree on American and United airlines stock in the days before the attacks? Betting on the stocks to go down—was this real sicko Wall Street insider trading?
There were so many questions. But when it came to the big “why” of 9/11, there was only the classic conspiratorial query: “Who benefits?”
For Tarpley and others, this was a slam dunk: September 11 was a holocaust-as-ordered by the neocon cabal Project for the New American Century, which, like its Svengali, Leo Strauss, recognized the U.S. masses to be meth-addled, postliterate, post-logical lard-asses, a race of “sheeple” that would never rise to inherit the mantle of post–Cold War world-dominators without “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” In other words, a new Pearl Harbor like the old Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt was supposed to have known about and used as an excuse to get us into World War II.
Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire, take your pick. What mattered was that 3,000 human beings were dead, freeing Manchurian Candidate Bush to decree his fraudulent War on Terror, a Social Darwinian/Hobbesian/with-us-or-against-us struggle to corner the planet’s dwindling bounty—a global conflict without end in which only the strong, the white, and the Republican would survive.
3.Your “HOP” Level
In his paper “What Is Your ‘HOP’ Level?” Nick Levis, who co-coordinates the N.Y. 9/11 Truth meetings with Father Morales and Les Jamieson, categorizes the basic narrative theories about September 11. The options essentially boil down to four.
(A) The Official Story (a.k.a. “The Official Conspiracy Theory”). The received Bushian line: Osama, nineteen freedom-haters with box cutters, etc. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, there was “no warning.”
(B) The Incompetence Theory (also the Stupidity, Arrogance, “Reno Wall” Theory). Accepts the Official Story, adds failure by the White House, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. to heed ample warnings. This line was advanced, with much ass-covering compensation, in The 9/11 Commission Report.
(C) LIHOP (or “Let It Happen on Purpose”). Many variations, but primarily that elements of the U.S. government and the private sector were aware of the hijackers’ plans and, recognizing that 9/11 suited their policy goals, did nothing to stop it.
(D) MIHOP (“Made It Happen on Purpose”). The U.S. government or private forces planned and executed the attacks.
Tarpley’s conception of a far-flung, supragovernmental alliance of intelligence agencies (he reserves a key spot for Britain’s MI6) and military forces is only one of many MIHOPs floating around 9/11 Truth circles. Popular are various configurations of a Cheney-Bush MIHOP, with most asserting that the vice-president, who appeared to be in charge on 9/11, was the main actor in the plot. Also ambient is the ecodoomsday Peak Oil MIHOP, the idea that the “peaking” of petroleum reserves required a false provocation to start an “oil war” in the Middle East.
More controversial is Mossad MIHOP: the conjecture that Israeli intelligence (and kowtowing by the U.S. to the “Israel lobby”) played a crucial role, attempting to draw the U.S. into a prolonged struggle with Israel’s enemies. Notable in this is the “white van” story: Five men observed filming the attacks from Liberty State Park were later pulled over by cops near Giants Stadium. One man was found to have $4,700 in his sock. “We are Israelis,” the men reportedly told the cops. “We are not your problem.” The men were quickly deported to Israel, after which the Forward claimed that the company that owned the van, Urban Moving Systems, was a Mossad front.
Mossad MIHOP dovetails with the baseless rumor, widely believed in Arab countries, that 4,000 Jewish World Trade Center workers were told to stay home that day, showing that conspiracy theory can be tricky terrain. Mossad MIHOP easily morphs into Zionist MIHOP or Jewish MIHOP, leading to the charges of anti-Semitism that have dogged the 9/11 Truth movement. “Do I believe Israel has undue influence over U.S. foreign policy?” asks one activist. “Absolutely. But there are people in this movement who are fucking Nazis. You have to draw the line at Holocaust denial.”
Deeper into late-night-talk-radio, Da Vinci Code territory are numerous incarnations of the New World Order MIHOP, defined by Nick Levis as the work of “a global ruling elite seeking greater control of the world Zeitgeist.” Ever elastic, NWO MIHOPs often date back to secret societies like the Knights Templar, founded in 1118 during the First Crusade. (Bush’s alleged slip of calling the terror war a “crusade” was a key hint to the real, if surreal, agenda.) The continuity is clear to any student of the hidden history. The Templars begat the Freemasons (look at the pyramid-meeting-the-eye on every dollar in your pocket, fool!), from whom emerged the nefarious Illuminati, and onward to current standard-bearers like Yale’s Skull and Bones society (both Bushes are Bonesmen; John Kerry, too), the Council on Foreign Relations, and the blue-helmeted armies of the United Nations.
Cave man: Fundamental to the theorists’ worldview is that bin Laden, living in primitive conditions half a world away, could not have orchestrated such a complex plot.
AP)
Less-cited scenarios include Sino MIHOP, claiming the attack was a first strike in the inevitable conflict between China and the West. Scientologists have suggested a Shrink MIHOP, imagining evil Thetan psychologists as culprits. In the postmodern battle of paranoid narratives, we get to choose our terror dream, identify our own evil genius.
4.Inevitable MIHOP
“For me, MIHOP was inevitable, because the more you know, the more you know,” says Les Jamieson, a friendly, eminently reasonable 51-year-old from Brooklyn who remembers the moment the scales of Official Story hallucination fell from his eyes.
“I read a story in Newsweek, which said these generals were told earlier that week not to fly. Obviously, someone knew. My reaction was, ‘Holy shit.’ This process has been one holy shit after another.”
Father Frank Morales’s conversion was more dramatic. Raised in the Jacob Riis Projects, Morales, who if not for his priest collar could be mistaken for an East Village hipster, is a longtime Lower East Side hero, primarily for his work with local squatter communities. The day after 9/11, the diocese asked if he’d go to ground zero to perform last rites. “They said be prepared, because ‘we’re not talking bodies, Frank, we’re talking body parts.’ ”
“I could feel myself getting madder and madder, not the way a priest is supposed to feel,” says Morales. Sitting with a fireman, Morales called out, “If I had somebody in this mess, I’d wanna get those motherfuckers.” It was then, Morales says, that the fireman whispered, “Hey, that’s not it. You wanna know something? Bush and bin Laden have the same banker.”
It was everything that happened afterward, the Patriot Act and Iraq, that turned him into a 9/11 Truth activist, says Morales, who likewise sees little alternative to MIHOP.
“To me,” Morales says, “this is about history. History and truth, the nature of truth in a not particularly truthful age.”
“We’re like the minutemen of Revolutionary times, prosecutors in the discovery phase for a trial that is sure to come,” says Jamieson, who on Saturday afternoons can often be found at ground zero holding up a banner proclaiming that 9/11 was AN INSIDE JOB.
As 9/11 Truth advocates know well, the veracity they seek is unlikely to meet the ontological standards of Saint Anselm. They’ve got people on their side like the “WebFairy,” who runs a site “proving” the towers were not hit by planes but holograms, or “ghost planes.” Still, the truth movement wields one irrefutably puissant weapon in its struggle. As Nick Levis says, “Would you believe anything George W. Bush told you?”
5.A Fast-Moving Meme
Google “911 conspiracy” and the bytes bury you. The first great conspiracy theory of the Internet Age—imagine JFK assassinationology with the Web!—9/11 Truth is a fast-moving meme. The thicket of “truth” sites is myriad. There is “911truth.org,” 911forthetruth.com,” “911truthla.org,” “nakedfor911truth.com,” “911truthemergence.com,” “911citizenswatch.org,” “911research.wtc7.net,” “911review.com,” and hundreds more.
It can be argued that a whole new kind of politics is being waged in the 9/11 Truth assault. Apocalyptical survivalists and extreme Bush-haters are equally attracted to the movement’s blanket J’accuse. Be you a Starbucks-window breaker or John Bircher, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way Thomas L. Friedman and his globalist windbaggery blows.
This is not a movement that takes its Nagra tape recorders to document Dealey Plaza acoustics to ascertain which bullet came from what angle. When 9/11 Truth “researchers” cite “the physical evidence,” they usually mean the referred reality of photographs or videos posted on the Net. Paul Thompson, whose 9/11 timeline has become the undisputed gold standard of Truth research, does all his work on the Net. “I don’t have to be any particular place to do this,” says Thompson, who for a while moved to New Zealand so it would be easier for him to concentrate.
Yet it is difficult to deny the allure of this movement. The conspiracist has always relied on a degree of magical thinking. As Marshall McLuhan would swear if he weren’t dead, there has never been a more conspiracy-ready medium than the Net. It is an exhilarating serendipity that every surfer has felt: the glorious synchronicity in the way one link handshakes the next, the sensation of not knowing how you got there but being sure this is the right place. Such miraculous methodology cannot simply be random. For the moment, it feels like Truth.
Coincidences are rife. What is to be made of reports that prior to September 11, parties unknown purchased the domain names “nycterrorstrike.com,” “horrorinnewyork.com,” and “tradetowerstrike.com.” Was this Mohammad Atta’s idea of a cyberjoke?
Consider Pammy Wynant, protagonist of the novel Players, by Don DeLillo. Published in 1977, the book describes how Pammy, working for a firm called Grief Management Council, which has its offices in the World Trade Center, at first thought the WTC was “an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?” Later, DeLillo writes, “to Pammy the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.”
Mystery Plane: The plane that hit the Pentagon isn’t seen in any photographs. Some ask if it existed at all.
Even dismissing numerological smut—like how 9+1+1=11 and there are eleven letters in both George W. Bush and The Pentagon, for which ground was broken September 11, 1941, exactly 155 (=11) years after the Masonic-dominated Founding Fathers opened the Constitutional Convention on September 11, 1786, not to mention, for CIA MIHOP fans, that Kissinger and the Langley boys chose September 11, 1973, to overthrow Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende—we appear to have entered the realm of the precognitively strange.
Does it matter that the pilot for the conspiracy-themed Lone Gunmen (a short-lived Fox knockoff of The X-Files), which aired on March 4, 2001, tells the story of a U.S. government agency’s plot to crash a remote-controlled 727 into the World Trade Center as an excuse to raise the military budget and then blame the attack on a “tin-pot dictator” who was “begging to be smart-bombed”?
And why does every 9-year-old know how to fold a $20 bill so it forms a likeness of the burning Pentagon on one side and the Trade Center on the back? (See clydelewis.com/twenty.html.)
German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen may have been roundly chastised for calling 9/11 “the greatest work of art ever.” Yet what is the conspiracist’s obsessive attempt to make sense where there is no sense but a kind of (paranoid) art? No wonder Jungian shrinks, who churn out copious papers on the topic, are so crazy about 9/11. It’s got so much archetype. Perhaps one of these learned men will pen a monograph on mandala-like smoke patterns (wwnet.fi/users/veijone/satan.htm) in the burning South Tower, which seem to form a likeness of Lucifer?
6.Inside the Truth Vacuum
“People are always coming up with stuff about holograms and planes shooting pods. That’s what happens when the truth is systematically suppressed,” says Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, was killed in the attacks.
Monica, who describes herself as being “a completely normal housewife paying my taxes, raising my children” before 9/11 and who now lives on Long Island “with my dog, my alarm, and some plants,” testified before the 9/11 Commission. She ended her statement saying she hoped “this commission understands the need to leave a legacy of truth, accountability, and reform as a tribute to all of the innocent victims . . . We look to you for leadership.”
Asked if she ever expected to get a “legacy of truth,” Monica, who manifests an endearingly New Yorkish manner, laughs. “I must be an idiot because, yeah, I did. I was brought up to believe in things like the U.S. government. But we got screwed. The commission was whitewash, a stonewall. Maybe 3,000 people dead wasn’t enough to do the right thing. Did they need 5,000, or 10,000?
“They had these people come in, made them promise to do better next time, and gave them medals. Rich was dead, and nobody was at fault. To me, that’s a sin . . . With them, everything is fake. The government gave out ceremonial urns to the victims’ families. It had beach sand inside. From Coney Island or somewhere. They could have at least used the dust from the Trade Center. Something real.”
Asked about 9/11 Truth, Monica laughs again. “You want tinfoil-hat-wearing nutters? I get these e-mails from this woman. She’s nice, supportive. Then she says to be careful because ‘our thoughts, feelings, and bodily functions are being controlled 100,000 percent by electromagnetic waves.’ But I write back. I know she means well. Everyone needs a friend.”
“Conspiracy theories,” says Lorie Van Auken with a sigh. She’s one of the “Jersey girls” who pushed the Bush administration to convene the 9/11 Commission. Her husband, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, was killed in the North Tower. She says, “That’s why we demanded the commission, so there wouldn’t be any conspiracy theories.
“Now, when I hear Philip Zelikow [the 9/11 Commission’s executive director] wrote a book with Condi Rice or was seen with Karl Rove, it drives me crazy. I feel like I’m trapped in a truth vacuum.”
One thing that has changed over Lorie’s “career as a 9/11 widow” is that she’s come to appreciate “these conspiracy nuts, or whatever you want to call them.
“At first, we widows didn’t want to be seen with conspiracy people. But they kept showing up. They cared more than those supposedly doing the investigating. If you ask me, they’re just Americans, looking for the truth, which is supposed to be our right.”
7.Why 7 WTC Fell
Talking to these women was not unlike watching the Zapruder film, I thought. The famous 8-mm. movie shot by ladies’-garment manufacturer Abraham Zapruder has been used to justify any number of Kennedy-assassination theories. Think the driver of the limo was the actual shooter, as a few nutbags have postulated? It’s in the Zapruder film, if you’re stoned and squint enough.
Hot Zone: The fact that people, like the woman in this picture, could survive near the impact zone suggests the fires weren’t hot enough to melt structural steel.
AP)
However, you always get to the part where the president’s head explodes in a flash and shower of blood. It remains a horrible, frozen moment. One look and I am back in geometry class at Francis Lewis High School, the principal’s voice on the loudspeaker saying that the president had been shot, that he was “dead.”
Speaking with the widows, or simply walking by a firehouse, was a teleportation back to the raw unspun brutality of the Day. This isn’t as much of a stretch as it sounds, since I was there on September 11.
I’d just walked right into what would come to be called ground zero. No one stopped me. I knew the towers had fallen, seen it on TV. Still, I didn’t expect things that big to totally disappear, as if the ground had swallowed them up.
“Where are the towers?” I asked a fireman. “Under your foot” was the reply.
Hours later, I sat down beside another, impossibly weary firefighter. Covered with dust, he was drinking a bottle of Poland Spring water. Half his squad was missing. They’d gone into the South Tower and never come out. Then, almost as a non sequitur, the fireman indicated the building in front of us, maybe 400 yards away.
“That building is coming down,” he said with a drained casualness.
“Really?” I asked. At 47 stories, it would be a skyscraper in most cities, centerpiece of the horizon. But in New York, it was nothing but a nondescript box with fire coming out of the windows. “When?”
“Tonight . . . Maybe tomorrow morning.”
This was around 5:15 p.m. I know because five minutes later, at 5:20, the building, 7 World Trade Center, crumbled.
“Shit!” I screamed, unsure which way to run, because who knows which way these things fall. As it turned out, I wasn’t in any danger, since 7 WTC appeared to drop straight down. I still have dreams about the moment. Even then, the event is oddly undramatic, just a building falling.
Now the 9/11 Truth movement tells me I saw much more. According to Jim Hoffman, a software engineer and physicist from Alameda, California, where he authors the site 911research.wtc7.net, what I saw was a “classic controlled demolition.” This was why, Hoffman contends, 7 WTC dropped so rapidly (in about 6.6 seconds, or almost at the speed of a free-falling object) and so neatly, into its “own footprint.”
For 7 WTC to collapse unaided at that speed, Hoffman says, would mean “its 58 perimeter columns and 25 central columns of structural steel would have to have been shattered at almost the same instant, so unlikely as to be impossible.”
What happened at 7 WTC might be the key to the entire mystery of September 11, contends Hoffman. The $500 million insurance profit made by Larry Silverstein is a garden-variety motive, but the list of 7 WTC tenants sets conspiracy heads spinning.
To wit: The IRS, the Department of Defense, and the CIA kept offices on the 25th floor. The Secret Service occupied the ninth and tenth. The Securities and Exchange Commission (home to vast records of bank transactions) was on floors 11 through 13. The 23rd floor was home to Rudy Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, his crisis center. If this wasn’t enough, the mortgage of 7 WTC was held by the Blackstone Group, headed by Pete Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, stalwart players in any NWO MIHOP.
In the 9/11 Truth cosmology, the destruction of 7 World Trade Center is akin to Jack Ruby’s shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Seven WTC was the home of secrets. It had to go. Central to the scenario is a comment made by Silverstein in a 2002 PBS documentary.
“We’ve had such a terrible loss of life,” he quotes himself as saying on 9/11. “Maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.”
“Pull it,” as Truth people never tire of repeating, is the term usually used for controlled demolition.
These were vexing questions, especially since 7 WTC is not even mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report. Nor is the building given much shrift in the subsequent “Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Towers,” compiled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
And there I was, thinking all I saw was a building falling down.
8.The Magician and the Expert
A few days after the St. Mark’s meeting, I went to a Community Board No. 1 forum where the NIST report would be discussed. The meeting was in the Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest structure when it was completed in 1913. Since it was still standing, it seemed a good place to talk about the only former world’s tallest building(s) to fall down. I was with William Rodriguez, who, as he always does, brought along his video camera, “so they know I’m watching them.”
Smoke Bomb: Could this puff of smoke be evidence of an internal explosion consistent with controlled demolition?
AP)
As a boy shining shoes in Puerto Rico, William dreamed of being wrapped in a straitjacket and suspended upside down from a flaming rope. “That was going to be my big trick. It was my goal to become a magician, the greatest illusionist in the Caribbean basin.”
Later, Rodriguez met James Randi, a.k.a. the Amazing Randi, the magician best known as a debunker of supernatural claims, offering the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anyone able to demonstrate verifiable evidence of psychic powers.
“Randi was my mentor,” said William. “I admired him for his tricks but also because he never said they were anything but tricks. He separated the truth from the phony.”
William moved to New York, but beyond some gigs at Mostly Magic, his career did not take off. He started working for a cleaning company in the World Trade Center. He’d stay there twenty years.
On 9/11, William was late. Instead of mopping the stairwells on the 110th floor, where he almost certainly would have died, he was chatting with the maintenance crew on level B-1 in the basement. “I heard this massive explosion below, on level B-2 or 3. I saw this guy come up the stairs. The skin on his arms was peeled away . . . hanging. Then I heard another explosion, from above. That was the first plane, hitting the building.”
In possession of one of the few master keys in the building, William led firemen up the stairwells. He was responsible for getting at least a dozen people out of the towers. Trying to escape as the North Tower fell, he found himself beneath a half-buried fire engine.
“I told myself this is going to be a slow death, but I should make it last as long as I could. My training as an escape artist helped me. I knew to be calm. They found me just in time. I understood my whole life had been pointing to this moment.”
Acclaimed as “the last man pulled from the rubble,” William became a hero of 9/11. “I was at the White House. They took my picture with President Bush.”
Four years later, after repeatedly being rebuffed in his attempts to tell officials his story about the basement explosion, William is suing the U.S. government under the rico statute, legislation drafted to prosecute Mafia families. The suit reads like an Air America wet dream, with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, George Tenet, Karl Rove, and others (the Diebold Company is thrown in for good measure) listed as defendants.
“They say I’m a conspiracy theorist; I call them conspirators, too,” William says.
