Raytheon bids for border contract
By Jay Fitzgerald
Boston Herald General Economics Reporter
Saturday, May 20, 2006 - Updated: 12:17 AM EST
A vast sensor system being used in Brazil’s Amazon forest could be the high-tech model for a similar “virtual fence” along America’s borders - if Waltham-based Raytheon has its way.
Raytheon is now preparing its official multibillion-dollar bid proposal in response to the U.S. government’s recent call for ideas on how to better monitor the Mexican and Canadian borders to prevent illegal aliens and potential terrorists from sneaking into the country.
Bids are expected on May 30 - and a final contract for the so-called “SBInet” system will be awarded this fall by the Department of Homeland Security.
Raytheon is hoping its past effort to build an electronic monitoring system in Brazil will give it a leg up on competition for the U.S. contract.
Four years ago, Raytheon finished up its $1.4 billion contract to construct Brazil’s “System for the Vigilance of the Amazon,” whose high-tech monitoring devices are intended to catch drug traffickers and people cutting down trees in the 2 million-square-mile region of the Amazon.
The idea is to tie together ground and satellite sensors, planes flying above, mobile radars, and other high-tech gadgets to track people and trucks within the Amazon.
“All of the (information) feeds into one central command system,” said Lynford Morton, a spokesman for Raytheon, a defense contractor that’s increasingly moving into non-military business areas.
In March, four airports in the New York City area gave Raytheon a $100 million contract to build anti-terrorist monitoring systems at the airports.
That contract came after New York officials visited the Amazon, Morton noted.
“It’s (similar) to what we’re doing in Brazil,” said Morton of the U.S.-border system federal officials envision.
jfitz@bostonherald.com
Saturday, May 20, 2006
House of War--The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
Pentagon paranoia -- a vicious cycle
General's son describes a self-perpetuating mind-set
Reviewed by Chuck Leddy
Sunday, May 21, 2006
House of War
The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
By James Carroll
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 658 PAGES; $30
Conventional wisdom holds that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, forever changed the way the United States relates to the rest of the world. Not so, says James Carroll, who has written a book that is among the most important works of history produced in the past few years. Carroll offers an exhaustively researched chronicling of the Pentagon's continuity over the past six decades, and also describes how the Pentagon has profoundly influenced his own life (Carroll's father was a general who worked in the building).
What distinguishes Carroll's book is not just this blending of the personal and the institutional -- a blending that brilliantly illuminates his thesis that the Pentagon's growth has been fueled by a bipolar view of the world that depends on paranoia and deceit -- but also Carroll's willingness to ask basic moral questions that almost never get asked amid the Pentagon's Orwellian language of "collateral damage" and "asymmetric warfare." Carroll wants to understand the psychological and institutional underpinnings that have motivated those who've shaped the Pentagon, people like his father. More frighteningly, Carroll also believes the building has developed a life of its own, one dedicated to a self-perpetuating ideology that is often inimical to the civilian authorities it "serves."
It all started during World War II, when President Roosevelt needed more space to house the burgeoning military bureaucracy. He intended the Pentagon as temporary. Carroll discusses the man who supervised construction, Gen. Leslie Groves, who afterward oversaw the Manhattan Project. Carroll then offers us a fascinating examination of President Truman's fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb, a decision, he says, that was made in the context of horrific Allied firebombing of civilian populations in Dresden, Tokyo and other cities. Carroll points out that the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed perhaps 100,000 civilians, was a precursor to the more destructive raid on Hiroshima. Carroll notes that humanitarian concerns were brushed aside by those obsessed with the impersonal metrics of destruction.
Carroll shows that the dropping of the atomic bomb was also meant to send a message to Moscow, carving out more power for the United States in the postwar world. With the Cold War, the Pentagon adopted a bipolar mind-set that continues to this day -- the enemy is totally evil, while we represent all that's good in the world. There can thus be no other course but total war and absolute victory. Those who dare ask questions are disloyal, unpatriotic and subversive.
Carroll details the development of a paranoid line of reasoning whose "intellectual" groundwork was laid by George Kennan, James Forrestal and Paul Nitze. This view had a very practical effect -- the skyrocketing of Pentagon budgets. In his final speech as president, Dwight Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex, but his complaint was made when the onetime military leader of World War II was already exiting the scene.
When Nixon became president, his secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, warned Congress about the Soviets' ability to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States. What Nixon and Laird wanted was congressional funding for a hyper-expensive anti-ballistic missile system (ABM) to shoot down Soviet missiles. Unfortunately, Laird's testimony about Soviet first-strike capability was directly contradicted by existing U.S. intelligence, intelligence gathered by Carroll's father. Carroll surmises that Laird went to his father and requested a re-evaluation of his findings. Shortly after Carroll's father refused to fudge this intelligence, he was out of a job. Later, the intelligence was indeed altered.
Carroll meticulously analyzes the cycle of fear that led to the growth of Pentagon power during the Cold War and beyond. This fear-based worldview is bolstered by intelligence that supports the initial premise. Such intelligence spurs more funding that increases our military arsenals. Increased arsenals on our side lead to countermoves by the enemy. Those countermoves help make the case for still more Pentagon spending. The cycle perpetuates.
Carroll does not believe the myth that President Reagan's toughness finally ended the Cold War. Again and again, it was Soviet Premier Gorbachev who unilaterally took the initiative to dismantle his nuclear arsenals. Reagan's crucial role was in not opposing these moves, a role Reagan assumed, Carroll says, because he needed political cover from the disgrace of the Iran-Contra scandal. With the Soviet enemy gone, the United States could have begun demilitarizing. But the Pentagon's bipolar mind-set never disappeared, and two factors helped re-energize it: Saddam Hussein and the terrorists of Sept. 11. Now, we're fighting an open-ended war against "evil-doers" across the globe.
The way to break this paranoid cycle, Carroll says, is to face the fear, bring it to the surface and name it. And to oppose the lies and embrace hope. For in a democracy, even one burdened with a massive military-industrial complex embodied by the Pentagon, people retain the power to choose their future, whether they decide to exercise it or not.
Chuck Leddy, a writer and book reviewer from Massachusetts, is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle.
General's son describes a self-perpetuating mind-set
Reviewed by Chuck Leddy
Sunday, May 21, 2006
House of War
The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
By James Carroll
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 658 PAGES; $30
Conventional wisdom holds that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, forever changed the way the United States relates to the rest of the world. Not so, says James Carroll, who has written a book that is among the most important works of history produced in the past few years. Carroll offers an exhaustively researched chronicling of the Pentagon's continuity over the past six decades, and also describes how the Pentagon has profoundly influenced his own life (Carroll's father was a general who worked in the building).
What distinguishes Carroll's book is not just this blending of the personal and the institutional -- a blending that brilliantly illuminates his thesis that the Pentagon's growth has been fueled by a bipolar view of the world that depends on paranoia and deceit -- but also Carroll's willingness to ask basic moral questions that almost never get asked amid the Pentagon's Orwellian language of "collateral damage" and "asymmetric warfare." Carroll wants to understand the psychological and institutional underpinnings that have motivated those who've shaped the Pentagon, people like his father. More frighteningly, Carroll also believes the building has developed a life of its own, one dedicated to a self-perpetuating ideology that is often inimical to the civilian authorities it "serves."
It all started during World War II, when President Roosevelt needed more space to house the burgeoning military bureaucracy. He intended the Pentagon as temporary. Carroll discusses the man who supervised construction, Gen. Leslie Groves, who afterward oversaw the Manhattan Project. Carroll then offers us a fascinating examination of President Truman's fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb, a decision, he says, that was made in the context of horrific Allied firebombing of civilian populations in Dresden, Tokyo and other cities. Carroll points out that the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed perhaps 100,000 civilians, was a precursor to the more destructive raid on Hiroshima. Carroll notes that humanitarian concerns were brushed aside by those obsessed with the impersonal metrics of destruction.
Carroll shows that the dropping of the atomic bomb was also meant to send a message to Moscow, carving out more power for the United States in the postwar world. With the Cold War, the Pentagon adopted a bipolar mind-set that continues to this day -- the enemy is totally evil, while we represent all that's good in the world. There can thus be no other course but total war and absolute victory. Those who dare ask questions are disloyal, unpatriotic and subversive.
Carroll details the development of a paranoid line of reasoning whose "intellectual" groundwork was laid by George Kennan, James Forrestal and Paul Nitze. This view had a very practical effect -- the skyrocketing of Pentagon budgets. In his final speech as president, Dwight Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex, but his complaint was made when the onetime military leader of World War II was already exiting the scene.
When Nixon became president, his secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, warned Congress about the Soviets' ability to launch a nuclear first strike against the United States. What Nixon and Laird wanted was congressional funding for a hyper-expensive anti-ballistic missile system (ABM) to shoot down Soviet missiles. Unfortunately, Laird's testimony about Soviet first-strike capability was directly contradicted by existing U.S. intelligence, intelligence gathered by Carroll's father. Carroll surmises that Laird went to his father and requested a re-evaluation of his findings. Shortly after Carroll's father refused to fudge this intelligence, he was out of a job. Later, the intelligence was indeed altered.
Carroll meticulously analyzes the cycle of fear that led to the growth of Pentagon power during the Cold War and beyond. This fear-based worldview is bolstered by intelligence that supports the initial premise. Such intelligence spurs more funding that increases our military arsenals. Increased arsenals on our side lead to countermoves by the enemy. Those countermoves help make the case for still more Pentagon spending. The cycle perpetuates.
Carroll does not believe the myth that President Reagan's toughness finally ended the Cold War. Again and again, it was Soviet Premier Gorbachev who unilaterally took the initiative to dismantle his nuclear arsenals. Reagan's crucial role was in not opposing these moves, a role Reagan assumed, Carroll says, because he needed political cover from the disgrace of the Iran-Contra scandal. With the Soviet enemy gone, the United States could have begun demilitarizing. But the Pentagon's bipolar mind-set never disappeared, and two factors helped re-energize it: Saddam Hussein and the terrorists of Sept. 11. Now, we're fighting an open-ended war against "evil-doers" across the globe.
The way to break this paranoid cycle, Carroll says, is to face the fear, bring it to the surface and name it. And to oppose the lies and embrace hope. For in a democracy, even one burdened with a massive military-industrial complex embodied by the Pentagon, people retain the power to choose their future, whether they decide to exercise it or not.
Chuck Leddy, a writer and book reviewer from Massachusetts, is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle.
Should Gen. Hayden Be Confirmed or Court-Martialed?
Should Gen. Hayden Be Confirmed or Court-Martialed?
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 20 May 2006
"Court-martialed," says one highly-respected former DIRNSA (which, for the uninitiated, stands for "Director, National Security Agency"). The comment came amid a private burst of indignation at the news that Gen. Mike Hayden had bowed to administration pressure to skirt the law and violate what until then was the NSA's "First Commandment" - Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on US Citizens.
Another highly respected former DIRNSA, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, on May 8, expressed serious reservations over the administration's flouting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 by ordering warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. During a New York Public Library panel discussion including New York Times reporter James Risen, who originally broke the eavesdropping story, Inman said, "In my view, this activity was not authorized by a [congressional] resolution.... There clearly was a line in the FISA statutes which says you couldn't do this." Inman also pointed out the "extra sentence put in the bill that said, 'You can't do anything that is not authorized by this bill.'"
Adm. Inman added, "My problem is not going through the Congress to revise the statute," if FISA needed to be amended to deal with issues not anticipated in 1978. He spoke proudly of the earlier ethos at the NSA, where "it was deeply ingrained that you operate within the law and you get the law changed if you need to." As for now, Inman insisted, "What you want is to get away from this idea that they can continue doing it." He placed the blame squarely on Vice President Dick Cheney, whose attitude, he said, has not changed from when he was chief of staff for President Gerald Ford. Inman gave this account of Cheney's input:
"We don't need law. The president has authorized these in the past and can authorize them now."
Inman added that this is "why no activity moved forward to pursue changing the law, to do it in the courts." Whether the president changes course and decides to work with Congress will depend on "whether the president walks away from the vice president on this issue."
But the George W. Bush administration did take soundings in Congress. And this has been known since December 19, 2005, when attorney Alberto Gonzales, in an unguarded moment, responded to a question as to why - if FISA was inadequate - the administration did not seek new legislation to enable it to conduct such a program legally. Why the "backdoor approach?" he was asked. Gonzales's response was a masterpiece of casuistry, but it escaped wide notice:
"This is not a backdoor approach. We believe Congress has authorized this kind of surveillance. We have had discussions with Congress in the past - certain members of Congress - as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."
You do not need a law degree to ask the obvious question: If you believe you already had congressional authorization, why approach Congress for authorization? Earlier, at the December 19 press conference, Gonzales had adduced a twin argument that the eavesdropping program was legal: (1) Congress's post-9/11 authorization to use force; and (2) the president's "inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander-in-chief, to engage in this kind of activity." (During his confirmation hearing before the Senate on May 18, Gen. Hayden referred only to the commander-in-chief-Constitution Article II-argument, and it appears that the administration has now recognized that even though the Article II argument is quite a stretch, the force-authorization approach stretches beyond the breaking point.)
On December 19, Gonzales was asked a second time: "If FISA didn't work, why didn't you seek a new statute that allowed something like this legally." Gonzales read from the same notes, but then added the disingenuous argument that going to Congress would have risked revealing the program and killing it - which has become a favorite administration line. Inman addressed that argument directly on May 8 saying, "I don't happen to think it's valid." And there are few, if any, top intelligence officials with as much experience in this area as Inman has.
Add to this that in the immediate post-9/11 atmosphere in which the draconian Patriot Act sailed through Congress, it seems clear that the skids would have been greased for any sensible proposal to amend the already flexible FISA. Indeed, panelist James Risen quipped, "In October 2001 you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America." It is hard to escape the conclusion that the program (since dubbed "The Terrorist Surveillance Program") was of such scope and intrusiveness into our civil rights that it had not a prayer for passage.
I am sorry to have to be the one to tell you all this. The New York Times has been reporting all week on the Hayden nomination, and had a sensible editorial on the subject on May 19. But what about previous NSA director Inman's contribution to the discussion? Did James Risen forget to file a story? Or did his editors deem it short of the threshold of All The News That's Fit to Print? Or did a Risen story get put in the "Hold Until After November" file? Was no one on the Senate Intelligence Committee aware of Inman's remarks even though they were available ten days before Hayden's nomination hearing Thursday? What about the Washington Post, whose ads say, "If you don't get it, you don't get it." Well, you would not have gotten it there either.
How did I learn all this? From a story on Steve Clemons's blog, The Washington Note, which included a link to a transcript of the May 8 New York Public Library event: "Listening In: Eavesdropping and the National Security Agency." Amy Goodman also mentioned it on Democracy Now on May 17.
So What About Hayden?
On CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight on May 17, Adm. Inman gave Gen. Hayden a relatively favorable review, despite Hayden's willingness to obey what Inman implicitly said were illegal orders, and Hayden's willingness to take the lead in defending the eavesdropping program. It is likely that Inman's overly charitable approach can be attributed to professional courtesy. Inman himself certainly would not have behaved as Hayden did. A thorough professional, Inman would not have put on the back burner his oath to defend the Constitution of the United States and the universal obligation not to obey an illegal order.
And there is more. The Cheney-esque ethos of contempt for Congress still rules, facilitated by party partisans in Congress. House Intelligence Committee Chair Pete Hoekstra, for example, speaks of "vigorous oversight" of the NSA, but evidence is lacking. Late last year, for example, the current head of the NSA, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, deliberately misled House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt (D-NJ) on the eavesdropping program. On December 6, Rep. Holt called on Alexander and NSA lawyers to discuss protecting Americans' privacy. They all assured Holt that only with a court warrant would the NSA eavesdrop on Americans.
Later that month, when the disclosures in the New York Times made it clear that Gen. Alexander had deliberately misled a member of his committee of jurisdiction, Hoekstra merely suggested that Holt write a letter to Alexander to complain. The inescapable message to Alexander? Fear not: Hoekstra the fox is watching the hen house. Alexander was accorded the privilege of briefing the Senate Intelligence Committee on NSA operations the day before the hearing on Gen. Mike Hayden's nomination to be the next director of the CIA. There is no sign that any of those Senators were gauche enough to ask Alexander why the general had lied to one of their House counterparts. And there is every sign that Roberts's committee will give its approval to the president having another yes-man as director of the CIA.
It is interesting, if not surprising, that Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, party loyalist Pat Roberts, decided to call no previous NSA director to testify at the Hayden nomination hearing. Adm. Inman would have been the most experienced and able witness (especially in view of his intimate knowledge of the history of FISA). Roberts would have been well aware that for Inman it is one thing to praise Hayden to Lou Dobbs, and quite another to state under oath that Hayden had not already disqualified himself for the job. It is altogether understandable that Roberts would be reluctant to subject a basically honest officer like Inman to withering cross-examination by the likes of Sen. Russ Feingold.
Call my thinking "quaint" or "obsolete," but I can find no excuse for an officer who lets nearness to absolute power, together with hired-gun lawyers, corrupt and blur his oath to defend the Constitution and responsibility not to obey illegal orders. When I was an Army officer, both were drummed into us; and if we reneged on those promises, we were liable to being drummed out. So I would agree with the first former NSA director quoted above. Hayden should be court-martialed, not confirmed. And Alexander, too.
--------
Ray McGovern served nine CIA directors and seven presidents as a CIA analyst from the administrations of John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 20 May 2006
"Court-martialed," says one highly-respected former DIRNSA (which, for the uninitiated, stands for "Director, National Security Agency"). The comment came amid a private burst of indignation at the news that Gen. Mike Hayden had bowed to administration pressure to skirt the law and violate what until then was the NSA's "First Commandment" - Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on US Citizens.
Another highly respected former DIRNSA, Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, on May 8, expressed serious reservations over the administration's flouting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 by ordering warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. During a New York Public Library panel discussion including New York Times reporter James Risen, who originally broke the eavesdropping story, Inman said, "In my view, this activity was not authorized by a [congressional] resolution.... There clearly was a line in the FISA statutes which says you couldn't do this." Inman also pointed out the "extra sentence put in the bill that said, 'You can't do anything that is not authorized by this bill.'"
Adm. Inman added, "My problem is not going through the Congress to revise the statute," if FISA needed to be amended to deal with issues not anticipated in 1978. He spoke proudly of the earlier ethos at the NSA, where "it was deeply ingrained that you operate within the law and you get the law changed if you need to." As for now, Inman insisted, "What you want is to get away from this idea that they can continue doing it." He placed the blame squarely on Vice President Dick Cheney, whose attitude, he said, has not changed from when he was chief of staff for President Gerald Ford. Inman gave this account of Cheney's input:
"We don't need law. The president has authorized these in the past and can authorize them now."
Inman added that this is "why no activity moved forward to pursue changing the law, to do it in the courts." Whether the president changes course and decides to work with Congress will depend on "whether the president walks away from the vice president on this issue."
But the George W. Bush administration did take soundings in Congress. And this has been known since December 19, 2005, when attorney Alberto Gonzales, in an unguarded moment, responded to a question as to why - if FISA was inadequate - the administration did not seek new legislation to enable it to conduct such a program legally. Why the "backdoor approach?" he was asked. Gonzales's response was a masterpiece of casuistry, but it escaped wide notice:
"This is not a backdoor approach. We believe Congress has authorized this kind of surveillance. We have had discussions with Congress in the past - certain members of Congress - as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."
You do not need a law degree to ask the obvious question: If you believe you already had congressional authorization, why approach Congress for authorization? Earlier, at the December 19 press conference, Gonzales had adduced a twin argument that the eavesdropping program was legal: (1) Congress's post-9/11 authorization to use force; and (2) the president's "inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander-in-chief, to engage in this kind of activity." (During his confirmation hearing before the Senate on May 18, Gen. Hayden referred only to the commander-in-chief-Constitution Article II-argument, and it appears that the administration has now recognized that even though the Article II argument is quite a stretch, the force-authorization approach stretches beyond the breaking point.)
On December 19, Gonzales was asked a second time: "If FISA didn't work, why didn't you seek a new statute that allowed something like this legally." Gonzales read from the same notes, but then added the disingenuous argument that going to Congress would have risked revealing the program and killing it - which has become a favorite administration line. Inman addressed that argument directly on May 8 saying, "I don't happen to think it's valid." And there are few, if any, top intelligence officials with as much experience in this area as Inman has.
Add to this that in the immediate post-9/11 atmosphere in which the draconian Patriot Act sailed through Congress, it seems clear that the skids would have been greased for any sensible proposal to amend the already flexible FISA. Indeed, panelist James Risen quipped, "In October 2001 you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America." It is hard to escape the conclusion that the program (since dubbed "The Terrorist Surveillance Program") was of such scope and intrusiveness into our civil rights that it had not a prayer for passage.
I am sorry to have to be the one to tell you all this. The New York Times has been reporting all week on the Hayden nomination, and had a sensible editorial on the subject on May 19. But what about previous NSA director Inman's contribution to the discussion? Did James Risen forget to file a story? Or did his editors deem it short of the threshold of All The News That's Fit to Print? Or did a Risen story get put in the "Hold Until After November" file? Was no one on the Senate Intelligence Committee aware of Inman's remarks even though they were available ten days before Hayden's nomination hearing Thursday? What about the Washington Post, whose ads say, "If you don't get it, you don't get it." Well, you would not have gotten it there either.
How did I learn all this? From a story on Steve Clemons's blog, The Washington Note, which included a link to a transcript of the May 8 New York Public Library event: "Listening In: Eavesdropping and the National Security Agency." Amy Goodman also mentioned it on Democracy Now on May 17.
So What About Hayden?
On CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight on May 17, Adm. Inman gave Gen. Hayden a relatively favorable review, despite Hayden's willingness to obey what Inman implicitly said were illegal orders, and Hayden's willingness to take the lead in defending the eavesdropping program. It is likely that Inman's overly charitable approach can be attributed to professional courtesy. Inman himself certainly would not have behaved as Hayden did. A thorough professional, Inman would not have put on the back burner his oath to defend the Constitution of the United States and the universal obligation not to obey an illegal order.
And there is more. The Cheney-esque ethos of contempt for Congress still rules, facilitated by party partisans in Congress. House Intelligence Committee Chair Pete Hoekstra, for example, speaks of "vigorous oversight" of the NSA, but evidence is lacking. Late last year, for example, the current head of the NSA, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, deliberately misled House Intelligence Committee member Rush Holt (D-NJ) on the eavesdropping program. On December 6, Rep. Holt called on Alexander and NSA lawyers to discuss protecting Americans' privacy. They all assured Holt that only with a court warrant would the NSA eavesdrop on Americans.
Later that month, when the disclosures in the New York Times made it clear that Gen. Alexander had deliberately misled a member of his committee of jurisdiction, Hoekstra merely suggested that Holt write a letter to Alexander to complain. The inescapable message to Alexander? Fear not: Hoekstra the fox is watching the hen house. Alexander was accorded the privilege of briefing the Senate Intelligence Committee on NSA operations the day before the hearing on Gen. Mike Hayden's nomination to be the next director of the CIA. There is no sign that any of those Senators were gauche enough to ask Alexander why the general had lied to one of their House counterparts. And there is every sign that Roberts's committee will give its approval to the president having another yes-man as director of the CIA.
It is interesting, if not surprising, that Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, party loyalist Pat Roberts, decided to call no previous NSA director to testify at the Hayden nomination hearing. Adm. Inman would have been the most experienced and able witness (especially in view of his intimate knowledge of the history of FISA). Roberts would have been well aware that for Inman it is one thing to praise Hayden to Lou Dobbs, and quite another to state under oath that Hayden had not already disqualified himself for the job. It is altogether understandable that Roberts would be reluctant to subject a basically honest officer like Inman to withering cross-examination by the likes of Sen. Russ Feingold.
Call my thinking "quaint" or "obsolete," but I can find no excuse for an officer who lets nearness to absolute power, together with hired-gun lawyers, corrupt and blur his oath to defend the Constitution and responsibility not to obey illegal orders. When I was an Army officer, both were drummed into us; and if we reneged on those promises, we were liable to being drummed out. So I would agree with the first former NSA director quoted above. Hayden should be court-martialed, not confirmed. And Alexander, too.
--------
Ray McGovern served nine CIA directors and seven presidents as a CIA analyst from the administrations of John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Analysis: Sino-Russian ties gaining momentum
Analysis: Sino-Russian ties gaining momentum
By Edward Lanfranco
United Press International
Published May 19, 2006
BEIJING -- The strategic partnership forged between China and Russia as a counterweight to American predominance on the world stage a decade ago is gaining momentum.
Analysts monitoring the development of the Sino-Russian alliance characterize developments this week as a combination of coordinated policies on major diplomatic issues to foster a multilateral international order, while at the same time both countries are taking incremental steps to deepen their bilateral relationship.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with his counterpart Li Zhaoxing to discuss the latest developments on the international situation, using Beijing as a platform for tough words for Washington.
Describing discussions Tuesday with his host as "long and pragmatic," Lavrov told a press conference that the two countries were united against sanctioning the use of force in the United Nations to thwart Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.
In a veiled warning against unilateral action by the Bush administration Lavrov stated, "We confirmed today that neither Russia nor China will be able to support the Security Council's possible resolution that would contain a pretext for coercive, let alone military, measures."
Challenging U.S. efforts to isolate Iran, Lavrov said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been invited to attend the June 15 leadership summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the regional grouping which includes the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The association, which analysts say is largely financed and directed by China with Russian support, is the PRC's first foray into regional strategic bloc building. Energy access and security underpins the Chinese strategy for expanding its influence.
China is using its growing economic muscle to forge closer trade and security links with member states. The group's influence is expanding, as the SCO granted Mongolia observer status in 2004 then added Iran, Pakistan and India as observers in 2005. Several countries have expressed interest in becoming full-fledged members.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao would not confirm Thursday if Ahmadinejad had accepted the invitation, saying the SCO would "respect the decision made by observer states on the representative they chose to send."
Liu was evasive responding to a question about increasing membership. He stated the topic had come up at the SCO foreign ministers' meeting on Monday with "several formal and informal requests to join" expressed. The spokesman said "the legal basis for more members was being studied."
Besides nuclear diplomacy and the SCO, China and Russia also agreed to coordinate efforts concerning Iraq, Afghanistan and U.N. reform, Lavrov told reporters.
During his meeting with the Russian foreign minister Tuesday, Chinese President Hu Jintao was quoted in state-run media expressing the hope that both sides "will intensify bilateral cooperation in major projects covering economic and trade issues, including energy, investment and technology, to achieve quick results."
The foreign ministry spokesman said Thursday "energy cooperation would hasten their comprehensive relationship," calling it "an important part of their complimentary economies."
Liu stated China was "satisfied" with collaboration with Russia on energy issues, mentioning crude oil shipments surpassed 10 million tons in 2005 and that ongoing work for crude and natural gas pipelines "were part of the ways to build mutual trust and a win-win situation."
While no progress on energy was reached during Lavrov's visit, he said "bilateral relations had reached unprecedented levels since the March summit meeting between Hu and Vladimir Putin." The two presidents will meet at the SCO gathering in June, followed by the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July, then again at the APEC summit this autumn, he noted.
There were several subtle, yet key, developments during Lavrov's visit, designed to improve bilateral ties, step-by-step.
First was an agreement signed to rebuild a bridge over the Argun River, one of three islands on rivers of their nearly 2,700 mile long common border, which needs to be delimited. Since 1991, the two countries have resolved more than 98 percent of their border issues. Liu said negotiations on the remainder had been "thoroughly solved" and the demarcation agreement finalized in 2007.
The other measure was to set up a working commission on immigration. There are concerns in the sparsely populated Russian far east that China and its vast population has designs on annexing the area, with illegal immigrant workers the first step towards that goal.
Liu tried to allay such fears, saying his country "firmly opposes illegal immigration to Russia and other countries." He added that the commission will work on management and coordination of their borders.
"It is unnecessary to worry about such a threat," the spokesman said.
By Edward Lanfranco
United Press International
Published May 19, 2006
BEIJING -- The strategic partnership forged between China and Russia as a counterweight to American predominance on the world stage a decade ago is gaining momentum.
Analysts monitoring the development of the Sino-Russian alliance characterize developments this week as a combination of coordinated policies on major diplomatic issues to foster a multilateral international order, while at the same time both countries are taking incremental steps to deepen their bilateral relationship.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with his counterpart Li Zhaoxing to discuss the latest developments on the international situation, using Beijing as a platform for tough words for Washington.
Describing discussions Tuesday with his host as "long and pragmatic," Lavrov told a press conference that the two countries were united against sanctioning the use of force in the United Nations to thwart Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.
In a veiled warning against unilateral action by the Bush administration Lavrov stated, "We confirmed today that neither Russia nor China will be able to support the Security Council's possible resolution that would contain a pretext for coercive, let alone military, measures."
Challenging U.S. efforts to isolate Iran, Lavrov said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been invited to attend the June 15 leadership summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the regional grouping which includes the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The association, which analysts say is largely financed and directed by China with Russian support, is the PRC's first foray into regional strategic bloc building. Energy access and security underpins the Chinese strategy for expanding its influence.
China is using its growing economic muscle to forge closer trade and security links with member states. The group's influence is expanding, as the SCO granted Mongolia observer status in 2004 then added Iran, Pakistan and India as observers in 2005. Several countries have expressed interest in becoming full-fledged members.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao would not confirm Thursday if Ahmadinejad had accepted the invitation, saying the SCO would "respect the decision made by observer states on the representative they chose to send."
Liu was evasive responding to a question about increasing membership. He stated the topic had come up at the SCO foreign ministers' meeting on Monday with "several formal and informal requests to join" expressed. The spokesman said "the legal basis for more members was being studied."
Besides nuclear diplomacy and the SCO, China and Russia also agreed to coordinate efforts concerning Iraq, Afghanistan and U.N. reform, Lavrov told reporters.
During his meeting with the Russian foreign minister Tuesday, Chinese President Hu Jintao was quoted in state-run media expressing the hope that both sides "will intensify bilateral cooperation in major projects covering economic and trade issues, including energy, investment and technology, to achieve quick results."
The foreign ministry spokesman said Thursday "energy cooperation would hasten their comprehensive relationship," calling it "an important part of their complimentary economies."
Liu stated China was "satisfied" with collaboration with Russia on energy issues, mentioning crude oil shipments surpassed 10 million tons in 2005 and that ongoing work for crude and natural gas pipelines "were part of the ways to build mutual trust and a win-win situation."
While no progress on energy was reached during Lavrov's visit, he said "bilateral relations had reached unprecedented levels since the March summit meeting between Hu and Vladimir Putin." The two presidents will meet at the SCO gathering in June, followed by the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July, then again at the APEC summit this autumn, he noted.
There were several subtle, yet key, developments during Lavrov's visit, designed to improve bilateral ties, step-by-step.
First was an agreement signed to rebuild a bridge over the Argun River, one of three islands on rivers of their nearly 2,700 mile long common border, which needs to be delimited. Since 1991, the two countries have resolved more than 98 percent of their border issues. Liu said negotiations on the remainder had been "thoroughly solved" and the demarcation agreement finalized in 2007.
The other measure was to set up a working commission on immigration. There are concerns in the sparsely populated Russian far east that China and its vast population has designs on annexing the area, with illegal immigrant workers the first step towards that goal.
Liu tried to allay such fears, saying his country "firmly opposes illegal immigration to Russia and other countries." He added that the commission will work on management and coordination of their borders.
"It is unnecessary to worry about such a threat," the spokesman said.
Is US fading as superpower?
Is US fading as superpower?
Critics argue that war in Iraq has sapped US ability to influence world events.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
For the past five years, since the 9/11 attacks, US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have helped shape key world events. But now, some influential media and political critics are saying that both men, and the US in particular, no longer can get the world to do as they wish. In a recent article entitled, "Axis of Feeble," the Economist argues that "the debacle in Iraq and problems at home have turned both leaders from soaring hawks into the lamest of ducks."
This week Mr Bush's popularity drooped to 31 percent in the polls; his party faces a beating and the possible loss of one or both houses of Congress in November's mid-term elections. In Britain meanwhile, much of the Labour Party, which Mr Blair reinvented and led through three consecutive election victories, wants to bundle its saviour into retirement and replace him with Gordon Brown.
Neither man is going right away. Mr Blair may hang on for another year. Unpopular lame duck though he may be, Mr Bush will stay in office until January 2009. And the path may not be all downhill: the dysfunctionality of the Democrats may yet let the Republicans limp home in the mid-terms. But an era is plainly drawing to an end. No matter how long they remain in office, the self-confident and often self-righteous political partnership that shaped the West's military response to Al Qaeda and led the march into Afghanistan and Iraq is now faltering.
For those who would "rejoice" at the end of this partnership, because of the idea that "in a world of one superpower, some say, people are safer when its president is too weak for foreign adventures," the Economist says they are wrong.
That Mr. Bush has made big mistakes in foreign policy is not in doubt. He oversold the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, bungled the aftermath, betrayed America's own principles in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, ignored Mr. Blair's pleas to restart peace diplomacy in Palestine. But America cannot fix any of these mistakes by folding its tents and slinking home to a grumpy isolation. On the contrary. In his belief that America needed to respond resolutely to the dangers of terrorism, tyranny and proliferation, Mr. Bush was mainly right. His chief failures stem from incompetent execution.
WBUR.org's OnPoint recently looked at the question "Is America losing its luster?" (audio link). The conclusion reached by panelists on the show was that while the US continues to be militarily powerful, the "notion of irresistible power" no longer is the case. David Kennedy, professor of history at Stanford University, argued that the US is learning "[t]he world is a recalcitant place and does not yield itself to us easily." He added that the notion the US could shape the world as it wished proved to be an illusion. The US is learning the lesson that all great powers have learned, Kennedy said, that no matter how much power a country has, the world will not just go along with its wishes.
Kennedy also argues that after World War II, the US used its position as a dominant power to work with other countries to create new global initiatives. But since the start of the Bush administration, the notions of cooperation, diplomacy, and multilaterialism have been replaced by a unilaterial approach that has led much of the world to "push back" or even work to "check our power."
United Press International reports that a new survey by the Pew Research Center, part of a new book "America against the World," also illustrates the problem for the US. More than 70 percent of the 91,000 people around the world interviewed for the survey believe that the US needs a rival superpower.
It found individualistic traits, such as US military operations, have turned off the rest of the world that considered the United States to be the light of democracy in the past. Suicide attacks on US forces in Iraq are OK according to half of Lebanese, Jordanians and Moroccans polled. The survey found anti-American sentiment is at its highest level ever – even higher than in 1983 when a Newsweek survey found about 25 percent of French, Japanese and German citizens were supportive of US policies.
President Bush's troubles at home are also playing a role in the global reaction to US intiatives. CBSNews.com's editorial director Dick Meyer wrote earlier this week that Bush is "a lame duck."
Short of another disaster on the scale of 9/11, George Bush no longer has the power, credibility or ability to effectively govern for the rest of his term in office. Contrary to what you hear on television, governing remains more important than campaigning. Government is more important than elections — to the extent the two can be differentiated anymore.
Bush's realm of efficacy will be limited to areas where he can make unilateral decisions, mostly in war and foreign policy. The tax cuts that oozed through Congress last week may well be his last "significant" piece of domestic legislation; I put quotations around significant because they are, in fact temporary. The entire menu of Bush tax tinkering is set to expire in 2010 on someone else's watch, an apt metaphor for this administration.
Jonah Goldberg, of the National Review, argues that President Bush should be getting a lot more credit on several fronts, especially how well the economy is doing. The war in Iraq, however, colors everything else the President does.
In the 1990s, the James Carville catechism "It's the economy, stupid" was hailed as the distilled essence of all electoral wisdom among liberals. Nonpartisan political scientists assure us that economic performance is the indispensable factor in presidential popularity. The main reason Bush doesn't get a lot of credit for the booming economy is almost surely Iraq. The war makes many people feel the country is "on the wrong track" - a view normally, but not necessarily, prompted by a weak economy.
Finally, David Wood writes in a column for the Newhouse News Service that while surveys like the Pew Research Center poll show that there is an ominous turn against the US, it's important to keep the big picture in mind.
No question this is bad news [the Pew survey] – but put it into perspective, urged Richard Solomon, the veteran diplomat and negotiator who is president of the US Institute of Peace, a federally funded think tank. "It's an attractive aspect of our culture that we worry about what other people think," Solomon said. "The French couldn't care less if they make people unhappy." Much of the enmity aimed at the United States is because Americans have tackled difficult jobs like removing Saddam Hussein from power, Solomon said, while the Germans and French took a pass. "One of the costs we bear for taking on these responsibilities is that people get nervous when they see an 800-pound gorilla willing to jump. "But being liked is important," he added, because public support goes either "to us or to the bad guys."
Critics argue that war in Iraq has sapped US ability to influence world events.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
For the past five years, since the 9/11 attacks, US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have helped shape key world events. But now, some influential media and political critics are saying that both men, and the US in particular, no longer can get the world to do as they wish. In a recent article entitled, "Axis of Feeble," the Economist argues that "the debacle in Iraq and problems at home have turned both leaders from soaring hawks into the lamest of ducks."
This week Mr Bush's popularity drooped to 31 percent in the polls; his party faces a beating and the possible loss of one or both houses of Congress in November's mid-term elections. In Britain meanwhile, much of the Labour Party, which Mr Blair reinvented and led through three consecutive election victories, wants to bundle its saviour into retirement and replace him with Gordon Brown.
Neither man is going right away. Mr Blair may hang on for another year. Unpopular lame duck though he may be, Mr Bush will stay in office until January 2009. And the path may not be all downhill: the dysfunctionality of the Democrats may yet let the Republicans limp home in the mid-terms. But an era is plainly drawing to an end. No matter how long they remain in office, the self-confident and often self-righteous political partnership that shaped the West's military response to Al Qaeda and led the march into Afghanistan and Iraq is now faltering.
For those who would "rejoice" at the end of this partnership, because of the idea that "in a world of one superpower, some say, people are safer when its president is too weak for foreign adventures," the Economist says they are wrong.
That Mr. Bush has made big mistakes in foreign policy is not in doubt. He oversold the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, bungled the aftermath, betrayed America's own principles in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, ignored Mr. Blair's pleas to restart peace diplomacy in Palestine. But America cannot fix any of these mistakes by folding its tents and slinking home to a grumpy isolation. On the contrary. In his belief that America needed to respond resolutely to the dangers of terrorism, tyranny and proliferation, Mr. Bush was mainly right. His chief failures stem from incompetent execution.
WBUR.org's OnPoint recently looked at the question "Is America losing its luster?" (audio link). The conclusion reached by panelists on the show was that while the US continues to be militarily powerful, the "notion of irresistible power" no longer is the case. David Kennedy, professor of history at Stanford University, argued that the US is learning "[t]he world is a recalcitant place and does not yield itself to us easily." He added that the notion the US could shape the world as it wished proved to be an illusion. The US is learning the lesson that all great powers have learned, Kennedy said, that no matter how much power a country has, the world will not just go along with its wishes.
Kennedy also argues that after World War II, the US used its position as a dominant power to work with other countries to create new global initiatives. But since the start of the Bush administration, the notions of cooperation, diplomacy, and multilaterialism have been replaced by a unilaterial approach that has led much of the world to "push back" or even work to "check our power."
United Press International reports that a new survey by the Pew Research Center, part of a new book "America against the World," also illustrates the problem for the US. More than 70 percent of the 91,000 people around the world interviewed for the survey believe that the US needs a rival superpower.
It found individualistic traits, such as US military operations, have turned off the rest of the world that considered the United States to be the light of democracy in the past. Suicide attacks on US forces in Iraq are OK according to half of Lebanese, Jordanians and Moroccans polled. The survey found anti-American sentiment is at its highest level ever – even higher than in 1983 when a Newsweek survey found about 25 percent of French, Japanese and German citizens were supportive of US policies.
President Bush's troubles at home are also playing a role in the global reaction to US intiatives. CBSNews.com's editorial director Dick Meyer wrote earlier this week that Bush is "a lame duck."
Short of another disaster on the scale of 9/11, George Bush no longer has the power, credibility or ability to effectively govern for the rest of his term in office. Contrary to what you hear on television, governing remains more important than campaigning. Government is more important than elections — to the extent the two can be differentiated anymore.
Bush's realm of efficacy will be limited to areas where he can make unilateral decisions, mostly in war and foreign policy. The tax cuts that oozed through Congress last week may well be his last "significant" piece of domestic legislation; I put quotations around significant because they are, in fact temporary. The entire menu of Bush tax tinkering is set to expire in 2010 on someone else's watch, an apt metaphor for this administration.
Jonah Goldberg, of the National Review, argues that President Bush should be getting a lot more credit on several fronts, especially how well the economy is doing. The war in Iraq, however, colors everything else the President does.
In the 1990s, the James Carville catechism "It's the economy, stupid" was hailed as the distilled essence of all electoral wisdom among liberals. Nonpartisan political scientists assure us that economic performance is the indispensable factor in presidential popularity. The main reason Bush doesn't get a lot of credit for the booming economy is almost surely Iraq. The war makes many people feel the country is "on the wrong track" - a view normally, but not necessarily, prompted by a weak economy.
Finally, David Wood writes in a column for the Newhouse News Service that while surveys like the Pew Research Center poll show that there is an ominous turn against the US, it's important to keep the big picture in mind.
No question this is bad news [the Pew survey] – but put it into perspective, urged Richard Solomon, the veteran diplomat and negotiator who is president of the US Institute of Peace, a federally funded think tank. "It's an attractive aspect of our culture that we worry about what other people think," Solomon said. "The French couldn't care less if they make people unhappy." Much of the enmity aimed at the United States is because Americans have tackled difficult jobs like removing Saddam Hussein from power, Solomon said, while the Germans and French took a pass. "One of the costs we bear for taking on these responsibilities is that people get nervous when they see an 800-pound gorilla willing to jump. "But being liked is important," he added, because public support goes either "to us or to the bad guys."
Is America Becoming a Police State?--Yes, because perpetual war means dictatorship at home
Is America Becoming a Police State?
Yes, because perpetual war means dictatorship at home
by Justin Raimondo
Editor's note: Justin Raimondo's column will return Monday.
In the question and answer session following a speech given at the American Enterprise Institute, Karl Rove blurted out the truth. Although no doubt inadvertent, this unusual incident of truth-telling is nevertheless shocking to those of us who have grown used to an administration that lies as a first resort. In front of an audience of politicians, policy wonks, and journalists, the president's grand strategist admitted that, while Americans are content with their economic lot, they are in a "sour" mood because of the Iraq war: "I think the war looms over everything," Rove said:
"There's no doubt about it. Being in the middle of a war where people turn on their television sets and see brave men and women dying is not something that makes people happy and optimistic and upbeat."
While it is no doubt true that Americans are disturbed and saddened by the sight of their soldiers falling in combat, it isn't the fact of war per se that has soured them on this administration, and, more broadly, the GOP. If television cameras had been present to chronicle, say, the War of 1812, one can hardly imagine that the sight of Washington burning would have lessened their zeal to keep up the fight. To take a more recent example, Americans would not have caviled and turned against Franklin Roosevelt even as they watched the battle of Bataan and the fall of Corregidor broadcast live: the reaction might even have increased support for the Roosevelt administration as the public rallied around their commander in chief and determined to fight the "Japs" – as the newspapers of the day routinely referred to the enemy – with renewed fury.
During World War II, Americans knew – or thought they knew – why they were fighting, and had to fight. No such certainty is present in their minds as they watch the tragedy of Iraq unfold on the nightly news.
As Hitler's armies occupied the Eurasian landmass, in the early years of WWII, and Japan gobbled up the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and threatened Hawaii, Americans believed they were in a fight for their very survival. They believe no such thing when it comes to the war in Iraq. Most Americans are skeptical of this administration's announced war aims: they correctly perceive the invasion and conquest of Iraq as a futile crusade to "democratize" a region that has never known anything but the rule of thugs. They see their sons and daughters dying, not to protect the homeland or even to defend capital-D Democracy, but to ensure the survival of an Iraqi government made up of authoritarian mullahs and their armed gangs.
Americans do not fear adversity, nor do they quail at the sight of brave men and women dying – as long as it's in a good cause. The only causes one can discern in the current conflict, however – a lust for oil, and the seductive power of America's pro-Israel lobby – are hardly enough to inspire a crowd much bigger than the editorial staff of the Weekly Standard.
Rove is right when he says the war looms over everything. As the cost of our Iraq campaign approaches the trillion-dollar mark, the entire Republican agenda of less government and lower taxes has been fatally undermined by the Napoleonic foreign policy championed by this White House. And we aren't even winning! If this is the price of defeat, one has to wonder what victory would cost us.
While the astronomical cost in dollars and cents has an immediate and readily apparent impact, the price we are paying in other ways – in damage to our core values and institutions – is even dearer. The Bush administration may be losing the war against the Iraqi insurgency, but they are doing much better with their war on the American people – reading our e-mails, gathering up our phone records, and instituting a hi-tech spy system such as no Russian commissar ever dreamt of. The news that the feds are tracking phone calls made by and to major news organizations, including ABC News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times – ostensibly to find evidence of "security leaks" – is just the latest in a series of outrages against civil liberties and common decency.
A foreign policy driven by the imperial impulse is bound to have grave domestic consequences, none of them conducive to the American form of government. The Founders envisioned a republic, not an empire: they set up a system designed to govern the 13 former colonies, not the world. Foreign policy was a matter of avoiding reabsorption by the British and quashing the ambitions of the other European empires in their quest for North American colonies. Domestic policy was the main concern of every major American political figure and political party, right up until World War II. With the advent of the Cold War, however, and the rise of the national security state, the focus was increasingly on foreign policy.
Garet Garrett, the Old Right author and editor, saw the dawn of the new day and was quick to discern its meaning. In his 1951 philippic "Rise of Empire" [.pdf file], Garrett described what he called the "marks of empire," the signs that say the republic is no more and "Hail Caesar!" There were, I recall, five or six of them: the first was the ascendancy of presidential power over the other two branches of the federal government. We see this, today, in the neoconservative theory of the "unitary executive," which puts special emphasis on the president's role as commander in chief of the armed forces. Militarism goes hand in hand with this Bonapartist impulse, quite naturally, and this, in Garrett's words, gives rise to:
"A second mark by which you may unmistakably distinguish Empire is: Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.
"That happened to Rome. It has happened to every Empire. The consequences of its having happened to the British Empire are tragically appearing. The fact now to be faced is that it has happened also to us. The voice of government is saying that if our foreign policy fails we are ruined. It is all or nothing. Our survival as a free nation is at hazard.
"That makes it simple, for in that case there is no domestic policy that may not have to be sacrificed to the necessities of foreign policy – even freedom."
That was written just as the first frosts of the Cold War blew arctic gusts across Europe, and the freezing wind of witch-hunts and loyalty oaths deadened the political atmosphere in America. Yet it could easily have been written today, as America gets ready to launch a new global struggle – the president calls it his "global democratic revolution" – against a new enemy. We are in a war, the president and his allies tell us, that will last for at least a generation. Small wonder, then, that the current administration is launching a large-scale assault on civil liberties of a kind not seen since the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, spying on and trying to intimidate journalists, trampling on what remains of the Founders' libertarian legacy.
As recent events have shown, the danger is not theoretical or postponed to some future time: we are not speaking here of some dark dystopia as a kind of "what if" experiment. The danger is imminent: the dystopia is here and now. The only question is: will the American people stand for it?
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
Our spring 2006 fundraising drive was a great success: once again, our readers have come through for us, and words can't even begin to express the gratitude all of us at Antiwar.com feel. We raised close to $65,000, so far, and the contributions are still coming in. It's enormously gratifying to see this level of support coming so consistently from our readers. But we aren't letting this vote of confidence go to our heads: we're working to improve Antiwar.com, offering more commentary and other original material, and expanding our efforts to give you the best coverage of world affairs available on the Internet.
Again, thank you all for your support: we couldn't continue without it, and we'll do our best to keep earning it.
Yes, because perpetual war means dictatorship at home
by Justin Raimondo
Editor's note: Justin Raimondo's column will return Monday.
There are many reasons to oppose war, both moral and practical. Aside from abhorrence of mass murder, however, libertarians such as myself dedicate so much of their energies to this issue because the price of interventionism is liberty itself. With each war, the power of government increases, until, at some point, it spills over the dike of the Constitution, washes away the Bill of Rights, and drowns us all in a flood tide of tyranny......
In the question and answer session following a speech given at the American Enterprise Institute, Karl Rove blurted out the truth. Although no doubt inadvertent, this unusual incident of truth-telling is nevertheless shocking to those of us who have grown used to an administration that lies as a first resort. In front of an audience of politicians, policy wonks, and journalists, the president's grand strategist admitted that, while Americans are content with their economic lot, they are in a "sour" mood because of the Iraq war: "I think the war looms over everything," Rove said:
"There's no doubt about it. Being in the middle of a war where people turn on their television sets and see brave men and women dying is not something that makes people happy and optimistic and upbeat."
While it is no doubt true that Americans are disturbed and saddened by the sight of their soldiers falling in combat, it isn't the fact of war per se that has soured them on this administration, and, more broadly, the GOP. If television cameras had been present to chronicle, say, the War of 1812, one can hardly imagine that the sight of Washington burning would have lessened their zeal to keep up the fight. To take a more recent example, Americans would not have caviled and turned against Franklin Roosevelt even as they watched the battle of Bataan and the fall of Corregidor broadcast live: the reaction might even have increased support for the Roosevelt administration as the public rallied around their commander in chief and determined to fight the "Japs" – as the newspapers of the day routinely referred to the enemy – with renewed fury.
During World War II, Americans knew – or thought they knew – why they were fighting, and had to fight. No such certainty is present in their minds as they watch the tragedy of Iraq unfold on the nightly news.
As Hitler's armies occupied the Eurasian landmass, in the early years of WWII, and Japan gobbled up the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and threatened Hawaii, Americans believed they were in a fight for their very survival. They believe no such thing when it comes to the war in Iraq. Most Americans are skeptical of this administration's announced war aims: they correctly perceive the invasion and conquest of Iraq as a futile crusade to "democratize" a region that has never known anything but the rule of thugs. They see their sons and daughters dying, not to protect the homeland or even to defend capital-D Democracy, but to ensure the survival of an Iraqi government made up of authoritarian mullahs and their armed gangs.
Americans do not fear adversity, nor do they quail at the sight of brave men and women dying – as long as it's in a good cause. The only causes one can discern in the current conflict, however – a lust for oil, and the seductive power of America's pro-Israel lobby – are hardly enough to inspire a crowd much bigger than the editorial staff of the Weekly Standard.
Rove is right when he says the war looms over everything. As the cost of our Iraq campaign approaches the trillion-dollar mark, the entire Republican agenda of less government and lower taxes has been fatally undermined by the Napoleonic foreign policy championed by this White House. And we aren't even winning! If this is the price of defeat, one has to wonder what victory would cost us.
While the astronomical cost in dollars and cents has an immediate and readily apparent impact, the price we are paying in other ways – in damage to our core values and institutions – is even dearer. The Bush administration may be losing the war against the Iraqi insurgency, but they are doing much better with their war on the American people – reading our e-mails, gathering up our phone records, and instituting a hi-tech spy system such as no Russian commissar ever dreamt of. The news that the feds are tracking phone calls made by and to major news organizations, including ABC News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times – ostensibly to find evidence of "security leaks" – is just the latest in a series of outrages against civil liberties and common decency.
The price of perpetual war is a police state, one in which a permanent state of "emergency" – the threat of a terrorist attack – is utilized to break down institutional safeguards, the system of constitutional checks and balances, that protect us from dictatorship.
A foreign policy driven by the imperial impulse is bound to have grave domestic consequences, none of them conducive to the American form of government. The Founders envisioned a republic, not an empire: they set up a system designed to govern the 13 former colonies, not the world. Foreign policy was a matter of avoiding reabsorption by the British and quashing the ambitions of the other European empires in their quest for North American colonies. Domestic policy was the main concern of every major American political figure and political party, right up until World War II. With the advent of the Cold War, however, and the rise of the national security state, the focus was increasingly on foreign policy.
Garet Garrett, the Old Right author and editor, saw the dawn of the new day and was quick to discern its meaning. In his 1951 philippic "Rise of Empire" [.pdf file], Garrett described what he called the "marks of empire," the signs that say the republic is no more and "Hail Caesar!" There were, I recall, five or six of them: the first was the ascendancy of presidential power over the other two branches of the federal government. We see this, today, in the neoconservative theory of the "unitary executive," which puts special emphasis on the president's role as commander in chief of the armed forces. Militarism goes hand in hand with this Bonapartist impulse, quite naturally, and this, in Garrett's words, gives rise to:
"A second mark by which you may unmistakably distinguish Empire is: Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.
"That happened to Rome. It has happened to every Empire. The consequences of its having happened to the British Empire are tragically appearing. The fact now to be faced is that it has happened also to us. The voice of government is saying that if our foreign policy fails we are ruined. It is all or nothing. Our survival as a free nation is at hazard.
"That makes it simple, for in that case there is no domestic policy that may not have to be sacrificed to the necessities of foreign policy – even freedom."
That was written just as the first frosts of the Cold War blew arctic gusts across Europe, and the freezing wind of witch-hunts and loyalty oaths deadened the political atmosphere in America. Yet it could easily have been written today, as America gets ready to launch a new global struggle – the president calls it his "global democratic revolution" – against a new enemy. We are in a war, the president and his allies tell us, that will last for at least a generation. Small wonder, then, that the current administration is launching a large-scale assault on civil liberties of a kind not seen since the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, spying on and trying to intimidate journalists, trampling on what remains of the Founders' libertarian legacy.
There are many reasons to oppose war, both moral and practical. Aside from abhorrence of mass murder, however, libertarians such as myself dedicate so much of their energies to this issue because the price of interventionism is liberty itself. With each war, the power of government increases, until, at some point, it spills over the dike of the Constitution, washes away the Bill of Rights, and drowns us all in a flood tide of tyranny.
As recent events have shown, the danger is not theoretical or postponed to some future time: we are not speaking here of some dark dystopia as a kind of "what if" experiment. The danger is imminent: the dystopia is here and now. The only question is: will the American people stand for it?
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
Our spring 2006 fundraising drive was a great success: once again, our readers have come through for us, and words can't even begin to express the gratitude all of us at Antiwar.com feel. We raised close to $65,000, so far, and the contributions are still coming in. It's enormously gratifying to see this level of support coming so consistently from our readers. But we aren't letting this vote of confidence go to our heads: we're working to improve Antiwar.com, offering more commentary and other original material, and expanding our efforts to give you the best coverage of world affairs available on the Internet.
Again, thank you all for your support: we couldn't continue without it, and we'll do our best to keep earning it.
NYT: Bush breaks pledge made in 1999 to veto any tax increases
NYT: Bush breaks pledge made in 1999 to veto any tax increases
05/20/2006 @ 12:35 pm
Filed by RAW STORYPresident Bush appears to have broken a pledge he made in 1999 to veto any tax increase bills, according to an article set for Sunday's New York Times, RAW STORY has found.
"The $69 billion tax cut bill that President Bush signed last week tripled tax rates for teenagers with college savings funds, despite Bush's 1999 pledge to veto any tax increase," reports David Cay Johnston.
In 1999, the conservative group Americans For Tax Reform convinced Bush - and the other candidates seeking the GOP nomination for president at the time - to sign anti-tax increase pledges (link).
"If I were elected president," Bush pledged. "I will oppose and veto any increase in individual or corporate marginal income tax rates or individual or corporate income tax hikes."
Developing...
Doc shines light on homeless Iraq vets
Doc shines light on homeless Iraq vets
By Daniel TrottaFri May 19, 3:05 PM ET
The nightmare of Iraq was bad enough for Vanessa Gamboa. Unprepared for combat beyond her basic training, the supply specialist soon found herself in a firefight, commanding a handful of clerks.
"They promoted me to sergeant. I knew my job but I didn't know anything about combat. So I'm responsible for all these people and I don't know what to tell them but to duck," Gamboa said.
The battle, on a supply delivery run, ended without casualties, and it did little to steel Gamboa for what awaited her back home in Brooklyn.
When the single mother was discharged in April, after her second tour in Iraq, she was 24 and had little money and no place to live. She slept in her son's day-care center.
Gamboa is part of a small but growing trend among U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- homelessness.
On any given night the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helps 200 to 250 of them, and more go uncounted. They are among nearly 200,000 homeless veterans in America, largely from the Vietnam War.
Advocates say the number of homeless veterans is certain to grow, just as it did in the years following the Vietnam and Gulf wars, as a consequence of the stresses of war and inadequate job training.
Homeless veterans have remained in the shadows of the national debate about Iraq, although the issue may gain traction from the film "When I Came Home," which won an award this month for best New York-made documentary at the city's Tribeca Film Festival.
The documentary tells the story of Iraq war veteran Herold Noel as he lived in his car. It will get a screening in June at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
U.S. Rep. Bob Filner (news, bio, voting record), a California Democrat, calls it a "national disgrace" that homelessness among veterans has not been solved and held an informal hearing on Thursday to highlight the issue.
"We've seen the same thing with Agent Orange and Gulf War syndrome," Filner said of ailments from prior wars. "The bureaucracy is denying that there's anything wrong. First it's deny, deny, deny. Then they admit it's a small problem. And later they admit it's a widespread problem.
"We're not talking about a lot of money (to solve the problem) compared with overall spending on the war in Iraq. We're spending a billion dollars every two and a half days," he told Reuters.
DISCHARGED AND FORGOTTEN
One theme of the documentary is that veterans who risked their lives in war are too easily discarded by society once they are out of the military. The film shows Noel being denied housing by New York City's housing agency.
Gamboa had a similar experience.
"They put me in this roach-infested hotel. I was there for 10 days," Gamboa said. "Then they said I wasn't eligible to stay in a shelter because I could stay with my sister, who lives in a studio apartment with her husband. And I haven't spoken to her in six years."
Now her luck is improving.
Unlike many low-ranking soldiers, Gamboa received army training with civilian applications -- logistics -- and started a job with a fancy Fifth Avenue clothing store this week.
And despite an Army snafu that nearly denied her U.S. citizenship, the Guatemalan-born Gamboa, who moved to Brooklyn as a child, took her oath before the U.S. flag on Friday.
Military recruiters target poor neighborhoods like Gamboa's Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Young adults with few job skills join the Army. When they get out, many have fallen behind their contemporaries, experts say.
The stresses of combat and military life contribute to post traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and mental illness, which are especially taboo subjects to soldiers trained not to admit failure easily.
About half of all homeless veterans suffer from mental illness, and more than two-thirds suffer from alcohol or drug abuse problems, the VA says.
Gamboa has avoided those pitfalls, but female veterans are three times more likely to become homeless than women in the general population, the American Journal of Public Health reported.
Repeated deployments -- a hallmark of the Iraq war -- and separation from family can also portend future problems.
"Then the downward spiral begins with substance abuse and problems with the law," said Amy Fairweather of Iraq Veteran, which helps war veterans in San Francisco.
"If you wanted to put together all the repercussions that put people at risk for homelessness, you couldn't do better than the Iraq war."
By Daniel TrottaFri May 19, 3:05 PM ET
The nightmare of Iraq was bad enough for Vanessa Gamboa. Unprepared for combat beyond her basic training, the supply specialist soon found herself in a firefight, commanding a handful of clerks.
"They promoted me to sergeant. I knew my job but I didn't know anything about combat. So I'm responsible for all these people and I don't know what to tell them but to duck," Gamboa said.
The battle, on a supply delivery run, ended without casualties, and it did little to steel Gamboa for what awaited her back home in Brooklyn.
When the single mother was discharged in April, after her second tour in Iraq, she was 24 and had little money and no place to live. She slept in her son's day-care center.
Gamboa is part of a small but growing trend among U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- homelessness.
On any given night the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helps 200 to 250 of them, and more go uncounted. They are among nearly 200,000 homeless veterans in America, largely from the Vietnam War.
Advocates say the number of homeless veterans is certain to grow, just as it did in the years following the Vietnam and Gulf wars, as a consequence of the stresses of war and inadequate job training.
Homeless veterans have remained in the shadows of the national debate about Iraq, although the issue may gain traction from the film "When I Came Home," which won an award this month for best New York-made documentary at the city's Tribeca Film Festival.
The documentary tells the story of Iraq war veteran Herold Noel as he lived in his car. It will get a screening in June at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
U.S. Rep. Bob Filner (news, bio, voting record), a California Democrat, calls it a "national disgrace" that homelessness among veterans has not been solved and held an informal hearing on Thursday to highlight the issue.
"We've seen the same thing with Agent Orange and Gulf War syndrome," Filner said of ailments from prior wars. "The bureaucracy is denying that there's anything wrong. First it's deny, deny, deny. Then they admit it's a small problem. And later they admit it's a widespread problem.
"We're not talking about a lot of money (to solve the problem) compared with overall spending on the war in Iraq. We're spending a billion dollars every two and a half days," he told Reuters.
DISCHARGED AND FORGOTTEN
One theme of the documentary is that veterans who risked their lives in war are too easily discarded by society once they are out of the military. The film shows Noel being denied housing by New York City's housing agency.
Gamboa had a similar experience.
"They put me in this roach-infested hotel. I was there for 10 days," Gamboa said. "Then they said I wasn't eligible to stay in a shelter because I could stay with my sister, who lives in a studio apartment with her husband. And I haven't spoken to her in six years."
Now her luck is improving.
Unlike many low-ranking soldiers, Gamboa received army training with civilian applications -- logistics -- and started a job with a fancy Fifth Avenue clothing store this week.
And despite an Army snafu that nearly denied her U.S. citizenship, the Guatemalan-born Gamboa, who moved to Brooklyn as a child, took her oath before the U.S. flag on Friday.
Military recruiters target poor neighborhoods like Gamboa's Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Young adults with few job skills join the Army. When they get out, many have fallen behind their contemporaries, experts say.
The stresses of combat and military life contribute to post traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and mental illness, which are especially taboo subjects to soldiers trained not to admit failure easily.
About half of all homeless veterans suffer from mental illness, and more than two-thirds suffer from alcohol or drug abuse problems, the VA says.
Gamboa has avoided those pitfalls, but female veterans are three times more likely to become homeless than women in the general population, the American Journal of Public Health reported.
Repeated deployments -- a hallmark of the Iraq war -- and separation from family can also portend future problems.
"Then the downward spiral begins with substance abuse and problems with the law," said Amy Fairweather of Iraq Veteran, which helps war veterans in San Francisco.
"If you wanted to put together all the repercussions that put people at risk for homelessness, you couldn't do better than the Iraq war."
Venezuela intends to import the bulk of weapons from Russia – ambassador
Venezuela intends to import the bulk of weapons from Russia – ambassador
19 May. Venezuelan Ambassador to Russia Alexis Navarro Rojas in an interview with Interfax expressed the intentions of his country to negotiate Russian arms deliveries to Venezuela.
"Venezuela needs to renew its arms systems. Several years ago we decided that we won't buy weapons from the United States and that the bulk of new orders will be placed with Russia. Our military experts have studied the parameters of the arms that Russia is offering and concluded that they are the best in the world," the ambassador said.
Rojas said there are several reasons why Venezuela is switching from importing U.S.-made weapons to Russian-made products, including the "aggressive foreign policy of Washington" and "irresponsibility in the fulfillment of contracts."
"The weapons we are getting from Russia come with guarantees of further maintenance services and personnel training," he said.
The Venezuelan government is preparing for talks on the delivery of Su-35 fighters from Russia, Rojas said.
"Our pilots have flown on Su-27 and Su-30 fighters already. They have simply fallen in love with the aircraft. They have also tried piloting Su-35. Now we are waiting for talks to begin," he said.
Russia has already delivered Mi-17 helicopters, which Venezuela is using for transportation and also for border patrols to prevent drug trafficking. The delivery of Mi-26 and Mi-35 helicopters is also expected, Rojas said.
In the near future Venezuela will also receive 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles. "Some people are trying to underestimate the importance of the weapons, but they are very important for us as we will use them to replace outdated guns that had been used for over 55 years," the ambassador said.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is planning to visit Russia at the end of August - beginning of September, Rojas said.