“It is like Randi said. There’s reality, and there’s illusion. When illusion becomes reality, that’s a problem. Nine-eleven is a giant illusion. Besides, what can they do to me? I’m a national hero, Bush told me so himself.”
“That’s him, the NIST guy,” William said, indicating Dr. S. Shyam Sunder, head of the institute’s Trade Center report.
An elegantly attired man in his fifties, Dr. Sunder, holder of degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and MIT, took his seat beside Carl Galioto, a partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects of the new $700 million replacement for 7 WTC. Behind them was a slide of “the new downtown skyline,” dominated by another Skidmore project, the Freedom Tower, which, at an iconic 1,776 feet, is next in line to be the world’s tallest building. Like the new 7 WTC, which Galioto said featured a “two-foot-thick vertical core encasing the elevators, utility infrastructure, and exit stairs,” the Freedom Tower will be “among the safest buildings ever built.” This was important, the architect said, because “constantly building and rebuilding” was what New York was all about.
After Dr. Sunder’s presentation (planes and fire did it), a woman from N.Y. 9/11 Truth stood up and said she hadn’t been able “to sleep at night” since her best friend had died at the WTC. She had hoped NIST would clear up doubts, but this was not the case. “I have here a report which contradicts much of what you say.”
The woman put a paper by Steven E. Jones, a physics professor from Brigham Young University, in front of Dr. Sunder. Jones makes the case for controlled demolition, claiming the persistence of “molten metal” at ground zero indicates the likely presence of “high-temperature cutter-charges . . . routinely used to melt/cut/demolish steel.”
“I hope you read this; perhaps it will enable you to see things a different way,” the woman said.
“Actually, I have read it,” Dr. Sunder said with a sigh.
Later, asked if such outbursts were common, Dr. Sunder said, “Yes. I am sympathetic. But our report . . . it is extensive. We consulted 80 public-sector experts and 125 private-sector experts. It is a Who’s Who of experts. People look for other solutions. As scientists, we can’t worry about that. Facts are facts.”
Brother Act: One of many eerie 9/11 coincidences is that Marvin Bush, the president’s brother, worked for a firm that handled security for the WTC, and United and American airlines.
AP)
I asked Dr. Sunder about 7 WTC. Why was the fate of the building barely mentioned in the final report?
This was a matter of staffing and budget, Sunder said. He hoped to release something on 7 WTC by the end of the year.
NIST did have some “preliminary hypotheses” on 7 WTC, Dr. Sunder said. “We are studying the horizontal movement east to west, internal to the structure, on the fifth to seventh floors.”
Then Dr. Sunder paused. “But truthfully, I don’t really know. We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.”
9.Can 49.3 Percent of the People Be Crazy?
Late in the summer of 2004, as the Republicans in Madison Square Garden extolled George Bush’s staunch protection of the homeland, a Zogby poll asked New Yorkers if they believed that “some of our leaders knew in advance attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and consciously failed to act.”
Of city residents, 49.3 percent said yes.
A year and a half later, doubt had increased, at least according to my own informal canvassing. Per Nick Levis’s “HOP” paper, I offered four choices: (A) the Official Story; (B) the Official Story plus incompetence; (C) LIHOP; (D) MIHOP.
Of the 56 respondents, 28 said C, 23 picked B, with 4 (including two Muslim cabdrivers) opting for MIHOP.
Almost every white person with a straight job said B. Many disliked Bush but said they couldn’t bring themselves to believe the U.S. government would take part in the death of 3,000 of its countrymen.
Typical was the opinion offered by an investment banker at a downtown bar. “I can see them wishing it would happen, secretly happy it did. But on purpose? Look at the way they’ve managed Iraq. They’re boobs. They couldn’t have pulled off 9/11 without getting caught. Not possible.”
Uptown, responses were different. “Yeah, they knew,” said a retired transit worker on 116th Street, one of the 17 of 22 black people questioned who picked C. He said he’d heard Marvin Bush, the president’s younger brother, was a director of Securacom, a firm that on 9/11 was in charge of security not only at the World Trade Center but also for United and American airlines as well as at Dulles airport, where Flight 77 took off.
“That true?” he asked.
Yeah, I said. That’s what I heard.
“There anywhere he ain’t got no brother?”
“Bush’s cousin, Wirt Walker III, worked there, too.”
“Wirt? The third? You’re shitting me.”
This was pretty much the opinion. If Katrina proved the government was willing to let people die, right there on TV, why should 9/11 have been any different? Only one person picked A, the official story. This was a fireman, who was smoking a cigarette outside a downtown engine company. Truth be told, I wasn’t keen on quizzing firemen about 9/11 Truth, but I knew the guy’s brother from high school.
“Not answering that,” he said, warning not to ask others in the company, which had lost men on 9/11. This didn’t mean he wasn’t of the opinion that if he lived to be a million he’d never “see anything as corrupt, bullshit, and sad as what happened at the WTC.
“They got their gold and shipped us to Fresh Kills,” he said. Call it one more conspiracy theory, but many uniformed firefighters believe the powers that be cared more about finding the gold reserves held in vaults beneath the Trade Center than the bodies of their fallen brothers.
Still, the fireman said, if he had to pick a letter in my poll, it would be A.
“Osama fucking bin Laden, like Bush says. If I thought it was someone else, then I’d have to do something about it. And I don’t want to think about what I’d do.”
10.Disinformation
It weighs on you, thinking about 9/11, the day and the unremitting aftermath. Being a supposedly unflappable New Yorker offers little solace. The wound remains unhealed, emotions close to the surface.
Certainly there was an urgency as activists gathered at the Veselka restaurant after the Tarpley meeting.
With all the saber-rattling about Iran, this was no time to decrease vigilance, said Nick Levis, proposing a toast: “That in 2006, we will crack the Official Story so we can stop being 9/11-heads and return to normality.” A classically hermetic New York conversation ensued, quickly moving from snickers about bin Laden’s supposed CIA code name, “Tim Osmond . . . as in Donny and Marie,” to speculation about the role of Jerry Hauer, Giuliani’s former OEM guy, in the post-9/11 anthrax threats.
Talk came to a halt, however, with the mention of whether it was American Airlines Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon on 9/11.
For New York Magazine)
Broached in 2002 by Thierry Meyssan in his French best-seller L’Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Fraud), the idea that the Pentagon was struck by a missile instead of a 757 is the most controversial tenet of 9/11 Truth–iana. The claim is based on Meyssan’s reading of photographs (“Hunt the Boeing” at asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm) supposedly showing the hole in the building to be no more than fifteen to eighteen feet wide—far too small to fit a plane with a 125-foot wingspan.
But there are problems, such as the many eyewitnesses who saw a plane flying low near the Pentagon shortly before impact. Disputing the no-crash theory, Jim Hoffman has argued, “This is just the sort of wackiness defenders of the Official Story harp on to show how gullible and incompetent we conspiracy theorists are supposed to be.” In other words, Meyssan and other no-plane believers were either wrong, unknowing dupes or spreaders of disinformation.
The D-word is nothing to take lightly in conspiracy circles. For, as Thomas Pynchon notes in his “Proverbs for Paranoids,” if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
At Veselka, the question was, if Flight 77 did not crash, what happened to the 56 people on the plane? This query did not sit well with Nico Haupt, a thin, black-clad man from Cologne, Germany, compiler of the 9/11 Encyclopedia (911review.org/Wiki/Sept11Topics.shtml).
“Gassed,” he hissed. “Have you ever heard of gassing? It is very easy. You open the door of the plane, and it spreads.”
“You think they gassed them?” Would even the Illuminati stoop this low?
Haupt cast a withering look. “That, or some other method of murder. Assholes!”
“Nico, calm down,” said Tarpley. “This is tactics. There’s no reason to make an enormous moral issue out of everything.”
But Haupt was past consoling. “You are motherfuckers. Stupid motherfuckers.” Slamming the tabletop, he gathered his things and stormed out.
“Nico is so emotional,” said one activist, returning to her plate of pierogi.
11. 250 Greenwich Street
After dinner, I stopped at ground zero. Before the towers were built, my father took me here when the area was called Radio Row and sold tubes cheap. After 9/11, I spent many nights watching the great plume of water, shining in the vapor lamps, raining onto the smoking pit.
Now I was in front of the replacement for 7 WTC, Silverstein’s $700 million baby, a nifty parallelogram with a stainless-steel finish like a Viking stove in a Soho loft. According to the Web brochure, 7 WTC collapsed “probably” as a result of “the ignition of Con Edison diesel stored in the base.” To “avoid this hazard in the new building, the diesel is stored under the new plaza across from the reopened Greenwich Street.”
Another change is the offering of an alternative address, 250 Greenwich Street. Apparently, Silverstein felt this would play better in “the trendy Tribeca neighborhood.” Call it real-estate MIHOP.
When the new 7 WTC opens, N.Y. 9/11 Truth plans a demonstration here. Now, however, it being late Sunday night, the place looked like a neutron-bomb landscape, lights on in the finished lobby, gleaming card-reading security gates in place, but no sign of humanity anywhere.
A giant LCD screen scrolled various alphabetical fonts, one after another. It was numbing watching this, thinking that time was moving on, new fortunes would be made here, and like 11/22, it would never be known who did what on 9/11.
A cop car pulled up. They wanted me to move on. Cops always want you to move on. Not that I was in any hurry. Larry Silverstein didn’t own the sidewalk. I had as much right to the disaster as anyone.
Then I remembered one more factoid. David Cohen, who headed the CIA office at 7 WTC on September 11, was the same guy hired by Ray Kelly as deputy commissioner of Intelligence. It was Cohen who instituted the subway bag search, one more chimera of security in the post-9/11 world. Who knew what a guy like that might be up to? So I moved on. Can’t trust anyone nowadays.
The Plane Truth
9/11 conspiracy theories, from nuts to soup.
Mossad Did It
A common theory, especially in the Arab world, holds that Israel orchestrated the attacks in order to bring the U.S. into conflict with Israel’s enemies. Evidence cited ranges from the arly spurious and deeply anti-Semitic (the oft-heard, oft-refuted canard that Jews were told to leave the towers before the attacks) to the apparently true but unexplainable. (Five men who were seen filming the attacks in Liberty Park were later apprehended and found by the Forward to have ties to Mossad.)
Oilmen Did It
A theory based on the idea that worldwide oil production, having reached its peak, is beginning a long decline, leading to surging energy prices and global economic collapse. The 9/11 attacks, goes this scenario, were orchestrated by Cheney, Bush, and their friends in the oil industry and government, in order to begin a process that would secure further reserves in Iraq and increase the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.
Bush and Cheney Did it
The most basic of conspiracy theories. Bush and Cheney orchestrated the attacks, for much the same reason Roosevelt was sometimes said to have orchestrated Pearl Harbor: in order to begin the conflict that would allow them to realize their global ambitions.
The New World Order Did It
After winning a long struggle against the old Kissingerian pragmatists and balance-of-power devotees, neocon idealists centered at the Council on Foreign Relations initiated the conflict in order to establish the United States as the sole global power.
A Rogue Network Did It
A secret government used Bush and Cheney as patsies in carrying out the attacks. Bush was kept on the run in Air Force One (code-named “Angel”) by an anonymous call saying, “Angel is next.” Bin Laden and his henchmen were CIA plants and double agents. Britain’s MI6 intelligence service was involved. The towers were blown up from inside, by teams of secret government assassins. Even Bush and Cheney are in the dark about why the attacks took place.
Shrinks Did It
Scientologists believe that psychiatry (through a mechanism that remains murky) helped give birth to the suicide attackers “through drugs and psycho-political methods.”
–Reported by Janelle Nanos
Find this article at:
http://www.nymag.com/news/features/16464/index.html
ABC News: Pentagon mulls torture rule on Guantanamo evidence
ABC News: Pentagon mulls torture rule on Guantanamo evidence
WASHINGTON - In what would be a key change in U.S. policy, the Pentagon may formally require military prosecutors to observe a U.N. convention against torture in their use of evidence during tribunals at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Such a move would represent a formal bar on the use of any evidence obtained by torture in prisoner tribunals at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, where the United States has held hundreds of foreign terrorism suspects since early 2002.
Washington has faced steady criticism over the Guantanamo camp from the United Nations, rights groups and some foreign governments. Former detainees have charged U.S. authorities use torture at the camp, which the Pentagon denies.
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said on Wednesday the administration up to now has relied on prosecutors to ensure that their cases before tribunals, known as military commissions, reflect President George W. Bush's stated policy that the United States not condone torture.
"Up to this point, it's not believed to have been necessary because of the way in which prosecutors and the commission members have been able to proceed in their trials," Whitman told reporters.
"But it is something that is being looked at as a possible way to eliminate any doubt that the Convention Against Torture, Article 15, is understood and is applicable to these prosecutions," he said. "The department is taking a look at it and may issue a separate instruction on it."
Article 15 of the U.N Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment requires states to ensure that evidence invoked in proceedings not be the result of torture.
But Air Force Maj. Jane Boomer, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters at Guantanamo earlier this month that current tribunal rules hypothetically could allow the use of evidence obtained through torture because such evidence was not explicitly banned.
"It is not specified in the rulebook, period," she said at a March 2 news conference at the camp.
However, she said such evidence could not be admitted if it would deny the accused a fair trial.
Bush authorized the military tribunals after the September 11 attacks, but the system has come under fire from human rights activists and some military lawyers as fundamentally unfair to defendants.
U.S. officials have vigorously and repeatedly denied any claim that they engage in torture.
But word of the possible policy change, which some officials expect soon, comes a month after five United Nations special envoys called for closing the Guantanamo prison in a report that accused the United States of violating bans on torture, arbitrary detention and the right to fair trial.
Most of the roughly 500 inmates at Guantanamo have been held for four years without trial.
Ten Guantanamo prisoners have been charged with war crimes and six have undergone pretrial hearings. But no case has yet reached the trial stage before a military commission.
Guantanamo inmates have challenged their detention in more than 180 cases filed in federal district court.
Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in an important legal challenge to the tribunal system by Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the first inmate to face a military tribunal.
Hamdan, a Yemeni accused of being Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver, is challenging Bush's authority to use military tribunals to try Guantanamo prisoners for war crimes.
(Additional reporting by Jane Sutton in Miami)
WASHINGTON - In what would be a key change in U.S. policy, the Pentagon may formally require military prosecutors to observe a U.N. convention against torture in their use of evidence during tribunals at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Such a move would represent a formal bar on the use of any evidence obtained by torture in prisoner tribunals at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, where the United States has held hundreds of foreign terrorism suspects since early 2002.
Washington has faced steady criticism over the Guantanamo camp from the United Nations, rights groups and some foreign governments. Former detainees have charged U.S. authorities use torture at the camp, which the Pentagon denies.
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said on Wednesday the administration up to now has relied on prosecutors to ensure that their cases before tribunals, known as military commissions, reflect President George W. Bush's stated policy that the United States not condone torture.
"Up to this point, it's not believed to have been necessary because of the way in which prosecutors and the commission members have been able to proceed in their trials," Whitman told reporters.
"But it is something that is being looked at as a possible way to eliminate any doubt that the Convention Against Torture, Article 15, is understood and is applicable to these prosecutions," he said. "The department is taking a look at it and may issue a separate instruction on it."
Article 15 of the U.N Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment requires states to ensure that evidence invoked in proceedings not be the result of torture.
But Air Force Maj. Jane Boomer, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters at Guantanamo earlier this month that current tribunal rules hypothetically could allow the use of evidence obtained through torture because such evidence was not explicitly banned.
"It is not specified in the rulebook, period," she said at a March 2 news conference at the camp.
However, she said such evidence could not be admitted if it would deny the accused a fair trial.
Bush authorized the military tribunals after the September 11 attacks, but the system has come under fire from human rights activists and some military lawyers as fundamentally unfair to defendants.
U.S. officials have vigorously and repeatedly denied any claim that they engage in torture.
But word of the possible policy change, which some officials expect soon, comes a month after five United Nations special envoys called for closing the Guantanamo prison in a report that accused the United States of violating bans on torture, arbitrary detention and the right to fair trial.
Most of the roughly 500 inmates at Guantanamo have been held for four years without trial.
Ten Guantanamo prisoners have been charged with war crimes and six have undergone pretrial hearings. But no case has yet reached the trial stage before a military commission.
Guantanamo inmates have challenged their detention in more than 180 cases filed in federal district court.
Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in an important legal challenge to the tribunal system by Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the first inmate to face a military tribunal.
Hamdan, a Yemeni accused of being Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver, is challenging Bush's authority to use military tribunals to try Guantanamo prisoners for war crimes.
(Additional reporting by Jane Sutton in Miami)
Afraid to Answer Questions
Gmail - [bbgOT] Afraid to Answer Questions
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/michael_putney/14155490.htm
KATHERINE HARRIS
Shying away from reporters
BY MICHAEL PUTNEY
mputney@local10.com
I talked to Katherine Harris the other day, and it wasn't easy. Not the talking part, the finding-the-candidate-and-getting-permission- to-talk-to-her part.
The two-term Sarasota congresswoman and star of Florida's 2000 election was perfectly willing to go on Fox News last week to field some soft balls from Sean Hannity about her new and improved Senate campaign. But she canceled a news conference two days later with Florida reporters and was not available to sit down with me for 12 minutes of free TV air time on Sunday even though she was in town.
I eventually caught up with Harris last Saturday at one of her ''grass fire'' campaign events in Fort Lauderdale. Speaking to about 30 people at a restaurant, she spent a lot of time talking about her commitment to keeping Florida ''strong in job creation,'' building adequate infrastructure and making sure we have enough evacuation routes during hurricanes. She also scolded the media for ignoring her sponsorship of ''Carlie's Law,'' named for Carlie Brucia, which calls for harsher probation for anyone convicted of a committing a crime against a child. All well and good, but if she thinks she'll be elected to the U.S. Senate on any of these issues, she's delusional.
When Harris finally did get around to some key issues, she seemed to impress the upper-middle-class white folks who'd come out to hear her. She confidently declared that ''homeland security is safer than ever before,'' despite recent reports that our airports and seaports remain vulnerable to terrorist attacks. On Iraq, Harris said: ''We are being successful there, and it's protecting us back home.'' She didn't say how. She also recounted how a recent visit to Iraq proved to her that the situation there is ''much better than the media report'' (big applause). She added that American troops ``told me they don't want to be sent home before they finish the job.''
While some U.S. military personnel may have told her that, the first credible survey of American troops in Iraq recently showed most think the war is unwinnable and that the United States should get out.
It looks like Harris is floating merrily along on the far-right side of the political mainstream and can't even see the other shore. It's not just that she sees the world through rose-colored Prada glasses, she sees it through a different prism. Hers is a Weltenschauung based on privilege and plutocracy. As the granddaughter of one of Florida's great citrus and cattle barons, Ben Hill Griffin, you can understand why. But Harris gives no sign of understanding or even empathizing with the plight of Floridians who struggle to find a decent job, make their mortgage payments, buy groceries or see a doctor when they get sick.
When I asked her to name the single overriding theme of her Senate campaign, she answered, ''Our voting records.'' Presumably, that means hers in the four years she has served in the House versus six years in the Senate for Bill Nelson, whom she calls ''a liberal with an anti-family voting record.'' Nelson is many things, but liberal is not one of them, and it's hard to conceive how his moderate voting record makes him ``anti-family.''
No unscripted interviews
Can Nelson be beaten? His approval rating is hovering around 50 percent, which would make him vulnerable to a strong GOP candidate. Jeb Bush, Gen. Tommy Franks or U.S. Rep. Mark Foley all would stand a good chance of taking him out, but none has expressed an interest in running. And with Harris' pledge to spend her $10 million inheritance on the race, I doubt that any of them will. It looks like Harris will have the GOP field to herself.
If Harris can rebuild her staff, which has suffered from high turnover, and bring some discipline to her campaign, Harris could make it interesting. She could also get a good deal of ''free'' media should she ever decide to deal straightforwardly with reporters. I doubt that will happen. After her speech last Sunday to the conservative Reclaiming America conference, she refused to speak to the media.
Perhaps one reason is that Harris knows her unscripted TV appearances are not confidence-builders or vote-getters. As I watched her on Hannity & Colmes last week, a name from the past sprang to mind: Paula Hawkins. The former Florida senator was another nice lady but something of a ditz. She and Harris share the same unsettling affect: slightly off-kilter, too smiley, emotionally disproportionate and occasionally just plain weird.
That's why Harris prefers to appear only in tightly controlled settings (and $10 million will buy many) and avoid giving reporters the chance to pepper her with their pesky questions. Such as, why did you take $50,000 in illegal campaign contributions from defense contractor Mitchell Wade, who has pleaded guilty to bribing another congressman? Why did one of your staffers resign and show up a few days later working for Wade, for whom you introduced a bill that would have given his company a $10 million defense contract?
The questions for Harris are legion. First we've got find her and make her answer them.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/michael_putney/14155490.htm
KATHERINE HARRIS
Shying away from reporters
BY MICHAEL PUTNEY
mputney@local10.com
I talked to Katherine Harris the other day, and it wasn't easy. Not the talking part, the finding-the-candidate-and-getting-permission- to-talk-to-her part.
The two-term Sarasota congresswoman and star of Florida's 2000 election was perfectly willing to go on Fox News last week to field some soft balls from Sean Hannity about her new and improved Senate campaign. But she canceled a news conference two days later with Florida reporters and was not available to sit down with me for 12 minutes of free TV air time on Sunday even though she was in town.
I eventually caught up with Harris last Saturday at one of her ''grass fire'' campaign events in Fort Lauderdale. Speaking to about 30 people at a restaurant, she spent a lot of time talking about her commitment to keeping Florida ''strong in job creation,'' building adequate infrastructure and making sure we have enough evacuation routes during hurricanes. She also scolded the media for ignoring her sponsorship of ''Carlie's Law,'' named for Carlie Brucia, which calls for harsher probation for anyone convicted of a committing a crime against a child. All well and good, but if she thinks she'll be elected to the U.S. Senate on any of these issues, she's delusional.
When Harris finally did get around to some key issues, she seemed to impress the upper-middle-class white folks who'd come out to hear her. She confidently declared that ''homeland security is safer than ever before,'' despite recent reports that our airports and seaports remain vulnerable to terrorist attacks. On Iraq, Harris said: ''We are being successful there, and it's protecting us back home.'' She didn't say how. She also recounted how a recent visit to Iraq proved to her that the situation there is ''much better than the media report'' (big applause). She added that American troops ``told me they don't want to be sent home before they finish the job.''
While some U.S. military personnel may have told her that, the first credible survey of American troops in Iraq recently showed most think the war is unwinnable and that the United States should get out.
It looks like Harris is floating merrily along on the far-right side of the political mainstream and can't even see the other shore. It's not just that she sees the world through rose-colored Prada glasses, she sees it through a different prism. Hers is a Weltenschauung based on privilege and plutocracy. As the granddaughter of one of Florida's great citrus and cattle barons, Ben Hill Griffin, you can understand why. But Harris gives no sign of understanding or even empathizing with the plight of Floridians who struggle to find a decent job, make their mortgage payments, buy groceries or see a doctor when they get sick.
When I asked her to name the single overriding theme of her Senate campaign, she answered, ''Our voting records.'' Presumably, that means hers in the four years she has served in the House versus six years in the Senate for Bill Nelson, whom she calls ''a liberal with an anti-family voting record.'' Nelson is many things, but liberal is not one of them, and it's hard to conceive how his moderate voting record makes him ``anti-family.''
No unscripted interviews
Can Nelson be beaten? His approval rating is hovering around 50 percent, which would make him vulnerable to a strong GOP candidate. Jeb Bush, Gen. Tommy Franks or U.S. Rep. Mark Foley all would stand a good chance of taking him out, but none has expressed an interest in running. And with Harris' pledge to spend her $10 million inheritance on the race, I doubt that any of them will. It looks like Harris will have the GOP field to herself.
If Harris can rebuild her staff, which has suffered from high turnover, and bring some discipline to her campaign, Harris could make it interesting. She could also get a good deal of ''free'' media should she ever decide to deal straightforwardly with reporters. I doubt that will happen. After her speech last Sunday to the conservative Reclaiming America conference, she refused to speak to the media.
Perhaps one reason is that Harris knows her unscripted TV appearances are not confidence-builders or vote-getters. As I watched her on Hannity & Colmes last week, a name from the past sprang to mind: Paula Hawkins. The former Florida senator was another nice lady but something of a ditz. She and Harris share the same unsettling affect: slightly off-kilter, too smiley, emotionally disproportionate and occasionally just plain weird.
That's why Harris prefers to appear only in tightly controlled settings (and $10 million will buy many) and avoid giving reporters the chance to pepper her with their pesky questions. Such as, why did you take $50,000 in illegal campaign contributions from defense contractor Mitchell Wade, who has pleaded guilty to bribing another congressman? Why did one of your staffers resign and show up a few days later working for Wade, for whom you introduced a bill that would have given his company a $10 million defense contract?
The questions for Harris are legion. First we've got find her and make her answer them.
Federal Grants Flow to Bush Allies
Federal Grants Flow to Bush Allies
Grants Flow to Bush Allies on Social Issues
By Thomas B. Edsall
The Washington Post
Wednesday 22 March 2006
Federal programs direct at least $157 million.
For years, conservatives have complained about what they saw as the liberal tilt of federal grant money. Taxpayer funds went to abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood to promote birth control, and groups closely aligned with the AFL-CIO got Labor Department grants to run worker-training programs.
In the Bush administration, conservatives are discovering that turnabout is fair play: Millions of dollars in taxpayer funds have flowed to groups that support President Bush's agenda on abortion and other social issues.
Under the auspices of its religion-based initiatives and other federal programs, the administration has funneled at least $157 million in grants to organizations run by political and ideological allies, according to federal grant documents and interviews.
An example is Heritage Community Services in Charleston, S.C. A decade ago, Heritage was a tiny organization with deeply conservative social philosophy but not much muscle to promote it. An offshoot of an antiabortion pregnancy crisis center, Heritage promoted abstinence education at the county fair, local schools and the local Navy base. The budget was $51,288.
By 2004, Heritage Community Services had become a major player in the booming business of abstinence education. Its budget passed $3 million - much of it in federal grants distributed by Bush's Department of Health and Human Services - supporting programs for students in middle school and high school in South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.
Among other new beneficiaries of federal funding during the Bush years are groups run by Christian conservatives, including those in the African American and Hispanic communities. Many of the leaders have been active Republicans and influential supporters of Bush's presidential campaigns.
Programs such as the Compassion Capital Fund, under the Health and Human Services, are designed to support religion-based social services, a goal that inevitably funnels money to organizations run by people who share Bush's conservative cultural agenda.
"If what you are asking is, has George Bush as president of the United States established priorities in spending for his administration? The answer is yes," said Wade F. Horn, who as assistant secretary for children and families at HHS oversees much of the spending going to conservative groups. "That is a prerogative that presidents have."
Horn and other officials said politics has not played a role in making grants. "Whoever got these grants wrote the best applications, and the panels in rating these grants rated them objectively, based on the criteria we published in the Federal Register," he said. "Whether they support the president or not is not a test in any of my grant programs."
"These are just slush funds for conservative interest groups," countered Bill Smith, vice president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, one of the most outspoken critics of abstinence-only sex-education programs. "These organizations would not be in existence if not for the federal dollars coming through."
H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said politics plays no role in grant-making decisions. "We don't have that kind of calculation," he said.
Most, but not all, of the money going to conservative groups has come from two programs that did not exist before Bush took office in 2001. The Compassion Capital Fund, which distributed $148.3 million from 2002 to 2005, was created "to expand the role that faith-based and community groups play in providing social services to those in need," according to the White House.
The Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program was enacted by Congress in 2001, and $391.7 million has been appropriated for it.
Beneficiaries of more than $2 million each from the compassion fund include five organizations run by black and Hispanic leaders who endorsed Bush and Operation Blessing, a charity run by television evangelist Pat Robertson. It has received $23.5 million, which includes $1.5 million from the Compassion Capital Fund and $22 million in surplus dry milk from the Agriculture Department.
Hundreds of struggling antiabortion and pregnancy crisis centers have received federal grants that often doubled or tripled their annual budgets, allowing them to branch out and hire staff, especially for abstinence education.
The Door of Hope Pregnancy Care Center in Madisonville, Ky., a small outfit of four part-time employees committed "to the belief in the sanctity of human life, primarily as it relates to the protection of the unborn," operated on an annual budget of $75,000 to $79,000, most of it raised from an annual banquet and a "walk for life." Last year, Door of Hope got an abstinence education grant of $317,017, allowing it to hire staff and expand.
In Dyersburg, Tenn., the Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center, where the staff believes "without reservation or qualification that the Scriptures teach that human life begins at conception," had revenue of $81,621 and could pay Executive Director Natalie Wilson $12,247 in 2001. Two years later, the center got a $534,339 grant for abstinence education. By 2004, annual revenue totaled $617,355.
Altogether, local antiabortion and crisis pregnancy centers have received well over $60 million in grants for abstinence education and other programs, according to a Post review of federal records.
The distribution of new money to conservative organizations is a small part of an estimated flood of $2 billion a year in federal grants to religious and religiously affiliated organizations. For decades, in Democratic and Republican administrations, well over $1 billion annually has been going to such groups, most of it to mainline organizations such as Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army and Lutheran Social Services.
The shift under Bush in part grows out of the administration's Faith and Community Based Initiative. Under the initiative, White House officials and new offices in 10 Cabinet-level departments have aggressively sought to widen the "pool" of applicants for federal grants for all kinds. Faith-based organizations are encouraged to apply for grants to operate Head Start and subsidized housing programs.
In a Dec. 12, 2002, executive order, Bush addressed one of the major concerns of religious groups considering applying for public money. Bush declared that religious groups receiving federal grants would not be required to comply with certain civil rights statutes, and could discriminate by hiring employees of specific religious faiths.
Skepticism about the distribution of money under the religion-based initiatives abounds in both parties.
Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), chairman of the Government Reform subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and human resources, said the effort "has gone political."
"Quite frankly, part of the reason it went political is because we can't sell it unless we can show Republicans a political advantage to it, because it's not our base," he said, referring to the fact that many of those receiving social services are Democratic voters.
Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.) was more outspoken. "I believe ultimately this will be seen as one of the largest patronage programs in American history," he said.
The Compassion Capital Fund has disbursed many multiyear grants of $1.5 million to $7.5 million to groups designated as "intermediary organizations" empowered, according to the White House to "issue sub-awards directly to qualified faith- and community-based organizations."
In effect, this designation turns the recipient organization into a major dispenser of federal money.
The Institute for Youth Development in Sterling, which is run by Shepherd Smith and his wife, Anita M. Smith, has been awarded $7.5 million over three years. In turn, the institute has parceled out $4.5 million of the federal money in grants of $5,000 to $50,000 to smaller organizations.
Shepherd Smith, who was a top strategist in Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential bid, said the institute's grants were "not an effort on my part to make the right stronger; this was an effort to help little people" who have difficulty getting access to federal money.
The recipients listed on the institute's Web site include many socially conservative groups, among them at least 15 pregnancy crisis and counseling centers that oppose abortion.
The Rev. Luis Cortés's Esperanza USA has received three $2.5 million grants. Cortés is an evangelical Protestant; many of the grants from his organization have gone to Protestant Hispanic providers.
Among organizations run by ordained ministers, every Latino group receiving a large grant is headed by a Protestant. Protestant Hispanics are a key Republican target constituency. From 2000 to 2004, Bush's support among Hispanic Protestants grew from 44 percent to 54 percent, while remaining unchanged among Hispanic Roman Catholics, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
In Milwaukee, a 2004 presidential battleground state, Pentecostal Bishop Sedgwick Daniels's Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ was awarded $626,598 in 2003 and $824,471 in 2004 from the Compassion Capital Fund. Daniels, a Bush supporter, was a 2004 Republican National Convention delegate.
In Florida, another presidential battleground state, the National Center for Faith Based Initiatives, run by one of Bush's earliest 2000 supporters in the black community, Bishop Harold Calvin Ray, has received $1.75 million over three years from the compassion fund.
HHS is not the only department making such grants.
The Education Department awarded a $750,000 discretionary grant to the GEO Foundation, run by Kevin Teasley, a former staffer at the libertarian Reason Foundation and conservative Heritage Foundation, and conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, to "provide outreach and information" on public-school choice. The department also awarded $1.5 million over three years to the conservative Black Alliance for Educational Options, which was created in 2000 with support from such funders on the right as the Bradley, John M. Olin and Walton Family foundations, to provide information about the No Child Left Behind Act.
In addition to liberals, there are conservative critics of taxpayer funding of groups on the right.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said the grant-making is "corrupting."
"The danger is that any group that gets money from the government will end up serving the interests of the state rather than the constituencies they are trying to serve," he said. "The guy who writes the check writes the rules."
Grants Flow to Bush Allies on Social Issues
By Thomas B. Edsall
The Washington Post
Wednesday 22 March 2006
Federal programs direct at least $157 million.
For years, conservatives have complained about what they saw as the liberal tilt of federal grant money. Taxpayer funds went to abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood to promote birth control, and groups closely aligned with the AFL-CIO got Labor Department grants to run worker-training programs.
In the Bush administration, conservatives are discovering that turnabout is fair play: Millions of dollars in taxpayer funds have flowed to groups that support President Bush's agenda on abortion and other social issues.
Under the auspices of its religion-based initiatives and other federal programs, the administration has funneled at least $157 million in grants to organizations run by political and ideological allies, according to federal grant documents and interviews.
An example is Heritage Community Services in Charleston, S.C. A decade ago, Heritage was a tiny organization with deeply conservative social philosophy but not much muscle to promote it. An offshoot of an antiabortion pregnancy crisis center, Heritage promoted abstinence education at the county fair, local schools and the local Navy base. The budget was $51,288.
By 2004, Heritage Community Services had become a major player in the booming business of abstinence education. Its budget passed $3 million - much of it in federal grants distributed by Bush's Department of Health and Human Services - supporting programs for students in middle school and high school in South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.
Among other new beneficiaries of federal funding during the Bush years are groups run by Christian conservatives, including those in the African American and Hispanic communities. Many of the leaders have been active Republicans and influential supporters of Bush's presidential campaigns.
Programs such as the Compassion Capital Fund, under the Health and Human Services, are designed to support religion-based social services, a goal that inevitably funnels money to organizations run by people who share Bush's conservative cultural agenda.
"If what you are asking is, has George Bush as president of the United States established priorities in spending for his administration? The answer is yes," said Wade F. Horn, who as assistant secretary for children and families at HHS oversees much of the spending going to conservative groups. "That is a prerogative that presidents have."
Horn and other officials said politics has not played a role in making grants. "Whoever got these grants wrote the best applications, and the panels in rating these grants rated them objectively, based on the criteria we published in the Federal Register," he said. "Whether they support the president or not is not a test in any of my grant programs."
"These are just slush funds for conservative interest groups," countered Bill Smith, vice president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, one of the most outspoken critics of abstinence-only sex-education programs. "These organizations would not be in existence if not for the federal dollars coming through."
H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said politics plays no role in grant-making decisions. "We don't have that kind of calculation," he said.
Most, but not all, of the money going to conservative groups has come from two programs that did not exist before Bush took office in 2001. The Compassion Capital Fund, which distributed $148.3 million from 2002 to 2005, was created "to expand the role that faith-based and community groups play in providing social services to those in need," according to the White House.
The Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program was enacted by Congress in 2001, and $391.7 million has been appropriated for it.
Beneficiaries of more than $2 million each from the compassion fund include five organizations run by black and Hispanic leaders who endorsed Bush and Operation Blessing, a charity run by television evangelist Pat Robertson. It has received $23.5 million, which includes $1.5 million from the Compassion Capital Fund and $22 million in surplus dry milk from the Agriculture Department.
Hundreds of struggling antiabortion and pregnancy crisis centers have received federal grants that often doubled or tripled their annual budgets, allowing them to branch out and hire staff, especially for abstinence education.
The Door of Hope Pregnancy Care Center in Madisonville, Ky., a small outfit of four part-time employees committed "to the belief in the sanctity of human life, primarily as it relates to the protection of the unborn," operated on an annual budget of $75,000 to $79,000, most of it raised from an annual banquet and a "walk for life." Last year, Door of Hope got an abstinence education grant of $317,017, allowing it to hire staff and expand.
In Dyersburg, Tenn., the Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center, where the staff believes "without reservation or qualification that the Scriptures teach that human life begins at conception," had revenue of $81,621 and could pay Executive Director Natalie Wilson $12,247 in 2001. Two years later, the center got a $534,339 grant for abstinence education. By 2004, annual revenue totaled $617,355.
Altogether, local antiabortion and crisis pregnancy centers have received well over $60 million in grants for abstinence education and other programs, according to a Post review of federal records.
The distribution of new money to conservative organizations is a small part of an estimated flood of $2 billion a year in federal grants to religious and religiously affiliated organizations. For decades, in Democratic and Republican administrations, well over $1 billion annually has been going to such groups, most of it to mainline organizations such as Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army and Lutheran Social Services.
The shift under Bush in part grows out of the administration's Faith and Community Based Initiative. Under the initiative, White House officials and new offices in 10 Cabinet-level departments have aggressively sought to widen the "pool" of applicants for federal grants for all kinds. Faith-based organizations are encouraged to apply for grants to operate Head Start and subsidized housing programs.
In a Dec. 12, 2002, executive order, Bush addressed one of the major concerns of religious groups considering applying for public money. Bush declared that religious groups receiving federal grants would not be required to comply with certain civil rights statutes, and could discriminate by hiring employees of specific religious faiths.
Skepticism about the distribution of money under the religion-based initiatives abounds in both parties.
Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), chairman of the Government Reform subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and human resources, said the effort "has gone political."
"Quite frankly, part of the reason it went political is because we can't sell it unless we can show Republicans a political advantage to it, because it's not our base," he said, referring to the fact that many of those receiving social services are Democratic voters.
Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.) was more outspoken. "I believe ultimately this will be seen as one of the largest patronage programs in American history," he said.
The Compassion Capital Fund has disbursed many multiyear grants of $1.5 million to $7.5 million to groups designated as "intermediary organizations" empowered, according to the White House to "issue sub-awards directly to qualified faith- and community-based organizations."
In effect, this designation turns the recipient organization into a major dispenser of federal money.
The Institute for Youth Development in Sterling, which is run by Shepherd Smith and his wife, Anita M. Smith, has been awarded $7.5 million over three years. In turn, the institute has parceled out $4.5 million of the federal money in grants of $5,000 to $50,000 to smaller organizations.