"President Chavez has approached the Russian leadership asking to visit Moscow at the end of August - the beginning of September. We are awaiting a reply from the Russian side. President Chavez likes visiting Russia," he said.
The foreign minister will accompany Chavez. Rojas said that the Venezuelan defense minister may also visit Russia in June to discuss Russian arms deliveries, as well as space cooperation.
Speaking of relations between Venezuela and the United States the ambassador said: "We don't want a war, but even less do we want to give in to the imperialist policy of the United States."
"In the past few years Washington has been pursuing an aggressive policy and is in a state of war with other countries, as part of its search for cheap sources of energy," he said.
"In these conditions it would be irresponsible of the Venezuelan government to sit doing nothing in the face of aggression. Presently the threat is quite real," he said.
Venezuela will resort to an asymmetric response should it be subject to foreign aggression, the ambassador said.
Speaking of international affairs he mentioned the Iranian nuclear program. "Iran should be given the right to a nuclear program as has been the case with other countries, namely Pakistan, India and Israel," he said.
He said the Venezuelan authorities have no plans to stop oil deliveries to the United States.
"We have never spoken about stopping shipments of oil to the United States under previously signed commercial contracts," he said.
Rojas said oil cooperation can be severed only at Washington's initiative.
The Venezuelan authorities could blow up all of the country's oil wells in the event of a U.S. military operation in Venezuela, he said.
"We will have to defend our energy reserves in the event of aggression. No country has the right to aim to control our natural resources. We will defend them," he said.
19 May. Venezuelan Ambassador to Russia Alexis Navarro Rojas in an interview with Interfax expressed the intentions of his country to negotiate Russian arms deliveries to Venezuela.
"Venezuela needs to renew its arms systems. Several years ago we decided that we won't buy weapons from the United States and that the bulk of new orders will be placed with Russia. Our military experts have studied the parameters of the arms that Russia is offering and concluded that they are the best in the world," the ambassador said.
Rojas said there are several reasons why Venezuela is switching from importing U.S.-made weapons to Russian-made products, including the "aggressive foreign policy of Washington" and "irresponsibility in the fulfillment of contracts."
"The weapons we are getting from Russia come with guarantees of further maintenance services and personnel training," he said.
The Venezuelan government is preparing for talks on the delivery of Su-35 fighters from Russia, Rojas said.
"Our pilots have flown on Su-27 and Su-30 fighters already. They have simply fallen in love with the aircraft. They have also tried piloting Su-35. Now we are waiting for talks to begin," he said.
Russia has already delivered Mi-17 helicopters, which Venezuela is using for transportation and also for border patrols to prevent drug trafficking. The delivery of Mi-26 and Mi-35 helicopters is also expected, Rojas said.
In the near future Venezuela will also receive 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles. "Some people are trying to underestimate the importance of the weapons, but they are very important for us as we will use them to replace outdated guns that had been used for over 55 years," the ambassador said.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is planning to visit Russia at the end of August - beginning of September, Rojas said.
"President Chavez has approached the Russian leadership asking to visit Moscow at the end of August - the beginning of September. We are awaiting a reply from the Russian side. President Chavez likes visiting Russia," he said.
The foreign minister will accompany Chavez. Rojas said that the Venezuelan defense minister may also visit Russia in June to discuss Russian arms deliveries, as well as space cooperation.
Speaking of relations between Venezuela and the United States the ambassador said: "We don't want a war, but even less do we want to give in to the imperialist policy of the United States."
"In the past few years Washington has been pursuing an aggressive policy and is in a state of war with other countries, as part of its search for cheap sources of energy," he said.
"In these conditions it would be irresponsible of the Venezuelan government to sit doing nothing in the face of aggression. Presently the threat is quite real," he said.
Venezuela will resort to an asymmetric response should it be subject to foreign aggression, the ambassador said.
Speaking of international affairs he mentioned the Iranian nuclear program. "Iran should be given the right to a nuclear program as has been the case with other countries, namely Pakistan, India and Israel," he said.
He said the Venezuelan authorities have no plans to stop oil deliveries to the United States.
"We have never spoken about stopping shipments of oil to the United States under previously signed commercial contracts," he said.
Rojas said oil cooperation can be severed only at Washington's initiative.
The Venezuelan authorities could blow up all of the country's oil wells in the event of a U.S. military operation in Venezuela, he said.
"We will have to defend our energy reserves in the event of aggression. No country has the right to aim to control our natural resources. We will defend them," he said.
U.N. tells U.S. to close detention camps
US News
U.N. tells U.S. to close detention camps
By UPI
May 19, 2006, 19:00 GMT
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The White House Friday responded to a U.N. call to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, saying interrogations conducted at the prison are within U.S. law.
The U.N. Committee Against Torture called for an end to \'secret\' detention facilities and urged \'immediate measures\' to stop all forms of torture and ill-treatment of detainees in an 11-page report issued in Geneva.
\'It is important to note that everything that is done in terms of questioning detainees is fully within the boundaries of American law,\' White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters. He also noted the committee declined to inspect the Guantanamo prison in person.
Hundreds of prisoners have been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, as well as at facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The BBC said the U.N. report called for more information on secret facilities.
\'The state party should investigate and disclose the existence of any such facilities and the authority under which they have been established and the manner in which detainees are treated,\' the report said.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
U.N. tells U.S. to close detention camps
By UPI
May 19, 2006, 19:00 GMT
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The White House Friday responded to a U.N. call to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, saying interrogations conducted at the prison are within U.S. law.
The U.N. Committee Against Torture called for an end to \'secret\' detention facilities and urged \'immediate measures\' to stop all forms of torture and ill-treatment of detainees in an 11-page report issued in Geneva.
\'It is important to note that everything that is done in terms of questioning detainees is fully within the boundaries of American law,\' White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters. He also noted the committee declined to inspect the Guantanamo prison in person.
Hundreds of prisoners have been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, as well as at facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The BBC said the U.N. report called for more information on secret facilities.
\'The state party should investigate and disclose the existence of any such facilities and the authority under which they have been established and the manner in which detainees are treated,\' the report said.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
Drug Addiction Lucrative for Neolib Banksters, CIA
Drug Addiction Lucrative for Neolib Banksters, CIA
Kurt Nimmo
Thursday May 18th 2006, 7:05 pm
"An American counternarcotics official was killed and two other Americans wounded in a suicide bombing in western Afghanistan today, while heavy fighting between Taliban insurgents and Afghan police continued in two southern provinces, officials said," reports the New York Times. "We confirm that a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement, working for the police training program in Herat was killed in a vehicle-borne I.E.D. attack," Chris Harris, an American Embassy spokesman, told the newspaper. After this mention, the Times moves on to detail the increasing violence between Afghan puppet police and "militants," that is to say Afghans fighting against the occupation of their country, an entirely natural occurrence.
Of course, the Times does not bother to mention that the Afghan opium trade—in fact much of the opium trade in the so-called "Golden Crescent" (Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan)—was cultivated and nurtured by the United States government and the CIA, leading to countless cases of miserable heroin addiction in America and Europe. Reading the Times, we get the impression the Taliban—at one time sponsored by the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence services, so long as they were kicking Russian hindquarter—are responsible for the opium trade all on their lonesome. As usual, the Times twists the story through omission.
"ClA-supported Mujahedeen rebels … engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government," writes historian William Blum. "The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a leading heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies," and also because selling heroin and spreading misery is highly profitable. In fact, the Soviets attempted to impose an opium ban on the country and this resulted in a revolt by tribal groups eventually exploited by the CIA and Pakistan.
"Reports issued by the UN and Drug Enforcement Administration in the early 1980s stated that by 1981 Afghan heroin producers may have captured 60 per cent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United States. In New York City in 1979 alone, the year the CIA-organized flow of arms to the mujahiddeen began) heroin-related deaths increased by 77 per cent. There were no Superbowl ads that year about doing drugs and aiding terror. You could say that those dead addicts had given their lives in the fight to drive back Communism," write Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Making sure heroin addiction continues unabated is such a lucrative business for the CIA and Wall Street investors, Bush decided "not to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan. President Bush, who previously linked the Afghan drug trade directly to terrorism, has now decided not to destroy the Afghan opium crop," Charles R. Smith reported for NewsMax on March 28, 2002, as Bush’s illegal invasion of the country was well underway. "Several sources inside Capitol Hill noted that the CIA opposes the destruction of the Afghan opium supply because to do so might destabilize the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf…. The threat to overthrow Musharraf is motivated in part by Islamic radical groups linked to the Pakistani intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The radical groups reportedly obtain their primary funding through opium production and trade." In fact, destroying the opium crop would have put a terrible financial squeeze on the agency and angered financiers who routinely trade in misery and death.
Naturally, the Times did not bother to mention the fact the Taliban attempted to eradicate opium production and this was likely one of the reasons Bush the Junior invaded Afghanistan. "Although the Taliban had virtually stamped out poppy production, the country now accounts for two-third of the world’s heroin. As hard as it may be to believe, there is compelling evidence that the US (via the CIA) may be directly involved in narco-trafficing," notes Mike Whitney, who cites the following from Portland Independent Media:
Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world’s opium. But then the CIA moved in, and by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world’s heroin supply. By 1999, they were churning out 3,200 TONS of heroin a year—nearly 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened. The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed nearly all of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction! This enormous drop in revenue subsequently hurt not only the CIA’s Black Budget projects, but also the free-flow of laundered money in and out of the Controller’s banks.
It also put a pinch on the criminals and gangsters in Pakistan. "The Taliban’s actions … (destroying the opium crop) severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban completely expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had been previously laundered through western banks and Russian financial institutions connected to them," explains From the Wilderness (see previous link). "Prior to the WTC attacks, credible sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S. Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 billion a year," not exactly small potatoes.
In 2004, according to research conducted by the Democratic Policy Committee, after "decreasing dramatically under the Taliban regime, Afghanistan now [2004] produces nearly 3/4 of the world’s opium. CIC [Center for International Cooperation] found that 'opium production, processing, and trafficking have surged, with revenues equaling roughly half of the legal economy of Afghanistan.’ It is estimated that 1.7 million people, or 7 percent of the total population now grow poppies," all of this under the United States installed government of Hamid Karzai, the ex-Unocal employee.
But then none of this should be surprising—the CIA and neolib financiers and moneymen have long dabbled in drug dealing and drug addiction profiteering.
In addition to turning immense profits for societal parasites and other cockroach infestations on Wall Street, drug dealing is a great way for the government to intervene in the business of other nations, as Oliver North well understands (as the Contra was funded by the smuggling of cocaine). "The CIA functionally gains influence and control in governments corrupted by criminal narco-trafficking. Politically, the CIA exerts influence by leveraging narco-militarists and corrupted politicians… This is really NEO-narco-colonialism, whereby local criminal proxies do the bidding of the patron government seeking expanded influence. But because of the quid-pro-quo of protecting the criminal proxies’ illicit pipelines, the result is still a functional narco-colonialism, involving a narcotics commodity in the actual practical execution of policy, with the very different twist of covert action," summarizes the CIA & Drugs website.
So it is not surprising, as the New York Times puts it, there is a "Sudden Rise of Violence in Afghanistan" and the predictable murder of "a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement." In Afghanistan, the Hegelian dialect is working overtime—the U.S. government engineers the Afghan opium trade, thus resulting in social problems and violence associated with illicit drug distribution and consumption, and then turns around and organizes police training programs to combat the scourge it has spawned.
As well, for the Fabian socialist globalists, it is a great way to break down borders and implement "free trade zones," that is to say unhindered thievery zones. Call it a "war on drugs" or the endless war against "terrorism" (yet another Hegelian contrivance), it is all engineered to turn the world into a large slave plantation ruled by a decadent and debased elite cadre of neoliberal criminals.
:: Article nr. 23390 sent on 19-may-2006 19:53 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=23390
:: The incoming address of this article is :
kurtnimmo.com/?p=369
Kurt Nimmo
Thursday May 18th 2006, 7:05 pm
"An American counternarcotics official was killed and two other Americans wounded in a suicide bombing in western Afghanistan today, while heavy fighting between Taliban insurgents and Afghan police continued in two southern provinces, officials said," reports the New York Times. "We confirm that a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement, working for the police training program in Herat was killed in a vehicle-borne I.E.D. attack," Chris Harris, an American Embassy spokesman, told the newspaper. After this mention, the Times moves on to detail the increasing violence between Afghan puppet police and "militants," that is to say Afghans fighting against the occupation of their country, an entirely natural occurrence.
Of course, the Times does not bother to mention that the Afghan opium trade—in fact much of the opium trade in the so-called "Golden Crescent" (Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan)—was cultivated and nurtured by the United States government and the CIA, leading to countless cases of miserable heroin addiction in America and Europe. Reading the Times, we get the impression the Taliban—at one time sponsored by the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence services, so long as they were kicking Russian hindquarter—are responsible for the opium trade all on their lonesome. As usual, the Times twists the story through omission.
"ClA-supported Mujahedeen rebels … engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government," writes historian William Blum. "The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a leading heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies," and also because selling heroin and spreading misery is highly profitable. In fact, the Soviets attempted to impose an opium ban on the country and this resulted in a revolt by tribal groups eventually exploited by the CIA and Pakistan.
"Reports issued by the UN and Drug Enforcement Administration in the early 1980s stated that by 1981 Afghan heroin producers may have captured 60 per cent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United States. In New York City in 1979 alone, the year the CIA-organized flow of arms to the mujahiddeen began) heroin-related deaths increased by 77 per cent. There were no Superbowl ads that year about doing drugs and aiding terror. You could say that those dead addicts had given their lives in the fight to drive back Communism," write Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Making sure heroin addiction continues unabated is such a lucrative business for the CIA and Wall Street investors, Bush decided "not to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan. President Bush, who previously linked the Afghan drug trade directly to terrorism, has now decided not to destroy the Afghan opium crop," Charles R. Smith reported for NewsMax on March 28, 2002, as Bush’s illegal invasion of the country was well underway. "Several sources inside Capitol Hill noted that the CIA opposes the destruction of the Afghan opium supply because to do so might destabilize the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf…. The threat to overthrow Musharraf is motivated in part by Islamic radical groups linked to the Pakistani intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The radical groups reportedly obtain their primary funding through opium production and trade." In fact, destroying the opium crop would have put a terrible financial squeeze on the agency and angered financiers who routinely trade in misery and death.
Naturally, the Times did not bother to mention the fact the Taliban attempted to eradicate opium production and this was likely one of the reasons Bush the Junior invaded Afghanistan. "Although the Taliban had virtually stamped out poppy production, the country now accounts for two-third of the world’s heroin. As hard as it may be to believe, there is compelling evidence that the US (via the CIA) may be directly involved in narco-trafficing," notes Mike Whitney, who cites the following from Portland Independent Media:
Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world’s opium. But then the CIA moved in, and by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world’s heroin supply. By 1999, they were churning out 3,200 TONS of heroin a year—nearly 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened. The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed nearly all of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction! This enormous drop in revenue subsequently hurt not only the CIA’s Black Budget projects, but also the free-flow of laundered money in and out of the Controller’s banks.
It also put a pinch on the criminals and gangsters in Pakistan. "The Taliban’s actions … (destroying the opium crop) severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban completely expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had been previously laundered through western banks and Russian financial institutions connected to them," explains From the Wilderness (see previous link). "Prior to the WTC attacks, credible sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S. Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 billion a year," not exactly small potatoes.
In 2004, according to research conducted by the Democratic Policy Committee, after "decreasing dramatically under the Taliban regime, Afghanistan now [2004] produces nearly 3/4 of the world’s opium. CIC [Center for International Cooperation] found that 'opium production, processing, and trafficking have surged, with revenues equaling roughly half of the legal economy of Afghanistan.’ It is estimated that 1.7 million people, or 7 percent of the total population now grow poppies," all of this under the United States installed government of Hamid Karzai, the ex-Unocal employee.
But then none of this should be surprising—the CIA and neolib financiers and moneymen have long dabbled in drug dealing and drug addiction profiteering.
In addition to turning immense profits for societal parasites and other cockroach infestations on Wall Street, drug dealing is a great way for the government to intervene in the business of other nations, as Oliver North well understands (as the Contra was funded by the smuggling of cocaine). "The CIA functionally gains influence and control in governments corrupted by criminal narco-trafficking. Politically, the CIA exerts influence by leveraging narco-militarists and corrupted politicians… This is really NEO-narco-colonialism, whereby local criminal proxies do the bidding of the patron government seeking expanded influence. But because of the quid-pro-quo of protecting the criminal proxies’ illicit pipelines, the result is still a functional narco-colonialism, involving a narcotics commodity in the actual practical execution of policy, with the very different twist of covert action," summarizes the CIA & Drugs website.
So it is not surprising, as the New York Times puts it, there is a "Sudden Rise of Violence in Afghanistan" and the predictable murder of "a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement." In Afghanistan, the Hegelian dialect is working overtime—the U.S. government engineers the Afghan opium trade, thus resulting in social problems and violence associated with illicit drug distribution and consumption, and then turns around and organizes police training programs to combat the scourge it has spawned.
As well, for the Fabian socialist globalists, it is a great way to break down borders and implement "free trade zones," that is to say unhindered thievery zones. Call it a "war on drugs" or the endless war against "terrorism" (yet another Hegelian contrivance), it is all engineered to turn the world into a large slave plantation ruled by a decadent and debased elite cadre of neoliberal criminals.
:: Article nr. 23390 sent on 19-may-2006 19:53 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=23390
:: The incoming address of this article is :
kurtnimmo.com/?p=369
Pentagon report said to find killing of Iraqi civilians deliberate
Pentagon report said to find killing of Iraqi civilians deliberate
By Drew Brown
05/18/06 "Knight Ridder" -- -- WASHINGTON - A Pentagon report on an incident in Haditha, Iraq, where U.S. Marines shot and killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November will show that those killings were deliberate and worse than initially reported, a Pennsylvania congressman said Wednesday.
"There was no firefight. There was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed those innocent people," Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said during a news conference on Iraq. "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them. And they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. That is what the report is going to tell."
Murtha's comments were the first on-the-record remarks by a U.S. official characterizing the findings of military investigators looking into the Nov. 19 incident. Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee and an opponent of Bush administration policy in Iraq, said he hadn't read the report but had learned about its findings from military commanders and other sources.
Military public affairs officers said the investigation isn't completed and declined to provide further information. "There is an ongoing investigation," said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla. "Any comment at this time would be inappropriate."
Both Gibson and Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said that the military has yet to decide what, if any action, might be taken against Marines involved in the incident.
"It would be premature to judge any individual or unit until the investigation is complete," Irwin said. Said Gibson, "No charges have been made as we have to go through the entire investigatory process and determine whether or not that is a course of action."
Three Marine commanders whose troops were involved in the incident were relieved of duty in April, but the Marines didn't link their dismissals to the incident, saying only that Gen. Richard Natonski, commander of 1st Marine Division, had lost confidence in the officers' ability to command. Gibson reiterated that point Wednesday. "It's important to remember that the officers were relieved by the commanding general of 1st Marine Division as a result of events that took place throughout their tour of duty in Iraq," he said.
The dismissed officers were Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and two of his company commanders, Capt. James S. Kimber and Capt. Lucas M. McConnell. Gibson said all three have been assigned to staff jobs with the 1st Division.
U.S. military authorities in Iraq initially reported that one Marine and 15 Iraqi civilians traveling in a bus were killed by a roadside bomb in the western Iraq insurgent stronghold of Haditha. They said eight insurgents were killed in an ensuing firefight.
But Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the ground commander of coalition forces in Iraq, ordered an investigation on Feb. 14 after a reporter with Time magazine told military authorities of allegations that the Marines had killed innocent civilians.
After CNN broke the news of the initial investigation in March, military officials told Knight Ridder that the civilians were killed not in the initial blast but were apparently caught in the crossfire of a subsequent gun battle as 12 to 15 Marines fought insurgents from house to house over the next five hours. At that time, military officials told Knight Ridder that four of the civilians killed were women and five were children.
Subsequent reporting from Haditha by Time and Knight Ridder revealed a still different account of events, with survivors describing Marines breaking down the door of a house and indiscriminately shooting the building's occupants.
Twenty-three people were killed in the incident, relatives of the dead told Knight Ridder.
The uncle of one survivor, a 13-year-old girl, told Knight Ridder that the girl had watched the Marines open fire on her family and that she had held her 5-year-old brother in her arms as he died. The girl shook visibly as her uncle relayed her account, too traumatized to recount what happened herself.
"I understand the investigation shows that in fact there was no firefight, there was no explosion that killed the civilians on a bus," Murtha said. "There was no bus. There was no shrapnel. There was only bullet holes inside the house where the Marines had gone in. So it's a very serious incident, unfortunately. It shows the tremendous pressure these guys are under every day when they're out in combat and the stress and consequences."
Murtha, who retired as a colonel after 37 years in the Marine Corps, said nothing indicates that the Iraqis killed in the incident were at fault.
"One man was killed with an IED," Murtha said, referring to a Marine killed by the roadside bomb. "And after that, they actually went into the houses and killed women and children."
Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondent Steven Thomma contributed to this report
By Drew Brown
05/18/06 "Knight Ridder" -- -- WASHINGTON - A Pentagon report on an incident in Haditha, Iraq, where U.S. Marines shot and killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November will show that those killings were deliberate and worse than initially reported, a Pennsylvania congressman said Wednesday.
"There was no firefight. There was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed those innocent people," Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said during a news conference on Iraq. "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them. And they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. That is what the report is going to tell."
Murtha's comments were the first on-the-record remarks by a U.S. official characterizing the findings of military investigators looking into the Nov. 19 incident. Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee and an opponent of Bush administration policy in Iraq, said he hadn't read the report but had learned about its findings from military commanders and other sources.
Military public affairs officers said the investigation isn't completed and declined to provide further information. "There is an ongoing investigation," said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla. "Any comment at this time would be inappropriate."
Both Gibson and Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said that the military has yet to decide what, if any action, might be taken against Marines involved in the incident.
"It would be premature to judge any individual or unit until the investigation is complete," Irwin said. Said Gibson, "No charges have been made as we have to go through the entire investigatory process and determine whether or not that is a course of action."
Three Marine commanders whose troops were involved in the incident were relieved of duty in April, but the Marines didn't link their dismissals to the incident, saying only that Gen. Richard Natonski, commander of 1st Marine Division, had lost confidence in the officers' ability to command. Gibson reiterated that point Wednesday. "It's important to remember that the officers were relieved by the commanding general of 1st Marine Division as a result of events that took place throughout their tour of duty in Iraq," he said.
The dismissed officers were Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and two of his company commanders, Capt. James S. Kimber and Capt. Lucas M. McConnell. Gibson said all three have been assigned to staff jobs with the 1st Division.
U.S. military authorities in Iraq initially reported that one Marine and 15 Iraqi civilians traveling in a bus were killed by a roadside bomb in the western Iraq insurgent stronghold of Haditha. They said eight insurgents were killed in an ensuing firefight.
But Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the ground commander of coalition forces in Iraq, ordered an investigation on Feb. 14 after a reporter with Time magazine told military authorities of allegations that the Marines had killed innocent civilians.
After CNN broke the news of the initial investigation in March, military officials told Knight Ridder that the civilians were killed not in the initial blast but were apparently caught in the crossfire of a subsequent gun battle as 12 to 15 Marines fought insurgents from house to house over the next five hours. At that time, military officials told Knight Ridder that four of the civilians killed were women and five were children.
Subsequent reporting from Haditha by Time and Knight Ridder revealed a still different account of events, with survivors describing Marines breaking down the door of a house and indiscriminately shooting the building's occupants.
Twenty-three people were killed in the incident, relatives of the dead told Knight Ridder.
The uncle of one survivor, a 13-year-old girl, told Knight Ridder that the girl had watched the Marines open fire on her family and that she had held her 5-year-old brother in her arms as he died. The girl shook visibly as her uncle relayed her account, too traumatized to recount what happened herself.
"I understand the investigation shows that in fact there was no firefight, there was no explosion that killed the civilians on a bus," Murtha said. "There was no bus. There was no shrapnel. There was only bullet holes inside the house where the Marines had gone in. So it's a very serious incident, unfortunately. It shows the tremendous pressure these guys are under every day when they're out in combat and the stress and consequences."
Murtha, who retired as a colonel after 37 years in the Marine Corps, said nothing indicates that the Iraqis killed in the incident were at fault.
"One man was killed with an IED," Murtha said, referring to a Marine killed by the roadside bomb. "And after that, they actually went into the houses and killed women and children."
Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondent Steven Thomma contributed to this report
Army Sgt. Kevin Benderman--He Refused To Return To Iraq sentenced to 15 months in prison
Army Sgt. Kevin Benderman, 40,
He Refused To Return To Iraq sentenced to 15 months in prison
| July 30, 2005 |
| In Praise of Kevin Benderman |
| by Norman Solomon |
| Conscience is not in the chain of command. "Before being sentenced to 15 months for refusing to return to Iraq with his Army unit, Sgt. Kevin Benderman told a military judge that he acted with his conscience, not out of a disregard for duty," the Associated Press reports. Benderman, a 40-year-old Army mechanic, "refused to go on a second combat tour in January, saying the destruction and misery he witnessed during the 2003 Iraq invasion had turned him against war." Three weeks ago, his wife Monica Benderman wrote: "He returned knowing that war is wrong, the most dehumanizing creation of humanity that exists. He saw war destroy civilians, innocent men, women, and children. He saw war destroy homes, relationships, and a country. He saw this not only in the country that was invaded, but he saw this happening to the invading country as well – and he knew that the only way to save those soldiers was for people to no longer participate in war. Sgt. Kevin Benderman is a conscientious objector to war, and the Army is mad." |
Friday, May 19, 2006
Inflated Terrorism - Propaganda Lies
Inflated Terrorism - Propaganda Lies
By Peter Phillips
The Bush administration is paltering to the American public with exaggerated misconceptions of worldwide terrorism to frighten us into supporting a global police state. With seven hundred military bases and a budget bigger than the rest of the world combined, the US military has become the new supreme-power force repressing "terrorism" everywhere.
Vice President Dick Cheney's keynote address at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference March 7, 2006 is a telling example of neo-conservative global dominance thought in the current administration. Here are his exact words, "Israel, and the United States, and all civilized nations will win the war on terror. To prevail in this fight, we must understand the nature of the enemy. Šas America experienced on September 11th, 2001, the terrorist enemy is brutal and heartless. This enemy wears no uniform, has no regard for the rules of warfare, and is unconstrained by any standard of decency or moralityŠ.The terrorists want to end all American and Western influence in the Middle East. Their goal in that region is to seize control of a country, so they have a base from which to launch attacks and wage war against governments that do not meet their demandsŠ ultimately to establish a totalitarian empire that encompasses a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia."
Cheney claims that evil terrorists everywhere are plotting for the ruin of "civilized" nations. In order to stop them we must militarily control all the regions they are threatening in a permanent global war. Cheney's military empire, set to prevail over the totalitarian terrorists, will inevitably expand global resistance to US domination. Large coalitions of freedom fighters, fundamentalists, patriots, religious zealots, nationalists, and ideologues of various beliefs will emerge from within the regions the US occupies.
Widespread resistance is exactly what is happening in Iraq. Le Monde Diplomatique on May 2, 2006 described the Iraq insurgents - terrorists to Cheney - as "armed opposition often divided into a set of wholly independent categories which apparently do not have much in common. The categories include the patriotic former army officers, the foreign terrorists, the Sunni Arabs determined to regain power, the Muslims opposed to any kind of foreign occupation, the tribal factions pursuing their own specific vendettas, the die-hard Ba'athists - and the "pissed-off" Iraqis (in coalition soldier jargon, POIs) who are simply sick of the foreign forces occupying their country."
For Cheney and other global dominance neo-conservatives, the terrorist label is so broad that it can be applied to any individual, group, or nation that resists US military occupations, US threats, or US corporate interests anywhere in the world. In reality, the US military is the world's foremost totalitarian force.
Three years ago I met a Dutch journalist, Willem Oltman, at the International Campaign Against US Aggression on Iraq in Cairo, Egypt. Oltman described his teen years during World War II in the Dutch resistance movement. "The Nazi's called us terrorists," he exclaimed. "Now as the US invades and occupies other countries you do the same thing," he added.
Maintaining an US military global police force enriches defense contractors and enflames resistance. There is no worldwide terrorism threat other than the one we create when we make war on other peoples. Addressing world poverty, sickness, and environmental issues will go much further in preventing single acts of terrorism inside the United States than any military actions we can muster. It is time to challenge the neo-conservative global dominance agenda and stand up for human rights and the traditional American values of grass-roots democracy, due process, governmental transparency, and individual freedoms for ourselves and the rest of the world.
Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media research group. www.projectcensored.org. He is co-editor with Dennis Loo of the forthcoming book, Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney, from Seven Stories Press, summer 2006.
By Peter Phillips
The Bush administration is paltering to the American public with exaggerated misconceptions of worldwide terrorism to frighten us into supporting a global police state. With seven hundred military bases and a budget bigger than the rest of the world combined, the US military has become the new supreme-power force repressing "terrorism" everywhere.
Vice President Dick Cheney's keynote address at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference March 7, 2006 is a telling example of neo-conservative global dominance thought in the current administration. Here are his exact words, "Israel, and the United States, and all civilized nations will win the war on terror. To prevail in this fight, we must understand the nature of the enemy. Šas America experienced on September 11th, 2001, the terrorist enemy is brutal and heartless. This enemy wears no uniform, has no regard for the rules of warfare, and is unconstrained by any standard of decency or moralityŠ.The terrorists want to end all American and Western influence in the Middle East. Their goal in that region is to seize control of a country, so they have a base from which to launch attacks and wage war against governments that do not meet their demandsŠ ultimately to establish a totalitarian empire that encompasses a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia."
Cheney claims that evil terrorists everywhere are plotting for the ruin of "civilized" nations. In order to stop them we must militarily control all the regions they are threatening in a permanent global war. Cheney's military empire, set to prevail over the totalitarian terrorists, will inevitably expand global resistance to US domination. Large coalitions of freedom fighters, fundamentalists, patriots, religious zealots, nationalists, and ideologues of various beliefs will emerge from within the regions the US occupies.
Widespread resistance is exactly what is happening in Iraq. Le Monde Diplomatique on May 2, 2006 described the Iraq insurgents - terrorists to Cheney - as "armed opposition often divided into a set of wholly independent categories which apparently do not have much in common. The categories include the patriotic former army officers, the foreign terrorists, the Sunni Arabs determined to regain power, the Muslims opposed to any kind of foreign occupation, the tribal factions pursuing their own specific vendettas, the die-hard Ba'athists - and the "pissed-off" Iraqis (in coalition soldier jargon, POIs) who are simply sick of the foreign forces occupying their country."
For Cheney and other global dominance neo-conservatives, the terrorist label is so broad that it can be applied to any individual, group, or nation that resists US military occupations, US threats, or US corporate interests anywhere in the world. In reality, the US military is the world's foremost totalitarian force.
Three years ago I met a Dutch journalist, Willem Oltman, at the International Campaign Against US Aggression on Iraq in Cairo, Egypt. Oltman described his teen years during World War II in the Dutch resistance movement. "The Nazi's called us terrorists," he exclaimed. "Now as the US invades and occupies other countries you do the same thing," he added.
Maintaining an US military global police force enriches defense contractors and enflames resistance. There is no worldwide terrorism threat other than the one we create when we make war on other peoples. Addressing world poverty, sickness, and environmental issues will go much further in preventing single acts of terrorism inside the United States than any military actions we can muster. It is time to challenge the neo-conservative global dominance agenda and stand up for human rights and the traditional American values of grass-roots democracy, due process, governmental transparency, and individual freedoms for ourselves and the rest of the world.
Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media research group. www.projectcensored.org. He is co-editor with Dennis Loo of the forthcoming book, Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney, from Seven Stories Press, summer 2006.
Mexico Condemns US Border Fence Plan
Mexico Condemns US Border Fence Plan
The Associated Press
Friday 19 May 2006
Mexico City - Mexico and four Central American nations condemned the US plan to build hundreds of miles of triple-layered fencing on its southern border, saying it would not stop illegal immigration.