Shepherd Smith, who was a top strategist in Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential bid, said the institute's grants were "not an effort on my part to make the right stronger; this was an effort to help little people" who have difficulty getting access to federal money.
The recipients listed on the institute's Web site include many socially conservative groups, among them at least 15 pregnancy crisis and counseling centers that oppose abortion.
The Rev. Luis Cortés's Esperanza USA has received three $2.5 million grants. Cortés is an evangelical Protestant; many of the grants from his organization have gone to Protestant Hispanic providers.
Among organizations run by ordained ministers, every Latino group receiving a large grant is headed by a Protestant. Protestant Hispanics are a key Republican target constituency. From 2000 to 2004, Bush's support among Hispanic Protestants grew from 44 percent to 54 percent, while remaining unchanged among Hispanic Roman Catholics, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
In Milwaukee, a 2004 presidential battleground state, Pentecostal Bishop Sedgwick Daniels's Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ was awarded $626,598 in 2003 and $824,471 in 2004 from the Compassion Capital Fund. Daniels, a Bush supporter, was a 2004 Republican National Convention delegate.
In Florida, another presidential battleground state, the National Center for Faith Based Initiatives, run by one of Bush's earliest 2000 supporters in the black community, Bishop Harold Calvin Ray, has received $1.75 million over three years from the compassion fund.
HHS is not the only department making such grants.
The Education Department awarded a $750,000 discretionary grant to the GEO Foundation, run by Kevin Teasley, a former staffer at the libertarian Reason Foundation and conservative Heritage Foundation, and conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, to "provide outreach and information" on public-school choice. The department also awarded $1.5 million over three years to the conservative Black Alliance for Educational Options, which was created in 2000 with support from such funders on the right as the Bradley, John M. Olin and Walton Family foundations, to provide information about the No Child Left Behind Act.
In addition to liberals, there are conservative critics of taxpayer funding of groups on the right.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said the grant-making is "corrupting."
"The danger is that any group that gets money from the government will end up serving the interests of the state rather than the constituencies they are trying to serve," he said. "The guy who writes the check writes the rules."
Scott Galindez | Someone Should Tell Bush Why We Went to War
Scott Galindez | Someone Should Tell Bush Why We Went to War
Why Did We Go to War?
03.21.06 QuickTime DSL | 56K
Windows Media DSL | 56K
RealMedia DSL | 56K
Someone Should Tell Bush Why We Went to War
By Scott Galindez
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 22 March 2006
After yesterday's presidential news conference, I am beginning to wonder if George W. Bush knows why we went to war with Iraq. He should just come clean and admit that we went to war because Dick, Wolfie, and Rummy told him to.
Three years into the war and the President still can't answer the question of why we went to war in the first place. It is perfectly clear now why he can't meet with Cindy Sheehan. Imagine him saying to Cindy, "after September 11th, we realized killers could destroy innocent life." Hmmmm, we have a president who didn't know that prior to 9/11?
Imagine him telling Cindy that we invaded Iraq because "the Taliban provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where al Qaeda trained...." Someone also needs to tell George that the Taliban probably wanted Saddam out of power too; bin Laden did. Of course he knows the Taliban were in Afghanistan, doesn't he?
When he finally got to Iraq, he rewrote history again. "We worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it" said Bush.
The world didn't agree, that's why there was no vote at the UN authorizing the war. I seem to remember inspectors in Iraq until we warned them that it wouldn't be safe for them to remain. I also want to know what Iraq was supposed to disclose if they had no WMD?
Please, one of you neo-cons, brief the President on the real reason for the war in Iraq, so the next time a reporter asks him a real question he doesn't embarrass us again.
Excerpted from the transcript of yesterday's press conference:
Helen Thomas: I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet - your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth - what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil - quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?
The President: I think your premise - in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist - is that - I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect -
Helen Thomas: Everything -
The President: Hold on for a second, please.
Helen Thomas: - everything I've heard -
The President: Excuse me, excuse me. No President wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true. My attitude about the defense of this country changed on September the 11th. We - when we got attacked, I vowed then and there to use every asset at my disposal to protect the American people. Our foreign policy changed on that day, Helen. You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life. And I'm never going to forget it. And I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.
Part of that meant to make sure that we didn't allow people to provide safe haven to an enemy. And that's why I went into Iraq - hold on for a second -
Helen Thomas: They didn't do anything to you, or to our country.
The President: Look - excuse me for a second, please. Excuse me for a second. They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where al Qaeda trained -
Helen Thomas: I'm talking about Iraq -
The President: Helen, excuse me. That's where - Afghanistan provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where they trained. That's where they plotted. That's where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans.
I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences -
Helen Thomas: - go to war -
The President: - and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it.
Scott Galindez is the Managing Editor of truthout.org.
Why Did We Go to War?
03.21.06 QuickTime DSL | 56K
Windows Media DSL | 56K
RealMedia DSL | 56K
Someone Should Tell Bush Why We Went to War
By Scott Galindez
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 22 March 2006
After yesterday's presidential news conference, I am beginning to wonder if George W. Bush knows why we went to war with Iraq. He should just come clean and admit that we went to war because Dick, Wolfie, and Rummy told him to.
Three years into the war and the President still can't answer the question of why we went to war in the first place. It is perfectly clear now why he can't meet with Cindy Sheehan. Imagine him saying to Cindy, "after September 11th, we realized killers could destroy innocent life." Hmmmm, we have a president who didn't know that prior to 9/11?
Imagine him telling Cindy that we invaded Iraq because "the Taliban provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where al Qaeda trained...." Someone also needs to tell George that the Taliban probably wanted Saddam out of power too; bin Laden did. Of course he knows the Taliban were in Afghanistan, doesn't he?
When he finally got to Iraq, he rewrote history again. "We worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it" said Bush.
The world didn't agree, that's why there was no vote at the UN authorizing the war. I seem to remember inspectors in Iraq until we warned them that it wouldn't be safe for them to remain. I also want to know what Iraq was supposed to disclose if they had no WMD?
Please, one of you neo-cons, brief the President on the real reason for the war in Iraq, so the next time a reporter asks him a real question he doesn't embarrass us again.
Excerpted from the transcript of yesterday's press conference:
Helen Thomas: I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet - your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth - what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil - quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?
The President: I think your premise - in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist - is that - I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect -
Helen Thomas: Everything -
The President: Hold on for a second, please.
Helen Thomas: - everything I've heard -
The President: Excuse me, excuse me. No President wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true. My attitude about the defense of this country changed on September the 11th. We - when we got attacked, I vowed then and there to use every asset at my disposal to protect the American people. Our foreign policy changed on that day, Helen. You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life. And I'm never going to forget it. And I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.
Part of that meant to make sure that we didn't allow people to provide safe haven to an enemy. And that's why I went into Iraq - hold on for a second -
Helen Thomas: They didn't do anything to you, or to our country.
The President: Look - excuse me for a second, please. Excuse me for a second. They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where al Qaeda trained -
Helen Thomas: I'm talking about Iraq -
The President: Helen, excuse me. That's where - Afghanistan provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That's where they trained. That's where they plotted. That's where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans.
I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences -
Helen Thomas: - go to war -
The President: - and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it.
Scott Galindez is the Managing Editor of truthout.org.
The Sino-Russian romance
Asia Times Online :: Central Asian News and current affairs, Russia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan
By Rian Jensen and Erich Marquardt
This Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin is to make an official state visit to China. Putin will arrive in time to witness China's Year of Russia ceremony, kicking off a year-long festival with the aim of encouraging improved cultural relations between the two countries.
Putin's visit to China is further evidence of the intensifying ties between Moscow and Beijing, with Liu Guchang, China's ambassador to Russia, describing the bilateral relationship in recent days as reaching an "unprecedented high level".
Both countries find it in their strategic interests to improve relations. This enhanced relationship is manifest in their participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the strengthening of their military relationship, improved economic ties, and substantial energy commitments.
Strategic partners
The Russia-China relationship improved significantly last July 1, when a meeting between Putin and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao led to a joint statement that rejected attempts by any country to gain a "monopoly in world affairs" and to "impose models of social development" on other countries.
This statement was clearly directed at the United States and came after Moscow and Beijing reached agreement that they did not desire increased US influence in Central Asia. The "colored revolutions" that were sweeping through Eurasia - in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan - caused concern in both Moscow and Beijing, as each perceived US motives in the region as potentially threatening their spheres of influence.
Moscow's and Beijing's efforts to increase control over the countries that make up the SCO reflect this policy. For instance, shortly after the SCO meetings in Kazakhstan last July 5, member-state Uzbekistan announced that the US military could not use its base at Karshi-Khanabad for any purpose other than its support operations in Afghanistan. Tashkent's statement was a prelude to its July 29 announcement that the United States would have to shut down its operations at Karshi-Khanabad altogether.
Outside the SCO, Russia and China have closely aligned diplomatic stances. Russia supports China's policy toward Taiwan, voicing criticisms in recent weeks regarding Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian's move to "cease" the activities of the National Unification Council. Beijing, for its part, remains quiet about Russia's activities in Chechnya. Moreover, both countries have been reluctant to take concrete action against Iran and its controversial nuclear-research program.
Last August, the Russia-China relationship reached a symbolic point when both countries engaged in their first-ever bilateral war games. The exercises, called Peace Mission 2005, took place from August 18-25 and consisted of sea, land and air maneuvers. Peace Mission 2005 provided Beijing the opportunity to demonstrate to Taiwan and other Asian states that its improved relations with Moscow augment Chinese power in the region. Additionally, the war games allowed Russia to show the United States and the European Union that Moscow was nurturing a relationship with the up-and-coming Asian superpower. On a more immediate level, the joint war games provided Moscow the opportunity to sell more Russian military hardware to the Chinese.
For instance, as a result of Peace Mission 2005, Beijing discussed with Moscow the purchase of Russian-made Il-76 air transport planes and Il-78 air-refueling tankers. China continues to buy much of its military equipment from Russia, including Su-27 and Su-30 fighter jets and a few Sovremenny-class destroyers. Speaking to reporters on January 13, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said, "Russian-Chinese military and technical cooperation has been, is and will be developing. I can assure you of that."
Indeed, the chairman of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs, Konstantin Kosachev, recently said China and Russia are "strategic partners". Nevertheless, Moscow has refrained from selling Beijing some of its most technologically advanced weapons systems, although this could change.
Peace Mission 2005 also served Russia's and China's interests in Central Asia, with Sino-Russian military cohesion sending a strong signal to the states of the SCO. The signal was that Russia and China see it in their strategic interests to control developments in Central Asia and in the former Soviet republics. This signal acts as a warning to those states - or factions within those states - that changes in foreign policy toward the West and away from the East could result in repercussions from China and Russia.
With Peace Mission 2005 behind them, Russia and China are planning for new military exercises, this time to take place in southern Russia. Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev stated on March 2 that Russia and China have "made plans to conduct exercises in spring 2007 in [Russia's] Southern Federal District". According to Nurgaliyev, the joint exercises will include special forces from China's Public Security Ministry, in addition to special forces and regular troops from Russia's Interior Ministry. The exercises, described by Nurgaliyev as large-scale, will "develop skills for cooperation in accomplishing objectives to counter the threat of terrorism".
Economic and energy needs
In addition to the political and geostrategic motives, there are economic imperatives behind this strengthening partnership. Bilateral trade volume in 2005 reached nearly US$30 billion, a 37% increase from 2004, and leaders of both countries have pledged to at least double that level by 2010.
When speaking to the media on March 13, Russia's trade commissioner to China, Sergei Tsyplakov, projected that Russia-China trade may reach $36 billion this year. The two countries are also expected to agree on the establishment of special economic zones, which was noted by a Chinese diplomat on Saturday as "one of the most important documents to be signed [during Putin's visit] at an inter-governmental level".
Energy is also a critical area for Sino-Russian cooperation. Bilateral initiatives are driven by Beijing's aggressive effort to secure reliable access to energy supplies to fuel its booming economy, which recently surpassed France and the United Kingdom as the world's fourth-fastest-growing, at an annual rate of roughly 10%. As the world's second-largest importer of oil (nearly 130 million barrels in 2005), with demand projected to grow roughly 7% in 2006, China naturally looks to the Russian Far East as a source for imports.
Russia currently provides 8% of China's energy needs, and is expected to ship nearly 15 million tons of oil to China this year - nearly double last year's level. Already the amount shipped this January via the Trans-Siberian Mainline Railway was up 42% from the same period in 2005. Yet Russia's ability to meet the 2006 target remains unclear as, among other reasons, the imperiled Yukos will have difficulty even meeting previous years' export levels.
The two countries have been engaged in discussions for expanding energy cooperation on a number of fronts, and Putin's visit to Beijing is widely expected to finalize - if not add substantive momentum to - talks about oil and gas pipeline projects. For instance, Russian state energy firm Gazprom announced on March 13 that it will sign a memorandum with China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) agreeing to build gas pipelines to China's Xinjiang region. The budget and prospective date of completion are unknown.
The signing will occur during Putin's visit, and will build on negotiations that were initiated last December between the two energy companies. Beijing has been seeking ways to raise the level of gas as a percentage of total energy consumption to 8-10% by 2010, doubling current figures. Gazprom chief executive officer Alexander Medvedev said the signing of an agreement in Beijing this month will "stipulate the price formula" for gas shipments.
Putin's visit may also provide a push to negotiations about a cross-border oil pipeline from Siberia to northeastern China. Such a pipeline would be an offshoot of the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline, which received final approval from Russian authorities at the end of February, overcoming vociferous criticism from environmental groups concerned about the pipeline's proximity to Lake Baikal and the possibility of oil seepage into the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site.
On March 11, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov, who is also co-chairman of the Russian-Chinese commission for cooperation in education, culture, health care and sports, announced that the Russian state oil giant Transneft would construct the ESPO line through Siberia to the Pacific coast, with a possible spur to China. The first stage of the $11 billion, two-stage pipeline will run 2,400 kilometers from Taishet in Ikurtsk region to Skovorodino in Amur region and is due for completion in 2008; the second stage consists of a pipeline from Skovorodino to Perevoznaya Bay for export to Japan and other Asia-Pacific economies.
The agenda for Putin's visit is expected to include discussions about an ESPO offshoot from Skovorodino that will link up with China's energy grid in Daqing. China has lobbied intensively for this separate pipeline, fearing that Siberian oil supplies will be directed instead to Japan. A possible Daqing spur is expected to deliver a total capacity of 30 million tons of crude to China, with the remaining 50 million proceeding to the terminal at Perevoznaya.
A lasting partnership
During the past year, Russia and China have taken measures to improve their bilateral relationship, and Putin's visit is sure to strengthen ties. Moscow and Beijing recognize their mutual interests in Central Asia, both in terms of limiting US encroachment and weakening revolutionary forces in the region. Although debates persist about sales of advanced weaponry, China's security calculus still requires a reliance on imported Russian arms that, in turn, sustains Moscow's defense economy.
The most contentious aspect of the bilateral relationship is in the energy arena: Russia has historically been reluctant to allow Chinese investment in this strategic sector, and unwilling to commit firmly to the construction of cross-border oil pipelines. Yet recent developments may portend changes in this area. Russia's readiness to establish a direct energy corridor to China ensures that relations will continue to intensify in the near term, although it remains unclear whether continued cooperation - in political, military, and economic areas - will lead to a truly durable partnership.
Rian Jensen is the associate editor of China Brief, a journal published by the Jamestown Foundation. Erich Marquardt is the publications coordinator at the Jamestown Foundation. The views expressed in this article are their own, and do not represent the Jamestown Foundation.
By Rian Jensen and Erich Marquardt
This Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin is to make an official state visit to China. Putin will arrive in time to witness China's Year of Russia ceremony, kicking off a year-long festival with the aim of encouraging improved cultural relations between the two countries.
Putin's visit to China is further evidence of the intensifying ties between Moscow and Beijing, with Liu Guchang, China's ambassador to Russia, describing the bilateral relationship in recent days as reaching an "unprecedented high level".
Both countries find it in their strategic interests to improve relations. This enhanced relationship is manifest in their participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the strengthening of their military relationship, improved economic ties, and substantial energy commitments.
Strategic partners
The Russia-China relationship improved significantly last July 1, when a meeting between Putin and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao led to a joint statement that rejected attempts by any country to gain a "monopoly in world affairs" and to "impose models of social development" on other countries.
This statement was clearly directed at the United States and came after Moscow and Beijing reached agreement that they did not desire increased US influence in Central Asia. The "colored revolutions" that were sweeping through Eurasia - in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan - caused concern in both Moscow and Beijing, as each perceived US motives in the region as potentially threatening their spheres of influence.
Moscow's and Beijing's efforts to increase control over the countries that make up the SCO reflect this policy. For instance, shortly after the SCO meetings in Kazakhstan last July 5, member-state Uzbekistan announced that the US military could not use its base at Karshi-Khanabad for any purpose other than its support operations in Afghanistan. Tashkent's statement was a prelude to its July 29 announcement that the United States would have to shut down its operations at Karshi-Khanabad altogether.
Outside the SCO, Russia and China have closely aligned diplomatic stances. Russia supports China's policy toward Taiwan, voicing criticisms in recent weeks regarding Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian's move to "cease" the activities of the National Unification Council. Beijing, for its part, remains quiet about Russia's activities in Chechnya. Moreover, both countries have been reluctant to take concrete action against Iran and its controversial nuclear-research program.
Last August, the Russia-China relationship reached a symbolic point when both countries engaged in their first-ever bilateral war games. The exercises, called Peace Mission 2005, took place from August 18-25 and consisted of sea, land and air maneuvers. Peace Mission 2005 provided Beijing the opportunity to demonstrate to Taiwan and other Asian states that its improved relations with Moscow augment Chinese power in the region. Additionally, the war games allowed Russia to show the United States and the European Union that Moscow was nurturing a relationship with the up-and-coming Asian superpower. On a more immediate level, the joint war games provided Moscow the opportunity to sell more Russian military hardware to the Chinese.
For instance, as a result of Peace Mission 2005, Beijing discussed with Moscow the purchase of Russian-made Il-76 air transport planes and Il-78 air-refueling tankers. China continues to buy much of its military equipment from Russia, including Su-27 and Su-30 fighter jets and a few Sovremenny-class destroyers. Speaking to reporters on January 13, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said, "Russian-Chinese military and technical cooperation has been, is and will be developing. I can assure you of that."
Indeed, the chairman of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs, Konstantin Kosachev, recently said China and Russia are "strategic partners". Nevertheless, Moscow has refrained from selling Beijing some of its most technologically advanced weapons systems, although this could change.
Peace Mission 2005 also served Russia's and China's interests in Central Asia, with Sino-Russian military cohesion sending a strong signal to the states of the SCO. The signal was that Russia and China see it in their strategic interests to control developments in Central Asia and in the former Soviet republics. This signal acts as a warning to those states - or factions within those states - that changes in foreign policy toward the West and away from the East could result in repercussions from China and Russia.
With Peace Mission 2005 behind them, Russia and China are planning for new military exercises, this time to take place in southern Russia. Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev stated on March 2 that Russia and China have "made plans to conduct exercises in spring 2007 in [Russia's] Southern Federal District". According to Nurgaliyev, the joint exercises will include special forces from China's Public Security Ministry, in addition to special forces and regular troops from Russia's Interior Ministry. The exercises, described by Nurgaliyev as large-scale, will "develop skills for cooperation in accomplishing objectives to counter the threat of terrorism".