In a joint news conference in Mexico City late Thursday, the foreign ministers of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Mexico said that building barriers was not the way to solve problems between neighboring nations.
"The position of Mexico and the other countries is that walls will not make a difference in terms of the solution to the migration problem," said Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez.
On Wednesday, the US Senate approved a proposal to build 370 miles of triple-layer fencing along parts of the 2,000-mile border separating the US and Mexico. The Senate also agreed to give many illegal immigrants a shot at US citizenship.
Guatemalan Foreign Minister Jorge Briz said major immigration reform in the United States was the only way to stop the wave of people heading northward.
"All of us are looking for a comprehensive migratory regulation so that millions of Latin Americans can continue working in and supporting the United States economy," Briz said.
Earlier Thursday, Mexico's Foreign Relations Department sent a note to the US State Department outlining the nation's concerns about the proposed barrier.
Honduran Foreign Minister Milton Jimenez said he expected several South American and Caribbean countries to join Mexico and the Central Americans in issuing a joint declaration on the matter soon.
In December, the US House approved a bill to build a fence about twice as long as the one approved by the Senate. The House plan sparked a wave of criticism from Latin American leaders, with Mexican President Vicente Fox comparing such a barrier to the Berlin Wall.
Fox reiterated his criticisms on Thursday.
"Building walls, constructing barriers on the border does not offer an efficient solution in a relationship of friends, neighbors and partners," Fox said in the border city of Tijuana. "We will go on defending the rights of our countrymen without rest or respite. With passion we will demand the full respect of their human rights."
On the border with Arizona, bedraggled migrants who had been turned back by the border patrol said that more fences would not keep them from crossing but only make smugglers charge more money for the trip.
"I had to leave my three children, walk for three days in the desert, and now I'm here with more debts than ever," said Edith Martinez, a 40-year-old from Oaxaca who walked back over the border bridge to the Mexican town of Nogales. "Now I have to work in the United States to pay my debts from the trip."
-------
The Associated Press
Friday 19 May 2006
Mexico City - Mexico and four Central American nations condemned the US plan to build hundreds of miles of triple-layered fencing on its southern border, saying it would not stop illegal immigration.
In a joint news conference in Mexico City late Thursday, the foreign ministers of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Mexico said that building barriers was not the way to solve problems between neighboring nations.
"The position of Mexico and the other countries is that walls will not make a difference in terms of the solution to the migration problem," said Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez.
On Wednesday, the US Senate approved a proposal to build 370 miles of triple-layer fencing along parts of the 2,000-mile border separating the US and Mexico. The Senate also agreed to give many illegal immigrants a shot at US citizenship.
Guatemalan Foreign Minister Jorge Briz said major immigration reform in the United States was the only way to stop the wave of people heading northward.
"All of us are looking for a comprehensive migratory regulation so that millions of Latin Americans can continue working in and supporting the United States economy," Briz said.
Earlier Thursday, Mexico's Foreign Relations Department sent a note to the US State Department outlining the nation's concerns about the proposed barrier.
Honduran Foreign Minister Milton Jimenez said he expected several South American and Caribbean countries to join Mexico and the Central Americans in issuing a joint declaration on the matter soon.
In December, the US House approved a bill to build a fence about twice as long as the one approved by the Senate. The House plan sparked a wave of criticism from Latin American leaders, with Mexican President Vicente Fox comparing such a barrier to the Berlin Wall.
Fox reiterated his criticisms on Thursday.
"Building walls, constructing barriers on the border does not offer an efficient solution in a relationship of friends, neighbors and partners," Fox said in the border city of Tijuana. "We will go on defending the rights of our countrymen without rest or respite. With passion we will demand the full respect of their human rights."
On the border with Arizona, bedraggled migrants who had been turned back by the border patrol said that more fences would not keep them from crossing but only make smugglers charge more money for the trip.
"I had to leave my three children, walk for three days in the desert, and now I'm here with more debts than ever," said Edith Martinez, a 40-year-old from Oaxaca who walked back over the border bridge to the Mexican town of Nogales. "Now I have to work in the United States to pay my debts from the trip."
-------
One Step Closer to a Police State
One Step Closer to a Police State
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
Thursday 18 May 2006
Placing National Guard troops on the border could be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. And that's just fine with the Bush administration.
President Bush's plan to deploy 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border, widely seen as a political gambit, is coming under fire from both left and right.
It's likely that the move is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a law established after the Civil War that prohibits the use of U.S. troops for domestic law enforcement. Passed in 1878 to prohibit federal troops from running elections in the former confederate states, it is considered a bulwark against the development of a police state.
A central issue of Bush's plan is that the troops would be under federal authority. One of the exceptions built into the Posse Comitatus Act is that troops may be deployed to support law enforcement agencies, but with the exception of insurrections and riots, nuclear attack or interdiction of drug smuggling (when working directly with law enforcement agencies), they must be under the authority of a state governor.
The ACLU sent a letter to the administration warning that turning immigration "into another military operation is not the answer," adding that it "violates the spirit of the Posse Comitatus Act." The libertarian Cato Institute agreed, writing that "the same training that makes U.S. soldiers outstanding warriors makes them extremely dangerous as cops." Larry Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, said that the military "is trained to vaporize, not Mirandize."
In 1997, a Marine corporal deployed in the border area shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an 18-year-old goat herder. The incident led to a congressional review that criticized the Justice Department's handling of the case and ended the Marines' involvement in policing the border.
But while some conservatives are joining civil liberties groups in expressing concern over the deployment, the Republican leadership is reportedly pursuing another course: rolling back the protections of Posse Comitatus once and for all.
Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who maintains close connections in the national security community, reports that, according to "a credible source on the Hill," the Senate "is moving to amend [or] repeal the Posse Comitatus Act, ostensibly to allow greater options for National Guard troops on the border. The move would remove National Guardsmen "from governors' authority" and place them "under the president."
The move comes in the context of an administration that has consistently expressed disdain for Posse Comitatus, and the constraint it puts on the use of troops in domestic actions. As James Bovard reported for AlterNet in 2004:
From its support of the Total Information Awareness surveillance vacuum cleaner, to its use of Pentagon spy planes during the Washington-area sniper shootings in late 2002, to its attempt to empower military officials to seize Americans' financial and other private information without a warrant, the Bush administration gives grave cause for concern about the growing role of the armed forces in our daily life.
As far back as 2002, the president issued a national security plan calling for a "review" of Posse Comitatus. Gen. Ralph Eberhart, who headed the Northern Command said that he "welcomed" changes in the law if necessary. "My view has been that Posse Comitatus will constantly be under review as we mature this command," he told the New York Times.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the calls for using troops in federal disaster relief grew. In September of last year, then-Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita called the Posse Comitatus Act "very archaic," and said that it hampered disaster response. Bush echoed that sentiment two weeks later, saying he wanted "a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people." A week later, Bush called for the possible use of federal troops to respond to a bird flu outbreak, saying "I think the president ought to have all options on the table."
But as William Arkin, military analyst for the Washington Post noted, there's no reason in the world to modify or repeal Posse Comitatus to respond to disasters:
Nothing in law prevents the president from employing the military in a Katrina-like emergency if state and local government really breaks down. In fact, the 130-year-old Posse Comitatus Act more symbolizes the military's subordination to civil authority than it actually restricts what the military can do.
Arkin warned that "Donald Rumsfeld and his ever-growing industry of military complexes ... seem to be intentionally badmouthing Posse Comitatus ... in order to earn themselves greater operational flexibility in the United States."
He also reported on a plan developed under Rumsfeld that predicted "a scenario in which the Defense Department would have to take 'the lead' from ... civil agencies, and the states, that is, to act without civil authority." He added: "I think we call that martial law."
And the military is not leaving domestic surveillance up to the NSA. Last month, Robert Dreyfus, writing in Rolling Stone detailed how Bush, "operating in secret" soon after Sept. 11, established the Counterintelligence Field Activity agency (CIFA), and "in a move that received little public attention," charged it "with consolidating all Pentagon intelligence."
Last year, a commission appointed by Bush urged that CIFA be empowered to collect and analyze intelligence "both inside and outside the United States." Dreyfus says that the Pentagon "is systematically gathering and analyzing intelligence on American citizens at home" and cites several examples of the new agency spying on antiwar protesters.
After it was revealed that a new intelligence unit in the California National Guard was spying on the Raging Grannies, a group that organized a Mother's Day protest against the war, an outraged California state senator, Joe Dunn, called for the Guard's intelligence unit to be dismantled, saying: "Our fear is that this was part of a federally sponsored effort to set up domestic surveillance programs in a way that would circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act."
The danger is that a president who even conservatives concede has consolidated more power in the White House than any administration since Lincoln's, and who has little faith in the rest of the government will lean more heavily on the military than he already does. Add to that this administration's well-known contempt for dissent, and there's a real potential for slipping into a full-blown police state.
-------
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
Thursday 18 May 2006
Placing National Guard troops on the border could be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. And that's just fine with the Bush administration.
President Bush's plan to deploy 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border, widely seen as a political gambit, is coming under fire from both left and right.
It's likely that the move is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a law established after the Civil War that prohibits the use of U.S. troops for domestic law enforcement. Passed in 1878 to prohibit federal troops from running elections in the former confederate states, it is considered a bulwark against the development of a police state.
A central issue of Bush's plan is that the troops would be under federal authority. One of the exceptions built into the Posse Comitatus Act is that troops may be deployed to support law enforcement agencies, but with the exception of insurrections and riots, nuclear attack or interdiction of drug smuggling (when working directly with law enforcement agencies), they must be under the authority of a state governor.
The ACLU sent a letter to the administration warning that turning immigration "into another military operation is not the answer," adding that it "violates the spirit of the Posse Comitatus Act." The libertarian Cato Institute agreed, writing that "the same training that makes U.S. soldiers outstanding warriors makes them extremely dangerous as cops." Larry Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, said that the military "is trained to vaporize, not Mirandize."
In 1997, a Marine corporal deployed in the border area shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an 18-year-old goat herder. The incident led to a congressional review that criticized the Justice Department's handling of the case and ended the Marines' involvement in policing the border.
But while some conservatives are joining civil liberties groups in expressing concern over the deployment, the Republican leadership is reportedly pursuing another course: rolling back the protections of Posse Comitatus once and for all.
Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who maintains close connections in the national security community, reports that, according to "a credible source on the Hill," the Senate "is moving to amend [or] repeal the Posse Comitatus Act, ostensibly to allow greater options for National Guard troops on the border. The move would remove National Guardsmen "from governors' authority" and place them "under the president."
The move comes in the context of an administration that has consistently expressed disdain for Posse Comitatus, and the constraint it puts on the use of troops in domestic actions. As James Bovard reported for AlterNet in 2004:
From its support of the Total Information Awareness surveillance vacuum cleaner, to its use of Pentagon spy planes during the Washington-area sniper shootings in late 2002, to its attempt to empower military officials to seize Americans' financial and other private information without a warrant, the Bush administration gives grave cause for concern about the growing role of the armed forces in our daily life.
As far back as 2002, the president issued a national security plan calling for a "review" of Posse Comitatus. Gen. Ralph Eberhart, who headed the Northern Command said that he "welcomed" changes in the law if necessary. "My view has been that Posse Comitatus will constantly be under review as we mature this command," he told the New York Times.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the calls for using troops in federal disaster relief grew. In September of last year, then-Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita called the Posse Comitatus Act "very archaic," and said that it hampered disaster response. Bush echoed that sentiment two weeks later, saying he wanted "a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people." A week later, Bush called for the possible use of federal troops to respond to a bird flu outbreak, saying "I think the president ought to have all options on the table."
But as William Arkin, military analyst for the Washington Post noted, there's no reason in the world to modify or repeal Posse Comitatus to respond to disasters:
Nothing in law prevents the president from employing the military in a Katrina-like emergency if state and local government really breaks down. In fact, the 130-year-old Posse Comitatus Act more symbolizes the military's subordination to civil authority than it actually restricts what the military can do.
Arkin warned that "Donald Rumsfeld and his ever-growing industry of military complexes ... seem to be intentionally badmouthing Posse Comitatus ... in order to earn themselves greater operational flexibility in the United States."
He also reported on a plan developed under Rumsfeld that predicted "a scenario in which the Defense Department would have to take 'the lead' from ... civil agencies, and the states, that is, to act without civil authority." He added: "I think we call that martial law."
And the military is not leaving domestic surveillance up to the NSA. Last month, Robert Dreyfus, writing in Rolling Stone detailed how Bush, "operating in secret" soon after Sept. 11, established the Counterintelligence Field Activity agency (CIFA), and "in a move that received little public attention," charged it "with consolidating all Pentagon intelligence."
Last year, a commission appointed by Bush urged that CIFA be empowered to collect and analyze intelligence "both inside and outside the United States." Dreyfus says that the Pentagon "is systematically gathering and analyzing intelligence on American citizens at home" and cites several examples of the new agency spying on antiwar protesters.
After it was revealed that a new intelligence unit in the California National Guard was spying on the Raging Grannies, a group that organized a Mother's Day protest against the war, an outraged California state senator, Joe Dunn, called for the Guard's intelligence unit to be dismantled, saying: "Our fear is that this was part of a federally sponsored effort to set up domestic surveillance programs in a way that would circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act."
The danger is that a president who even conservatives concede has consolidated more power in the White House than any administration since Lincoln's, and who has little faith in the rest of the government will lean more heavily on the military than he already does. Add to that this administration's well-known contempt for dissent, and there's a real potential for slipping into a full-blown police state.
-------
What Is the Real Purpose of Bush's NSA Surveillance?
What Is the Real Purpose of Bush's NSA Surveillance?
Patriot Daily | Editorial
Thursday 18 May 2006
The Baltimore Sun reported today that Bush rejected President Clinton's effective, legal surveillance program that did not invade privacy to adopt the current NSA spying program, which is ineffective, illegal and invasive of citizens' privacy rights. So, the question jumping off the page may be: Why would Bush use a program that does not actually assist the finding of terrorists, yet also has the disadvantage of invading Americans' privacy rights?
The Clinton surveillance program, called ThinThread, was created during the late 1990s to "gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws." Several bloggers provide excellent posts on the components and nature of the program.
The key to evaluating Bush's true motive for his NSA program is that testing of ThinThread showed it was far better in finding potential threats and protecting privacy than the current NSA program that Bush chose in its stead. "For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy." But, Gen. Hayden of NSA decided not to use these two tools or the monitoring feature to prevent abuse of the records. The problem is that not using the ThinThread program has "undermined the agency's ability to zero in on potential threats." Moreover, "ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns."
Incredibly, the ThinThread program was far superior to the NSA program in place in 2004:
A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon's inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided 'superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets,' said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.
The upshot is that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program is ineffective at finding terrorists:
Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials. Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information. The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends."
And, Bush did not adopt ThinThread's privacy protections even though the "encryption feature would have been simple to implement" in minutes. One explanation may be that "encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.
So, using ThinThread would have required compliance with legal search standards, something that the Decider says is just not technically feasible with his program. Sounds like a convenient method for chipping away at constitutional safeguards.
While Bush proclaims that his NSA program is for the purpose of finding terrorists, this article says it is not effective for that purpose. On the other hand, the former head of NSA operations division told the 9/11 Commission that "ThinThread could have identified the hijackers had it been in place before the attacks." Is that why Bush team often states that NSA surveillance would have permitted the identification and capture of the 9/11 hijackers had it been in place prior to 9/11? That is, the general statements made by Bush are true for ThinThread, which is a NSA surveillance program, just not the program that Bush is using. So, in accordance with Bush's parsing practice, his statements would be technically true, just misleadingly false.
Finally, the article points out that ThinThread was rejected partially because it too aggressive and could violate civil rights. After 9/11, NSA lawyers reversed position by adopting Bush's theory of his war powers. However, one intelligence official stated that ThinThread is legal regardless of whether the US is at war. So, did Bush reject ThinThread partially because he could not then use the terror card as a pretext to expand presidential powers?
Given that a perfectly legal program which could actually accomplish the stated objective of capturing terrorists before attacking Americans exists, but was rejected by Bush, would could be the real underlying purpose for Bush's NSA surveillance program that has a minor, if any, impact on anti-terror objectives?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that if Bush is to actually succeed in finding terrorists with the program he is using, this program requires more data about Americans. That is, phone records are not sufficient for this objective, so more data would be required. Like the camel who first sticks its head in the tent, Bush may have wanted pretextual grounds to keep expanding the nature and amount of information about Americans that he collected and deposited in databases.
As noted by one expert, the NSA program Bush is using is apparently not effective at finding terrorists, not unless more data is obtained by the government in addition to phone records. Public reports indicate the NSA is using social network analysis to find terrorists, which is not effective without more data. If the NSA wants to use mathematics to root out terrorists, it would have to use a different type of profiling technique called formal concept analysis, which requires more than phone records: "For instance, you might group together people based on what cafes, bookstores and mosques they visit, and then find out that all the people who go to a certain cafe also attend the same mosque (but maybe not vice versa)."
Additional information indicates Bush wanted more than phone records. Statements by telecom company officials indicate that Bush wanted long-distance carriers, not local telecoms, which expands the nature and amount of information the NSA can obtain. Technical experts say long-distance calling records may provide information not only on long-distance customers but also "traffic that the carriers connect on behalf of others, including some calls placed on cellphones or on Internet voice connections."
Finally, the equipment that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein says was installed by NSA in AT&T's secret switching room is apparently Narus, which has the capacity to be the "best internet spy tool:"
Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.
* * *
The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network.
So, what is the real purpose of Bush's NSA spying program? Is terrorism being used as a cover to collect reams of information about Americans to establish a central database? Could there be political motives?
Given this history, is it such a stretch to think the White House might find this information useful in helping Republican candidates hold on to national power in 2008? You really think it would never occur to Bush or Karl Rove that private knowledge of which Democratic supporters were contributing to which candidates, or which campaign advisers were leaking to which reporters, would be an advantage in a tough campaign? Or that a little listen-in to their conversations might produce a few votes? We don't know that this thought ever crossed their minds, but there's so much we don't know about what they are thinking. So we just have to trust the integrity of the administration's public statements. Oh, goodie. Do you feel safer now?
Given that Bush rejected the ThinThread program that is reported to be both effective at finding terrorists and provide protection to privacy rights, one just has to wonder at the real reason for the NSA program.
Go to Original
NSA Killed System That Sifted Phone Data Legally
By Siobhan Gorman
The Baltimore Sun
Wednesday 17 May 2006
Sources say project was shelved in part because of bureaucratic infighting.
Washington - The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project - not because it failed to work - but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.
The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA's warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls.
Four intelligence officials knowledgeable about the program agreed to discuss it with The Sun only if granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:
* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.
* Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.
* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.
* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.
An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations.
"Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to discuss actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the U.S. insight and potentially place Americans in danger," said NSA spokesman Don Weber in a statement to The Sun
"However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities very seriously and operates within the law."
In what intelligence experts describe as rigorous testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeded at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.
But the NSA, then headed by Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, opted against both of those tools, as well as the feature that monitored potential abuse of the records. Only the data analysis facet of the program survived and became the basis for the warrantless surveillance program.
The decision, which one official attributed to "turf protection and empire building," has undermined the agency's ability to zero in on potential threats, sources say. In the wake of revelations about the agency's wide gathering of U.S. phone records, they add, ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns.
A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon's inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided "superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets," said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.
Hayden, the president's nominee to lead the CIA, is to appear Thursday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is expected to face tough questioning about the warrantless surveillance program, the collection of domestic phone records and other NSA programs.
While the furor over warrantless surveillance, particularly collection of domestic phone records, has raised questions about the legality of the program, there has been little or no discussion about how it might be altered to eliminate such concerns.
ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: The NSA had more information than it could digest, and, increasingly, its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.
With the explosion of digital communications, especially phone calls over the Internet and the use of devices such as BlackBerries, the NSA was struggling to sort key nuggets of information from the huge volume of data it took in.
By 1999, as some NSA officials grew increasingly concerned about millennium-related security, ThinThread seemed in position to become an important tool with which the NSA could prevent terrorist attacks. But it was never launched. Neither was it put into effect after the attacks in 2001. Despite its success in tests, ThinThread's information-sorting system was viewed by some in the agency as a competitor to Trailblazer, a $1.2 billion program that was being developed with similar goals. The NSA was committed to Trailblazer, which later ran into trouble and has been essentially abandoned.
Both programs aimed to better sort through the sea of data to find key tips to the next terrorist attack, but Trailblazer had more political support internally because it was initiated by Hayden when he first arrived at the NSA, sources said.
NSA managers did not want to adopt the data-sifting component of ThinThread out of fear that the Trailblazer program would be outperformed and "humiliated," an intelligence official said.
Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials.
Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.
The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends.
The privacy protections offered by ThinThread were also abandoned in the post-Sept. 11 push by the president for a faster response to terrorism.
Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records - an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection - agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it, according to two intelligence officials knowledgeable about ThinThread and the warrantless surveillance programs.
"They basically just disabled the [privacy] safeguards," said one intelligence official.
Another, a former top intelligence official, said that without a privacy requirement, "there was no reason to go back to something that was perhaps more difficult to implement."
However two officials familiar with the program said the encryption feature would have been simple to implement. One said the time required would have involved minutes, not hours.
Encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.
While it is unclear why the agency dropped the component that monitored for abuse of records, one intelligence official noted that the feature was not popular with analysts. It not only tracked the use of the database, but hunted for the most effective analysis techniques, and some analysts thought it would be used to judge their performance.
Within the NSA, the primary advocate for the ThinThread program was Richard Taylor, who headed the agency's operations division. Taylor who has retired from the NSA, did not return calls seeking comment.
Officials say that after the successful tests of ThinThread in 1998, Taylor argued that the NSA should implement the full program. He later told the 9/11 Commission that ThinThread could have identified the hijackers had it been in place before the attacks, according to an intelligence expert close to the commission.
But at the time, NSA lawyers viewed the program as too aggressive. At that point, the NSA's authority was limited strictly to overseas communications, with the FBI responsible for analyzing domestic calls. The lawyers feared that expanding NSA data collection to include communications in the United States could violate civil liberties, even with the encryption function.
Taylor had an intense meeting with Hayden and NSA lawyers. "It was a very emotional debate," recalled a former intelligence official. "Eventually it was rejected by [NSA] lawyers."
After the 2001 attacks, the NSA lawyers who had blocked the program reversed their position and approved the use of the program without the enhanced technology to sift out terrorist communications and without the encryption protections.
The NSA's new legal analysis was based on the commander in chief's powers during war, said former officials familiar with the program. The Bush administration's defense has rested largely on that argument since the warrantless surveillance program became public in December.
The strength of ThinThread's approach is that by encrypting information on Americans, it is legal regardless of whether the country is at war, according to one intelligence official.
Officials familiar with Thin Thread say some within NSA were stunned by the legal flip-flop. ThinThread "was designed very carefully from a legal point of view, so that even in non-wartime, you could have done it legitimately," the official said.
In a speech in January, Hayden said the warrantless surveillance program was not only limited to al-Qaida communications, but carefully implemented with an eye toward preserving the Constitution and rights of Americans.
"As the director, I was the one responsible to ensure that this program was limited in its scope and disciplined in its application," he said.
-------
Patriot Daily | Editorial
Thursday 18 May 2006
The Baltimore Sun reported today that Bush rejected President Clinton's effective, legal surveillance program that did not invade privacy to adopt the current NSA spying program, which is ineffective, illegal and invasive of citizens' privacy rights. So, the question jumping off the page may be: Why would Bush use a program that does not actually assist the finding of terrorists, yet also has the disadvantage of invading Americans' privacy rights?
The Clinton surveillance program, called ThinThread, was created during the late 1990s to "gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws." Several bloggers provide excellent posts on the components and nature of the program.
The key to evaluating Bush's true motive for his NSA program is that testing of ThinThread showed it was far better in finding potential threats and protecting privacy than the current NSA program that Bush chose in its stead. "For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy." But, Gen. Hayden of NSA decided not to use these two tools or the monitoring feature to prevent abuse of the records. The problem is that not using the ThinThread program has "undermined the agency's ability to zero in on potential threats." Moreover, "ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns."
Incredibly, the ThinThread program was far superior to the NSA program in place in 2004:
A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon's inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided 'superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets,' said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.
The upshot is that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program is ineffective at finding terrorists:
Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials. Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information. The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends."
And, Bush did not adopt ThinThread's privacy protections even though the "encryption feature would have been simple to implement" in minutes. One explanation may be that "encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.
So, using ThinThread would have required compliance with legal search standards, something that the Decider says is just not technically feasible with his program. Sounds like a convenient method for chipping away at constitutional safeguards.
While Bush proclaims that his NSA program is for the purpose of finding terrorists, this article says it is not effective for that purpose. On the other hand, the former head of NSA operations division told the 9/11 Commission that "ThinThread could have identified the hijackers had it been in place before the attacks." Is that why Bush team often states that NSA surveillance would have permitted the identification and capture of the 9/11 hijackers had it been in place prior to 9/11? That is, the general statements made by Bush are true for ThinThread, which is a NSA surveillance program, just not the program that Bush is using. So, in accordance with Bush's parsing practice, his statements would be technically true, just misleadingly false.
Finally, the article points out that ThinThread was rejected partially because it too aggressive and could violate civil rights. After 9/11, NSA lawyers reversed position by adopting Bush's theory of his war powers. However, one intelligence official stated that ThinThread is legal regardless of whether the US is at war. So, did Bush reject ThinThread partially because he could not then use the terror card as a pretext to expand presidential powers?
Given that a perfectly legal program which could actually accomplish the stated objective of capturing terrorists before attacking Americans exists, but was rejected by Bush, would could be the real underlying purpose for Bush's NSA surveillance program that has a minor, if any, impact on anti-terror objectives?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that if Bush is to actually succeed in finding terrorists with the program he is using, this program requires more data about Americans. That is, phone records are not sufficient for this objective, so more data would be required. Like the camel who first sticks its head in the tent, Bush may have wanted pretextual grounds to keep expanding the nature and amount of information about Americans that he collected and deposited in databases.
As noted by one expert, the NSA program Bush is using is apparently not effective at finding terrorists, not unless more data is obtained by the government in addition to phone records. Public reports indicate the NSA is using social network analysis to find terrorists, which is not effective without more data. If the NSA wants to use mathematics to root out terrorists, it would have to use a different type of profiling technique called formal concept analysis, which requires more than phone records: "For instance, you might group together people based on what cafes, bookstores and mosques they visit, and then find out that all the people who go to a certain cafe also attend the same mosque (but maybe not vice versa)."
Additional information indicates Bush wanted more than phone records. Statements by telecom company officials indicate that Bush wanted long-distance carriers, not local telecoms, which expands the nature and amount of information the NSA can obtain. Technical experts say long-distance calling records may provide information not only on long-distance customers but also "traffic that the carriers connect on behalf of others, including some calls placed on cellphones or on Internet voice connections."
Finally, the equipment that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein says was installed by NSA in AT&T's secret switching room is apparently Narus, which has the capacity to be the "best internet spy tool:"
Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.
* * *
The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network.
So, what is the real purpose of Bush's NSA spying program? Is terrorism being used as a cover to collect reams of information about Americans to establish a central database? Could there be political motives?
Given this history, is it such a stretch to think the White House might find this information useful in helping Republican candidates hold on to national power in 2008? You really think it would never occur to Bush or Karl Rove that private knowledge of which Democratic supporters were contributing to which candidates, or which campaign advisers were leaking to which reporters, would be an advantage in a tough campaign? Or that a little listen-in to their conversations might produce a few votes? We don't know that this thought ever crossed their minds, but there's so much we don't know about what they are thinking. So we just have to trust the integrity of the administration's public statements. Oh, goodie. Do you feel safer now?
Given that Bush rejected the ThinThread program that is reported to be both effective at finding terrorists and provide protection to privacy rights, one just has to wonder at the real reason for the NSA program.
Go to Original
NSA Killed System That Sifted Phone Data Legally
By Siobhan Gorman
The Baltimore Sun
Wednesday 17 May 2006
Sources say project was shelved in part because of bureaucratic infighting.
Washington - The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project - not because it failed to work - but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.
The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA's warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls.
Four intelligence officials knowledgeable about the program agreed to discuss it with The Sun only if granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:
* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.
* Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.
* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.
* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.
An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations.
"Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to discuss actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the U.S. insight and potentially place Americans in danger," said NSA spokesman Don Weber in a statement to The Sun
"However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities very seriously and operates within the law."
In what intelligence experts describe as rigorous testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeded at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.
But the NSA, then headed by Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, opted against both of those tools, as well as the feature that monitored potential abuse of the records. Only the data analysis facet of the program survived and became the basis for the warrantless surveillance program.
The decision, which one official attributed to "turf protection and empire building," has undermined the agency's ability to zero in on potential threats, sources say. In the wake of revelations about the agency's wide gathering of U.S. phone records, they add, ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns.
A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon's inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided "superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets," said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.
Hayden, the president's nominee to lead the CIA, is to appear Thursday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is expected to face tough questioning about the warrantless surveillance program, the collection of domestic phone records and other NSA programs.
While the furor over warrantless surveillance, particularly collection of domestic phone records, has raised questions about the legality of the program, there has been little or no discussion about how it might be altered to eliminate such concerns.
ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: The NSA had more information than it could digest, and, increasingly, its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.
With the explosion of digital communications, especially phone calls over the Internet and the use of devices such as BlackBerries, the NSA was struggling to sort key nuggets of information from the huge volume of data it took in.
By 1999, as some NSA officials grew increasingly concerned about millennium-related security, ThinThread seemed in position to become an important tool with which the NSA could prevent terrorist attacks. But it was never launched. Neither was it put into effect after the attacks in 2001. Despite its success in tests, ThinThread's information-sorting system was viewed by some in the agency as a competitor to Trailblazer, a $1.2 billion program that was being developed with similar goals. The NSA was committed to Trailblazer, which later ran into trouble and has been essentially abandoned.
Both programs aimed to better sort through the sea of data to find key tips to the next terrorist attack, but Trailblazer had more political support internally because it was initiated by Hayden when he first arrived at the NSA, sources said.
NSA managers did not want to adopt the data-sifting component of ThinThread out of fear that the Trailblazer program would be outperformed and "humiliated," an intelligence official said.
Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials.
Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.
The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends.
The privacy protections offered by ThinThread were also abandoned in the post-Sept. 11 push by the president for a faster response to terrorism.
Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records - an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection - agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it, according to two intelligence officials knowledgeable about ThinThread and the warrantless surveillance programs.
"They basically just disabled the [privacy] safeguards," said one intelligence official.
Another, a former top intelligence official, said that without a privacy requirement, "there was no reason to go back to something that was perhaps more difficult to implement."
However two officials familiar with the program said the encryption feature would have been simple to implement. One said the time required would have involved minutes, not hours.
Encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.
While it is unclear why the agency dropped the component that monitored for abuse of records, one intelligence official noted that the feature was not popular with analysts. It not only tracked the use of the database, but hunted for the most effective analysis techniques, and some analysts thought it would be used to judge their performance.
Within the NSA, the primary advocate for the ThinThread program was Richard Taylor, who headed the agency's operations division. Taylor who has retired from the NSA, did not return calls seeking comment.
Officials say that after the successful tests of ThinThread in 1998, Taylor argued that the NSA should implement the full program. He later told the 9/11 Commission that ThinThread could have identified the hijackers had it been in place before the attacks, according to an intelligence expert close to the commission.
But at the time, NSA lawyers viewed the program as too aggressive. At that point, the NSA's authority was limited strictly to overseas communications, with the FBI responsible for analyzing domestic calls. The lawyers feared that expanding NSA data collection to include communications in the United States could violate civil liberties, even with the encryption function.
Taylor had an intense meeting with Hayden and NSA lawyers. "It was a very emotional debate," recalled a former intelligence official. "Eventually it was rejected by [NSA] lawyers."
After the 2001 attacks, the NSA lawyers who had blocked the program reversed their position and approved the use of the program without the enhanced technology to sift out terrorist communications and without the encryption protections.
The NSA's new legal analysis was based on the commander in chief's powers during war, said former officials familiar with the program. The Bush administration's defense has rested largely on that argument since the warrantless surveillance program became public in December.