Economic and energy needs
In addition to the political and geostrategic motives, there are economic imperatives behind this strengthening partnership. Bilateral trade volume in 2005 reached nearly US$30 billion, a 37% increase from 2004, and leaders of both countries have pledged to at least double that level by 2010.
When speaking to the media on March 13, Russia's trade commissioner to China, Sergei Tsyplakov, projected that Russia-China trade may reach $36 billion this year. The two countries are also expected to agree on the establishment of special economic zones, which was noted by a Chinese diplomat on Saturday as "one of the most important documents to be signed [during Putin's visit] at an inter-governmental level".
Energy is also a critical area for Sino-Russian cooperation. Bilateral initiatives are driven by Beijing's aggressive effort to secure reliable access to energy supplies to fuel its booming economy, which recently surpassed France and the United Kingdom as the world's fourth-fastest-growing, at an annual rate of roughly 10%. As the world's second-largest importer of oil (nearly 130 million barrels in 2005), with demand projected to grow roughly 7% in 2006, China naturally looks to the Russian Far East as a source for imports.
Russia currently provides 8% of China's energy needs, and is expected to ship nearly 15 million tons of oil to China this year - nearly double last year's level. Already the amount shipped this January via the Trans-Siberian Mainline Railway was up 42% from the same period in 2005. Yet Russia's ability to meet the 2006 target remains unclear as, among other reasons, the imperiled Yukos will have difficulty even meeting previous years' export levels.
The two countries have been engaged in discussions for expanding energy cooperation on a number of fronts, and Putin's visit to Beijing is widely expected to finalize - if not add substantive momentum to - talks about oil and gas pipeline projects. For instance, Russian state energy firm Gazprom announced on March 13 that it will sign a memorandum with China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) agreeing to build gas pipelines to China's Xinjiang region. The budget and prospective date of completion are unknown.
The signing will occur during Putin's visit, and will build on negotiations that were initiated last December between the two energy companies. Beijing has been seeking ways to raise the level of gas as a percentage of total energy consumption to 8-10% by 2010, doubling current figures. Gazprom chief executive officer Alexander Medvedev said the signing of an agreement in Beijing this month will "stipulate the price formula" for gas shipments.
Putin's visit may also provide a push to negotiations about a cross-border oil pipeline from Siberia to northeastern China. Such a pipeline would be an offshoot of the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline, which received final approval from Russian authorities at the end of February, overcoming vociferous criticism from environmental groups concerned about the pipeline's proximity to Lake Baikal and the possibility of oil seepage into the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site.
On March 11, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov, who is also co-chairman of the Russian-Chinese commission for cooperation in education, culture, health care and sports, announced that the Russian state oil giant Transneft would construct the ESPO line through Siberia to the Pacific coast, with a possible spur to China. The first stage of the $11 billion, two-stage pipeline will run 2,400 kilometers from Taishet in Ikurtsk region to Skovorodino in Amur region and is due for completion in 2008; the second stage consists of a pipeline from Skovorodino to Perevoznaya Bay for export to Japan and other Asia-Pacific economies.
The agenda for Putin's visit is expected to include discussions about an ESPO offshoot from Skovorodino that will link up with China's energy grid in Daqing. China has lobbied intensively for this separate pipeline, fearing that Siberian oil supplies will be directed instead to Japan. A possible Daqing spur is expected to deliver a total capacity of 30 million tons of crude to China, with the remaining 50 million proceeding to the terminal at Perevoznaya.
A lasting partnership
During the past year, Russia and China have taken measures to improve their bilateral relationship, and Putin's visit is sure to strengthen ties. Moscow and Beijing recognize their mutual interests in Central Asia, both in terms of limiting US encroachment and weakening revolutionary forces in the region. Although debates persist about sales of advanced weaponry, China's security calculus still requires a reliance on imported Russian arms that, in turn, sustains Moscow's defense economy.
The most contentious aspect of the bilateral relationship is in the energy arena: Russia has historically been reluctant to allow Chinese investment in this strategic sector, and unwilling to commit firmly to the construction of cross-border oil pipelines. Yet recent developments may portend changes in this area. Russia's readiness to establish a direct energy corridor to China ensures that relations will continue to intensify in the near term, although it remains unclear whether continued cooperation - in political, military, and economic areas - will lead to a truly durable partnership.
Rian Jensen is the associate editor of China Brief, a journal published by the Jamestown Foundation. Erich Marquardt is the publications coordinator at the Jamestown Foundation. The views expressed in this article are their own, and do not represent the Jamestown Foundation.
Print Story: Bush sees US in Iraq after his term on Yahoo! News
Print Story: Bush sees US in Iraq after his term on Yahoo! News
By Steve HollandTue Mar 21, 4:28 PM ET
President George W. Bush said on Tuesday it is possible some U.S. troops will still be in Iraq after his presidency ends in three years time, but he insisted civil war had not erupted there.
Washington has resisted setting a timetable for withdrawal although American officials have said a substantial pullout could start later this year and many of Bush's Republican allies are anxious to show progress before U.S. congressional elections in November.
With Iraqi leaders and the U.S. ambassador warning of the imminent risk of civil war in Iraq, the 133,000 heavily armed U.S. troops are seen as vital in stemming violence.
Asked when all U.S. forces would finally pull out of Iraq, Bush told a White House news conference: "That will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."
Bush must step down when his term ends in January 2009.
White House officials cautioned that Bush was asked when "all" U.S. forces would withdraw and pointed to recent comments from U.S. generals in Iraq predicting substantial reductions later this year and into 2007.
Defense officials also said Army Gen. John Abizaid, who oversees U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as head of Central Command, had agreed to keep the job at least another year at the request of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking to troops in Illinois, held out hope for troop reductions but said the decisions would be made by military commanders.
"As the Iraqi forces gain strength and experience, and as the political process advances, we'll be able to decrease troop levels without losing our capacity to defeat the terrorists," Cheney told soldiers at Scott Air Force Base.
CIVILIAN KILLINGS
As Bush addressed Americans' concerns on Iraq three years after the U.S. invasion, Iraqis voiced new complaints about alleged killings of civilians by U.S. troops.
The military announced a second investigation in the space of a few days into accusations that soldiers shot women and children in their homes.
A U.S. Army dog handler was convicted of abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison and faces more than eight years in jail.
The U.S.-trained Iraqi forces that Washington hopes will take on most security tasks suffered one of their worst setbacks when suspected al Qaeda guerrillas killed at least 22 people, mostly policemen, and freed over 30 prisoners from jail.
About 100 insurgents staged the dawn raid on two official buildings in Miqdadiya, northeast of Baghdad, officials said. Ten of the attackers were also killed, one source said.
Bush dismissed comments from former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that sectarian violence constituted civil war, saying it was a good sign that an attack a month ago on a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra failed to spark all-out conflict.
"The way I look at it, the Iraqis took a look and decided not to give in to civil war," Bush said.
UPBEAT MESSAGE
Despite grim images on television screens of death and mayhem, Bush remained upbeat. "I'm optimistic we'll succeed," he said. "If not, I'd pull our troops out. If I didn't believe we had a plan for victory, I wouldn't leave our people in harm's way."
In Iraq, a delegation of U.S. senators expressed impatience with Iraqi leaders' failure, three months after an election, to form a government that could help contain the conflict.
"The American people are of good heart ... but do not try in any way to deceive them or let this progress indicate to the world a less than sincere and prompt effort to bring about a new government," John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after meeting Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
"There has to be some pressure put on political leaders to reach a settlement," said his Democratic colleague Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record). "The American people are impatient."
A U.S. soldier was shot dead in Baghdad Tuesday, the 2,319th American serviceman to die in the conflict.
The U.S. military said it was investigating Iraqi police allegations that its troops shot dead a family of 11, including five children, in their home at Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, last week. Soldiers said they killed four, including a militant.
The probe began after a magazine published allegations that U.S. Marines killed 15 civilians in another town last year. A criminal inquiry into those deaths was launched last week.
(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria in Washington, Michael Georgy, Ross Colvin, Aseel Kami, Mariam Karouny, Omar al-Ibadi and Hiba Moussa in Baghdad and Ali al-Mashhadani in Haditha)
By Steve HollandTue Mar 21, 4:28 PM ET
President George W. Bush said on Tuesday it is possible some U.S. troops will still be in Iraq after his presidency ends in three years time, but he insisted civil war had not erupted there.
Washington has resisted setting a timetable for withdrawal although American officials have said a substantial pullout could start later this year and many of Bush's Republican allies are anxious to show progress before U.S. congressional elections in November.
With Iraqi leaders and the U.S. ambassador warning of the imminent risk of civil war in Iraq, the 133,000 heavily armed U.S. troops are seen as vital in stemming violence.
Asked when all U.S. forces would finally pull out of Iraq, Bush told a White House news conference: "That will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."
Bush must step down when his term ends in January 2009.
White House officials cautioned that Bush was asked when "all" U.S. forces would withdraw and pointed to recent comments from U.S. generals in Iraq predicting substantial reductions later this year and into 2007.
Defense officials also said Army Gen. John Abizaid, who oversees U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as head of Central Command, had agreed to keep the job at least another year at the request of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking to troops in Illinois, held out hope for troop reductions but said the decisions would be made by military commanders.
"As the Iraqi forces gain strength and experience, and as the political process advances, we'll be able to decrease troop levels without losing our capacity to defeat the terrorists," Cheney told soldiers at Scott Air Force Base.
CIVILIAN KILLINGS
As Bush addressed Americans' concerns on Iraq three years after the U.S. invasion, Iraqis voiced new complaints about alleged killings of civilians by U.S. troops.
The military announced a second investigation in the space of a few days into accusations that soldiers shot women and children in their homes.
A U.S. Army dog handler was convicted of abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison and faces more than eight years in jail.
The U.S.-trained Iraqi forces that Washington hopes will take on most security tasks suffered one of their worst setbacks when suspected al Qaeda guerrillas killed at least 22 people, mostly policemen, and freed over 30 prisoners from jail.
About 100 insurgents staged the dawn raid on two official buildings in Miqdadiya, northeast of Baghdad, officials said. Ten of the attackers were also killed, one source said.
Bush dismissed comments from former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that sectarian violence constituted civil war, saying it was a good sign that an attack a month ago on a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra failed to spark all-out conflict.
"The way I look at it, the Iraqis took a look and decided not to give in to civil war," Bush said.
UPBEAT MESSAGE
Despite grim images on television screens of death and mayhem, Bush remained upbeat. "I'm optimistic we'll succeed," he said. "If not, I'd pull our troops out. If I didn't believe we had a plan for victory, I wouldn't leave our people in harm's way."
In Iraq, a delegation of U.S. senators expressed impatience with Iraqi leaders' failure, three months after an election, to form a government that could help contain the conflict.
"The American people are of good heart ... but do not try in any way to deceive them or let this progress indicate to the world a less than sincere and prompt effort to bring about a new government," John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after meeting Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
"There has to be some pressure put on political leaders to reach a settlement," said his Democratic colleague Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record). "The American people are impatient."
A U.S. soldier was shot dead in Baghdad Tuesday, the 2,319th American serviceman to die in the conflict.
The U.S. military said it was investigating Iraqi police allegations that its troops shot dead a family of 11, including five children, in their home at Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, last week. Soldiers said they killed four, including a militant.
The probe began after a magazine published allegations that U.S. Marines killed 15 civilians in another town last year. A criminal inquiry into those deaths was launched last week.
(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria in Washington, Michael Georgy, Ross Colvin, Aseel Kami, Mariam Karouny, Omar al-Ibadi and Hiba Moussa in Baghdad and Ali al-Mashhadani in Haditha)
What's Become of Americans? - by Paul Craig Roberts
What's Become of Americans? - by Paul Craig Roberts
Imagine knocking on America's door and being told, "Americans don't live here any longer. They have gone away."
But isn't that what we are hearing, that Americans have gone away? Alan Shore told us so on ABC's Boston Legal on March 14:
"When the weapons of mass destruction thing turned out not to be true, I expected the American people to rise up. They didn't.
"Then, when the Abu Ghraib torture thing surfaced and it was revealed that our government participated in rendition, a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure then the American people would be heard from. We stood mute.
"Then came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called terrorist suspects, locked them up without the right to a trial or even the right to confront their accusers. Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did.
"And now, it's been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven't.
"In fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the message is we're okay with it all. Torture, warrantless search and seizure, illegal wiretappings, prison without a fair trial or any trial, war on false pretenses. We, as a citizenry, are apparently not offended.
"There are no demonstrations on college campuses. In fact, there's no clear indication that young people even seem to notice. …
"The Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest. Stop for a second and try to fathom that. At a presidential rally, parade, or appearance, if you have on a supportive T-shirt, you can be there. If you're wearing or carrying something in protest, you can be removed.
"This! In the United States of America."
Readers tell me that Americans don't live here any more. They ask what responsible American citizenry would put up with the trashing of the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers, with wars based on deception, and with pathological liars in control of their government? One reader recently wrote that he believes that "no element of the U.S. government has been left untainted" by the lies and manipulations that have driven away accountability. So-called leaders, he wrote, "talk a great story of American pride and patriotism," but in their hands patriotism is merely a device for "cynical manipulation and fraud."
The Bush regime acknowledges that 30,000 Iraqi civilians, largely women and children, have been killed as a result of Bush's invasion. Others who have looked at civilian casualties with greater attention have come up with numbers three to six times as large. The Johns Hopkins study accounted for 98,000 civilian deaths. Alex Cockburn, using more sophisticated statistical analysis, concluded that 180,000 Iraqis died as a result of Bush's invasion. The former prime minister Iyad Allawi says that Iraqi sectarian violence alone is claiming 50-60 deaths per day, or 18,000-22,000 annually, a figure that could quickly worsen.
Some were killed by "smart bombs" that weren't very smart and dropped on hospitals, schools, and weddings. Others were mistaken for resistance fighters and killed. Still others were killed by spooked, trigger-happy U.S. troops. And many died due to the breakdown of the Iraqi health system.
Now comes a report in the online edition of Time magazine that U.S. Marines went on a rampage in the village of Haditha and deliberately slaughtered 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes. The Iraqis were still in their bed clothes, and 10 of the 15 were women and children.
The Marines turned in a false report that the civilians were killed by an insurgent bomb. But the evidence of wanton carnage was too powerful. Pressed by Time's collection of evidence, U.S. military officials in Baghdad opened an investigation. Time reports that "according to military officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military's initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which will conduct a criminal investigation."
If this story is true, under Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush's leadership, proud and honorable U.S. Marines have degenerated into the Waffen SS. Those of us raised on John Wayne war movies find this very hard to take.
A fish rots from the head. Clearly, deception in the Oval Office is corrupting the U.S. military. One reader reported that on March 19 his local PBS station aired a program that discussed the deaths of two young American soldiers in friendly fire incidents similar to Pat Tillman's death. In each case, he reports, "elements within the military falsified reports and attempted to shift blame to either enemy combatants or allied (Polish) forces."
The neocons have yet to tell us the real reason for their assault on Iraq, which has so far produced 20,000 dead, maimed, and wounded U.S. soldiers, between 30,000 and 180,000 (and rising) Iraqi civilians, and demoralized U.S. Marines to the point that they commit atrocities on women and children.
Would real Americans accept these blows for the sake of an undeclared agenda? Perhaps it is true that Americans don't live here any longer.
The War Party in Disarray- by Justin Raimondo
The War Party in Disarray- by Justin Raimondo
| |
| by Justin Raimondo |
| It isn't looking so good for the War Party. As things fall apart on the ground in Iraq, a similar process of disintegration is occurring on the home front. It seems as if there are almost daily defections from the ranks, and – as the blame game gets underway – our war birds are turning on each other, with Donald "Super-Stud" Rumsfeld, once hailed as the War Party's answer to George Clooney, now in the neocons' crosshairs. As for our commander in chief, his poll numbers are at an all-time low, and he seems to have retreated so deeply into a world of delusion that not even the outbreak of full-scale civil war in Iraq can shock him out of his mental catatonia. Worse yet, as the ostensible rationales for the invasion of Iraq are debunked and fall by the wayside, the War Party's real motivation for bringing about what Gen. William E. Odom has rightly called the biggest strategic disaster in our history has come out in the wash. "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a study by John J. Mearsheimer, the doyen of foreign policy realism, and Stephen M. Walt, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has blasted the scales from our eyes. While not falling into the trap of identifying the efforts of "the Lobby" as the sole reason for the radicalization of U.S. foreign policy in the post-9/11 era, their research clearly shows that this was the decisive factor. I have to say that this conclusion was fairly obvious early on: after all, if all the other rationalizations – WMD, Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda, uranium-pilfering in Niger – were pure bunk, then, by means of a simple process of elimination, we come to the geopolitical explanation as the only logical alternative. If the U.S. is systematically dismantling Arab regimes from Baghdad to Beirut to Tehran – and perhaps beyond – then the primary geostrategic beneficiary leaps out at any objective analyst. As I put it way back in 2003: "The Iraq war, as we are beginning to discover, had nothing to do with 'weapons of mass destruction,' zero to do with al-Qaeda, and zilch to do with implanting 'democracy' in the inhospitable soil of Iraq. The first phase of the second Yom Kippur War is revealing, in action, the strategic doctrine at the heart of U.S. Middle Eastern policy: the installation of Israel as regional hegemon." I am glad to see the Kennedy School is finally catching up to the level of analysis long available here at Antiwar.com: it's a good sign, albeit long overdue. Another good sign is the wellspring of hysteria that has arisen in the wake of the study's publication. Already Alan Dershowitz has smeared the distinguished authors as anti-Semites, and the Usual Suspects have launched a deafening chorus of caterwauling. Among the "arguments" raised by the study's detractors: David Duke has praised it, the Washington office of Fatah is handing out copies, and the Muslim Brotherhood likes it, too. None of which proves anything – except for the thesis, advanced by the study's authors, that the role of the Lobby is to prevent any objective analysis and rational discussion of the very "special relationship" Israel enjoys with key U.S. policymakers. The Mearsheimer-Walt study is an important step in identifying how and why we are bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, but it is only a first step. The second, third, and fourth steps will come as we unravel the complex web of lies that lured us in on a variety of pretexts. What were the sources of the phony "intelligence" that made U.S. policymakers believe – or pretend to believe – Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" primed to launch at a moment's notice? More importantly, how did this ersatz data get pumped into the U.S. intelligence stream, and who injected it? As I wrote two years ago: "The concept of the Iraq war as a successful Israeli covert operation is altogether plausible. It would hardly be the first time a foreign government made a concerted effort to drag us into war on their side. " Those who are crying the loudest about this study are the same people who, when confronted with the news of an FBI raid – two of them! –on the headquarters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby that has long dominated the debate of Middle East policy on Capitol Hill, were either uncharacteristically silent or else in total denial. The arrest of Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, and charges of spying on behalf of Israel lodged against longtime AIPAC leader and spark plug Steve Rosen, and his associate Keith Weissman, should have alerted even the most loyal pro-Israel stalwarts that where there's so much smoke there has to be some real fire. Seen as background to the mid-April trial of Rosen and Weissman, the Mearsheimer-Walt study throws some real light on a situation that has long been untenable and may now be finally coming to a head. NOTES IN THE MARGIN Speaking of the effort to drag us into war on Israel's behalf, I see that The American Conservative has put my piece, "Hillary the Hawk," online. While this very canny politician takes every opportunity to condemn the Bush administration for misleading the American people on Iraq, she is equally opportunistic when it comes to a very similar effort by the War Party to menace Iran. And all too many "antiwar" Democrats are falling for it, I'm afraid: perhaps my piece will do something to open their eyes. In any case, I apologize for the brevity of this column: I'm in the middle of preparing for a 10-day trip to New York and Connecticut, where I'll be speaking to the Yale Political Union on April 10. I'm also working on a book, tentatively titled The Bizarro War, which expands on my thesis that 9/11 blasted us into an alternate reality where the rules of logic are inverted and the insane is the "rational." So check out "Hillary the Hawk," and the rest of that issue of The American Conservative, too: there is some really great stuff in there, especially this, and this, and certainly this – not to mention this, and that. |
Iran poses threat to dominance of the US dollar - Pravda.Ru
Iran poses threat to dominance of the US dollar - Pravda.Ru
Iran poses threat to dominance of the US dollar
21.03.2006 Source: URL: http://english.pravda.ru/world/asia/77628-oil-0
This week in the world of economics began with the opening of the international oil exchange in Iran. The intrigue of the situation is accentuated by the fact that trading will take place in the European currency. This in itself is setting a precedent: in modern history oil has been quoted exclusively in dollars.
Alarmists and antiglobalists from all countries have rushed to describe this as yet another sentence against the hegemony of the dollar and the USA. It can not be ruled out that this idea is what is motivating the Iranian authorities. At the height of tension in relations between the USA and Iran the latter’s move looks like a blow to the economic power of its enemy.
This cannot be deemed a weak blow – Iran has a share of at least 4% of worldwide oil production. Moreover, it has been declared that the format of the exchange will meet international norms: the question now is: which other of the Persian Gulf states will support Iran?
“The situation there will depend on the extent to which other countries and regions will want to convert from the dollar to the euro,” the analyst of IK ‘FINAM” Olga Belenkaya told Pravda.Ru. “It is not a fact that Saudi Arabia will want to convert to the euro. If this is just something inside Iran, which will be selling oil in euros, then it is not very dangerous, because all the same its share in oil production is not that great.”
Analysts are for the moment being cautious in their predictions – everyone is advising to wait and see how this week at least will turn out. The dollar has slipped somewhat in world markets, but experts tend to think that this small fall was caused by the events of last week.
In order to contemplate the consequences of the opening of the euro oil market in Iran, it is necessary to look at its origins. However surprising this may be, the man behind the idea is the British financier Chris Cook, former director of the International Petroleum Exchange in London. In 2001 he wrote a letter to the head of the Iranian Central Bank Mohsen Nourbakhsh.
The letter said that the structure of the international oil markets is closely linked to trade brokers, and especially to investment banks, which has a disadvantageous effect on states such as Iran, which are both producers and consumers at the same time. Chris Cook advised Iran to make a decision as soon as possible about creating a Middle East exchange for energy resources which would set a new standard for oil prices in the Persian Gulf .
And not a word was said about “opposing the Atlanticists”. Ideas for shaking the dollar through unilateral efforts have always fallen apart – Iran , if anyone, should know about that.
We remember how at the end of the 1970s, when the OPEC countries agreed to sell oil for dollars and inflated the selling cost of a barrel, oil prices rocketed up by 400%. France, Germany and Japan suddenly decided to purchase oil in their own currencies and thus lower the pressure from the American currency.
In reply the US Treasury and the Pentagon did everything they could to ensure that this did not happen: secret diplomatic treaties, threats and military agreements were taken between the USA and the main OPEC oil producer, Saudi Arabia .
This is what started a new stage in the unlimited power of American financial system. Profit from the export of oil dollars by OPEC countries ended up in the hands of large banks in New York and London and resurfaced in the form of loans to countries experiencing an oil deficit. For example, to Brazil and Argentina, which would later be caught up in the quagmire of the tragic Latin American debt crisis.
Another example of a revolt against the oil dollar took place in Iraq. Two years before the US invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein switched from the dollar to the euro. This was one of the reasons for the aggression of American forces against this country.
The Americans have come up with plenty of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. Therefore it is logical to assume that with the slightest danger to the American financial world order, the White House will put an end to the Iranian experiment in trading oil for euros with the use of winged missiles and Abrams tanks.
The opinion of Europe, which presumably morally supports Iran ’s initiative, will remain as just that – as it did in all the global massacres of recent years.
It is Russia who really might be hit by the opening of the oil exchange in Iran. In any case, Russian analysts are not ruling out this turn of events.
“There are rumours going around that Europe is looking for alternative fuel suppliers,” Rosbank analyst Pavel Suprunov told Pravda.ru. After the fuel crises during the winter, Europeans are extremely concerned by their heavy dependence on Russia, therefore they would like to diversify their supplies. “I think that there is nowhere left for them to go, they have to look at the Middle East ,” says Suprunov.
The analyst does not exclude the possibility that, with the help of the Iranian oil exchange, the Old World countries may try to work more closely with oil exporters from the Middle East. “They have already declared that they will strive to increase their supplies from there”, affirms Suprunov.
But once again not enough has been done to talk about this with any degree of certainty. Several scandalous researchers are already calling this a decisive week for the American dollar.
“Analysts do not tend to exaggerate the threat of major upheavals. They are cautious: I think we will be hearing about Iran and the euro many more times,” says Suprunov. But he irrevocably adds that now is not the time to connect the faltering of currency markets with the opening of this exchange.
Sergei Malinin for Pravda.Ru
Translated by James Platt
Iran poses threat to dominance of the US dollar
21.03.2006 Source: URL: http://english.pravda.ru/world/asia/77628-oil-0
This week in the world of economics began with the opening of the international oil exchange in Iran. The intrigue of the situation is accentuated by the fact that trading will take place in the European currency. This in itself is setting a precedent: in modern history oil has been quoted exclusively in dollars.
Alarmists and antiglobalists from all countries have rushed to describe this as yet another sentence against the hegemony of the dollar and the USA. It can not be ruled out that this idea is what is motivating the Iranian authorities. At the height of tension in relations between the USA and Iran the latter’s move looks like a blow to the economic power of its enemy.
This cannot be deemed a weak blow – Iran has a share of at least 4% of worldwide oil production. Moreover, it has been declared that the format of the exchange will meet international norms: the question now is: which other of the Persian Gulf states will support Iran?
“The situation there will depend on the extent to which other countries and regions will want to convert from the dollar to the euro,” the analyst of IK ‘FINAM” Olga Belenkaya told Pravda.Ru. “It is not a fact that Saudi Arabia will want to convert to the euro. If this is just something inside Iran, which will be selling oil in euros, then it is not very dangerous, because all the same its share in oil production is not that great.”
Analysts are for the moment being cautious in their predictions – everyone is advising to wait and see how this week at least will turn out. The dollar has slipped somewhat in world markets, but experts tend to think that this small fall was caused by the events of last week.
In order to contemplate the consequences of the opening of the euro oil market in Iran, it is necessary to look at its origins. However surprising this may be, the man behind the idea is the British financier Chris Cook, former director of the International Petroleum Exchange in London. In 2001 he wrote a letter to the head of the Iranian Central Bank Mohsen Nourbakhsh.
The letter said that the structure of the international oil markets is closely linked to trade brokers, and especially to investment banks, which has a disadvantageous effect on states such as Iran, which are both producers and consumers at the same time. Chris Cook advised Iran to make a decision as soon as possible about creating a Middle East exchange for energy resources which would set a new standard for oil prices in the Persian Gulf .
And not a word was said about “opposing the Atlanticists”. Ideas for shaking the dollar through unilateral efforts have always fallen apart – Iran , if anyone, should know about that.
We remember how at the end of the 1970s, when the OPEC countries agreed to sell oil for dollars and inflated the selling cost of a barrel, oil prices rocketed up by 400%. France, Germany and Japan suddenly decided to purchase oil in their own currencies and thus lower the pressure from the American currency.
In reply the US Treasury and the Pentagon did everything they could to ensure that this did not happen: secret diplomatic treaties, threats and military agreements were taken between the USA and the main OPEC oil producer, Saudi Arabia .
This is what started a new stage in the unlimited power of American financial system. Profit from the export of oil dollars by OPEC countries ended up in the hands of large banks in New York and London and resurfaced in the form of loans to countries experiencing an oil deficit. For example, to Brazil and Argentina, which would later be caught up in the quagmire of the tragic Latin American debt crisis.
Another example of a revolt against the oil dollar took place in Iraq. Two years before the US invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein switched from the dollar to the euro. This was one of the reasons for the aggression of American forces against this country.
The Americans have come up with plenty of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. Therefore it is logical to assume that with the slightest danger to the American financial world order, the White House will put an end to the Iranian experiment in trading oil for euros with the use of winged missiles and Abrams tanks.
The opinion of Europe, which presumably morally supports Iran ’s initiative, will remain as just that – as it did in all the global massacres of recent years.
It is Russia who really might be hit by the opening of the oil exchange in Iran. In any case, Russian analysts are not ruling out this turn of events.
“There are rumours going around that Europe is looking for alternative fuel suppliers,” Rosbank analyst Pavel Suprunov told Pravda.ru. After the fuel crises during the winter, Europeans are extremely concerned by their heavy dependence on Russia, therefore they would like to diversify their supplies. “I think that there is nowhere left for them to go, they have to look at the Middle East ,” says Suprunov.
The analyst does not exclude the possibility that, with the help of the Iranian oil exchange, the Old World countries may try to work more closely with oil exporters from the Middle East. “They have already declared that they will strive to increase their supplies from there”, affirms Suprunov.
But once again not enough has been done to talk about this with any degree of certainty. Several scandalous researchers are already calling this a decisive week for the American dollar.
“Analysts do not tend to exaggerate the threat of major upheavals. They are cautious: I think we will be hearing about Iran and the euro many more times,” says Suprunov. But he irrevocably adds that now is not the time to connect the faltering of currency markets with the opening of this exchange.
Sergei Malinin for Pravda.Ru
Translated by James Platt
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Anthony Arnove | The Logic of Withdrawal
Anthony Arnove | The Logic of Withdrawal
Saturday 18 March 2006
We find ourselves in a remarkable situation today. Despite a massive propaganda campaign in support of the occupation of Iraq, a clear majority of people in the United States now believes the invasion was not worth the consequences and should never have been undertaken.
Likewise, people strongly disapprove of the foreign policy of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, particularly their position on the war in Iraq. In a September 2005 New York Times-CBS News poll, support for immediate withdrawal stood at 52 percent, a remarkable figure when one considers that very few political organizations have articulated an "Out Now" position.
The official justifications for the war have been exposed as complete fallacies. Even conservative defenders of U.S. empire now complain that the situation in Iraq is a disaster.
Yet many people who opposed this unjust invasion, who opposed the 1991 Gulf War and the sanctions on Iraq for years before that, some of whom joined mass demonstrations against the war before it began, have been persuaded that the U.S. military should now remain in Iraq for the benefit of the Iraqi people. We confront the strange situation of many people mobilizing against an unjust war but then reluctantly supporting the military occupation that flows directly from it.
In part, this position is rooted in the pessimistic conclusions many drew after the February 15, 2003,day of international demonstrations-perhaps the largest coordinated protest in human history-failed to prevent the war. This pessimism was exacerbated by some of the leading spokespeople for the antiwar movement, who misled audiences by suggesting that the demonstrations could stop the war. As inspiring as the demonstrations were, it would have taken a significantly higher degree of protest, organization, and disruption of business as usual to do so.
The lesson of February 15 is not that protest no longer works, but that protest needs to be sustained, coherent, forceful, persistent, and bold-rather than episodic and isolated. And it needs to involve large numbers of working-class people, veterans, military families, conscientious objectors, Arabs, Muslims, and other people from targeted communities, not just as passive observers but as active participants and leaders.
We will need this kind of protest to end the occupation of Iraq. But we will also need to be able to answer the objections and concerns of thoughtful, well-meaning people who have been persuaded by one or more of the arguments for why U.S. troops should remain in Iraq, at least until "stability" is restored. Below, I outline eight reasons why the United States should leave Iraq immediately, addressing common arguments for why the United States needs to "stay the course."
The US Military Has No Right to Be in Iraq in the First Place
The Bush administration built its case for invading Iraq on a series of deceptions. The war in Iraq was sold on the idea that the United States was preempting a terrorist attack by Iraq. But Iraq posed no threat. The country was disarmed and had overwhelmingly complied with the extremely invasive weapons inspections. In a rare moment of honesty, Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN in March 2001,"I don't believe [Saddam Hussein] is a significant military threat today."
As the case for war has crumbled, so has the case for occupation, which also rests on the idea that the United States can violate the sovereignty of the Iraqi people and all the laws of occupation, such as the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which clearly restrict the right of occupying powers to interfere in the internal affairs of an occupied people.
The United States Is Not Bringing Democracy to Iraq
Having failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq-the first big lie of the invasion-the United States has turned to a new big lie: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, John Negroponte, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton, and their friends are bringing democracy to the Iraqi people.
Democracy has nothing to do with why the United States is in Iraq. The Bush administration invaded Iraq to secure long-established imperial interests in the Middle East-the same reason Washington backed Saddam Hussein as he carried out the worst of his crimes against the Iraqi people, the Kurds, and the Iranians
By invading Iraq, Washington hoped not only to install a regime more favorable to U.S. oil interests; it hoped to use Iraq as a staging ground for further interventions to redraw the map of the Middle East. Several U.S. bases have been established in Iraq and are likely to remain long after U.S. troops are expelled. All of this has nothing to do with democracy. In fact, the United States has long been a major obstacle to any secular, democratic, nationalist, or socialist movements in the region that stood for fundamental change, preferring instead what is euphemistically called "stability," even if it meant supporting the most reactionary fundamentalist religious forces or repressive regimes.
The U.S. government opposes genuine democracy in the Middle East for a simple reason: if ordinary people controlled the region's energy resources, they might be put toward local economic development and social needs, rather than going to fuel the profits of Western oil companies.
Democracy cannot be "installed" by outside powers, at gunpoint. Genuine democracy can come about only through the struggle of people for control over their own lives and circumstances, through movements that are themselves democratic in nature. When confronted with such movements, such as the 1991 Iraqi uprising, the U.S. government has consistently preferred to see them crushed than to see them succeed.
The United States Is Not Making the World a Safer Place by Occupying Iraq
The invasion of Iraq has made the world a far more unstable and dangerous place. By invading Iraq, Washington sent the message to other states that anything goes in the so-called war on terror.
After September 11,India called its nuclear rival Pakistan an "epicenter of terrorism." Israel has carried out "targeted assassinations" of Palestinians, bombed Syria, and threatened to strike Iran, using the same rationale that Bush did for the invasion of Iraq." You don't negotiate with terrorism, you uproot it. This is simply the doctrine of Mr. Bush that we're following," explained Uzi Landau, Israel's minister of public security.
Furthermore, the invasion of Iraq is spurring the drive for countries to develop a deterrent to U.S. power. The most likely response to the invasion of Iraq is that more countries will pursue nuclear weapons, which may be the only possible protection from attack, and will increase their spending on more conventional weapons systems. Each move in this game has a multiplier effect in a world that is already perilously close to the brink of self-annihilation through nuclear warfare or accident.
***and who will they buy them from , I wonder? I've always said this was a brochure war...EG:) **
Meanwhile, the invasion has also quite predictably increased the resentment and anger that many people feel against the United States and its allies, therefore making innocent people in these countries far more vulnerable to terrorism, as we saw in the deadly attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004, and London on July 7, 2005.
The United States is reviled not because people "hate our freedoms," as Bush suggests, but because people hate the very real impact of U.S. policies on their lives. As the British playwright and essayist Harold Pinter observed," People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back."
The United States Is Not Preventing Civil War in Iraq
Perhaps the greatest fear of many antiwar activists who now support the occupation is that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will lead to civil war. This idea has been encouraged repeatedly by supporters of the war. "Sectarian fault lines in Iraq are inexorably pushing the country towards civil war unless we actually intervene decisively to stem it," explained one U.S. Army official, making the case for a continued U.S.presence.
But Washington is not preventing a civil war from breaking out. In fact, occupation authorities are deliberately pitting Kurds against Arabs, Shia against Sunni, and faction against faction to influence the character of the future government, following a classic divide- and-rule strategy.
Taking this idea to its logical extreme, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman argues, "We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind." Such arguments are not just the fantasy of keyboard warriors like Friedman, however. As the journalist A.K. Gupta notes, "the Pentagon is arming, training, and funding" militias in Iraq "for use in counter-insurgency operations." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said such commandos were among "the forces that are going to have the greatest leverage on suppressing and eliminating the insurgencies."
In addition, the Iraqi constitution, drafted under intense pressure from occupation authorities, essentially enshrines sectarian divisions in Iraqi politics. And, finally, despite all of its rhetoric about confronting Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq, the United States has in fact encouraged it, bringing formerly marginalized fundamentalist parties such as the Dawa Party and the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq into the Iraqi government.
The United States Is Not Confronting Terrorism by Staying in Iraq
Iraq has never been the center of a terrorist threat to the United States. Each month, further evidence emerges that the Bush administration went to great lengths to suppress facts that undermined its case for war, while touting bogus evidence in its support. As the New York Times reported in November 2005, "A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document."
Al-Qaeda made its first appearance in Iraq only after the invasion, a predictable outcome of the U.S. occupation. In reality, the United States engaged in state terrorism under the pretext of fighting a terrorist threat that did not exist in Iraq, and in the process greatly increased the likelihood of individual and organizational terrorist acts targeting the United States or its proxies abroad.
Even more circular is the idea that the United States has to stay in Iraq until it "defeats" the resistance to the occupation. The occupation itself is the source of the resistance, a fact that even some of the people responsible for the war have been forced to acknowledge.
The United States Is Not Honoring Those Who Died by Continuing the Conflict
One of the most cynical reasons for staying in Iraq was advanced by President Bush in response to the growing public criticism over the mounting deaths of U.S. soldiers and the deliberate campaign by the administration to suppress images of the returning coffins. Speaking to a carefully targeted audience in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he fled to escape the protest of Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey, in Iraq on April 4, 2004, Bush made a rare public acknowledgment of the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We owe them something," he said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for. We will honor their sacrifice by staying on the offensive against the terrorists."
Sheehan herself had the best response to this attempt to manipulate people into supporting continued occupation, asking, "Why should I want one more mother to go through what I've gone through, because my son is dead?. . . I don't want him using my son's death or my family's sacrifice to continue the killing."
The soldiers in Iraq have not died for a "noble cause," as Bush claims. Whatever personal motivations may have brought them into the military, they died for oil, for empire, for power and profit. More deaths and injuries of Iraqis and of U.S. soldiers will only compound the tragedy of the numerous lives already lost.
The United States Is Not Rebuilding Iraq
The contractors now in Iraq are not there to help the people of Iraq but to help themselves, drawing on their close ties to influential politicians to secure contracts and profit from what Pratap Chatterjee rightly calls the "reconstruction racket."
The reality is, Halliburton, Bechtel, and the other companies in Iraq are looting the country far more than they are rebuilding it. Iraqis have been forced to pay elevated prices to import oil, benefiting corporations like Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, while ordinary Iraqis have to stand in lines sometimes for days to buy gasoline. Project after project remains unfinished. Hospitals are in shambles. Electricity is still at woefully inadequate levels.
As the journalist Naomi Klein eloquently observes, "The United States, having broken Iraq, is not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry" of economic strangulation.