The strength of ThinThread's approach is that by encrypting information on Americans, it is legal regardless of whether the country is at war, according to one intelligence official.
Officials familiar with Thin Thread say some within NSA were stunned by the legal flip-flop. ThinThread "was designed very carefully from a legal point of view, so that even in non-wartime, you could have done it legitimately," the official said.
In a speech in January, Hayden said the warrantless surveillance program was not only limited to al-Qaida communications, but carefully implemented with an eye toward preserving the Constitution and rights of Americans.
"As the director, I was the one responsible to ensure that this program was limited in its scope and disciplined in its application," he said.
-------
A Safer Weapon, With Risks
A Safer Weapon, With Risks
By James Rainey
The Los Angeles Times
Thursday 18 May 2006
Baghdad - The U.S. military is deploying a laser device in Iraq that would temporarily blind drivers who fail to heed warnings at checkpoints, in an attempt to stem shootings of innocent Iraqis.
The pilot project will equip thousands of M-4 rifles with the 10 1/2 -inch-long weapon, which projects an intense beam of green light to "dazzle" the vision of oncoming drivers.
"I think this is going to make a huge difference in avoiding these confrontations," said Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander in charge of day-to-day operations in Iraq. "I promise you no one - no one - will be able to ignore it."
But so-called tactical laser devices have been controversial in the past. A protocol to the Geneva Convention bans the use of lasers that cause blindness, and human rights groups have protested previous U.S. attempts to employ such weapons.
A decade ago, the experimental use of tactical laser devices by U.S. Marines in Somalia was curtailed at the last minute for "humane reasons," according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which called their use "repugnant to the public conscience" in a 1995 report.
The Pentagon has canceled several programs for the stronger "blinding" lasers, in adherence to the Geneva protocol, according to Human Rights Watch. But the group has said that even less powerful "dazzling" lasers, similar to the one to be deployed in Iraq, can cause permanent damage.
One Washington-based defense analyst said American troops and commanders should not underestimate how the laser could complicate relations with Iraqis.
"If this 'safe' high-intensity laser damages retinas, we're in for a whole new type of [angry] Iraqi civilians," said Winslow T. Wheeler, who spent three decades as a Capitol Hill staffer and is now at the Center for Defense Information.
The military, however, has apparently decided the risks can be minimized through proper training and are worth taking to help U.S. troops ward off suicide attacks and to reduce accidental shootings of Iraqi civilians.
**proper training----like at Abu Ghraib, right? **
"I have no doubt," Chiarelli said, "that bullets are less safe."
A military standards panel analyzed the laser - a modification of a more powerful system used for aiming heavy machine guns - and found that the device could be harmful to the eyes when viewed from about 75 yards or closer, the manufacturer said.
Lt. Col. Richard Smith, deputy director of the Joint NonLethal Weapons Directorate at the Pentagon, said Wednesday that the deployment of the laser, which has been under development for a decade, marked an important milestone for nonlethal weapons.
"This is really the first time the visually overwhelming devices have actually been used," Smith said. "This was based off needs of war fighters and commanders in the field. They have several incidents a day where a vehicle is coming at a group of soldiers…. These dazzlers can reach out a couple hundred meters and give solders added security."
The laser being deployed in Baghdad is one of about six different models being tested by the directorate, Smith said.
In recent months, suicide bombings have been aimed mostly against Iraqis. The bulk of attacks on American troops, in contrast, have been made with explosives hidden along streets and highways.
But about eight times a day around Iraq, American soldiers still shoot in an attempt to stop vehicles that come too close to them, U.S. military statistics show. Although such confrontations are down from double that rate, commanders still worry about wounding or killing noncombatants.
The military has not released figures on the number of Iraqis killed and wounded in the confrontations, but Iraqi civilians frequently have protested what they consider reckless shootings. The Economist magazine quoted coalition military sources this year as saying that about 250 innocent Iraqis had died at vehicle checkpoints in the first three years after the U.S.-led March 2003 invasion.
Concern about the incidents increased as a result of several high-profile shootings early last year. The first came in January 2005, when a U.S. Army patrol in Tall Afar in northern Iraq opened fire on an Opel sedan that did not heed warnings to stop.
Killed as they tried to get home ahead of curfew were a husband and wife, Hussein and Kamila Hassan. Bullets paralyzed their 12-year-old son, Rakan. Four of their other children, ages 2 to 14, watched in terror from the back seat, along with a cousin. The shooting gained wide notoriety when pictures of the blood-soaked children ran in Newsweek magazine.
In March 2005, an Italian intelligence agent delivering a rescued hostage was shot and killed at a checkpoint near the Baghdad airport. The soldiers involved said the car was speeding and ignored warnings, but the freed hostage, journalist Giuliana Sgrena, said that the car was traveling at a moderate speed and that she did not see any warning from the troops.
Chiarelli and his subordinates have said they are determined to limit such incidents, not only to protect their troops and Iraqis but to improve relations between the two sides.
"Save an Iraqi life," the general recently told a group of soldiers newly arrived in Iraq and training at Camp Taji, north of Baghdad. "Because, I will tell you, most of the time he is just confused."
The laser that will be attached to soldiers' rifles here - known as the "green beam designator" - is manufactured by B.E. Meyers & Co. of Washington state. The firm calls the device the most powerful of its kind in production.
David Shannon, director of product development for the company, said that at a distance of 110 yards, the beam widens to cover an area about 16 inches in diameter - a little smaller than a regulation basketball hoop.
The beam can be fixed or set to pulse at two different rates. It can be seen from more than two miles. From 328 yards and closer, it's powerful enough to be "a strong deterrent," Shannon said.
In a recent demonstration at the U.S. military headquarters at Camp Victory near Baghdad, a soldier fired the beam across an indoor hallway. Even indirect exposure to the light as it bounced off the white marble floor left observers seeing stars for several minutes afterward.
Shannon agreed in a telephone interview that use of stronger lasers would be "cruel and unusual" even in warfare. But he said the green beam designator was considerably safer, particularly with proper training to limit its use with targets inside 75 yards.
"We know right now that people are dying and being maimed by bullets," he said. "This whole program is designed so that fewer people die and get hurt."
Added Matthew Murphy, who handles sales for the company, "It's almost like looking in the sun. They are going to know they are targeted and more likely than not they are going to stop."
Neither the company nor the military would say how much the units cost.
Army Sgt. Brendan Woolworth was one of the first soldiers to try the green laser. He said an Iraqi driver got too close to his convoy about 90 days ago and failed to heed shouts to stop. The soldier directed a pulsing beam at the car's windshield.
"He pulled off to the side of the road and stopped," Woolworth said. "He got the message. It looked like he just hadn't been paying attention."
Although he touted the laser as important in reducing death and injury, Chiarelli recently told troops that they would need to employ many other tools.
The general coached about three dozen troops on understanding Iraqi culture and on improving communications with local leaders. He stressed the importance, when all else failed, of firing warning shots.
He then asked how many in the classroom had been trained to fire a warning shot with the rifles that rested under their desks. Only a few hands went up.
"OK," responded Chiarelli. "Make sure that is one of the first things you do before you get out of your training here."
-------
By James Rainey
The Los Angeles Times
Thursday 18 May 2006
A laser device used in Iraq to temporarily blind drivers who get too close to troops is meant to reduce deaths, but it also raises worries.
Baghdad - The U.S. military is deploying a laser device in Iraq that would temporarily blind drivers who fail to heed warnings at checkpoints, in an attempt to stem shootings of innocent Iraqis.
The pilot project will equip thousands of M-4 rifles with the 10 1/2 -inch-long weapon, which projects an intense beam of green light to "dazzle" the vision of oncoming drivers.
"I think this is going to make a huge difference in avoiding these confrontations," said Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander in charge of day-to-day operations in Iraq. "I promise you no one - no one - will be able to ignore it."
But so-called tactical laser devices have been controversial in the past. A protocol to the Geneva Convention bans the use of lasers that cause blindness, and human rights groups have protested previous U.S. attempts to employ such weapons.
A decade ago, the experimental use of tactical laser devices by U.S. Marines in Somalia was curtailed at the last minute for "humane reasons," according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which called their use "repugnant to the public conscience" in a 1995 report.
The Pentagon has canceled several programs for the stronger "blinding" lasers, in adherence to the Geneva protocol, according to Human Rights Watch. But the group has said that even less powerful "dazzling" lasers, similar to the one to be deployed in Iraq, can cause permanent damage.
One Washington-based defense analyst said American troops and commanders should not underestimate how the laser could complicate relations with Iraqis.
"If this 'safe' high-intensity laser damages retinas, we're in for a whole new type of [angry] Iraqi civilians," said Winslow T. Wheeler, who spent three decades as a Capitol Hill staffer and is now at the Center for Defense Information.
The military, however, has apparently decided the risks can be minimized through proper training and are worth taking to help U.S. troops ward off suicide attacks and to reduce accidental shootings of Iraqi civilians.
**proper training----like at Abu Ghraib, right? **
"I have no doubt," Chiarelli said, "that bullets are less safe."
A military standards panel analyzed the laser - a modification of a more powerful system used for aiming heavy machine guns - and found that the device could be harmful to the eyes when viewed from about 75 yards or closer, the manufacturer said.
Lt. Col. Richard Smith, deputy director of the Joint NonLethal Weapons Directorate at the Pentagon, said Wednesday that the deployment of the laser, which has been under development for a decade, marked an important milestone for nonlethal weapons.
"This is really the first time the visually overwhelming devices have actually been used," Smith said. "This was based off needs of war fighters and commanders in the field. They have several incidents a day where a vehicle is coming at a group of soldiers…. These dazzlers can reach out a couple hundred meters and give solders added security."
The laser being deployed in Baghdad is one of about six different models being tested by the directorate, Smith said.
In recent months, suicide bombings have been aimed mostly against Iraqis. The bulk of attacks on American troops, in contrast, have been made with explosives hidden along streets and highways.
But about eight times a day around Iraq, American soldiers still shoot in an attempt to stop vehicles that come too close to them, U.S. military statistics show. Although such confrontations are down from double that rate, commanders still worry about wounding or killing noncombatants.
The military has not released figures on the number of Iraqis killed and wounded in the confrontations, but Iraqi civilians frequently have protested what they consider reckless shootings. The Economist magazine quoted coalition military sources this year as saying that about 250 innocent Iraqis had died at vehicle checkpoints in the first three years after the U.S.-led March 2003 invasion.
Concern about the incidents increased as a result of several high-profile shootings early last year. The first came in January 2005, when a U.S. Army patrol in Tall Afar in northern Iraq opened fire on an Opel sedan that did not heed warnings to stop.
Killed as they tried to get home ahead of curfew were a husband and wife, Hussein and Kamila Hassan. Bullets paralyzed their 12-year-old son, Rakan. Four of their other children, ages 2 to 14, watched in terror from the back seat, along with a cousin. The shooting gained wide notoriety when pictures of the blood-soaked children ran in Newsweek magazine.
In March 2005, an Italian intelligence agent delivering a rescued hostage was shot and killed at a checkpoint near the Baghdad airport. The soldiers involved said the car was speeding and ignored warnings, but the freed hostage, journalist Giuliana Sgrena, said that the car was traveling at a moderate speed and that she did not see any warning from the troops.
Chiarelli and his subordinates have said they are determined to limit such incidents, not only to protect their troops and Iraqis but to improve relations between the two sides.
"Save an Iraqi life," the general recently told a group of soldiers newly arrived in Iraq and training at Camp Taji, north of Baghdad. "Because, I will tell you, most of the time he is just confused."
The laser that will be attached to soldiers' rifles here - known as the "green beam designator" - is manufactured by B.E. Meyers & Co. of Washington state. The firm calls the device the most powerful of its kind in production.
David Shannon, director of product development for the company, said that at a distance of 110 yards, the beam widens to cover an area about 16 inches in diameter - a little smaller than a regulation basketball hoop.
The beam can be fixed or set to pulse at two different rates. It can be seen from more than two miles. From 328 yards and closer, it's powerful enough to be "a strong deterrent," Shannon said.
In a recent demonstration at the U.S. military headquarters at Camp Victory near Baghdad, a soldier fired the beam across an indoor hallway. Even indirect exposure to the light as it bounced off the white marble floor left observers seeing stars for several minutes afterward.
Shannon agreed in a telephone interview that use of stronger lasers would be "cruel and unusual" even in warfare. But he said the green beam designator was considerably safer, particularly with proper training to limit its use with targets inside 75 yards.
"We know right now that people are dying and being maimed by bullets," he said. "This whole program is designed so that fewer people die and get hurt."
Added Matthew Murphy, who handles sales for the company, "It's almost like looking in the sun. They are going to know they are targeted and more likely than not they are going to stop."
Neither the company nor the military would say how much the units cost.
Army Sgt. Brendan Woolworth was one of the first soldiers to try the green laser. He said an Iraqi driver got too close to his convoy about 90 days ago and failed to heed shouts to stop. The soldier directed a pulsing beam at the car's windshield.
"He pulled off to the side of the road and stopped," Woolworth said. "He got the message. It looked like he just hadn't been paying attention."
Although he touted the laser as important in reducing death and injury, Chiarelli recently told troops that they would need to employ many other tools.
The general coached about three dozen troops on understanding Iraqi culture and on improving communications with local leaders. He stressed the importance, when all else failed, of firing warning shots.
He then asked how many in the classroom had been trained to fire a warning shot with the rifles that rested under their desks. Only a few hands went up.
"OK," responded Chiarelli. "Make sure that is one of the first things you do before you get out of your training here."
-------
NSA's phone call data collection goes too far
Bold mining
NSA's phone call data collection goes too far
They call it data mining. We call it frightening. USA Today reports that the National Security Agency has been tracking the phone calls of "tens of millions of Americans." And you ask ... why? "To analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity," USA Today was told.
AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth have been complicit in this agreement. To its credit, Qwest refused to be part of it. With the cooperation of the others, the NSA has been able to compile the largest database in the world, the paper was told.
Last year President Bush admitted that the NSA was eavesdropping on international calls. He felt that doing it without warrants was justified. After all, it was a necessary weapon in the war on terror (which is the default excuse for a lot of stepping over U.S. law these days).
Do we have any evidence that this record keeping has been successful in stopping any terror attacks yet? That's a lot of excess information gathered that the government will probably never need. If the war on terror ends tomorrow, what would become of the records of Aunt Betty's calls to the psychic hotline or a scared teen's anonymous calls to an AIDS clinic? Will they be discarded or saved for future use?
In discussing the revelation by USA Today, Bush said Thursday that "The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval." Can we (or should we) believe him in light of his candor about the warrant-less wiretapping?
Yes, we need to keep an eye on terrorist activity, but this form of data mining is excessive.
You may have never thought of Ma Bell as Big Brother. You might want to think again.
NSA's phone call data collection goes too far
They call it data mining. We call it frightening. USA Today reports that the National Security Agency has been tracking the phone calls of "tens of millions of Americans." And you ask ... why? "To analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity," USA Today was told.
AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth have been complicit in this agreement. To its credit, Qwest refused to be part of it. With the cooperation of the others, the NSA has been able to compile the largest database in the world, the paper was told.
Last year President Bush admitted that the NSA was eavesdropping on international calls. He felt that doing it without warrants was justified. After all, it was a necessary weapon in the war on terror (which is the default excuse for a lot of stepping over U.S. law these days).
Do we have any evidence that this record keeping has been successful in stopping any terror attacks yet? That's a lot of excess information gathered that the government will probably never need. If the war on terror ends tomorrow, what would become of the records of Aunt Betty's calls to the psychic hotline or a scared teen's anonymous calls to an AIDS clinic? Will they be discarded or saved for future use?
In discussing the revelation by USA Today, Bush said Thursday that "The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval." Can we (or should we) believe him in light of his candor about the warrant-less wiretapping?
Yes, we need to keep an eye on terrorist activity, but this form of data mining is excessive.
You may have never thought of Ma Bell as Big Brother. You might want to think again.
DEA Supporting Alcohol Prohibition?
DEA Supporting Alcohol Prohibition?
Hammer of Truth - USA
Here is a clip of Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator Karen Tandy arguing that alcohol prohibition is a good thing. Perhaps Tandy ...
Hammer of Truth - USA
Here is a clip of Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator Karen Tandy arguing that alcohol prohibition is a good thing. Perhaps Tandy ...
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Lawmaker: Marines Killed Iraqis "In Cold Blood"
Lawmaker: Marines Killed Iraqis "In Cold Blood"
By Jim Miklaszewski and Mike Viqueira
NBC News
Wednesday 17 May 2006
Navy conducting war crimes probe into November violence in Haditha.
Washington - A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.
From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.
One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. "The Americans came into the room where my father was praying," she said, "and shot him."
On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.
Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps' own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.
A videotape taken by an Iraqi showed the aftermath of the alleged attack: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.
The video, obtained by Time magazine, was broadcast a day after town residents told The Associated Press that American troops entered homes on Nov. 19 and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.
On Nov. 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool issued a statement saying that on the previous day a roadside bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed eight insurgents, he said.
U.S. military officials later confirmed that the version of events was wrong.
Murtha, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, said at a news conference Wednesday that sources within the military have told him that an internal investigation will show that "there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."
Military officials say Marine Corp photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range, in the head and chest, execution-style. One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead, said the officials, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because the investigation hasn't been completed.
One military official says it appears the civilians were deliberately killed by the Marines, who were outraged at the death of their fellow Marine.
"This one is ugly," one official told NBC News.
Three Marine officers - commanders in Haditha - have been relieved of duty, and at least 12 Marines in all are under investigation for what would be the worst single incident involving the deliberate killing of civilians by U.S. military in Iraq.
The Marine Corps issued a statement in response to Murtha's remarks:
"There is an ongoing investigation; therefore, any comment at this time would be inappropriate and could undermine the investigatory and possible legal process. As soon as the facts are known and decisions on future actions are made, we will make that information available to the public to the fullest extent allowable."
Murtha held the news conference to mark six months since his initial call for "redeployment" of U.S. forces from Iraq.
He said U.S. forces were under undue pressure in Iraq because of poor planning and allocation of resources by the Bush administration.
--------
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Go to Original
Pentagon Report Said to Find Killing of Iraqi Civilians Deliberate
By Drew Brown
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Wednesday 17 May 2006
Washington - A Pentagon report on an incident in which U.S. Marines shot and killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November will show that those killings were deliberate and worse than initially reported, a Pennsylvania congressman said Wednesday.
"There was no firefight. There was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed those innocent people," Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said during a news conference on Iraq. "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them. And they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. That is what the report is going to tell."
Murtha's comments were the first on-the-record remarks by a U.S. official characterizing the findings of military investigators looking into the Nov. 19 incident. Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee and an opponent of Bush administration policy in Iraq, said he hadn't read the report but had learned about its findings from military commanders and other sources.
Military public affairs officers said the investigation isn't completed and declined to provide further information. "There is an ongoing investigation," said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla. "Any comment at this time would be inappropriate."
Both Gibson and Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said that the military has yet to decide what, if any action, might be taken against Marines involved in the incident.
"It would be premature to judge any individual or unit until the investigation is complete," Irwin said. Said Gibson, "No charges have been made as we have to go through the entire investigatory process and determine whether or not that is a course of action."
Three Marine commanders whose troops were involved in the incident were relieved of duty in April, but the Marines didn't link their dismissals to the incident, saying only that Gen. Richard Natonski, commander of 1st Marine Division, had lost confidence in the officers' ability to command. Gibson reiterated that point Wednesday. "It's important to remember that the officers were relieved by the commanding general of 1st Marine Division as a result of events that took place throughout their tour of duty in Iraq," he said.
The dismissed officers were Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and two of his company commanders, Capt. James S. Kimber and Capt. Lucas M. McConnell. Gibson said all three have been assigned to staff jobs with the 1st Division.
U.S. military authorities in Iraq initially reported that one Marine and 15 Iraqi civilians traveling in a bus were killed by a roadside bomb in the western Iraq insurgent stronghold of Haditha. They said eight insurgents were killed in an ensuing firefight.
But Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the ground commander of coalition forces in Iraq, ordered an investigation on Feb. 14 after a reporter with Time magazine told military authorities of allegations that the Marines had killed innocent civilians.
After CNN broke the news of the initial investigation in March, military officials told Knight Ridder that the civilians were killed not in the initial blast but were apparently caught in the crossfire of a subsequent gun battle as 12 to 15 Marines fought insurgents from house to house over the next five hours. At that time, military officials told Knight Ridder that four of the civilians killed were women and five were children.
Subsequent reporting from Haditha by Time and Knight Ridder revealed a still different account of events, with survivors describing Marines breaking down the door of a house and indiscriminately shooting the building's occupants.
Twenty-three people were killed in the incident, relatives of the dead told Knight Ridder.
The uncle of one survivor, a 13-year-old girl, told Knight Ridder that the girl had watched the Marines open fire on her family and that she had held her 5-year-old brother in her arms as he died. The girl shook visibly as her uncle relayed her account, too traumatized to recount what happened herself.
"I understand the investigation shows that in fact there was no firefight, there was no explosion that killed the civilians on a bus," Murtha said. "There was no bus. There was no shrapnel. There was only bullet holes inside the house where the Marines had gone in. So it's a very serious incident, unfortunately. It shows the tremendous pressure these guys are under every day when they're out in combat and the stress and consequences."
Murtha, who retired as a colonel after 37 years in the Marine Corps, said nothing indicates that the Iraqis killed in the incident were at fault.
"One man was killed with an IED," Murtha said, referring to a Marine killed by the roadside bomb. "And after that, they actually went into the houses and killed women and children."
--------
Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondent Steven Thomma contributed to this report.
-------
By Jim Miklaszewski and Mike Viqueira
NBC News
Wednesday 17 May 2006
Navy conducting war crimes probe into November violence in Haditha.
Washington - A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.
From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.
One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. "The Americans came into the room where my father was praying," she said, "and shot him."
On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.
Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps' own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.
A videotape taken by an Iraqi showed the aftermath of the alleged attack: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.
The video, obtained by Time magazine, was broadcast a day after town residents told The Associated Press that American troops entered homes on Nov. 19 and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.
On Nov. 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool issued a statement saying that on the previous day a roadside bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed eight insurgents, he said.
U.S. military officials later confirmed that the version of events was wrong.
Murtha, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, said at a news conference Wednesday that sources within the military have told him that an internal investigation will show that "there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."
Military officials say Marine Corp photos taken immediately after the incident show many of the victims were shot at close range, in the head and chest, execution-style. One photo shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead, said the officials, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because the investigation hasn't been completed.
One military official says it appears the civilians were deliberately killed by the Marines, who were outraged at the death of their fellow Marine.
"This one is ugly," one official told NBC News.
Three Marine officers - commanders in Haditha - have been relieved of duty, and at least 12 Marines in all are under investigation for what would be the worst single incident involving the deliberate killing of civilians by U.S. military in Iraq.
The Marine Corps issued a statement in response to Murtha's remarks:
"There is an ongoing investigation; therefore, any comment at this time would be inappropriate and could undermine the investigatory and possible legal process. As soon as the facts are known and decisions on future actions are made, we will make that information available to the public to the fullest extent allowable."
Murtha held the news conference to mark six months since his initial call for "redeployment" of U.S. forces from Iraq.
He said U.S. forces were under undue pressure in Iraq because of poor planning and allocation of resources by the Bush administration.
--------
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Go to Original
Pentagon Report Said to Find Killing of Iraqi Civilians Deliberate
By Drew Brown
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Wednesday 17 May 2006
Washington - A Pentagon report on an incident in which U.S. Marines shot and killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November will show that those killings were deliberate and worse than initially reported, a Pennsylvania congressman said Wednesday.
"There was no firefight. There was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed those innocent people," Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said during a news conference on Iraq. "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them. And they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. That is what the report is going to tell."
Murtha's comments were the first on-the-record remarks by a U.S. official characterizing the findings of military investigators looking into the Nov. 19 incident. Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee and an opponent of Bush administration policy in Iraq, said he hadn't read the report but had learned about its findings from military commanders and other sources.
Military public affairs officers said the investigation isn't completed and declined to provide further information. "There is an ongoing investigation," said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla. "Any comment at this time would be inappropriate."
Both Gibson and Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said that the military has yet to decide what, if any action, might be taken against Marines involved in the incident.
"It would be premature to judge any individual or unit until the investigation is complete," Irwin said. Said Gibson, "No charges have been made as we have to go through the entire investigatory process and determine whether or not that is a course of action."
Three Marine commanders whose troops were involved in the incident were relieved of duty in April, but the Marines didn't link their dismissals to the incident, saying only that Gen. Richard Natonski, commander of 1st Marine Division, had lost confidence in the officers' ability to command. Gibson reiterated that point Wednesday. "It's important to remember that the officers were relieved by the commanding general of 1st Marine Division as a result of events that took place throughout their tour of duty in Iraq," he said.
The dismissed officers were Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and two of his company commanders, Capt. James S. Kimber and Capt. Lucas M. McConnell. Gibson said all three have been assigned to staff jobs with the 1st Division.
U.S. military authorities in Iraq initially reported that one Marine and 15 Iraqi civilians traveling in a bus were killed by a roadside bomb in the western Iraq insurgent stronghold of Haditha. They said eight insurgents were killed in an ensuing firefight.
But Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the ground commander of coalition forces in Iraq, ordered an investigation on Feb. 14 after a reporter with Time magazine told military authorities of allegations that the Marines had killed innocent civilians.
After CNN broke the news of the initial investigation in March, military officials told Knight Ridder that the civilians were killed not in the initial blast but were apparently caught in the crossfire of a subsequent gun battle as 12 to 15 Marines fought insurgents from house to house over the next five hours. At that time, military officials told Knight Ridder that four of the civilians killed were women and five were children.
Subsequent reporting from Haditha by Time and Knight Ridder revealed a still different account of events, with survivors describing Marines breaking down the door of a house and indiscriminately shooting the building's occupants.
Twenty-three people were killed in the incident, relatives of the dead told Knight Ridder.
The uncle of one survivor, a 13-year-old girl, told Knight Ridder that the girl had watched the Marines open fire on her family and that she had held her 5-year-old brother in her arms as he died. The girl shook visibly as her uncle relayed her account, too traumatized to recount what happened herself.
"I understand the investigation shows that in fact there was no firefight, there was no explosion that killed the civilians on a bus," Murtha said. "There was no bus. There was no shrapnel. There was only bullet holes inside the house where the Marines had gone in. So it's a very serious incident, unfortunately. It shows the tremendous pressure these guys are under every day when they're out in combat and the stress and consequences."
Murtha, who retired as a colonel after 37 years in the Marine Corps, said nothing indicates that the Iraqis killed in the incident were at fault.
"One man was killed with an IED," Murtha said, referring to a Marine killed by the roadside bomb. "And after that, they actually went into the houses and killed women and children."
--------
Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondent Steven Thomma contributed to this report.
-------
Pentagon denying Israelis security clearances
Pentagon denying Israelis security clearances
Ynetnews
New York Sun reports State Department citing AIPAC leak case as basis for denying employees with dual Israeli-American citizenship security clearances. In one case, government lawyers argued Israel was 'actively spying on United States' to justify withdrawing clearance from worker
The Pentagon is citing a leak affair involving Defense Department analyst Lawrence Franklin and two pro-Israel lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, as a basis for stripping security clearances from government contractor employees who have dual Israeli-American citizenship or family in Israel, The New York Sun reported Wednesday.
The two former AIPAC officials and the Pentagon analyst were indicted in August 2005 on charges they conspired to pass classified information to persons not entitled to receive it, including Israeli officials and members of the press.
According to the Sun, Defense Department attorneys have used the AIPAC leak indictments in at least three cases, to justify withdrawing or denying security clearances.
The paper quoted Virginian Lawyer Sheldon Cohen who has been tracking these cases, as saying: "The only reason to possibly use it (the dual citizenship issue) is to implicate anybody with a connection to Israel, to imply they cannot be trusted. There is no other conceivable reason to bring it up."
A study conducted by Cohen on the subject of Israel-related security clearance cases, found that "an unusually large number" of cases involving foreign influence concerns seem to relate to Israel.
'Israel actively spying on US'
The Sun reported that in one case, an Israeli-born mechanical engineer who has worked as a major defense contractor and has been living in the United States for over 25 years, faced an attempt by government lawyers to revoke his security clearance because of his dual citizenship, his possession of an Israeli passport and the fact that he has relatives in Israel.
"There was some basis for McCarthyism. Here there's nothing, just this dual loyalty business," David Schoen, the employee's attorney, told the Sun. "It really strikes me as un-American."
"His wife is American. His kids are American," the lawyer said. "He has never had a problem at Lockheed (where he worked)," Schoen added.
According to the attorney, at a hearing on the case a few weeks ago, a government attorney tried to submit the leak indictment as an exhibit, arguing that it showed Israel was actively spying on America.
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, a leader of the Jewish community in Washington, told the Sun he was disturbed by the growing number of similar incidents. "People around the country are turning to us and telling us of ongoing cases where people are stripped of their livelihoods just because they're Jewish," he said.
(05.17.06, 21:53)
Ynetnews
New York Sun reports State Department citing AIPAC leak case as basis for denying employees with dual Israeli-American citizenship security clearances. In one case, government lawyers argued Israel was 'actively spying on United States' to justify withdrawing clearance from worker
The Pentagon is citing a leak affair involving Defense Department analyst Lawrence Franklin and two pro-Israel lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, as a basis for stripping security clearances from government contractor employees who have dual Israeli-American citizenship or family in Israel, The New York Sun reported Wednesday.
The two former AIPAC officials and the Pentagon analyst were indicted in August 2005 on charges they conspired to pass classified information to persons not entitled to receive it, including Israeli officials and members of the press.
According to the Sun, Defense Department attorneys have used the AIPAC leak indictments in at least three cases, to justify withdrawing or denying security clearances.
The paper quoted Virginian Lawyer Sheldon Cohen who has been tracking these cases, as saying: "The only reason to possibly use it (the dual citizenship issue) is to implicate anybody with a connection to Israel, to imply they cannot be trusted. There is no other conceivable reason to bring it up."
A study conducted by Cohen on the subject of Israel-related security clearance cases, found that "an unusually large number" of cases involving foreign influence concerns seem to relate to Israel.
'Israel actively spying on US'
The Sun reported that in one case, an Israeli-born mechanical engineer who has worked as a major defense contractor and has been living in the United States for over 25 years, faced an attempt by government lawyers to revoke his security clearance because of his dual citizenship, his possession of an Israeli passport and the fact that he has relatives in Israel.
"There was some basis for McCarthyism. Here there's nothing, just this dual loyalty business," David Schoen, the employee's attorney, told the Sun. "It really strikes me as un-American."
"His wife is American. His kids are American," the lawyer said. "He has never had a problem at Lockheed (where he worked)," Schoen added.
According to the attorney, at a hearing on the case a few weeks ago, a government attorney tried to submit the leak indictment as an exhibit, arguing that it showed Israel was actively spying on America.
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, a leader of the Jewish community in Washington, told the Sun he was disturbed by the growing number of similar incidents. "People around the country are turning to us and telling us of ongoing cases where people are stripped of their livelihoods just because they're Jewish," he said.
(05.17.06, 21:53)
Vigilant Eagle Incorporates New Technology For Urban Warfare
Vigilant Eagle Incorporates New Technology For Urban Warfare
by Staff Writers
Tucson AZ (SPX) May 18, 2006
Raytheon recently developed a version of the Vigilant Eagle Airport Protection System that employs the fire distribution center (FDC) of the Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS).
Raytheon
 NASAMS truck launcher. |
Tucson AZ (SPX) May 18, 2006
Raytheon recently developed a version of the Vigilant Eagle Airport Protection System that employs the fire distribution center (FDC) of the Norwegian Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS).
The NASAMS FDC is a capable, fielded and mature air defense system that can now serve as Vigilant Eagle's command and control (C2) component that operates the airport protection system's electromagnetic countermeasure to divert threatening missiles away from aircraft.
Vigilant Eagle is a ground-based electromagnetic energy system designed to actively protect all aircraft flying in and out of airports from surface-to-air missiles.
"This adds a field-proven command and control component to Vigilant Eagle, offering improved technical maturity to the system," said Mike Booen, vice president of Directed Energy Weapons at Raytheon Missile Systems.