The Iraqi people are perfectly capable of rebuilding their own society, in fact far more so than foreign soldiers or contractors. To the extent that there have been any social services or security in the last two years, it is primarily Iraqis who have provided it. During the years of sanctions, Iraqis also showed their immense resourcefulness in holding together their badly damaged infrastructure. Iraqi engineers, teachers, and doctors have long been among the most educated and best trained in the Arab world. It is ultimately a racist worldview that believes Iraqis cannot rebuild or run their own country.
The United States Is Not Fulfillig Its Obligation to the Iraqi People for the Harm and Suffering It Has Caused
Understandably, many opponents of the war now believe that the United States has an obligation to the Iraqi people and therefore has to stay to "clean up the mess it has created." MoveOn.org, which grabbed headlines and signed up millions of online members with its anti-Bush campaigning, refuses to call for withdrawal of troops from Iraq because, in the words of its executive director, Eli Pariser, "There are no good options in Iraq." Using this same logic, leading anti-sanctions and antiwar groups such as the Education for Peace in Iraq Center have formally adopted positions in support of occupation, if somehow a more enlightened occupation, and therefore against immediate withdrawal.
We must confront the bizarre logic of saying that the people who have devastated Iraq, who encouraged and enforced sanctions that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the last decade, who have failed at even the most basic responsibilities as an occupying power, who are the source of the instability in Iraq today, are the only ones who can protect Iraqis from hunger and anarchy. In no other area of our lives do we accept such logic, but when it comes to the crimes of empire, we are supposed to continually ignore history. The "doctrine of good intentions" exculpates all crimes.
The reality, however, is that the U.S. occupation, rather than being a source of stability in Iraq, is the major source of instability and ongoing suffering.
Moreover, those calling for immediate withdrawal do not advocate a position of isolationism and of simply walking away from any obligation to the Iraqi people. Does the U.S. government have an obligation to the Iraqi people? Absolutely. An obligation for the crimes Washington supported for years when Saddam Hussein was an ally. For arming and supporting both sides in the brutal Iran-Iraq War. For the destruction of the 1991 Gulf War. For the use of depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs, daisy cutters, and white phosphorus. For the devastating sanctions. For the humiliation and deaths caused by the 2003 invasion, and for the great damage the occupation has caused since.
But the first step in meeting this obligation is to withdraw immediately.
If there were any genuine justice for the people of Iraq, not only would the politicians responsible for this unjust war face prosecution for their crimes, but the U.S. government would be required to pay reparations to the Iraqi people and to the families of U.S. soldiers who have been maimed and killed by its criminal actions.
In demanding an end to the U.S. occupation, we do not need to call for some other occupying power to replace the United States. We should allow the people of Iraq to determine their own future. This means, as Naomi Klein has argued, that in addition to calling for an end to military occupation, we should be calling for an end to the economic occupation of Iraq and the cancellation of all debts that Iraq still owes from the previous regime (many of which still have not been forgiven). If the Iraqis ask for outside assistance, that is their prerogative. But it is their decision, not ours, to make, and that decision can only be freely made if the United States, United Kingdom, and other occupying armies withdraw completely and end their economic, political, and military coercion of Iraq.
--------
This article is adapted from Anthony Arnove's forthcoming book Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, due out in May from The New Press.
Saturday 18 March 2006
We find ourselves in a remarkable situation today. Despite a massive propaganda campaign in support of the occupation of Iraq, a clear majority of people in the United States now believes the invasion was not worth the consequences and should never have been undertaken.
Likewise, people strongly disapprove of the foreign policy of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, particularly their position on the war in Iraq. In a September 2005 New York Times-CBS News poll, support for immediate withdrawal stood at 52 percent, a remarkable figure when one considers that very few political organizations have articulated an "Out Now" position.
The official justifications for the war have been exposed as complete fallacies. Even conservative defenders of U.S. empire now complain that the situation in Iraq is a disaster.
Yet many people who opposed this unjust invasion, who opposed the 1991 Gulf War and the sanctions on Iraq for years before that, some of whom joined mass demonstrations against the war before it began, have been persuaded that the U.S. military should now remain in Iraq for the benefit of the Iraqi people. We confront the strange situation of many people mobilizing against an unjust war but then reluctantly supporting the military occupation that flows directly from it.
In part, this position is rooted in the pessimistic conclusions many drew after the February 15, 2003,day of international demonstrations-perhaps the largest coordinated protest in human history-failed to prevent the war. This pessimism was exacerbated by some of the leading spokespeople for the antiwar movement, who misled audiences by suggesting that the demonstrations could stop the war. As inspiring as the demonstrations were, it would have taken a significantly higher degree of protest, organization, and disruption of business as usual to do so.
The lesson of February 15 is not that protest no longer works, but that protest needs to be sustained, coherent, forceful, persistent, and bold-rather than episodic and isolated. And it needs to involve large numbers of working-class people, veterans, military families, conscientious objectors, Arabs, Muslims, and other people from targeted communities, not just as passive observers but as active participants and leaders.
We will need this kind of protest to end the occupation of Iraq. But we will also need to be able to answer the objections and concerns of thoughtful, well-meaning people who have been persuaded by one or more of the arguments for why U.S. troops should remain in Iraq, at least until "stability" is restored. Below, I outline eight reasons why the United States should leave Iraq immediately, addressing common arguments for why the United States needs to "stay the course."
The US Military Has No Right to Be in Iraq in the First Place
The Bush administration built its case for invading Iraq on a series of deceptions. The war in Iraq was sold on the idea that the United States was preempting a terrorist attack by Iraq. But Iraq posed no threat. The country was disarmed and had overwhelmingly complied with the extremely invasive weapons inspections. In a rare moment of honesty, Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN in March 2001,"I don't believe [Saddam Hussein] is a significant military threat today."
As the case for war has crumbled, so has the case for occupation, which also rests on the idea that the United States can violate the sovereignty of the Iraqi people and all the laws of occupation, such as the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which clearly restrict the right of occupying powers to interfere in the internal affairs of an occupied people.
The United States Is Not Bringing Democracy to Iraq
Having failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq-the first big lie of the invasion-the United States has turned to a new big lie: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, John Negroponte, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton, and their friends are bringing democracy to the Iraqi people.
Democracy has nothing to do with why the United States is in Iraq. The Bush administration invaded Iraq to secure long-established imperial interests in the Middle East-the same reason Washington backed Saddam Hussein as he carried out the worst of his crimes against the Iraqi people, the Kurds, and the Iranians
By invading Iraq, Washington hoped not only to install a regime more favorable to U.S. oil interests; it hoped to use Iraq as a staging ground for further interventions to redraw the map of the Middle East. Several U.S. bases have been established in Iraq and are likely to remain long after U.S. troops are expelled. All of this has nothing to do with democracy. In fact, the United States has long been a major obstacle to any secular, democratic, nationalist, or socialist movements in the region that stood for fundamental change, preferring instead what is euphemistically called "stability," even if it meant supporting the most reactionary fundamentalist religious forces or repressive regimes.
The U.S. government opposes genuine democracy in the Middle East for a simple reason: if ordinary people controlled the region's energy resources, they might be put toward local economic development and social needs, rather than going to fuel the profits of Western oil companies.
Democracy cannot be "installed" by outside powers, at gunpoint. Genuine democracy can come about only through the struggle of people for control over their own lives and circumstances, through movements that are themselves democratic in nature. When confronted with such movements, such as the 1991 Iraqi uprising, the U.S. government has consistently preferred to see them crushed than to see them succeed.
The United States Is Not Making the World a Safer Place by Occupying Iraq
The invasion of Iraq has made the world a far more unstable and dangerous place. By invading Iraq, Washington sent the message to other states that anything goes in the so-called war on terror.
After September 11,India called its nuclear rival Pakistan an "epicenter of terrorism." Israel has carried out "targeted assassinations" of Palestinians, bombed Syria, and threatened to strike Iran, using the same rationale that Bush did for the invasion of Iraq." You don't negotiate with terrorism, you uproot it. This is simply the doctrine of Mr. Bush that we're following," explained Uzi Landau, Israel's minister of public security.
Furthermore, the invasion of Iraq is spurring the drive for countries to develop a deterrent to U.S. power. The most likely response to the invasion of Iraq is that more countries will pursue nuclear weapons, which may be the only possible protection from attack, and will increase their spending on more conventional weapons systems. Each move in this game has a multiplier effect in a world that is already perilously close to the brink of self-annihilation through nuclear warfare or accident.
***and who will they buy them from , I wonder? I've always said this was a brochure war...EG:) **
Meanwhile, the invasion has also quite predictably increased the resentment and anger that many people feel against the United States and its allies, therefore making innocent people in these countries far more vulnerable to terrorism, as we saw in the deadly attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004, and London on July 7, 2005.
The United States is reviled not because people "hate our freedoms," as Bush suggests, but because people hate the very real impact of U.S. policies on their lives. As the British playwright and essayist Harold Pinter observed," People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back."
The United States Is Not Preventing Civil War in Iraq
Perhaps the greatest fear of many antiwar activists who now support the occupation is that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will lead to civil war. This idea has been encouraged repeatedly by supporters of the war. "Sectarian fault lines in Iraq are inexorably pushing the country towards civil war unless we actually intervene decisively to stem it," explained one U.S. Army official, making the case for a continued U.S.presence.
But Washington is not preventing a civil war from breaking out. In fact, occupation authorities are deliberately pitting Kurds against Arabs, Shia against Sunni, and faction against faction to influence the character of the future government, following a classic divide- and-rule strategy.
Taking this idea to its logical extreme, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman argues, "We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind." Such arguments are not just the fantasy of keyboard warriors like Friedman, however. As the journalist A.K. Gupta notes, "the Pentagon is arming, training, and funding" militias in Iraq "for use in counter-insurgency operations." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said such commandos were among "the forces that are going to have the greatest leverage on suppressing and eliminating the insurgencies."
In addition, the Iraqi constitution, drafted under intense pressure from occupation authorities, essentially enshrines sectarian divisions in Iraqi politics. And, finally, despite all of its rhetoric about confronting Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq, the United States has in fact encouraged it, bringing formerly marginalized fundamentalist parties such as the Dawa Party and the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq into the Iraqi government.
The United States Is Not Confronting Terrorism by Staying in Iraq
Iraq has never been the center of a terrorist threat to the United States. Each month, further evidence emerges that the Bush administration went to great lengths to suppress facts that undermined its case for war, while touting bogus evidence in its support. As the New York Times reported in November 2005, "A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document."
Al-Qaeda made its first appearance in Iraq only after the invasion, a predictable outcome of the U.S. occupation. In reality, the United States engaged in state terrorism under the pretext of fighting a terrorist threat that did not exist in Iraq, and in the process greatly increased the likelihood of individual and organizational terrorist acts targeting the United States or its proxies abroad.
Even more circular is the idea that the United States has to stay in Iraq until it "defeats" the resistance to the occupation. The occupation itself is the source of the resistance, a fact that even some of the people responsible for the war have been forced to acknowledge.
The United States Is Not Honoring Those Who Died by Continuing the Conflict
One of the most cynical reasons for staying in Iraq was advanced by President Bush in response to the growing public criticism over the mounting deaths of U.S. soldiers and the deliberate campaign by the administration to suppress images of the returning coffins. Speaking to a carefully targeted audience in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he fled to escape the protest of Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey, in Iraq on April 4, 2004, Bush made a rare public acknowledgment of the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We owe them something," he said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for. We will honor their sacrifice by staying on the offensive against the terrorists."
Sheehan herself had the best response to this attempt to manipulate people into supporting continued occupation, asking, "Why should I want one more mother to go through what I've gone through, because my son is dead?. . . I don't want him using my son's death or my family's sacrifice to continue the killing."
The soldiers in Iraq have not died for a "noble cause," as Bush claims. Whatever personal motivations may have brought them into the military, they died for oil, for empire, for power and profit. More deaths and injuries of Iraqis and of U.S. soldiers will only compound the tragedy of the numerous lives already lost.
The United States Is Not Rebuilding Iraq
The contractors now in Iraq are not there to help the people of Iraq but to help themselves, drawing on their close ties to influential politicians to secure contracts and profit from what Pratap Chatterjee rightly calls the "reconstruction racket."
The reality is, Halliburton, Bechtel, and the other companies in Iraq are looting the country far more than they are rebuilding it. Iraqis have been forced to pay elevated prices to import oil, benefiting corporations like Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, while ordinary Iraqis have to stand in lines sometimes for days to buy gasoline. Project after project remains unfinished. Hospitals are in shambles. Electricity is still at woefully inadequate levels.
As the journalist Naomi Klein eloquently observes, "The United States, having broken Iraq, is not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry" of economic strangulation.
The Iraqi people are perfectly capable of rebuilding their own society, in fact far more so than foreign soldiers or contractors. To the extent that there have been any social services or security in the last two years, it is primarily Iraqis who have provided it. During the years of sanctions, Iraqis also showed their immense resourcefulness in holding together their badly damaged infrastructure. Iraqi engineers, teachers, and doctors have long been among the most educated and best trained in the Arab world. It is ultimately a racist worldview that believes Iraqis cannot rebuild or run their own country.
The United States Is Not Fulfillig Its Obligation to the Iraqi People for the Harm and Suffering It Has Caused
Understandably, many opponents of the war now believe that the United States has an obligation to the Iraqi people and therefore has to stay to "clean up the mess it has created." MoveOn.org, which grabbed headlines and signed up millions of online members with its anti-Bush campaigning, refuses to call for withdrawal of troops from Iraq because, in the words of its executive director, Eli Pariser, "There are no good options in Iraq." Using this same logic, leading anti-sanctions and antiwar groups such as the Education for Peace in Iraq Center have formally adopted positions in support of occupation, if somehow a more enlightened occupation, and therefore against immediate withdrawal.
We must confront the bizarre logic of saying that the people who have devastated Iraq, who encouraged and enforced sanctions that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the last decade, who have failed at even the most basic responsibilities as an occupying power, who are the source of the instability in Iraq today, are the only ones who can protect Iraqis from hunger and anarchy. In no other area of our lives do we accept such logic, but when it comes to the crimes of empire, we are supposed to continually ignore history. The "doctrine of good intentions" exculpates all crimes.
The reality, however, is that the U.S. occupation, rather than being a source of stability in Iraq, is the major source of instability and ongoing suffering.
Moreover, those calling for immediate withdrawal do not advocate a position of isolationism and of simply walking away from any obligation to the Iraqi people. Does the U.S. government have an obligation to the Iraqi people? Absolutely. An obligation for the crimes Washington supported for years when Saddam Hussein was an ally. For arming and supporting both sides in the brutal Iran-Iraq War. For the destruction of the 1991 Gulf War. For the use of depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs, daisy cutters, and white phosphorus. For the devastating sanctions. For the humiliation and deaths caused by the 2003 invasion, and for the great damage the occupation has caused since.
But the first step in meeting this obligation is to withdraw immediately.
If there were any genuine justice for the people of Iraq, not only would the politicians responsible for this unjust war face prosecution for their crimes, but the U.S. government would be required to pay reparations to the Iraqi people and to the families of U.S. soldiers who have been maimed and killed by its criminal actions.
In demanding an end to the U.S. occupation, we do not need to call for some other occupying power to replace the United States. We should allow the people of Iraq to determine their own future. This means, as Naomi Klein has argued, that in addition to calling for an end to military occupation, we should be calling for an end to the economic occupation of Iraq and the cancellation of all debts that Iraq still owes from the previous regime (many of which still have not been forgiven). If the Iraqis ask for outside assistance, that is their prerogative. But it is their decision, not ours, to make, and that decision can only be freely made if the United States, United Kingdom, and other occupying armies withdraw completely and end their economic, political, and military coercion of Iraq.
--------
This article is adapted from Anthony Arnove's forthcoming book Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, due out in May from The New Press.
US Blasted for Creating Terrorism Quagmire on Anniversary of Iraq War
US Blasted for Creating Terrorism Quagmire on Anniversary of Iraq War
US Blasted for Creating Terrorism Quagmire on Anniversary of Iraq War
Agence France-Presse
Tuesday 21 March 2006
Sydney - Asian newspapers Monday took the United States to task on the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, with one commentator saying it had created the ideal environment for terrorism to fester.
"Three years into the Iraq war, and with no end in sight, it looks as if the United States, in creating a quagmire for itself in the Middle East, has also created the ideal environment in which the terrorism bacillus can fester, and then infect the whole world," said the Sydney Morning Herald.
President George W. Bush planned to head to Cleveland, Ohio, Monday as part of his public relations campaign to defend his Iraq strategy as opinion polls showed approval of the war at a new low.
Bush said Sunday he had been informed by US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad "of the progress the Iraqis are making toward forming a unity government" three months after national elections were held.
But with a mounting death toll from bombs and assassinations and the failure to agree on forming a new Iraqi government, a top member of Bush's own Republican Party said US policy needs "some new thinking".
"It's important that we stop this talk about we're not going to leave until we achieve victory," said Republican Senator Chuck Hagel. "We need some new thinking here."
Thousands of demonstrators in Asia and across the world denounced the US-led war on Sunday.
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post Monday said little apart from freedom of expression had been achieved three years after the invasion. "Civil conflict and rising sectarianism mean even that gain is under threat," it said in an editorial.
The Manila Times warned that US policymakers must take "a long hard look at Washington's role as Iraq's shepherd."
"Sooner rather than later, Iraq must be given a free hand to chart its destiny," an editorial said.
In Japan, which had deployed troops in Iraq, small demonstrations demanding a pullout were held over the weekend. However, the country's top spokesman said Tokyo's support for the war remains unchanged.
"Iraqi people have been progressing to build a new country by themselves with steady political steps based on the UN resolution," Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told reporters.
Japan is expected to pull its troops from Iraq in the coming months but Abe declined to comment on the timeframe for the withdrawal.
The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's top-selling daily, called on the United States to remain engaged in the world despite the turmoil in Iraq.
"Although US President Bush dismissed isolationism and protectionism in his State of the Union address, there are signs that the US Congress is being tempted by these doctrines," the Yomiuri said.
The conservative daily cited the stiff opposition in Congress to an Dubai-based company's attempted takeover of six US ports.
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily also said international cooperation remained crucial, particularly to fight nuclear proliferation.
The sharpest rebuke predictably came from communist North Korea, which Bush once labeled as part of the "axis of evil" along with Iran and pre-war Iraq.
"The US imperialists provoked wars in ... Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s and the new century, mercilessly destroying peaceful towns and villages and civilian establishments and cruelly killing countless innocent people," said Rodong Sinmun, the party newspaper.
"This clearly proves that the US is a war maniac, the ringleader of evils and the worst human rights abuser."
-------
US Blasted for Creating Terrorism Quagmire on Anniversary of Iraq War
Agence France-Presse
Tuesday 21 March 2006
Sydney - Asian newspapers Monday took the United States to task on the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, with one commentator saying it had created the ideal environment for terrorism to fester.
"Three years into the Iraq war, and with no end in sight, it looks as if the United States, in creating a quagmire for itself in the Middle East, has also created the ideal environment in which the terrorism bacillus can fester, and then infect the whole world," said the Sydney Morning Herald.
President George W. Bush planned to head to Cleveland, Ohio, Monday as part of his public relations campaign to defend his Iraq strategy as opinion polls showed approval of the war at a new low.
Bush said Sunday he had been informed by US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad "of the progress the Iraqis are making toward forming a unity government" three months after national elections were held.