"We have selected an operating command and control system that is successfully used today in both military and urban environments."
The NASAMS FDC has been in military use since 1994 and was recently deployed to protect Washington, D.C., from an airborne attack. In this role, the FDC can track and identify all objects in the capital's airspace, operate with existing civilian systems, discriminate friendly versus hostile objects and recommend appropriate action in the event of an attack.
The U.S. Army's Surface Launched Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (SLAMRAAM) system also under development by Raytheon builds upon proven NASAMS technology so that the SLAMRAAM system is capable of providing the next generation of command and control for Vigilant Eagle.
SLAMRAAM's FDC functionality is highly similar to that required by Vigilant Eagle's C2 subsystem that must identify, discriminate and engage shoulder-fired missile threats.
By leveraging the existing technology of the NASAMS FDC, Raytheon will be able to adapt the Vigilant Eagle system to an urban environment while dramatically reducing the cost.
All Vigilant Eagle's subsystems have successfully been demonstrated as individual components. With the incorporation of NASAMS FDC, Vigilant Eagle is now immediately available for demonstration in an urban environment.
The FDC currently receives radar and tracking information from a grid of civilian and military radars. Addition of the Vigilant Eagle infrared missile detect and track subsystem would prove interoperability in an urban environment and low false alarm rate.
Vigilant Eagle has been proven effective against the MANPADS threat in field testing. It is a ground-based system that protects all aircraft at an airport, with no additional weight, drag or cost added to airliners. Vigilant Eagle is a mature, cost-effective airport protection solution and is ready for a large-scale demonstration or military or commercial sale.
Related Links
Raytheon
Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence
A "Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence," published this month, is the third in a new series of reference works on major intelligence services, following volumes on British and U.S. intelligence.
"Mossad," the name of the Israeli foreign intelligence service, is probably the best known Hebrew word after "shalom," the preface suggests.
The new Dictionary, written by Israeli professor Ephraim Kahana, provides background, updated organizational charts, and other information on the Mossad and several other Israeli intelligence and security agencies.
The 424-page Dictionary provides an introduction to Israeli intelligence, along with entries on significant persons, operations and key historical episodes. All of the obvious topics are covered, from the capture of fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann to the Jonathan Pollard case, as are other relatively obscure subjects, such as the defense security organization Malmab, and its querulous director Yehiel Horev.
The individual subject entries are mostly brief, and do not include sources or references. But the book includes a fine bibliography (at least for those who lack Hebrew) featuring hardcopy and online resources on Israeli intelligence.
See "Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence" by Ephraim Kahana, Scarecrow Press, Inc., Lanham, MD, May 2006.
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/Venezuelan intelligence agencies informed Bush of "major terrorist attack" ahead of 9/11 tragedies ... but Bush ignored them!
Venezuelan intelligence agencies informed Bush of "major terrorist attack" ahead of 9/11 tragedies ... but Bush ignored them!
VHeadline.com editorial contributor Wayne Madsen writes: Add Cuba and Venezuela to the list of countries that knew of and informed the Bush administration about a "major terrorist attack" prior to 9/11.
In addition to Russia, Jordan, France, Germany, and other nations, Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence picked up chatter about a "major terrorist attack" on the United States prior to 9/11.
Cuban intelligence, which has an extensive network in Florida -- a home base of the hijackers and their handlers -- initially picked up reports about the attack and passed the information to both the United States and Venezuela ... however, the Bush administration failed to react to this and other foreign warnings.
* Venezuelan intelligence, likely from its own sources in Florida and elsewhere, confirmed that something major would occur in the United States.
The failure of the Bush administration to heed these warnings coupled with subsequent intelligence picked up by the Cuban and Venezuelan security services have led them to conclude that 9/11 was carried out as a result of an "inside job" within the Bush administration.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has announced plans to hold an international 9/11 commission of inquiry in Caracas that will bring together a host of international government, security, and political leaders.
Already, preliminary meetings in Caracas for the conference have attracted the attention of the FBI.
Recently, an FBI agent asked for the guest list of a hotel on Margarita island to check on names of guests, including Americans, associated with the preliminary planning meetings for the conference
* Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and author ... he is editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report and his forthcoming book is titled “Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates”
http://vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=57671
VHeadline.com editorial contributor Wayne Madsen writes: Add Cuba and Venezuela to the list of countries that knew of and informed the Bush administration about a "major terrorist attack" prior to 9/11.
In addition to Russia, Jordan, France, Germany, and other nations, Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence picked up chatter about a "major terrorist attack" on the United States prior to 9/11.
Cuban intelligence, which has an extensive network in Florida -- a home base of the hijackers and their handlers -- initially picked up reports about the attack and passed the information to both the United States and Venezuela ... however, the Bush administration failed to react to this and other foreign warnings.
* Venezuelan intelligence, likely from its own sources in Florida and elsewhere, confirmed that something major would occur in the United States.
The failure of the Bush administration to heed these warnings coupled with subsequent intelligence picked up by the Cuban and Venezuelan security services have led them to conclude that 9/11 was carried out as a result of an "inside job" within the Bush administration.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has announced plans to hold an international 9/11 commission of inquiry in Caracas that will bring together a host of international government, security, and political leaders.
Already, preliminary meetings in Caracas for the conference have attracted the attention of the FBI.
Recently, an FBI agent asked for the guest list of a hotel on Margarita island to check on names of guests, including Americans, associated with the preliminary planning meetings for the conference
* Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and author ... he is editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report and his forthcoming book is titled “Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates”
http://vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=57671
Post-Soviet states, China set to hold joint military exercises
Post-Soviet states, China set to hold joint military exercises
MOSCOW, May 18 (RIA Novosti) - Two regional security organizations comprising post-Soviet nations and China are planning joint military exercises, the chief of Russia's general staff said Thursday.
"We are currently discussing a joint exercise under the aegis of the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization]," Yury Baluyevsky said, adding that the date of the exercise, which would also involve troops from Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) nations, had yet to be decided.
Baluyevsky said the exercises would practice joint counteraction against terrorist threats.
The chiefs of the CSTO nations' general staffs held a meeting in Moscow Thursday to discuss ways to make the collective security system more effective, including by improving control of the Collective Rapid Reaction Force, which currently numbers 1,500 military personnel deployed in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which comprises the former Soviet republics in Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan - as well as Russia and China, was created in 2001 to deal with security issues, including border conflicts, terrorism, and militant Islam.
These countries, without China, also form the CSTO, which also includes Belarus and Armenia. The CSTO is seen by some experts as a counterbalance to NATO's eastward expansion.
Unlike the CSTO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization does not have in its charter a provision on collective defense of its member by others in the event of an outside attack. It was created to counter attacks by illegal armed groups if they cross the border of a member-country, and its military activities are rather limited, although two of its members, Russia and China, held major war games last fall.
MOSCOW, May 18 (RIA Novosti) - Two regional security organizations comprising post-Soviet nations and China are planning joint military exercises, the chief of Russia's general staff said Thursday.
"We are currently discussing a joint exercise under the aegis of the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization]," Yury Baluyevsky said, adding that the date of the exercise, which would also involve troops from Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) nations, had yet to be decided.
Baluyevsky said the exercises would practice joint counteraction against terrorist threats.
The chiefs of the CSTO nations' general staffs held a meeting in Moscow Thursday to discuss ways to make the collective security system more effective, including by improving control of the Collective Rapid Reaction Force, which currently numbers 1,500 military personnel deployed in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which comprises the former Soviet republics in Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan - as well as Russia and China, was created in 2001 to deal with security issues, including border conflicts, terrorism, and militant Islam.
These countries, without China, also form the CSTO, which also includes Belarus and Armenia. The CSTO is seen by some experts as a counterbalance to NATO's eastward expansion.
Unlike the CSTO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization does not have in its charter a provision on collective defense of its member by others in the event of an outside attack. It was created to counter attacks by illegal armed groups if they cross the border of a member-country, and its military activities are rather limited, although two of its members, Russia and China, held major war games last fall.
Venezuela may price oil exports in euros
Venezuela may price oil exports in euros
Reuters
Venezuela may consider pricing its oil in euros following Iran's declaration that it is contemplating adopting the European Union's single currency in place of the U.S. dollar to price its oil exports, President Hugo Chavez said yesterday. "That is an interesting proposal made by the President of Iran," he told Britain's Channel 4 news. "We are free to choose, too, between the dollar and the euro. I think the European Union has made a large contribution with the euro." He added, "So what the President of Iran says . . . is recognizing the power of Europe -- they have succeeded in integrating and have a single currency competing with the dollar, and Venezuela might also consider that -- we are free to do that."
Reuters
Venezuela may consider pricing its oil in euros following Iran's declaration that it is contemplating adopting the European Union's single currency in place of the U.S. dollar to price its oil exports, President Hugo Chavez said yesterday. "That is an interesting proposal made by the President of Iran," he told Britain's Channel 4 news. "We are free to choose, too, between the dollar and the euro. I think the European Union has made a large contribution with the euro." He added, "So what the President of Iran says . . . is recognizing the power of Europe -- they have succeeded in integrating and have a single currency competing with the dollar, and Venezuela might also consider that -- we are free to do that."
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Update on the Rove Indictment Story
Update on the Rove Indictment Story
By Marc Ash,
Wed May 17th, 2006 at 12:52:48 PM EDT :: Fitzgerald Investigation
For the past few days, we have endured non-stop attacks on our credibility, and we have fought hard to defend our reputation. In addition, we have worked around the clock to provide additional information to our readership. People want to know more about this, and our job is to keep them informed. We take that responsibility seriously.
Here's what we now know: I spoke personally yesterday with both Rove's spokesman Mark Corallo and Rove's attorney Robert Luskin. Both men categorically denied all key points of our recent reporting on this issue. Both said, "Rove is not a target," "Rove did not inform the White House late last week that he would be indicted," and "Rove has not been indicted." Further, both Corallo and Luskin denied Leopold's account of events at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm that represents Karl Rove. They specifically stated again that no such meeting ever occurred, that Fitzgerald was not there, that Rove was not there, and that a major meeting did not take place. Both men were unequivocal on that point.
We can now report, however, that we have additional, independent sources that refute those denials by Corallo and Luskin. While we had only our own sources to work with in the beginning, additional sources have now come forward and offered corroboration to us.
We have been contacted by at least three reporters from mainstream media - network level organizations - who shared with us off-the-record confirmation and moral support. When we asked why they were not going public with this information, in each case they expressed frustration with superiors who would not allow it.
We also learned the following: The events at the office building that houses the law firm of Patton Boggs were not in fact a very well-guarded secret. Despite denials by Corallo and Luskin, there was intense activity at the office building. In fact, the building was staked out by at least two major network news crews. Further, although Corallo and Luskin are not prepared to talk about what happened in the offices of Patton Boggs, others emerging from the building were, both on background and off-the-record. There were a lot of talkers, and they confirmed our accounts. We do have more information, but want additional confirmation before going public with it.
THE 24 HOUR THING
We reported that Patrick Fitzgerald had, "instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order...." That does not mean that at the end of that 24-hour period, Fitzgerald is obliged to hold a press conference and make an announcement. It just means that he has given Rove a 24-hour formal notification. Fitzgerald is not obliged to make an announcement at any point; he does so at his own discretion, and not if it compromises his case. So we're all stuck waiting here. Grab some coffee.
By Marc Ash,
Wed May 17th, 2006 at 12:52:48 PM EDT :: Fitzgerald Investigation
For the past few days, we have endured non-stop attacks on our credibility, and we have fought hard to defend our reputation. In addition, we have worked around the clock to provide additional information to our readership. People want to know more about this, and our job is to keep them informed. We take that responsibility seriously.
Here's what we now know: I spoke personally yesterday with both Rove's spokesman Mark Corallo and Rove's attorney Robert Luskin. Both men categorically denied all key points of our recent reporting on this issue. Both said, "Rove is not a target," "Rove did not inform the White House late last week that he would be indicted," and "Rove has not been indicted." Further, both Corallo and Luskin denied Leopold's account of events at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm that represents Karl Rove. They specifically stated again that no such meeting ever occurred, that Fitzgerald was not there, that Rove was not there, and that a major meeting did not take place. Both men were unequivocal on that point.
We can now report, however, that we have additional, independent sources that refute those denials by Corallo and Luskin. While we had only our own sources to work with in the beginning, additional sources have now come forward and offered corroboration to us.
We have been contacted by at least three reporters from mainstream media - network level organizations - who shared with us off-the-record confirmation and moral support. When we asked why they were not going public with this information, in each case they expressed frustration with superiors who would not allow it.
We also learned the following: The events at the office building that houses the law firm of Patton Boggs were not in fact a very well-guarded secret. Despite denials by Corallo and Luskin, there was intense activity at the office building. In fact, the building was staked out by at least two major network news crews. Further, although Corallo and Luskin are not prepared to talk about what happened in the offices of Patton Boggs, others emerging from the building were, both on background and off-the-record. There were a lot of talkers, and they confirmed our accounts. We do have more information, but want additional confirmation before going public with it.
THE 24 HOUR THING
We reported that Patrick Fitzgerald had, "instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order...." That does not mean that at the end of that 24-hour period, Fitzgerald is obliged to hold a press conference and make an announcement. It just means that he has given Rove a 24-hour formal notification. Fitzgerald is not obliged to make an announcement at any point; he does so at his own discretion, and not if it compromises his case. So we're all stuck waiting here. Grab some coffee.
Anti-abortion group seeks to keep Israel Jewish
Anti-abortion group seeks to keep Israel Jewish
17 May 2006 15:02:40 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Luke Baker
JERUSALEM, May 17 (Reuters) - In the 58 years since its founding, few issues have stalked the state of Israel like demographics -- the fear that Arabs may some day outnumber Jews.
Responding to an issue that Jews often refer to as "the demographic threat", a non-profit Jewish group is encouraging poor, pregnant Jewish women who might be considering having an abortion to go ahead and have a child instead.
Set up 29 years ago by Eli Schussheim, a surgeon, the Efrat organisation offers women $1,000 of support for a year, including diapers, a crib and baby clothes, if they decide to give birth rather than terminate their pregnancies.
It is one of a range of groups whose guiding principle is to prop up Israel's Jewish population amid statistics showing that the Arab birthrate is twice that of Jewish families.
According to government figures, Israel's population is just over seven million people, three-quarters of whom are Jewish.
But the Arab minority, about a fifth of the population, is growing rapidly, as are Palestinian communities under Israeli occupation. Some projections say Arabs will be a majority in Israel and the West Bank by 2020 unless action is taken.
"The demographic situation is getting worse all the time," says Schussheim, 64, who was born and raised in Argentina.
"Every child we can save makes a difference."
Schussheim says he started the organisation shortly after changes were made to Israel's abortion laws in the late 1970s.
While he considers himself "pro-choice", he says too many Jewish women end up making the wrong choice because of economic hardship and terminate their pregnancies.
"NO REGRETS"
According to government figures, about 22,000 abortions are performed in Israel each year but Efrat believes the numbers are more than double that if unofficial terminations are included.
"Since the founding of the state of Israel, more than one million Jewish children have been lost," says Tzvi Binn, a spokesman who helps raise funds for Efrat in the United States.
"It's a constant struggle to maintain the Jewishness of the state, but saving Jewish lives helps us in that struggle."
Whereas attacks by militants killed an average of one person a week in Israel last year, and car crashes nine people every seven days, Efrat says 900 babies a week were aborted.
"Imagine how much stronger Israel would have been demographically today with one million more Jews," the organisation says on its website, www.friendsofefrat.org.
"Supporting Efrat is the most direct way one can strengthen Israel and the Jewish people."
Efrat does not offer its services to Israeli Arabs, many of whom say they feel like second class citizens in Israel.
The group, which last year gave financial support to 1,806 women, calls what it does an "inner Aliyah" in reference to the process Jews make when they decide to move to live in Israel.
More than half its funding now comes from the United States, mostly from synagogues, but there is growing support from evangelical Christian groups and others opposed to abortion.
Schussheim says he is not so concerned about where the money comes from, just as long as Jewish babies are born.
"Even if we had 10 million Jews here and there wasn't a demographic problem, I would still do it," he says.
"In 29 years, I haven't had one case where a woman said she regretted it."
When Two Poor Countries Reclaimed Oil Fields, Why Did Just One Spark Uproar?
When Two Poor Countries Reclaimed Oil Fields, Why Did Just One Spark Uproar?
By George Monbiot
The Guardian UK
Tuesday 16 May 2006
The outcry over Bolivia's renationalisation and the silence over Chad's betrays the hypocrisy of the critics.
Civilization has a new enemy. He is a former coca grower called Evo Morales, who is currently the president of Bolivia. Yesterday he stood before the European parliament to explain why he had sent troops to regain control of his country's gas and oil fields. Bolivia's resources, he says, have been "looted by foreign companies", and he is reclaiming them for the benefit of his people. Last week, he told the summit of Latin American and European leaders in Vienna that the corporations which have been extracting the country's fossil fuels would not be compensated for these seizures.
You can probably guess how this has gone down. Tony Blair urged him to use his power responsibly, which is like Mark Oaten lecturing the Pope on sexual continence. Condoleezza Rice accused him of "demagoguery". The Economist announced that Bolivia was "moving backwards". The Times, in a marvellously haughty leader, called Morales "petulant", "xenophobic" and "capricious", and labelled his seizure of the gas fields "a gesture as childish as it is eye-catching".
Never mind that the privatisation of Bolivia's gas and oil in the 1990s was almost certainly illegal, as it took place without the consent of congress. Never mind that - until now - its natural wealth has only impoverished its people. Never mind that Morales had promised to regain national control of Bolivia's natural resources before he became president, and that the policy has massive support among Bolivians. It can't be long before Donald Rumsfeld calls him the new Hitler and Bush makes another speech about freedom and democracy being threatened by freedom and democracy.
This huffing and puffing is dressed up as concern for the people of Bolivia. The Financial Times fretted about the potential for "mismanagement and corruption". The Economist warned that while the government "may get richer, its people are likely to grow even poorer". The Times lamented that Morales had "set back Bolivia's development by 10 years or so ... the most vulnerable groups will find that an economic lifeline is soon removed from their reach". All this is humbug.
Four days before Morales seized the gas fields - on May 1 - an even bigger expropriation took place in an even poorer country: the African republic of Chad. When the Chadian government reasserted control over its oil revenues, not only did it ensure that an intended lifeline for the poor really was removed from their reach, but it also brought the World Bank's claims to be using oil as a social welfare programme crashing down in flames. So how did all those bold critics of Morales respond? They didn't. The whole hypocritical horde of them looked the other way.
The World Bank decided to fund Chad's massive oil scheme in 2000, after extracting a promise from the government of Idriss Deby - which has a terrible human rights record - that the profits would be used for the benefit of the country's people. Deby's administration passed a law allocating 85% of the government's oil revenues to education, health and development, and placing 10% "in trust for future generations". This, the bank said, amounted to "an unprecedented system of safeguards to ensure that these revenues would be used to finance development in Chad".
Without the World Bank, the project could not have gone ahead. It was asked to participate by Exxon, the leading partner in the project, to provide insurance against political risk. The bank's different lending arms stumped up a total of $333m, and the European Investment Bank threw in another $120m. The oil companies (Exxon, Petronas and Chevron) started drilling 300 wells in the south of the country, and building a pipeline to a port in Cameroon, which opened in 2003.
Environmentalists predicted that the pipeline would damage the rainforests of Cameroon and displace the indigenous people who lived there; that the oil companies would consume much of Chad's scarce water and that an influx of oil workers would be accompanied by an influx of Aids. They also argued that subsidising oil companies in the name of social welfare was a radical reinterpretation of the bank's mandate. As long ago as 1997, the Environmental Defence Fund warned that the government of Chad would not keep its promises to use the money for alleviating poverty. In 1999, researchers from Harvard Law School examined the law the government had passed, and predicted that the authorities "have little intention of allowing it to affect local practice".
In 2000, the oil companies gave the government of Chad a "signing bonus" of $4.5m, which it immediately spent on arms. Then, at the beginning of 2006, it simply tore up the law it had passed in 1998. It redefined the development budget to include security, seized the fund set aside for future generations, and diverted 30% of the total revenues into "general spending", which, in Chad, is another term for guns. The World Bank, embarrassed by the fulfilment of all the predictions its critics had made, froze the revenues the government had deposited in London and suspended the remainder of its loans. The Chadian government responded by warning that it would simply shut down the oil wells. The corporations ran to daddy (the US government) and, on April 27, the bank caved in. Its new agreement with Chad entitles Deby to pretty well everything he has already taken.
The World Bank's attempts to save face are almost funny. Last year, it said that the scheme was "a pioneering and collaborative effort ... to demonstrate that large-scale crude oil projects can significantly improve prospects for sustainable long-term development". In other words, it was a model for oil-producing countries to follow. Now it tells us that the project in Chad was "less a model for all oil-producing countries than a unique solution to a unique challenge". But, however much it wriggles, it cannot disguise the fact that the government's reassertion of control is a disaster both for the bank and for the impoverished people it claimed to be helping. Since the project began, Chad has fallen from 167th to 173rd on the UN's human development index, and life expectancy there has dropped from 44.7 to 43.6 years. If, by contrast, Morales does as he has promised and uses the extra revenues from Bolivia's gas fields in the same way as Hugo Chávez has used the money from Venezuela's oil, the result is likely to be a major improvement in his people's welfare.
So, on the one hand, you have a man who has kept his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to use it to help the poor. On the other, you have a man who has broken his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to buy guns. The first man is vilified as irresponsible, childish and capricious. The second man is left to get on with it. Why? Well, Deby's actions don't hurt the oil companies. Morales's do. When Blair and Rice and the Times and all the other apologists for undemocratic power say "the people", they mean the corporations. The reason they hate Morales is that when he says "the people", he means the people.
--------
The references for this and all George Monbiot's recent columns can be found at www.monbiot.com.
-------
By George Monbiot
The Guardian UK
Tuesday 16 May 2006
The outcry over Bolivia's renationalisation and the silence over Chad's betrays the hypocrisy of the critics.
Civilization has a new enemy. He is a former coca grower called Evo Morales, who is currently the president of Bolivia. Yesterday he stood before the European parliament to explain why he had sent troops to regain control of his country's gas and oil fields. Bolivia's resources, he says, have been "looted by foreign companies", and he is reclaiming them for the benefit of his people. Last week, he told the summit of Latin American and European leaders in Vienna that the corporations which have been extracting the country's fossil fuels would not be compensated for these seizures.
You can probably guess how this has gone down. Tony Blair urged him to use his power responsibly, which is like Mark Oaten lecturing the Pope on sexual continence. Condoleezza Rice accused him of "demagoguery". The Economist announced that Bolivia was "moving backwards". The Times, in a marvellously haughty leader, called Morales "petulant", "xenophobic" and "capricious", and labelled his seizure of the gas fields "a gesture as childish as it is eye-catching".
Never mind that the privatisation of Bolivia's gas and oil in the 1990s was almost certainly illegal, as it took place without the consent of congress. Never mind that - until now - its natural wealth has only impoverished its people. Never mind that Morales had promised to regain national control of Bolivia's natural resources before he became president, and that the policy has massive support among Bolivians. It can't be long before Donald Rumsfeld calls him the new Hitler and Bush makes another speech about freedom and democracy being threatened by freedom and democracy.
This huffing and puffing is dressed up as concern for the people of Bolivia. The Financial Times fretted about the potential for "mismanagement and corruption". The Economist warned that while the government "may get richer, its people are likely to grow even poorer". The Times lamented that Morales had "set back Bolivia's development by 10 years or so ... the most vulnerable groups will find that an economic lifeline is soon removed from their reach". All this is humbug.
Four days before Morales seized the gas fields - on May 1 - an even bigger expropriation took place in an even poorer country: the African republic of Chad. When the Chadian government reasserted control over its oil revenues, not only did it ensure that an intended lifeline for the poor really was removed from their reach, but it also brought the World Bank's claims to be using oil as a social welfare programme crashing down in flames. So how did all those bold critics of Morales respond? They didn't. The whole hypocritical horde of them looked the other way.
The World Bank decided to fund Chad's massive oil scheme in 2000, after extracting a promise from the government of Idriss Deby - which has a terrible human rights record - that the profits would be used for the benefit of the country's people. Deby's administration passed a law allocating 85% of the government's oil revenues to education, health and development, and placing 10% "in trust for future generations". This, the bank said, amounted to "an unprecedented system of safeguards to ensure that these revenues would be used to finance development in Chad".
Without the World Bank, the project could not have gone ahead. It was asked to participate by Exxon, the leading partner in the project, to provide insurance against political risk. The bank's different lending arms stumped up a total of $333m, and the European Investment Bank threw in another $120m. The oil companies (Exxon, Petronas and Chevron) started drilling 300 wells in the south of the country, and building a pipeline to a port in Cameroon, which opened in 2003.
Environmentalists predicted that the pipeline would damage the rainforests of Cameroon and displace the indigenous people who lived there; that the oil companies would consume much of Chad's scarce water and that an influx of oil workers would be accompanied by an influx of Aids. They also argued that subsidising oil companies in the name of social welfare was a radical reinterpretation of the bank's mandate. As long ago as 1997, the Environmental Defence Fund warned that the government of Chad would not keep its promises to use the money for alleviating poverty. In 1999, researchers from Harvard Law School examined the law the government had passed, and predicted that the authorities "have little intention of allowing it to affect local practice".
In 2000, the oil companies gave the government of Chad a "signing bonus" of $4.5m, which it immediately spent on arms. Then, at the beginning of 2006, it simply tore up the law it had passed in 1998. It redefined the development budget to include security, seized the fund set aside for future generations, and diverted 30% of the total revenues into "general spending", which, in Chad, is another term for guns. The World Bank, embarrassed by the fulfilment of all the predictions its critics had made, froze the revenues the government had deposited in London and suspended the remainder of its loans. The Chadian government responded by warning that it would simply shut down the oil wells. The corporations ran to daddy (the US government) and, on April 27, the bank caved in. Its new agreement with Chad entitles Deby to pretty well everything he has already taken.
The World Bank's attempts to save face are almost funny. Last year, it said that the scheme was "a pioneering and collaborative effort ... to demonstrate that large-scale crude oil projects can significantly improve prospects for sustainable long-term development". In other words, it was a model for oil-producing countries to follow. Now it tells us that the project in Chad was "less a model for all oil-producing countries than a unique solution to a unique challenge". But, however much it wriggles, it cannot disguise the fact that the government's reassertion of control is a disaster both for the bank and for the impoverished people it claimed to be helping. Since the project began, Chad has fallen from 167th to 173rd on the UN's human development index, and life expectancy there has dropped from 44.7 to 43.6 years. If, by contrast, Morales does as he has promised and uses the extra revenues from Bolivia's gas fields in the same way as Hugo Chávez has used the money from Venezuela's oil, the result is likely to be a major improvement in his people's welfare.
So, on the one hand, you have a man who has kept his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to use it to help the poor. On the other, you have a man who has broken his promises by regaining control over the money from the hydrocarbon industry, in order to buy guns. The first man is vilified as irresponsible, childish and capricious. The second man is left to get on with it. Why? Well, Deby's actions don't hurt the oil companies. Morales's do. When Blair and Rice and the Times and all the other apologists for undemocratic power say "the people", they mean the corporations. The reason they hate Morales is that when he says "the people", he means the people.
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The references for this and all George Monbiot's recent columns can be found at www.monbiot.com.
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US Secretly Backing Warlords in Somalia
US Secretly Backing Warlords in Somalia
By Emily Wax and Karen DeYoung
The Washington Post
Wednesday 17 May 2006
More than a decade after U.S. troops withdrew from Somalia following a disastrous military intervention, officials of Somalia's interim government and some U.S. analysts of Africa policy say the United States has returned to the African country, secretly supporting secular warlords who have been waging fierce battles against Islamic groups for control of the capital, Mogadishu.
The latest clashes, last week and over the weekend, were some of the most violent in Mogadishu since the end of the American intervention in 1994, and left 150 dead and hundreds more wounded. Leaders of the interim government blamed U.S. support of the militias for provoking the clashes.
U.S. officials have declined to directly address on the record the question of backing Somali warlords, who have styled themselves as a counterterrorism coalition in an open bid for American support. Speaking to reporters recently, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States would "work with responsible individuals . . . in fighting terror. It's a real concern of ours - terror taking root in the Horn of Africa. We don't want to see another safe haven for terrorists created. Our interest is purely in seeing Somalia achieve a better day."
U.S. officials have long feared that Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991, is a desirable place for al-Qaeda members to hide and plan attacks. The country is strategically located on the Horn of Africa, which is only a boat ride away from Yemen and a longtime gateway to Africa from the Middle East. No visas are needed to enter Somalia, there is no police force and no effective central authority.
The country has a weak transitional government operating largely out of neighboring Kenya and the southern city of Baidoa. Most of Somalia is in anarchy, ruled by a patchwork of competing warlords; the capital is too unsafe for even Somalia's acting prime minister to visit.
Leaders of the transitional government said they have warned U.S. officials that working with the warlords is shortsighted and dangerous.
"We would prefer that the U.S. work with the transitional government and not with criminals," the prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, said in an interview. "This is a dangerous game. Somalia is not a stable place and we want the U.S. in Somalia. But in a more constructive way. Clearly we have a common objective to stabilize Somalia, but the U.S. is using the wrong channels."
Many of the warlords have their own agendas, Somali officials said, and some reportedly fought against the United States in 1993 during street battles that culminated in an attack that downed two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and left 18 Army Rangers dead.
"The U.S. government funded the warlords in the recent battle in Mogadishu, there is no doubt about that," government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari told journalists by telephone from Baidoa. "This cooperation . . . only fuels further civil war."
U.S. officials have refused repeated requests to provide details about the nature and extent of their support for the coalition of warlords, which calls itself the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in what some Somalis say is a marketing ploy to get U.S. support.
But some U.S. officials, who declined to be identified by name because of the sensitivity of the issue, have said they are generally talking to these leaders to prevent people with suspected ties to al-Qaeda from being given safe haven in the lawless country.
"There are complicated issues in Somalia in that the government does not control Mogadishu and it has the potential for becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists," said one senior administration official in Washington. "We've got very clear interests in trying to ensure that al-Qaeda members are not using it to hide and to plan attacks." He said it was "a very difficult issue" trying to show support for the fledgling interim government while also working to prevent Somalia from becoming an al-Qaeda base.
A senior U.S. intelligence official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was a "Hobbesian" situation - that the transitional government operating from Kenya was in its "fifteenth iteration" and that it, too, was a "collection of warlords" that played both sides of the fence. The official said that it presented a classic "enemy of our enemy" situation.
The source said Somalia was "not an al-Qaeda safe haven" yet, adding, "There are some there, but it's so dysfunctional." U.S. officials specifically believe that a small number of al-Qaeda operatives who were involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania are now residing in Somalia.
Analysts said they were convinced the Bush administration was backing the warlords as part of its global war against terrorism.
"The U.S. relies on buying intelligence from warlords and other participants in the Somali conflict, and hoping that the strongest of the warlords can snatch a live suspect or two if the intelligence identifies their whereabouts," said John Prendergast, the director for African affairs in the Clinton administration and now a senior adviser at the nongovernmental International Crisis Group. "This strategy might reduce the short-term threat of another terrorist attack in East Africa, but in the long term the conditions which allow terrorist cells to take hold along the Indian Ocean coastline go unaddressed. We ignore these conditions at our peril."
"Are we talking to them and doing some of that? Yes," said Ted Dagne, the leading Africa analyst for the Congressional Research Service. "We fought some of these warlords in 1993 and now we are dealing with some of them again, perhaps supporting some of them against other groups. Somalia is still considered by some as an attractive location for terrorist groups."
The issue of U.S. backing came to the forefront this winter when warlords formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism after a fundamentalist Islamic group began asserting itself in the capital, setting up courts of Islamic law and building schools and hospitals.
Soon after, the coalition of warlords were well-equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and antiaircraft guns, which were used in heavy fighting in the capital last week. It was the second round of fighting this year, following clashes in March that killed more than 90 people, mostly civilians, and emptied neighborhoods around the capital.