But with a mounting death toll from bombs and assassinations and the failure to agree on forming a new Iraqi government, a top member of Bush's own Republican Party said US policy needs "some new thinking".
"It's important that we stop this talk about we're not going to leave until we achieve victory," said Republican Senator Chuck Hagel. "We need some new thinking here."
Thousands of demonstrators in Asia and across the world denounced the US-led war on Sunday.
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post Monday said little apart from freedom of expression had been achieved three years after the invasion. "Civil conflict and rising sectarianism mean even that gain is under threat," it said in an editorial.
The Manila Times warned that US policymakers must take "a long hard look at Washington's role as Iraq's shepherd."
"Sooner rather than later, Iraq must be given a free hand to chart its destiny," an editorial said.
In Japan, which had deployed troops in Iraq, small demonstrations demanding a pullout were held over the weekend. However, the country's top spokesman said Tokyo's support for the war remains unchanged.
"Iraqi people have been progressing to build a new country by themselves with steady political steps based on the UN resolution," Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told reporters.
Japan is expected to pull its troops from Iraq in the coming months but Abe declined to comment on the timeframe for the withdrawal.
The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's top-selling daily, called on the United States to remain engaged in the world despite the turmoil in Iraq.
"Although US President Bush dismissed isolationism and protectionism in his State of the Union address, there are signs that the US Congress is being tempted by these doctrines," the Yomiuri said.
The conservative daily cited the stiff opposition in Congress to an Dubai-based company's attempted takeover of six US ports.
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily also said international cooperation remained crucial, particularly to fight nuclear proliferation.
The sharpest rebuke predictably came from communist North Korea, which Bush once labeled as part of the "axis of evil" along with Iran and pre-war Iraq.
"The US imperialists provoked wars in ... Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s and the new century, mercilessly destroying peaceful towns and villages and civilian establishments and cruelly killing countless innocent people," said Rodong Sinmun, the party newspaper.
"This clearly proves that the US is a war maniac, the ringleader of evils and the worst human rights abuser."
-------
USATODAY.com - N. Korea: U.S. does not have 'monopoly' on pre-emptive strike
USATODAY.com - N. Korea: U.S. does not have 'monopoly' on pre-emptive strike
SEOUL — North Korea said Tuesday that it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States in its latest threat since being told it must stop its illegal trade activities.
"Our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter (a) possible U.S. pre-emptive strike," the North Korea Foreign Ministry said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States."
The ministry also said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat.
"We made nuclear weapons because of a nuclear threat from the United States," the ministry said.
The CIA has said the North may have enough plutonium from its nuclear program for at least a half-dozen weapons.
The United States urged the North to stop its threats and return to talks begun last year in which the North agreed to suspend its nuclear weapons program. The United States has also been pressuring the North to cease illegal activities used to bankroll its nuclear program such as money laundering, passing counterfeit money and trafficking in fake drugs and endangered species.
"They would do well to spend less time on propaganda and more time doing what the world would like them to do, which is preparing to come to the six-party talks and implement their part of the September agreement to denuclearize," Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of State, said Tuesday.
Five nations — the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China — reached an agreement with the North in September to provide the dictatorship with financial aid in return for a suspension of its nuclear program. The last round of the nuclear talks was held in November.
But North Korea has said it will not finalize the deal until the United States drops its demands regarding the North's alleged improper trade activities.
The United States says the nuclear talks and the demands are separate issues and that it will not merge the two.
North Korea has also expressed anger at annual joint U.S.-South Korean military drills. The drills will start next week and are designed to coordinate U.S. and South Korean forces in a joint defense of South Korea.
Contributing: Barbara Slavin in Washington
SEOUL — North Korea said Tuesday that it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States in its latest threat since being told it must stop its illegal trade activities.
"Our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter (a) possible U.S. pre-emptive strike," the North Korea Foreign Ministry said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States."
The ministry also said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat.
"We made nuclear weapons because of a nuclear threat from the United States," the ministry said.
The CIA has said the North may have enough plutonium from its nuclear program for at least a half-dozen weapons.
The United States urged the North to stop its threats and return to talks begun last year in which the North agreed to suspend its nuclear weapons program. The United States has also been pressuring the North to cease illegal activities used to bankroll its nuclear program such as money laundering, passing counterfeit money and trafficking in fake drugs and endangered species.
"They would do well to spend less time on propaganda and more time doing what the world would like them to do, which is preparing to come to the six-party talks and implement their part of the September agreement to denuclearize," Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of State, said Tuesday.
Five nations — the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia and China — reached an agreement with the North in September to provide the dictatorship with financial aid in return for a suspension of its nuclear program. The last round of the nuclear talks was held in November.
But North Korea has said it will not finalize the deal until the United States drops its demands regarding the North's alleged improper trade activities.
The United States says the nuclear talks and the demands are separate issues and that it will not merge the two.
North Korea has also expressed anger at annual joint U.S.-South Korean military drills. The drills will start next week and are designed to coordinate U.S. and South Korean forces in a joint defense of South Korea.
Contributing: Barbara Slavin in Washington
Jury Finds Abu Ghraib Dog Handler Guilty
Jury Finds Abu Ghraib Dog Handler Guilty
Jury Finds Abu Ghraib Dog Handler Guilty
By Josh White
The Washington Post
Tuesday 21 March 2006
A military dog handler who worked at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was found guilty today of improperly using his dog to frighten detainees, the latest in a line of convictions for low-ranking military police soldiers who were depicted in notorious photographs of abuse of detainees in late 2003 and early 2004.
A military jury panel of four officers and three senior non-commissioned officers found Sgt. Michael J. Smith, 24, responsible for maltreatment of one high-value detainee who was believed to be connected to al-Qaeda and of two juvenile detainees whom Smith scared as part of a contest with another dog handler to make them soil themselves. Smith was also convicted of dereliction of duty, simple assault on the al-Qaeda suspect and an indecent act related to an incident in which Smith allowed his dog to lick peanut butter from soldiers' bodies as part of a wager.
While the jury believed prosecution arguments that Smith was operating out of bounds when he allowed his black Belgian shepherd, Marco, to get close to detainees while barking and growling, members found him guilty on fewer than half of the original 13 specific charges against him. The jury rejected the government's argument that Smith conspired with other military police soldiers who have previously been convicted of various abuses at the prison and also found him not guilty of using his dog to abuse two other individual detainees - one of whom is depicted naked and cowering in a hallway in one of the most recognizable photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Smith initially faced a potential sentence of more than 24 years in prison, but an Army spokeswoman said today after the verdict that he now faces a maximum of just less than nine years in prison. The jury, which deliberated for more than two days, was scheduled to reconvene this afternoon to hear evidence for the sentencing phase of the military court-martial at Fort Meade, Md.
"This verdict sends a powerful message that abusive interrogation techniques using unmuzzled dogs to terrify detainees is strictly prohibited," said Human Rights First attorney Avidan Cover, who monitored the proceedings over the past week. "Sergeant Smith's court-martial made clear that there is more than enough blame to go around, with high-ranking officers and civilian command yet to be held to account for their role in these widespread instances of abuse."
The verdict focused largely on two incidents of abuse that took place on Tier 1 of the prison's hard-site, a building with several tiers of cell blocks that housed suspects who were under interrogation by military intelligence, as well as women and children who were in U.S. custody. In one incident, Smith brought his dog within inches of the face of Ashraf Abdullah Ahsy al-Juhayshi, a detainee who was believed to be linked to terrorist networks and was placed under a special interrogation plan that was monitored by high-ranking officers. In the other, Smith allegedly participated in a contest with Sgt. Santos A. Cardona to make detainees urinate or defecate on themselves.
There were pictures of Juhayshi - clothed in an orange jumpsuit with his hands bound behind his back - recoiling from Smith and his dog. There were no pictures of the "contest," and accounts of it came from one witness who recalled not taking the accounts seriously at the time. There was scant evidence that Smith's dog did anything but bark at detainees to scare them, something that his attorneys characterized as being the sole reason officers wanted the dogs at the facility.
Photographs of another detainee, Mohammed Bollendia, showed him naked and scared in a prison hallway and then suffering from a dog bite after an altercation. Evidence at the court-martial showed that Smith's dog did not inflict the bite, and jurors were not convinced that Smith was operating outside of the prison's ad hoc rules in that situation.
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at the prison, testified last week that he inappropriately authorized the use of dogs in interrogations of three detainees who were captured at about the same time as Saddam Hussein in mid-December 2003. Pappas, the highest-ranking officer to take responsibility for abuses at Abu Ghraib, testified under immunity that he did not properly supervise the use of dogs or ensure that people had the right training to use them.
Though Smith's use of a dog on Juhayshi came days after Pappas's approval and appeared to be supervised by at least one civilian interrogator, jurors still believed the act was illegal.
-------
Jury Finds Abu Ghraib Dog Handler Guilty
By Josh White
The Washington Post
Tuesday 21 March 2006
A military dog handler who worked at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was found guilty today of improperly using his dog to frighten detainees, the latest in a line of convictions for low-ranking military police soldiers who were depicted in notorious photographs of abuse of detainees in late 2003 and early 2004.
A military jury panel of four officers and three senior non-commissioned officers found Sgt. Michael J. Smith, 24, responsible for maltreatment of one high-value detainee who was believed to be connected to al-Qaeda and of two juvenile detainees whom Smith scared as part of a contest with another dog handler to make them soil themselves. Smith was also convicted of dereliction of duty, simple assault on the al-Qaeda suspect and an indecent act related to an incident in which Smith allowed his dog to lick peanut butter from soldiers' bodies as part of a wager.
While the jury believed prosecution arguments that Smith was operating out of bounds when he allowed his black Belgian shepherd, Marco, to get close to detainees while barking and growling, members found him guilty on fewer than half of the original 13 specific charges against him. The jury rejected the government's argument that Smith conspired with other military police soldiers who have previously been convicted of various abuses at the prison and also found him not guilty of using his dog to abuse two other individual detainees - one of whom is depicted naked and cowering in a hallway in one of the most recognizable photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Smith initially faced a potential sentence of more than 24 years in prison, but an Army spokeswoman said today after the verdict that he now faces a maximum of just less than nine years in prison. The jury, which deliberated for more than two days, was scheduled to reconvene this afternoon to hear evidence for the sentencing phase of the military court-martial at Fort Meade, Md.
"This verdict sends a powerful message that abusive interrogation techniques using unmuzzled dogs to terrify detainees is strictly prohibited," said Human Rights First attorney Avidan Cover, who monitored the proceedings over the past week. "Sergeant Smith's court-martial made clear that there is more than enough blame to go around, with high-ranking officers and civilian command yet to be held to account for their role in these widespread instances of abuse."
The verdict focused largely on two incidents of abuse that took place on Tier 1 of the prison's hard-site, a building with several tiers of cell blocks that housed suspects who were under interrogation by military intelligence, as well as women and children who were in U.S. custody. In one incident, Smith brought his dog within inches of the face of Ashraf Abdullah Ahsy al-Juhayshi, a detainee who was believed to be linked to terrorist networks and was placed under a special interrogation plan that was monitored by high-ranking officers. In the other, Smith allegedly participated in a contest with Sgt. Santos A. Cardona to make detainees urinate or defecate on themselves.
There were pictures of Juhayshi - clothed in an orange jumpsuit with his hands bound behind his back - recoiling from Smith and his dog. There were no pictures of the "contest," and accounts of it came from one witness who recalled not taking the accounts seriously at the time. There was scant evidence that Smith's dog did anything but bark at detainees to scare them, something that his attorneys characterized as being the sole reason officers wanted the dogs at the facility.
Photographs of another detainee, Mohammed Bollendia, showed him naked and scared in a prison hallway and then suffering from a dog bite after an altercation. Evidence at the court-martial showed that Smith's dog did not inflict the bite, and jurors were not convinced that Smith was operating outside of the prison's ad hoc rules in that situation.
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at the prison, testified last week that he inappropriately authorized the use of dogs in interrogations of three detainees who were captured at about the same time as Saddam Hussein in mid-December 2003. Pappas, the highest-ranking officer to take responsibility for abuses at Abu Ghraib, testified under immunity that he did not properly supervise the use of dogs or ensure that people had the right training to use them.
Though Smith's use of a dog on Juhayshi came days after Pappas's approval and appeared to be supervised by at least one civilian interrogator, jurors still believed the act was illegal.
-------
DefenseNews.com - Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Myers Named to Northrop Grumman Board - 03/20/06 10:37
DefenseNews.com - Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Myers Named to Northrop Grumman Board - 03/20/06 10:37
: "The former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, has been appointed a director of defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corporation.
Myers, a retired U.S. Air Force general, formally stepped down as America’s top military officer on September 30 after helping oversee the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Northrop Grumman’s chairman, Ronald Sugar, said in a statement that Myers would be “an excellent addition to our board and we look forward to benefiting from his contributions”.
Among the jobs the one-time fighter pilot held at the Pentagon, prior to becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the vice chairman of the Defense Acquisition Board.
Northrop Grumman announced Myer’s hiring March 15. The company also has two other former senior U.S. military officers serving on its board of directors."
: "The former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, has been appointed a director of defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corporation.
Myers, a retired U.S. Air Force general, formally stepped down as America’s top military officer on September 30 after helping oversee the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Northrop Grumman’s chairman, Ronald Sugar, said in a statement that Myers would be “an excellent addition to our board and we look forward to benefiting from his contributions”.
Among the jobs the one-time fighter pilot held at the Pentagon, prior to becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the vice chairman of the Defense Acquisition Board.
Northrop Grumman announced Myer’s hiring March 15. The company also has two other former senior U.S. military officers serving on its board of directors."
Raytheon's Upgraded Early Warning Radar Participates Successfully in Key Missile Defense Flight Test
Raytheon
Tuesday March 21, 10:00 am ET
TEWKSBURY, Mass., March 21, 2006 /PRNewswire/ --
Raytheon Company's Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR) at Beale Air Force Base, Calif., performed successfully in a flight test of the Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) element of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). The test was conducted by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) Feb. 23.
The UEWR, developed by Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS), successfully tracked the target system launched from the Kodiak Launch Center, Alaska, for approximately 20 minutes during its flight downrange to the test area several hundred miles west of California.
'This was a critical test of the missile defense capability of the UEWR, and we're pleased that the radar appears to have performed flawlessly,' said Pete Franklin, vice president, Raytheon IDS Missile Defense. 'This first GMD flight test for the Beale UEWR is particularly significant because it successfully demonstrated the radar's capability to provide information to the GMD system in support of an interceptor engagement.'
Dave Gulla, director of Early Warning Radar Programs for Raytheon IDS, said, 'Based on our initial assessment at Beale, our radar and test team achieved all planned objectives, successfully operated with the other components in the GMD system and provided intercept-quality tracking and object classification data as planned.'
Continuing the Raytheon heritage with UHF phased array radars, the Beale UEWR program upgrades existing PAVE PAWS and Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radars by adding missile defense capabilities while retaining legacy missile warning and space surveillance missions. A key sensor for the MDA's BMDS, UEWR provides 'no doubt'- midcourse target detection and tracking for the GMD portion of the BMDS to protect the U.S. from ballistic missile attacks. Boeing Integrated Defense Systems is the prime contractor for the GMD program.
Based in Tewksbury, Mass., Integrated Defense Systems is Raytheon's leader in Joint Battlespace Integration. With a strong international and domestic customer base, including the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and the U.S. armed forces, Integrated Defense Systems provides integrated air and missile defense and naval and maritime warfighting solutions.
Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN - News), with 2005 sales of $21.9 billion, is an industry leader in defense and government electronics, space, information technology, technical services, and business and special mission aircraft. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 80,000 people worldwide."
Tuesday March 21, 10:00 am ET
TEWKSBURY, Mass., March 21, 2006 /PRNewswire/ --
Raytheon Company's Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR) at Beale Air Force Base, Calif., performed successfully in a flight test of the Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) element of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). The test was conducted by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) Feb. 23.
The UEWR, developed by Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS), successfully tracked the target system launched from the Kodiak Launch Center, Alaska, for approximately 20 minutes during its flight downrange to the test area several hundred miles west of California.
'This was a critical test of the missile defense capability of the UEWR, and we're pleased that the radar appears to have performed flawlessly,' said Pete Franklin, vice president, Raytheon IDS Missile Defense. 'This first GMD flight test for the Beale UEWR is particularly significant because it successfully demonstrated the radar's capability to provide information to the GMD system in support of an interceptor engagement.'
Dave Gulla, director of Early Warning Radar Programs for Raytheon IDS, said, 'Based on our initial assessment at Beale, our radar and test team achieved all planned objectives, successfully operated with the other components in the GMD system and provided intercept-quality tracking and object classification data as planned.'
Continuing the Raytheon heritage with UHF phased array radars, the Beale UEWR program upgrades existing PAVE PAWS and Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radars by adding missile defense capabilities while retaining legacy missile warning and space surveillance missions. A key sensor for the MDA's BMDS, UEWR provides 'no doubt'- midcourse target detection and tracking for the GMD portion of the BMDS to protect the U.S. from ballistic missile attacks. Boeing Integrated Defense Systems is the prime contractor for the GMD program.
Based in Tewksbury, Mass., Integrated Defense Systems is Raytheon's leader in Joint Battlespace Integration. With a strong international and domestic customer base, including the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and the U.S. armed forces, Integrated Defense Systems provides integrated air and missile defense and naval and maritime warfighting solutions.
Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN - News), with 2005 sales of $21.9 billion, is an industry leader in defense and government electronics, space, information technology, technical services, and business and special mission aircraft. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 80,000 people worldwide."
RIA Novosti - World - Russia, U.S. sign technology agreement under satellite project
RIA Novosti - World - Russia, U.S. sign technology agreement under satellite project
: "WASHINGTON, March 21 (RIA Novosti, Alexei Berezin) - Russia and the United States signed an agreement Tuesday on the technological aspects of the Sea Launch satellite program.
The intergovernmental agreement, signed by Russian Ambassador to the United States Yury Ushakov and U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph, is expected to contribute to the further development of bilateral cooperation in space and cutting-edge technology.
A Russian embassy spokesman said the agreement set the framework for the protection of Russia's intellectual property within the Sea Launch project.
Sea Launch was created in 1995 as a consortium that included Boeing (United States), Kvaerner Group (Norway), Russian space corporation Energia (Moscow), the Yuzhnoye design bureau (Ukraine) and the Yuzhmash production association (Ukraine).
Based in Long Beach, California, Sea Launch is considered the most reliable provider of satellite launch services via the Boeing Launch Services company using Russian Zenit carrier rockets."
: "WASHINGTON, March 21 (RIA Novosti, Alexei Berezin) - Russia and the United States signed an agreement Tuesday on the technological aspects of the Sea Launch satellite program.
The intergovernmental agreement, signed by Russian Ambassador to the United States Yury Ushakov and U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph, is expected to contribute to the further development of bilateral cooperation in space and cutting-edge technology.
A Russian embassy spokesman said the agreement set the framework for the protection of Russia's intellectual property within the Sea Launch project.
Sea Launch was created in 1995 as a consortium that included Boeing (United States), Kvaerner Group (Norway), Russian space corporation Energia (Moscow), the Yuzhnoye design bureau (Ukraine) and the Yuzhmash production association (Ukraine).
Based in Long Beach, California, Sea Launch is considered the most reliable provider of satellite launch services via the Boeing Launch Services company using Russian Zenit carrier rockets."