In a report to the U.N. Security Council this month, the world body's monitoring group on Somalia said it was investigating an unnamed country's secret support for an anti-terrorism alliance in apparent violation of a U.N. arms embargo.
The experts said they were told in January and February of this year that "financial support was being provided to help organize and structure a militia force created to counter the threat posed by the growing militant fundamentalist movement in central and southern Somalia."
In March, the State Department said in its terrorism report that the U.S. government was concerned about al-Qaeda fugitives "responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the November 2002 bombing of a tourist hotel and attack on a civilian airliner in Kenya, who are believed to be operating in and around Somalia."
The United States relies on Ethiopia and Kenya for information about Somalia. Both countries have complex interests and long-standing ties and animosities in the country. In December 2002, the United States also established an anti-terrorism task force in neighboring Djibouti, with up to 1,600 U.S. troops stationed in the country.
Africa researchers said they were concerned that while the Bush administration was focused on the potential terrorist threat, little was being done to support economic development initiatives that could provide alternative livelihoods to picking up a gun or following extremist ideologies in Somalia. Somalia watchers and Somalis themselves said there has not been enough substantial backing for building a new government after 15 years of collapsed statehood.
"If the real problem is Somalia, then what have we done to change the situation inside Somalia? Are we funding schools, health care or helping establish an effective government?" Dagne said. "We have a generation of Somali kids growing up without education and only knowing violence and poverty. Unless there is a change, these could become the next warlords out of necessity for survival. That's perhaps the greatest threat we have yet to address."
Somalis far from the factional fighting in Mogadishu said they were waiting for anyone to help ease their destitute lives during the worst drought in a decade.
In Waajid, a dusty town about 200 miles northwest of the capital, thousands of villagers have left their farms for squalid camps, searching for water and living in open, rocky fields under low-lying, fragile shelters of sticks and rags that look like bird's nests.
Many people here say they feel that the United States has ignored Somalia since the failed 1993 military intervention. Today many Somalis said they regret that chapter in their history and thank the United States, the largest donor of food and funding for water trucks during this season's drought.
However, they said that news that the U.S. government was talking with warlords has awakened feelings of resentment.
"George W. Bush, we welcome the Americans. But not to back warlords. We need the U.S.A. to help the young government," said Isak Nur Isak, the district commissioner in Waajid. "We won't drag any Americans through the street like in 1993. We want to be clear: We don't want only food aid, but we do want political support for the new government, which is all we have right now to put our hopes in. We can't eat if everyone is dead."
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Wax reported from Waajid, Somalia, and Nairobi. DeYoung reported from Washington.
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By Emily Wax and Karen DeYoung
The Washington Post
Wednesday 17 May 2006
More than a decade after U.S. troops withdrew from Somalia following a disastrous military intervention, officials of Somalia's interim government and some U.S. analysts of Africa policy say the United States has returned to the African country, secretly supporting secular warlords who have been waging fierce battles against Islamic groups for control of the capital, Mogadishu.
The latest clashes, last week and over the weekend, were some of the most violent in Mogadishu since the end of the American intervention in 1994, and left 150 dead and hundreds more wounded. Leaders of the interim government blamed U.S. support of the militias for provoking the clashes.
U.S. officials have declined to directly address on the record the question of backing Somali warlords, who have styled themselves as a counterterrorism coalition in an open bid for American support. Speaking to reporters recently, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States would "work with responsible individuals . . . in fighting terror. It's a real concern of ours - terror taking root in the Horn of Africa. We don't want to see another safe haven for terrorists created. Our interest is purely in seeing Somalia achieve a better day."
U.S. officials have long feared that Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991, is a desirable place for al-Qaeda members to hide and plan attacks. The country is strategically located on the Horn of Africa, which is only a boat ride away from Yemen and a longtime gateway to Africa from the Middle East. No visas are needed to enter Somalia, there is no police force and no effective central authority.
The country has a weak transitional government operating largely out of neighboring Kenya and the southern city of Baidoa. Most of Somalia is in anarchy, ruled by a patchwork of competing warlords; the capital is too unsafe for even Somalia's acting prime minister to visit.
Leaders of the transitional government said they have warned U.S. officials that working with the warlords is shortsighted and dangerous.
"We would prefer that the U.S. work with the transitional government and not with criminals," the prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, said in an interview. "This is a dangerous game. Somalia is not a stable place and we want the U.S. in Somalia. But in a more constructive way. Clearly we have a common objective to stabilize Somalia, but the U.S. is using the wrong channels."
Many of the warlords have their own agendas, Somali officials said, and some reportedly fought against the United States in 1993 during street battles that culminated in an attack that downed two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and left 18 Army Rangers dead.
"The U.S. government funded the warlords in the recent battle in Mogadishu, there is no doubt about that," government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari told journalists by telephone from Baidoa. "This cooperation . . . only fuels further civil war."
U.S. officials have refused repeated requests to provide details about the nature and extent of their support for the coalition of warlords, which calls itself the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in what some Somalis say is a marketing ploy to get U.S. support.
But some U.S. officials, who declined to be identified by name because of the sensitivity of the issue, have said they are generally talking to these leaders to prevent people with suspected ties to al-Qaeda from being given safe haven in the lawless country.
"There are complicated issues in Somalia in that the government does not control Mogadishu and it has the potential for becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists," said one senior administration official in Washington. "We've got very clear interests in trying to ensure that al-Qaeda members are not using it to hide and to plan attacks." He said it was "a very difficult issue" trying to show support for the fledgling interim government while also working to prevent Somalia from becoming an al-Qaeda base.
A senior U.S. intelligence official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was a "Hobbesian" situation - that the transitional government operating from Kenya was in its "fifteenth iteration" and that it, too, was a "collection of warlords" that played both sides of the fence. The official said that it presented a classic "enemy of our enemy" situation.
The source said Somalia was "not an al-Qaeda safe haven" yet, adding, "There are some there, but it's so dysfunctional." U.S. officials specifically believe that a small number of al-Qaeda operatives who were involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania are now residing in Somalia.
Analysts said they were convinced the Bush administration was backing the warlords as part of its global war against terrorism.
"The U.S. relies on buying intelligence from warlords and other participants in the Somali conflict, and hoping that the strongest of the warlords can snatch a live suspect or two if the intelligence identifies their whereabouts," said John Prendergast, the director for African affairs in the Clinton administration and now a senior adviser at the nongovernmental International Crisis Group. "This strategy might reduce the short-term threat of another terrorist attack in East Africa, but in the long term the conditions which allow terrorist cells to take hold along the Indian Ocean coastline go unaddressed. We ignore these conditions at our peril."
"Are we talking to them and doing some of that? Yes," said Ted Dagne, the leading Africa analyst for the Congressional Research Service. "We fought some of these warlords in 1993 and now we are dealing with some of them again, perhaps supporting some of them against other groups. Somalia is still considered by some as an attractive location for terrorist groups."
The issue of U.S. backing came to the forefront this winter when warlords formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism after a fundamentalist Islamic group began asserting itself in the capital, setting up courts of Islamic law and building schools and hospitals.
Soon after, the coalition of warlords were well-equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and antiaircraft guns, which were used in heavy fighting in the capital last week. It was the second round of fighting this year, following clashes in March that killed more than 90 people, mostly civilians, and emptied neighborhoods around the capital.
In a report to the U.N. Security Council this month, the world body's monitoring group on Somalia said it was investigating an unnamed country's secret support for an anti-terrorism alliance in apparent violation of a U.N. arms embargo.
The experts said they were told in January and February of this year that "financial support was being provided to help organize and structure a militia force created to counter the threat posed by the growing militant fundamentalist movement in central and southern Somalia."
In March, the State Department said in its terrorism report that the U.S. government was concerned about al-Qaeda fugitives "responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the November 2002 bombing of a tourist hotel and attack on a civilian airliner in Kenya, who are believed to be operating in and around Somalia."
The United States relies on Ethiopia and Kenya for information about Somalia. Both countries have complex interests and long-standing ties and animosities in the country. In December 2002, the United States also established an anti-terrorism task force in neighboring Djibouti, with up to 1,600 U.S. troops stationed in the country.
Africa researchers said they were concerned that while the Bush administration was focused on the potential terrorist threat, little was being done to support economic development initiatives that could provide alternative livelihoods to picking up a gun or following extremist ideologies in Somalia. Somalia watchers and Somalis themselves said there has not been enough substantial backing for building a new government after 15 years of collapsed statehood.
"If the real problem is Somalia, then what have we done to change the situation inside Somalia? Are we funding schools, health care or helping establish an effective government?" Dagne said. "We have a generation of Somali kids growing up without education and only knowing violence and poverty. Unless there is a change, these could become the next warlords out of necessity for survival. That's perhaps the greatest threat we have yet to address."
Somalis far from the factional fighting in Mogadishu said they were waiting for anyone to help ease their destitute lives during the worst drought in a decade.
In Waajid, a dusty town about 200 miles northwest of the capital, thousands of villagers have left their farms for squalid camps, searching for water and living in open, rocky fields under low-lying, fragile shelters of sticks and rags that look like bird's nests.
Many people here say they feel that the United States has ignored Somalia since the failed 1993 military intervention. Today many Somalis said they regret that chapter in their history and thank the United States, the largest donor of food and funding for water trucks during this season's drought.
However, they said that news that the U.S. government was talking with warlords has awakened feelings of resentment.
"George W. Bush, we welcome the Americans. But not to back warlords. We need the U.S.A. to help the young government," said Isak Nur Isak, the district commissioner in Waajid. "We won't drag any Americans through the street like in 1993. We want to be clear: We don't want only food aid, but we do want political support for the new government, which is all we have right now to put our hopes in. We can't eat if everyone is dead."
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Wax reported from Waajid, Somalia, and Nairobi. DeYoung reported from Washington.
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They Track Journalists, Don't They?
They Track Journalists, Don't They?
By Amy Goodman | Interview
Democracy Now!
Tuesday 16 May 2006
ABC News reported on Monday that a senior federal law enforcement had revealed that the government is now tracking phone calls made by journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post and ABC News. We speak with Brian Ross, chief investigative reporter at ABC News.
On Monday, ABC News reported the government is tracking the phone numbers dialed from major news organizations in an effort to root out confidential government sources that speak to reporters. The media groups include the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC News itself. Government leaks have led to front-page stories detailing the Bush administration’s spy program and the CIA’s network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe. The leaks have greatly angered Bush administration officials.
This revelation comes on the heels of last week’s disclosure that three of the country’s largest telecom companies handed over millions of phone call records to help the National Security Agency build the world’s largest database, comes a new revelation.
We’re joined now by the ABC News reporter who broke this story – someone who may well be a target of this new phase of government monitoring himself. Brian Ross is the Chief Investigative reporter for ABC News. He joins us on the line from New York.
Amy Goodman: We now are joined by ABC News investigative reporter who may well be a target of this new phase of government monitoring, himself. Brian Ross is the investigative reporter for ABC News. He joins us on the line from here in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now!
Brian Ross: Thank you very much.
Amy Goodman: It's good to have you with us. Well, tell us what you've learned.
Brian Ross: Well, to start with, we were warned - Rich Esposito and I were warned last week that the government was aware of who we were calling and that we should quickly get new cell phones that didn't come back to our names. An insider told us, a friendly insider who did not necessarily think this is a good idea. It was clear to us that somehow the government knew our records. We were told our phone calls weren't being recorded, but just who we were calling. Now, in terms of trying to track down insiders at the government who are providing us with information, that's really about all they need. That's how they essentially tracked down Mary McCarthy at the C.I.A. and got her in a polygraph and fired her based on who she was making contact with. This, for us, is quite chilling. The F.B.I. then, Amy, last night put out a statement essentially acknowledging that they are tracking phone calls of reporters. The person I talked to said, "Well, it may be more like backtracking." But under this administration, what used to be hard to do, in going after reporters and their phone records, is now easy.
Amy Goodman: So, the F.B.I. is admitting this. And what are they saying further? Are they going to continue to do this?
Brian Ross: That's part of a criminal investigation into who provided information to reporters, who leaked classified information, which would certainly include evidence of secret prisons or N.S.A. spying, and that's considered classified. The fact that that was leaked represents a criminal act in the view of the C.I.A., which has made referrals to the Department of Justice, and then they handed over to the F.B.I. So, essentially, they have squads of F.B.I. agents, and what they do is, according to the F.B.I. statement, they begin by getting the phone records that are easily available to them off of the government phones themselves, and then they say in this statement, which is a long sort of non-denial denial, that they take the next logical step, which is to get a reporter's phone records.
And they do this, they say, legally. What that means is they use a provision in the PATRIOT Act - which is designed to go after terrorists, but they're using it to go after reporters - what they call a national security letter. Essentially, it's a letter an F.B.I. agent writes, takes it to a phone company - or anywhere, really - but takes it to a phone company, and the phone company is then required under the provisions of the PATRIOT Act to turn over the information, and also a phone company is required not divulge to the customer, me or anybody else, that the records have been sought by the government.
Amy Goodman: And these national security letters, or NSLs, are not signed by a judge?
Brian Ross: They are not signed by a judge.
Amy Goodman: Why do you think they're going after you, Brian Ross?
Brian Ross: There are two stories that I know by talking to people who have been interviewed that the C.I.A. considers to be evidence of criminal behavior on the part of someone. Our story on the C.I.A. secret prisons, the Washington Post broke that story. They did not report the two countries. We came along and with our own sources reported the two countries where the prisons had been were Poland and Romania, and this set off quite a firestorm inside the C.I.A.
As well, we reported on an attack in Pakistan using a C.I.A. Predator with missiles attached to it, the one that killed 18 people there, looking for the number two man in al-Qaeda, al-Zawahri. We got word of that very early and reported it, and that infuriated the C.I.A., because it embarrassed them with the Pakistanis. They hadn't quite made up the cover story they used when the C.I.A. operates inside Pakistan. Generally, the Pakistanis will say it was a bomb they set off or something to cover the fact that the U.S. operates inside Pakistan sometimes. So those two incidents resulted in the C.I.A. being upset and asking for an investigation as to who leaked that information.
Amy Goodman: And, Brian Ross, didn't Human Rights Watch first reveal Poland and Romania as the countries in Eastern Europe?
Brian Ross: They did. They did. And they did first reveal it. What made a difference was that we were able to - or they said they "suspected" it. We were able to actually confirm it with current and former C.I.A. officials, and what upset the C.I.A., apparently, is it's one thing for Human Rights Watch to say something, because they feel they can easily deny that; it's harder for them to deny it when one of the major news organizations says it. So it carries a certain weight, apparently, in their view, that is hard for them to deny with their overseas partners, I guess.
Amy Goodman: We're talking with Brian Ross, the chief investigative correspondent for ABC News. According to Justice Department figures, the F.B.I. issued a total of 9,254 so-called national security letters last year, targeting 3,500 citizens and legal residents.
Brian Ross: Astounding figure. I guess we're one of them, or we are this year. This has become a very common, easily done. The officials I've talked to say that there was a time when this was difficult to do, even for anything - particularly involving journalists, that there were all sorts of safeguards and essentially hoops to jump through. Those have been removed. And this really is the case. It began with the whole Scooter Libby case, when they went after reporters there to get information as to who talked to Scooter Libby, and now is commonly used. Whenever the C.I.A. refers a case for a criminal investigation, that is almost a quick second step they take.
Amy Goodman: Brian Ross, on the issue of the prisons, do you know if these prisons are still operating in Romania and Poland? I remember in one of her overseas trips recently, Condoleezza Rice went to Romania.
Brian Ross: We reported in December that they had rushed to close them before she landed in Europe, so that she could say there are no such prisons in Europe, that they had operated up to a week before, when this word got out. And that was one of the reasons they were so eager for us not to report it was that it embarrassed her further. We reported that they closed down those two prisons and moved the 12 to 14 top al-Qaeda figures being held there to a third country in North Africa. And we did not report the name of that country.
Amy Goodman: Now, USA Today in their story on AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon giving over the phone numbers of tens of millions of Americans, the calls that they're making, they now have reported that BellSouth is saying that they didn't do this. And you've written a piece on The Blotter at ABC's website, talking about why Qwest said no to N.S.A. Can you talk further about these companies and what they're doing?
Brian Ross: Well, BellSouth is essentially saying they did not do it on a large-scale basis, which - what we were told following USA Today's ground breaking story was that, in fact, they did. It's hard to know, because the companies initially said they couldn't talk about national security matters. I don't know how it is they feel that they have some sort of classified information about national security. But it well might be that there's some sort of sweeping national security letter that is involved here. The government said the companies did this voluntarily, so they felt that it was legal to do it.
There are two major events tomorrow, Amy, on this issue. One, Russ Tice, the former N.S.A. intelligence analyst, is going to Capitol Hill to meet with the Senate staff to reveal what he says are illegal and unlawful acts by the N.S.A., and in particular General Michael Hayden. As well, there's a hearing tomorrow in San Francisco over the lawsuit brought against AT&T. A former AT&T technical figure there has provided information that they set up secret rooms at AT&T buildings in San Francisco and San Diego, San Jose, I think L.A. and Seattle, where they essentially split off the fiber-optic cable, had a way to divert it. This would be so - and the N.S.A. set up secret rooms and hired people from the phone companies there to essentially run the information, which is essentially everybody's email and messages and everything, through this machine, which is able to detect the text and, as I understand it, they are able to set up sort of key words and sort of loop through the emails of everyone to see if anyone else is talking about al-Qaeda or bombings or whatever it is they consider to be the key words.
Amy Goodman: I encourage people to go to our website at democracynow.org for our hour with Russell Tice, who will be speaking before Congress. But I wanted to ask you, Brian Ross, about what this means for government whistleblowers and what you found in talking to them now.
Brian Ross: Well, this is very chilling now. We're working on a major story, Amy, that's coming out Friday, having to do with failures at the Federal Air Marshals Service, and a number of Federal Air Marshals, in violation of their rules, have been providing us information. And they are, to say the least, extremely concerned with the news that the government can so easily obtain my phone records and wondering what this will mean, because the Air Marshals Service has retaliated against them. So, they're concerned, and I know that means that there will be shorter people willing to talk, at least on the phone. It may be a case where a lot more shoe leather will be required to do reporting. And if so, that's what we'll have to do.
Any Goodman: What kind of guarantees do they ask for now from you? What kind of guarantees can you give them?
Brian Ross: The only guarantee I can give is that I will not reveal their name or their position. I certainly would not. I think everyone has to know, and there's nothing I can do about it - if my phone records have been taken by the government, obtained somehow, I don't know about it. But I do know that I've been told that they are looking at our records, so I assume they have.
Amy Goodman: Brian Ross, is this changing the way you work?
Brian Ross: Absolutely. I mean, this makes it very, very difficult. And, you know, you sort of have to start thinking, I guess, like some sort of Mafia capo. You make your phone calls with bags of quarters at pay phones, if you can find them anymore. It's chilling, to say the least, and I guess I've concluded that this requires, you know, on my part, your part, all of us who are reporters and care about the truth, really reporting on this subject, and I don't think it's self-centered. I think it's important that everyone know this is what's happening and, you know, let Americans decide if that's how they want the government to operate.
Amy Goodman: Aren't there whistleblower shield laws?
Brian Ross: Whistleblower shield - there are shield laws that protect whistleblowers who go to Congress from retaliation. And there still is the First Amendment, I believe, in this country, but it's under attack clearly. There are shield laws for them. But in the case of, say, the Federal Air Marshals or people at the C.I.A., just contact with a reporter probably is enough to put them in a fair amount of trouble. Just contacts.
Amy Goodman: Is ABC considering suing either the U.S. government or the corporations that are handing over your information?
Brian Ross: I think we certainly would if we could figure out who did it and how. Since we haven't been notified, you know, we won't know this for at least a year if they have our records. It puts us in a difficult situation. We have this insider tip, essentially, that someone has our records. We're trying to figure out as quickly as we can who it is and how we got them and what records they have and how we can prevent it. But quite frankly, the PATRIOT Act, I don't think, was designed to go after journalists, but it certainly is being used that way.
Amy Goodman: What what phone company do you use?
Brian Ross: Well, there are a variety of them. AT&T is one of them. Verizon is another. And, you know, they both seem to be prepared to cooperate, and especially if they're served with what appear to be legal documents. I guess I don't see how they don't cooperate.
Amy Goodman: Have you asked them directly if they have handed over your documents?
Brian Ross: Their response is "We cannot comment on any national security matter." They will not say.
Amy Goodman: Well, I want to thank you very much, Brian Ross, for joining us. Brian Ross is chief investigative correspondent for ABC News. And we will certainly continue to follow this story.
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By Amy Goodman | Interview
Democracy Now!
Tuesday 16 May 2006
ABC News reported on Monday that a senior federal law enforcement had revealed that the government is now tracking phone calls made by journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post and ABC News. We speak with Brian Ross, chief investigative reporter at ABC News.
On Monday, ABC News reported the government is tracking the phone numbers dialed from major news organizations in an effort to root out confidential government sources that speak to reporters. The media groups include the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC News itself. Government leaks have led to front-page stories detailing the Bush administration’s spy program and the CIA’s network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe. The leaks have greatly angered Bush administration officials.
This revelation comes on the heels of last week’s disclosure that three of the country’s largest telecom companies handed over millions of phone call records to help the National Security Agency build the world’s largest database, comes a new revelation.
We’re joined now by the ABC News reporter who broke this story – someone who may well be a target of this new phase of government monitoring himself. Brian Ross is the Chief Investigative reporter for ABC News. He joins us on the line from New York.
Amy Goodman: We now are joined by ABC News investigative reporter who may well be a target of this new phase of government monitoring, himself. Brian Ross is the investigative reporter for ABC News. He joins us on the line from here in New York. Welcome to Democracy Now!
Brian Ross: Thank you very much.
Amy Goodman: It's good to have you with us. Well, tell us what you've learned.
Brian Ross: Well, to start with, we were warned - Rich Esposito and I were warned last week that the government was aware of who we were calling and that we should quickly get new cell phones that didn't come back to our names. An insider told us, a friendly insider who did not necessarily think this is a good idea. It was clear to us that somehow the government knew our records. We were told our phone calls weren't being recorded, but just who we were calling. Now, in terms of trying to track down insiders at the government who are providing us with information, that's really about all they need. That's how they essentially tracked down Mary McCarthy at the C.I.A. and got her in a polygraph and fired her based on who she was making contact with. This, for us, is quite chilling. The F.B.I. then, Amy, last night put out a statement essentially acknowledging that they are tracking phone calls of reporters. The person I talked to said, "Well, it may be more like backtracking." But under this administration, what used to be hard to do, in going after reporters and their phone records, is now easy.
Amy Goodman: So, the F.B.I. is admitting this. And what are they saying further? Are they going to continue to do this?
Brian Ross: That's part of a criminal investigation into who provided information to reporters, who leaked classified information, which would certainly include evidence of secret prisons or N.S.A. spying, and that's considered classified. The fact that that was leaked represents a criminal act in the view of the C.I.A., which has made referrals to the Department of Justice, and then they handed over to the F.B.I. So, essentially, they have squads of F.B.I. agents, and what they do is, according to the F.B.I. statement, they begin by getting the phone records that are easily available to them off of the government phones themselves, and then they say in this statement, which is a long sort of non-denial denial, that they take the next logical step, which is to get a reporter's phone records.
And they do this, they say, legally. What that means is they use a provision in the PATRIOT Act - which is designed to go after terrorists, but they're using it to go after reporters - what they call a national security letter. Essentially, it's a letter an F.B.I. agent writes, takes it to a phone company - or anywhere, really - but takes it to a phone company, and the phone company is then required under the provisions of the PATRIOT Act to turn over the information, and also a phone company is required not divulge to the customer, me or anybody else, that the records have been sought by the government.
Amy Goodman: And these national security letters, or NSLs, are not signed by a judge?
Brian Ross: They are not signed by a judge.
Amy Goodman: Why do you think they're going after you, Brian Ross?
Brian Ross: There are two stories that I know by talking to people who have been interviewed that the C.I.A. considers to be evidence of criminal behavior on the part of someone. Our story on the C.I.A. secret prisons, the Washington Post broke that story. They did not report the two countries. We came along and with our own sources reported the two countries where the prisons had been were Poland and Romania, and this set off quite a firestorm inside the C.I.A.
As well, we reported on an attack in Pakistan using a C.I.A. Predator with missiles attached to it, the one that killed 18 people there, looking for the number two man in al-Qaeda, al-Zawahri. We got word of that very early and reported it, and that infuriated the C.I.A., because it embarrassed them with the Pakistanis. They hadn't quite made up the cover story they used when the C.I.A. operates inside Pakistan. Generally, the Pakistanis will say it was a bomb they set off or something to cover the fact that the U.S. operates inside Pakistan sometimes. So those two incidents resulted in the C.I.A. being upset and asking for an investigation as to who leaked that information.
Amy Goodman: And, Brian Ross, didn't Human Rights Watch first reveal Poland and Romania as the countries in Eastern Europe?
Brian Ross: They did. They did. And they did first reveal it. What made a difference was that we were able to - or they said they "suspected" it. We were able to actually confirm it with current and former C.I.A. officials, and what upset the C.I.A., apparently, is it's one thing for Human Rights Watch to say something, because they feel they can easily deny that; it's harder for them to deny it when one of the major news organizations says it. So it carries a certain weight, apparently, in their view, that is hard for them to deny with their overseas partners, I guess.
Amy Goodman: We're talking with Brian Ross, the chief investigative correspondent for ABC News. According to Justice Department figures, the F.B.I. issued a total of 9,254 so-called national security letters last year, targeting 3,500 citizens and legal residents.
Brian Ross: Astounding figure. I guess we're one of them, or we are this year. This has become a very common, easily done. The officials I've talked to say that there was a time when this was difficult to do, even for anything - particularly involving journalists, that there were all sorts of safeguards and essentially hoops to jump through. Those have been removed. And this really is the case. It began with the whole Scooter Libby case, when they went after reporters there to get information as to who talked to Scooter Libby, and now is commonly used. Whenever the C.I.A. refers a case for a criminal investigation, that is almost a quick second step they take.
Amy Goodman: Brian Ross, on the issue of the prisons, do you know if these prisons are still operating in Romania and Poland? I remember in one of her overseas trips recently, Condoleezza Rice went to Romania.
Brian Ross: We reported in December that they had rushed to close them before she landed in Europe, so that she could say there are no such prisons in Europe, that they had operated up to a week before, when this word got out. And that was one of the reasons they were so eager for us not to report it was that it embarrassed her further. We reported that they closed down those two prisons and moved the 12 to 14 top al-Qaeda figures being held there to a third country in North Africa. And we did not report the name of that country.
Amy Goodman: Now, USA Today in their story on AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon giving over the phone numbers of tens of millions of Americans, the calls that they're making, they now have reported that BellSouth is saying that they didn't do this. And you've written a piece on The Blotter at ABC's website, talking about why Qwest said no to N.S.A. Can you talk further about these companies and what they're doing?
Brian Ross: Well, BellSouth is essentially saying they did not do it on a large-scale basis, which - what we were told following USA Today's ground breaking story was that, in fact, they did. It's hard to know, because the companies initially said they couldn't talk about national security matters. I don't know how it is they feel that they have some sort of classified information about national security. But it well might be that there's some sort of sweeping national security letter that is involved here. The government said the companies did this voluntarily, so they felt that it was legal to do it.
There are two major events tomorrow, Amy, on this issue. One, Russ Tice, the former N.S.A. intelligence analyst, is going to Capitol Hill to meet with the Senate staff to reveal what he says are illegal and unlawful acts by the N.S.A., and in particular General Michael Hayden. As well, there's a hearing tomorrow in San Francisco over the lawsuit brought against AT&T. A former AT&T technical figure there has provided information that they set up secret rooms at AT&T buildings in San Francisco and San Diego, San Jose, I think L.A. and Seattle, where they essentially split off the fiber-optic cable, had a way to divert it. This would be so - and the N.S.A. set up secret rooms and hired people from the phone companies there to essentially run the information, which is essentially everybody's email and messages and everything, through this machine, which is able to detect the text and, as I understand it, they are able to set up sort of key words and sort of loop through the emails of everyone to see if anyone else is talking about al-Qaeda or bombings or whatever it is they consider to be the key words.
Amy Goodman: I encourage people to go to our website at democracynow.org for our hour with Russell Tice, who will be speaking before Congress. But I wanted to ask you, Brian Ross, about what this means for government whistleblowers and what you found in talking to them now.
Brian Ross: Well, this is very chilling now. We're working on a major story, Amy, that's coming out Friday, having to do with failures at the Federal Air Marshals Service, and a number of Federal Air Marshals, in violation of their rules, have been providing us information. And they are, to say the least, extremely concerned with the news that the government can so easily obtain my phone records and wondering what this will mean, because the Air Marshals Service has retaliated against them. So, they're concerned, and I know that means that there will be shorter people willing to talk, at least on the phone. It may be a case where a lot more shoe leather will be required to do reporting. And if so, that's what we'll have to do.
Any Goodman: What kind of guarantees do they ask for now from you? What kind of guarantees can you give them?
Brian Ross: The only guarantee I can give is that I will not reveal their name or their position. I certainly would not. I think everyone has to know, and there's nothing I can do about it - if my phone records have been taken by the government, obtained somehow, I don't know about it. But I do know that I've been told that they are looking at our records, so I assume they have.
Amy Goodman: Brian Ross, is this changing the way you work?
Brian Ross: Absolutely. I mean, this makes it very, very difficult. And, you know, you sort of have to start thinking, I guess, like some sort of Mafia capo. You make your phone calls with bags of quarters at pay phones, if you can find them anymore. It's chilling, to say the least, and I guess I've concluded that this requires, you know, on my part, your part, all of us who are reporters and care about the truth, really reporting on this subject, and I don't think it's self-centered. I think it's important that everyone know this is what's happening and, you know, let Americans decide if that's how they want the government to operate.
Amy Goodman: Aren't there whistleblower shield laws?
Brian Ross: Whistleblower shield - there are shield laws that protect whistleblowers who go to Congress from retaliation. And there still is the First Amendment, I believe, in this country, but it's under attack clearly. There are shield laws for them. But in the case of, say, the Federal Air Marshals or people at the C.I.A., just contact with a reporter probably is enough to put them in a fair amount of trouble. Just contacts.
Amy Goodman: Is ABC considering suing either the U.S. government or the corporations that are handing over your information?
Brian Ross: I think we certainly would if we could figure out who did it and how. Since we haven't been notified, you know, we won't know this for at least a year if they have our records. It puts us in a difficult situation. We have this insider tip, essentially, that someone has our records. We're trying to figure out as quickly as we can who it is and how we got them and what records they have and how we can prevent it. But quite frankly, the PATRIOT Act, I don't think, was designed to go after journalists, but it certainly is being used that way.
Amy Goodman: What what phone company do you use?
Brian Ross: Well, there are a variety of them. AT&T is one of them. Verizon is another. And, you know, they both seem to be prepared to cooperate, and especially if they're served with what appear to be legal documents. I guess I don't see how they don't cooperate.
Amy Goodman: Have you asked them directly if they have handed over your documents?
Brian Ross: Their response is "We cannot comment on any national security matter." They will not say.
Amy Goodman: Well, I want to thank you very much, Brian Ross, for joining us. Brian Ross is chief investigative correspondent for ABC News. And we will certainly continue to follow this story.
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The War on Sex
The War on Sex
By Cristina Page
TomPaine.com
Wednesday 17 May 2006
The architects of the South Dakota ban on abortion have a bold plan for our country. Certainly, they have already given a jolt to the majority of Americans, or at least the 66 percent who want Roe v. Wade to remain law of the land. But there's a great deal more the American public should know about these legislative campaigners. Especially since there's a lot more of their agenda they hope to realize.
They have a plan for you and if you are anything like the 85 percent of American couples who have sex once a week, you're not going to like it. The pro-life groups who are the most committed to ending legal abortion - and gotten the furthest in their goals - are also leading campaigns against the only proven ways to prevent abortion: contraception. Shocking as it may be, there is not one pro-life organization in the United States that supports the use of contraception. Instead the pro-life movement is the constant opponent of every single effort to provide Americans with the ability to prevent unwanted pregnancies. If the South Dakota ban is upheld and Roe v. Wade is toppled, it's safe to say the pro-life movement is not going to send out a brigade to furnish Americans with the most effective contraceptives. In fact pro-life groups' most recent activities suggest the exact opposite.
Take Leslee Unruh, the South Dakota native considered the primary force behind the near-total ban on abortion in her state. Unruh is, in many ways, the perfect representative of the modern pro-life movement. She is lauded in pro-life circles as the president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a group that promotes abstinence-until-marriage. Under Unruh's leadership, the Abstinence Clearinghouse has spearheaded campaigns to stop people from using the condom. On the organization's website, supporters of family planning are derided as the "safe sex cartel" and "condom-pushers." Her medical advisory board consists of physicians who pledge not to prescribe contraception to sexually active teens. The group's new project, "Abstinence Africa," discourages condom use in African countries like Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho where, on average, one in three adults is infected with HIV.
Unruh and her pro-life colleagues have moved beyond attacking the condom, too. For example, when pharmacists refuse to fill birth control prescriptions, the pro-life movement has responded with a favorite tactic: it has moved aggressively to welcome their deeds as acts of "conscience." The movement has helped pass laws allowing pharmacists to refuse on moral or religious grounds to fill birth control prescriptions in South Dakota - no surprise there - as well as Arkansas and Mississippi. Additionally another 19 states have moved to protect anyone who decides to stand in the way of a woman getting birth control; this conceivably includes cashiers who could choose to refuse to ring up your prescription.
Over the past decade, pro-choice groups have tried to get contraception covered by health insurers as a sensible way to stop unintended pregnancies. Nearly every time, these initiatives have provoked intense battles in state legislatures. Right to Life chapters in Ohio, Delaware, Illinois, Oregon, Wisconsin, Nevada and Missouri all fought against state legislation to get birth control covered. Year after year the Pro-Life Caucus of Congress defeats federal legislation to require health insurers to pay for birth control.
President Bush has complied with almost all the requests of his pro-life, anti-contraception base. He's attempted to revoke contraception benefits to federal employees, slashed US foreign aid programs that distribute birth control and appointed anti-contraception ideologues to the expert panels charged with approving new contraception methods. He's also appointed an abstinence-only-until-marriage crusader to direct the Title X program which delivers contraception to the nation's poor - the majority of Title X clients are not married. It should come as no surprise that Title X's funding has remained flat, while its clientele has swelled. What's also not surprising is that the abortion rate among the most indigent in our country has been increasing.
Today, pro-life groups in the United States are reclassifying the most common contraception methods, including the birth control pill, the patch, the IUD, and the Depo-Provera shot, as "abortifacients" by claiming, with no scientific backing, that they cause abortions.
The American Life League explained, "We have been working to prove that prescription contraceptives have nothing to do with woman's health and well-being but are recreational drugs that prevent fertilization and abort children."
Some groups will use legal means to put pressure on candidates to adopt their anti-contraception view. For example, Northern Kentucky Right to Life will only endorse candidates who believe the use of the standard birth control pill constitutes abortion.
While the more extreme side of the pro-life movement hasn't yet advocated violence against those that distribute birth control, they do agree with the concept of "contraception=abortion." Most chillingly, Army of God, a pro-life organization that honors those who murder abortion providers as "heroes," also classifies birth control as an abortion method. On the "Birth Control is Evil" section of their website, they explain, quite threateningly, "Birth control is evil and a sin. Birth control is anti-baby and anti-child ... Why would you stop your own child from being conceived or born? What kind of human being are you?"
Cloaked in the heated rhetoric of the abortion debate, an entirely new pro-life agenda is taking shape. Most Americans don't know about this yet. But the Right to Life movement, which is now rewriting the country's laws on abortion - of which South Dakota is clearly just a first target - has a broader and, for most of us, a disturbing plan. If this powerful movement succeeds, Americans will require safe abortion services more than ever.
Cristina Page is vice president of the Institute for Reproductive Health Access at NARAL Pro-Choice New York and author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex (Basic Books).
By Cristina Page
TomPaine.com
Wednesday 17 May 2006
The architects of the South Dakota ban on abortion have a bold plan for our country. Certainly, they have already given a jolt to the majority of Americans, or at least the 66 percent who want Roe v. Wade to remain law of the land. But there's a great deal more the American public should know about these legislative campaigners. Especially since there's a lot more of their agenda they hope to realize.
They have a plan for you and if you are anything like the 85 percent of American couples who have sex once a week, you're not going to like it. The pro-life groups who are the most committed to ending legal abortion - and gotten the furthest in their goals - are also leading campaigns against the only proven ways to prevent abortion: contraception. Shocking as it may be, there is not one pro-life organization in the United States that supports the use of contraception. Instead the pro-life movement is the constant opponent of every single effort to provide Americans with the ability to prevent unwanted pregnancies. If the South Dakota ban is upheld and Roe v. Wade is toppled, it's safe to say the pro-life movement is not going to send out a brigade to furnish Americans with the most effective contraceptives. In fact pro-life groups' most recent activities suggest the exact opposite.
Take Leslee Unruh, the South Dakota native considered the primary force behind the near-total ban on abortion in her state. Unruh is, in many ways, the perfect representative of the modern pro-life movement. She is lauded in pro-life circles as the president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a group that promotes abstinence-until-marriage. Under Unruh's leadership, the Abstinence Clearinghouse has spearheaded campaigns to stop people from using the condom. On the organization's website, supporters of family planning are derided as the "safe sex cartel" and "condom-pushers." Her medical advisory board consists of physicians who pledge not to prescribe contraception to sexually active teens. The group's new project, "Abstinence Africa," discourages condom use in African countries like Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho where, on average, one in three adults is infected with HIV.
Unruh and her pro-life colleagues have moved beyond attacking the condom, too. For example, when pharmacists refuse to fill birth control prescriptions, the pro-life movement has responded with a favorite tactic: it has moved aggressively to welcome their deeds as acts of "conscience." The movement has helped pass laws allowing pharmacists to refuse on moral or religious grounds to fill birth control prescriptions in South Dakota - no surprise there - as well as Arkansas and Mississippi. Additionally another 19 states have moved to protect anyone who decides to stand in the way of a woman getting birth control; this conceivably includes cashiers who could choose to refuse to ring up your prescription.
Over the past decade, pro-choice groups have tried to get contraception covered by health insurers as a sensible way to stop unintended pregnancies. Nearly every time, these initiatives have provoked intense battles in state legislatures. Right to Life chapters in Ohio, Delaware, Illinois, Oregon, Wisconsin, Nevada and Missouri all fought against state legislation to get birth control covered. Year after year the Pro-Life Caucus of Congress defeats federal legislation to require health insurers to pay for birth control.
President Bush has complied with almost all the requests of his pro-life, anti-contraception base. He's attempted to revoke contraception benefits to federal employees, slashed US foreign aid programs that distribute birth control and appointed anti-contraception ideologues to the expert panels charged with approving new contraception methods. He's also appointed an abstinence-only-until-marriage crusader to direct the Title X program which delivers contraception to the nation's poor - the majority of Title X clients are not married. It should come as no surprise that Title X's funding has remained flat, while its clientele has swelled. What's also not surprising is that the abortion rate among the most indigent in our country has been increasing.
Today, pro-life groups in the United States are reclassifying the most common contraception methods, including the birth control pill, the patch, the IUD, and the Depo-Provera shot, as "abortifacients" by claiming, with no scientific backing, that they cause abortions.
The American Life League explained, "We have been working to prove that prescription contraceptives have nothing to do with woman's health and well-being but are recreational drugs that prevent fertilization and abort children."
Some groups will use legal means to put pressure on candidates to adopt their anti-contraception view. For example, Northern Kentucky Right to Life will only endorse candidates who believe the use of the standard birth control pill constitutes abortion.
While the more extreme side of the pro-life movement hasn't yet advocated violence against those that distribute birth control, they do agree with the concept of "contraception=abortion." Most chillingly, Army of God, a pro-life organization that honors those who murder abortion providers as "heroes," also classifies birth control as an abortion method. On the "Birth Control is Evil" section of their website, they explain, quite threateningly, "Birth control is evil and a sin. Birth control is anti-baby and anti-child ... Why would you stop your own child from being conceived or born? What kind of human being are you?"
Cloaked in the heated rhetoric of the abortion debate, an entirely new pro-life agenda is taking shape. Most Americans don't know about this yet. But the Right to Life movement, which is now rewriting the country's laws on abortion - of which South Dakota is clearly just a first target - has a broader and, for most of us, a disturbing plan. If this powerful movement succeeds, Americans will require safe abortion services more than ever.
Cristina Page is vice president of the Institute for Reproductive Health Access at NARAL Pro-Choice New York and author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex (Basic Books).
Guffaws for Bush's Immigration Speech
Guffaws for Bush's Immigration Speech
By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive
Tuesday 16 May 2006
It's painful to watch Bush give a speech, and his immigration address was no exception.
Hell, it was hard not to break out into guffaws when he said, "We have enough Guard forces to win the war on terror, to respond to natural disasters, and to help secure our borders."
Anyone who has been watching what's going on in Iraq, or anyone who saw Katrina, knows that the Guard is spread woefully thin right now, even before Bush tries stretch them from San Diego to Brownsville.
Oh, but he's "not going to militarize the southern border," he promised. Right.
In this age of NSA data mining and privacy invading, none of us should be keen on the idea of "high-tech fences in urban corridors," or, for that matter, "unmanned aerial vehicles."
What's next? A predator missile?
The speech was obnoxious from the start, when Bush drew a parallel between the hundreds of thousands of people marching in city after city for immigrant rights, on the side, and the Minuteman vigilantes on the other.
Both are displaying "intense emotions," he said, condescendingly.
True to his base, Bush conjured up images of immigrants committing crimes and draining our Treasury, and then he went out of his way not to insult his buddies in the business community, who are flouting the law as much as anybody.
In his speech, the employers were the victims of sneaky immigrants, not the recruiters and the exploiters of undocumented workers.
Here's Bush: "Illegal immigrants live in the shadows of our society. Many use forged documents to get jobs, and that makes it difficult for employers to verify that the workers they hire are legal."
This is a charge he made not once but twice. Fifteen paragraphs after the first reference, he said, "Businesses often cannot verify the legal status of their employees because of the widespread problem of document fraud."
The speech was also internally inconsistent. Bush said, "When people know that they'll be caught and sent home if they enter our country illegally, they will be less likely to try to sneak in." A mere 12 words later, he said, "The reality is that there are many people on the other side of our border who will do anything to come to America to work and build a better life. They walk across miles of desert in the summer heat, or hide in the back of 18-wheelers to reach our country."
If they are that desperate to get here, the threat of being returned home won't amount to much.
But Bush did not address why people are so desperate to get here, and that's, in large part, because of NAFTA, which has thrown millions of Mexican peasants off the land and led to an increase in poverty. Bush couldn't own up to that because he worships at the altar of free trade.
Bush's speech was a desperate ploy to change the subject.
But the subject remains his ineptitude.
The subject remains the Iraq War.
The subject remains his corporate fealty.
And the subject remains his criminality.
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By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive
Tuesday 16 May 2006
It's painful to watch Bush give a speech, and his immigration address was no exception.
Hell, it was hard not to break out into guffaws when he said, "We have enough Guard forces to win the war on terror, to respond to natural disasters, and to help secure our borders."
Anyone who has been watching what's going on in Iraq, or anyone who saw Katrina, knows that the Guard is spread woefully thin right now, even before Bush tries stretch them from San Diego to Brownsville.
Oh, but he's "not going to militarize the southern border," he promised. Right.
In this age of NSA data mining and privacy invading, none of us should be keen on the idea of "high-tech fences in urban corridors," or, for that matter, "unmanned aerial vehicles."
What's next? A predator missile?
The speech was obnoxious from the start, when Bush drew a parallel between the hundreds of thousands of people marching in city after city for immigrant rights, on the side, and the Minuteman vigilantes on the other.
Both are displaying "intense emotions," he said, condescendingly.
True to his base, Bush conjured up images of immigrants committing crimes and draining our Treasury, and then he went out of his way not to insult his buddies in the business community, who are flouting the law as much as anybody.
In his speech, the employers were the victims of sneaky immigrants, not the recruiters and the exploiters of undocumented workers.
Here's Bush: "Illegal immigrants live in the shadows of our society. Many use forged documents to get jobs, and that makes it difficult for employers to verify that the workers they hire are legal."
This is a charge he made not once but twice. Fifteen paragraphs after the first reference, he said, "Businesses often cannot verify the legal status of their employees because of the widespread problem of document fraud."
The speech was also internally inconsistent. Bush said, "When people know that they'll be caught and sent home if they enter our country illegally, they will be less likely to try to sneak in." A mere 12 words later, he said, "The reality is that there are many people on the other side of our border who will do anything to come to America to work and build a better life. They walk across miles of desert in the summer heat, or hide in the back of 18-wheelers to reach our country."
If they are that desperate to get here, the threat of being returned home won't amount to much.
But Bush did not address why people are so desperate to get here, and that's, in large part, because of NAFTA, which has thrown millions of Mexican peasants off the land and led to an increase in poverty. Bush couldn't own up to that because he worships at the altar of free trade.
Bush's speech was a desperate ploy to change the subject.
But the subject remains his ineptitude.
The subject remains the Iraq War.
The subject remains his corporate fealty.
And the subject remains his criminality.
-------
Politics, or Insanity?--Molly Ivins
Politics, or Insanity?
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
Tuesday 16 May 2006
Plan to militarize Mexican border is sheer madness or blatant pandering.
Austin, Texas - I hate to raise such an ugly possibility, but have you considered lunacy as an explanation? Craziness would make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you announce you are going to militarize the Mexican border, but you assure the president of Mexico you are not militarizing the border. You announce you are sending the National Guard, but then you assure everyone it's not very many soldiers and just for a little while.
Militarizing the border is a totally terrible idea. Do we have a State Department? Are they sentient? How much do you want to infuriate Mexico when it's sitting on quite a bit of oil? Bush knows what the most likely outcome of this move will be. He was governor during the political firestorm that ensued when a Marine taking part in anti-drug patrols on the border shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an innocent goat-herder from Redford, Texas. That's the definition of crazy - repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
I suppose politics could explain it, too. It's quite possible that lunacy and politics are closely related. It's still damned hard cheese for the Guard, though. The Guard is heavily deployed in Iraq, currently 20 percent of those serving, down from 40 percent last year. Some soldiers are sent back for multiple tours. Lt. Gen. James Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, said the Reserve is rapidly degenerating into "a broken force" and is "in grave danger of being unable to meet other operational requirements." Happy hurricane season to you, too. The Guard is also short on equipment and falling short on recruiting goals.
But right-wingers are very unhappy with Bush right now, and this is a strong, red-meat gesture that will make them happy, even if it does nothing to shut down the border. You want to shut down illegal immigration? You want to use the military as police? Make it illegal to hire undocumented workers and put the National Guard into enforcing that. Then rewrite NAFTA and invest in Mexico.
Meanwhile, further proof that the entire party is cuckoo comes to us with the passage of another $70 billion tax cut for the rich. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the average middle-income household will get a $20 tax cut, while those making more than $1 million a year will get nearly $42,000.
The Washington Post editorialized, "Budgetary dishonesty, distributional unfairness, fiscal irresponsibility - by now the words are so familiar, it can be hard to appreciate how damaging this fiscal course will be."
Both President Bush and Veep Cheney are still going around claiming if you cut taxes, your tax revenues increase. No, they don't. Now we're just in whackoville. It's not true. Their own economists tell them it's not true, but they go about claiming it is with the same desperate tenacity they clung to false tales of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How pathetic.
Speaking of lunacy, the saddest report from Iraq is that American soldiers showing signs of psychological distress and depression are being kept on active duty, increasing the risk of suicide. The Hartford Courant reports that even soldiers who have already been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome are kept on duty. This has led to an increase in the suicide rate - 22 soldiers in 2005. And as I have reported before, the military is unprepared to deal with the flood of head cases coming back from Iraq. How many ways can we mistreat our own soldiers, while the right makes this elaborate show of devotion to "the troops"?
The consistent pattern that runs through all these problems is the failure to distinguish fantasy from reality. Mexican immigrants keep crossing the border because they can get jobs here - and most of those jobs are provided by companies whose CEOs support George W. Bush. That's where he can have an impact on the problem, should he choose to do so.
The $70 billion tax cut is part of a continuing right-wing fantasy going back to the Laffer Curve. Of course, clinging to demonstrably false economic precepts is understandable when you benefit from them, but at some point reality does intervene.
As for the Iraq fantasy and those who pushed it on a reluctant country through lies, disinformation and bending intelligence - isn't there a law against that?
-------
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
Tuesday 16 May 2006
Plan to militarize Mexican border is sheer madness or blatant pandering.
Austin, Texas - I hate to raise such an ugly possibility, but have you considered lunacy as an explanation? Craziness would make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you announce you are going to militarize the Mexican border, but you assure the president of Mexico you are not militarizing the border. You announce you are sending the National Guard, but then you assure everyone it's not very many soldiers and just for a little while.
Militarizing the border is a totally terrible idea. Do we have a State Department? Are they sentient? How much do you want to infuriate Mexico when it's sitting on quite a bit of oil? Bush knows what the most likely outcome of this move will be. He was governor during the political firestorm that ensued when a Marine taking part in anti-drug patrols on the border shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an innocent goat-herder from Redford, Texas. That's the definition of crazy - repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
I suppose politics could explain it, too. It's quite possible that lunacy and politics are closely related. It's still damned hard cheese for the Guard, though. The Guard is heavily deployed in Iraq, currently 20 percent of those serving, down from 40 percent last year. Some soldiers are sent back for multiple tours. Lt. Gen. James Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, said the Reserve is rapidly degenerating into "a broken force" and is "in grave danger of being unable to meet other operational requirements." Happy hurricane season to you, too. The Guard is also short on equipment and falling short on recruiting goals.
But right-wingers are very unhappy with Bush right now, and this is a strong, red-meat gesture that will make them happy, even if it does nothing to shut down the border. You want to shut down illegal immigration? You want to use the military as police? Make it illegal to hire undocumented workers and put the National Guard into enforcing that. Then rewrite NAFTA and invest in Mexico.
Meanwhile, further proof that the entire party is cuckoo comes to us with the passage of another $70 billion tax cut for the rich. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the average middle-income household will get a $20 tax cut, while those making more than $1 million a year will get nearly $42,000.
The Washington Post editorialized, "Budgetary dishonesty, distributional unfairness, fiscal irresponsibility - by now the words are so familiar, it can be hard to appreciate how damaging this fiscal course will be."
Both President Bush and Veep Cheney are still going around claiming if you cut taxes, your tax revenues increase. No, they don't. Now we're just in whackoville. It's not true. Their own economists tell them it's not true, but they go about claiming it is with the same desperate tenacity they clung to false tales of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How pathetic.
Speaking of lunacy, the saddest report from Iraq is that American soldiers showing signs of psychological distress and depression are being kept on active duty, increasing the risk of suicide. The Hartford Courant reports that even soldiers who have already been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome are kept on duty. This has led to an increase in the suicide rate - 22 soldiers in 2005. And as I have reported before, the military is unprepared to deal with the flood of head cases coming back from Iraq. How many ways can we mistreat our own soldiers, while the right makes this elaborate show of devotion to "the troops"?
The consistent pattern that runs through all these problems is the failure to distinguish fantasy from reality. Mexican immigrants keep crossing the border because they can get jobs here - and most of those jobs are provided by companies whose CEOs support George W. Bush. That's where he can have an impact on the problem, should he choose to do so.
The $70 billion tax cut is part of a continuing right-wing fantasy going back to the Laffer Curve. Of course, clinging to demonstrably false economic precepts is understandable when you benefit from them, but at some point reality does intervene.
As for the Iraq fantasy and those who pushed it on a reluctant country through lies, disinformation and bending intelligence - isn't there a law against that?
-------
America In Baghdad
America In Baghdad
David Phinney
May 15, 2006
David Phinney is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and on ABC and PBS. He can be contacted at: phinneydavid@yahoo.com.
Secret contract deals, fraud, ineptitude and shoddy work costing billions of dollars have been a centerpiece of our troubles in Iraq since the eve of the 2003 invasion.
Suspicions of favoritism began with Halliburton and its small $2 million task order to extinguish possible oil well fires that Saddam Hussein might ignite to dispirit coalition forces. The contract quickly steamrolled into a no-bid multi-billion deal to repair Iraq’s oil infrastructure once the March 2003 invasion was complete.
As the war dragged on, we found that Halliburton was not alone. Dozens of politically-connected U.S. corporations soon received what appeared to be sweetheart deals resulting in poor performance, little oversight and inflated salaries. The Coalition Provisional Authority and Washington officials created a “free-fraud zone,” according to Frank Willis, a former CPA advisor.
More than three years later, it’s clear that contracts large and small were regularly agreed to with little written record, proper competition or follow-through to ensure that work was performed.
This is not news. The contracting process, paid for with billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money and seized Iraqi assets controlled by the CPA, has been repeatedly found to be so lacking in accountability that it’s difficult to determine how the money was spent. Transparency International predicts the Iraq debacle may be found as “the biggest corruption scandal in history."
What is news is that the Bush administration continues to follow the same dysfunctional contracting methods and lack of transparency with one of its most recent and visible projects in Baghdad—the building of the new U.S. embassy.
When the U.S. State Department awarded the $592-million embassy deal last summer, officials reasoned they needed to keep the contract secret because of their concerns for the safety of work crews. Others believe it has more to do with keeping the lid on an overpriced, behind-the-scenes political deal with a building contractor that has been accused repeatedly of coercing low-paid laborers from poor Asian countries to work in Iraq against their better judgment.
Keep the contract secret? It’s a joke.
After all, the project is rising up like an 800-pound gorilla in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The Green Zone is the safe zone—relatively speaking—and anything that takes place there is for all to see. Construction cranes tower over the 104-acre construction site as 700 non-Iraqi laborers toil below to build a fortress-like structure with all the makings of a high-tech Fort Apache on steroids. How could anyone miss it?
**so who's it really being kept a secret from? Certainly not the Iraqis, who can see it clearly. It's being kept from those that will pay for it one way or another, in blood or money. The domestic audience....EG:) **
Located along the Tigris River, the sprawling embassy site is the size of Rome’s Vatican City and two-thirds of Washington’s national mall. When completed in June 2007, the facility will boast of its own Marine base, a helicopter pad, 15-foot thick walls, six apartment buildings and 1,000 residents. The price tag may well reach $1 billion. When all is said and done, it will be the largest embassy ever built to wave the U.S. flag.
But the company now building what may be the most lasting monument to the U.S. occupation isn’t American. It isn’t even Iraqi. It is a well-connected Kuwaiti firm partially owned by Muhammad I. H. Marafie, a member of one of Kuwait’s most powerful mercantile families.
The war in Iraq has been very, very good to Marafie’s company. On the eve of the 2003 invasion, the fledgling firm was valued at somewhere around $35 million. Now, thanks to war contracting, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting appears to be nudging the $2 billion mark.
Along the way, First Kuwaiti whipped up a bit of controversy as a leading supplier of low-paid laborers recruited from poor Asian countries to build and operate U.S. military camps in Iraq—frequently as a subcontractor to Halliburton’s multibillion support services agreement.
First Kuwaiti, as well as other Middle Eastern companies under U.S. contracts in Iraq, has been accused repeatedly of pressuring its workers to take jobs in war-torn Iraq against their wishes . Once there, those workers are said to have often endured pay of just dollars a day, lousy food, bad medical care, crammed housing and 12-hour work days, seven days a week. Some who have witnessed such brutal conditions liken it to modern-day slavery.
First Kuwaiti’s general manager, Wadih al-Absi, calls such accusations lies. But the accusations come from workers in Nepal, the Philippines, former Halliburton supervisors and even those well acquainted with the company’s upper management. None of these people know each other, but they have the same complaints of poor treatment and labor trafficking.
The list of companies that competed for the embassy contract includes the most accomplished engineering companies in the United States and boast of established track records for building secure embassies and large-scale construction projects. Some are skeptical about the State Department’s hard work to keep the project a secret for the better part of a year.
The hardest thing for them to swallow about the contract is that one award-winning American company, Framaco, offered to do the job for as much as $70 million less than First Kuwaiti.
The contract for the U.S. embassy “was political,” said one competitor.
Why political? Because Kuwait was the only country bordering Iraq that was willing to allow the staging of land troops for the 2003 invasion, whisper other disgruntled contractors.
The State Department intervened before on behalf of other Kuwaiti firms. After the invasion, the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, Richard Jones, pressured Halliburton to buy overpriced fuel from the unknown Kuwaiti firm Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company, according to official documents.
That fuel, intended for domestic use in Iraq, resulted in ongoing disputes about overcharges of possibly several hundred million dollars. Jones then returned to Washington to serve as the senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq at the State Department. He was in that position when First Kuwaiti was awarded the embassy contract.
As for the allegations against First Kuwaiti of labor trafficking and harsh treatment of its laborers, the State Department prefers to not offer any definitive statements on the question: Is this the kind of company American taxpayers want to pay to build their embassy in Iraq, the country where the U.S. has already spent $250 billion and counting to show the Iraqi people how to run a country right?
“Our people are investigating the issues,” said State Department spokesman Justin Higgins after U.S. Ambassador John Miller, head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking of Persons, left for the Middle East in late January to investigate allegations of labor trafficking by unnamed companies.
The U.S. Army did begin investigating the allegations last summer following similar inquires and in April, the Pentagon issued a new order to crack down on labor trafficking by contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan. The directive also notes that inspections of military contractors and subcontractors in Iraq has revealed deceptive hiring practices, excessive recruiting fees that indebt workers for months if not years, substandard living conditions that include crammed sleeping quarters and poor food and the circumventing of Iraqi immigration procedures. No companies were named for wrongdoing or exonerated.
So, in the end, it appears that the State Department secrets are perhaps more for the security of those who inked the contract.
David Phinney
May 15, 2006
David Phinney is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and on ABC and PBS. He can be contacted at: phinneydavid@yahoo.com.
Secret contract deals, fraud, ineptitude and shoddy work costing billions of dollars have been a centerpiece of our troubles in Iraq since the eve of the 2003 invasion.
Suspicions of favoritism began with Halliburton and its small $2 million task order to extinguish possible oil well fires that Saddam Hussein might ignite to dispirit coalition forces. The contract quickly steamrolled into a no-bid multi-billion deal to repair Iraq’s oil infrastructure once the March 2003 invasion was complete.
As the war dragged on, we found that Halliburton was not alone. Dozens of politically-connected U.S. corporations soon received what appeared to be sweetheart deals resulting in poor performance, little oversight and inflated salaries. The Coalition Provisional Authority and Washington officials created a “free-fraud zone,” according to Frank Willis, a former CPA advisor.
More than three years later, it’s clear that contracts large and small were regularly agreed to with little written record, proper competition or follow-through to ensure that work was performed.
This is not news. The contracting process, paid for with billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money and seized Iraqi assets controlled by the CPA, has been repeatedly found to be so lacking in accountability that it’s difficult to determine how the money was spent. Transparency International predicts the Iraq debacle may be found as “the biggest corruption scandal in history."
What is news is that the Bush administration continues to follow the same dysfunctional contracting methods and lack of transparency with one of its most recent and visible projects in Baghdad—the building of the new U.S. embassy.
When the U.S. State Department awarded the $592-million embassy deal last summer, officials reasoned they needed to keep the contract secret because of their concerns for the safety of work crews. Others believe it has more to do with keeping the lid on an overpriced, behind-the-scenes political deal with a building contractor that has been accused repeatedly of coercing low-paid laborers from poor Asian countries to work in Iraq against their better judgment.
Keep the contract secret? It’s a joke.
After all, the project is rising up like an 800-pound gorilla in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The Green Zone is the safe zone—relatively speaking—and anything that takes place there is for all to see. Construction cranes tower over the 104-acre construction site as 700 non-Iraqi laborers toil below to build a fortress-like structure with all the makings of a high-tech Fort Apache on steroids. How could anyone miss it?
**so who's it really being kept a secret from? Certainly not the Iraqis, who can see it clearly. It's being kept from those that will pay for it one way or another, in blood or money. The domestic audience....EG:) **
Located along the Tigris River, the sprawling embassy site is the size of Rome’s Vatican City and two-thirds of Washington’s national mall. When completed in June 2007, the facility will boast of its own Marine base, a helicopter pad, 15-foot thick walls, six apartment buildings and 1,000 residents. The price tag may well reach $1 billion. When all is said and done, it will be the largest embassy ever built to wave the U.S. flag.
But the company now building what may be the most lasting monument to the U.S. occupation isn’t American. It isn’t even Iraqi. It is a well-connected Kuwaiti firm partially owned by Muhammad I. H. Marafie, a member of one of Kuwait’s most powerful mercantile families.
The war in Iraq has been very, very good to Marafie’s company. On the eve of the 2003 invasion, the fledgling firm was valued at somewhere around $35 million. Now, thanks to war contracting, First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting appears to be nudging the $2 billion mark.
Along the way, First Kuwaiti whipped up a bit of controversy as a leading supplier of low-paid laborers recruited from poor Asian countries to build and operate U.S. military camps in Iraq—frequently as a subcontractor to Halliburton’s multibillion support services agreement.
First Kuwaiti, as well as other Middle Eastern companies under U.S. contracts in Iraq, has been accused repeatedly of pressuring its workers to take jobs in war-torn Iraq against their wishes . Once there, those workers are said to have often endured pay of just dollars a day, lousy food, bad medical care, crammed housing and 12-hour work days, seven days a week. Some who have witnessed such brutal conditions liken it to modern-day slavery.
First Kuwaiti’s general manager, Wadih al-Absi, calls such accusations lies. But the accusations come from workers in Nepal, the Philippines, former Halliburton supervisors and even those well acquainted with the company’s upper management. None of these people know each other, but they have the same complaints of poor treatment and labor trafficking.
The list of companies that competed for the embassy contract includes the most accomplished engineering companies in the United States and boast of established track records for building secure embassies and large-scale construction projects. Some are skeptical about the State Department’s hard work to keep the project a secret for the better part of a year.
The hardest thing for them to swallow about the contract is that one award-winning American company, Framaco, offered to do the job for as much as $70 million less than First Kuwaiti.
The contract for the U.S. embassy “was political,” said one competitor.
Why political? Because Kuwait was the only country bordering Iraq that was willing to allow the staging of land troops for the 2003 invasion, whisper other disgruntled contractors.
The State Department intervened before on behalf of other Kuwaiti firms. After the invasion, the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, Richard Jones, pressured Halliburton to buy overpriced fuel from the unknown Kuwaiti firm Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company, according to official documents.
That fuel, intended for domestic use in Iraq, resulted in ongoing disputes about overcharges of possibly several hundred million dollars. Jones then returned to Washington to serve as the senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq at the State Department. He was in that position when First Kuwaiti was awarded the embassy contract.
As for the allegations against First Kuwaiti of labor trafficking and harsh treatment of its laborers, the State Department prefers to not offer any definitive statements on the question: Is this the kind of company American taxpayers want to pay to build their embassy in Iraq, the country where the U.S. has already spent $250 billion and counting to show the Iraqi people how to run a country right?
“Our people are investigating the issues,” said State Department spokesman Justin Higgins after U.S. Ambassador John Miller, head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking of Persons, left for the Middle East in late January to investigate allegations of labor trafficking by unnamed companies.
The U.S. Army did begin investigating the allegations last summer following similar inquires and in April, the Pentagon issued a new order to crack down on labor trafficking by contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan. The directive also notes that inspections of military contractors and subcontractors in Iraq has revealed deceptive hiring practices, excessive recruiting fees that indebt workers for months if not years, substandard living conditions that include crammed sleeping quarters and poor food and the circumventing of Iraqi immigration procedures. No companies were named for wrongdoing or exonerated.
So, in the end, it appears that the State Department secrets are perhaps more for the security of those who inked the contract.
Using boot camps, prisons to control black children
Using boot camps, prisons to control black children
By Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist based in Washington: Tribune Media Services
Published May 16, 2006
So now we know how Martin Lee Anderson died.
We can forget the original autopsy report filed by Charles Siebert, a doctor so inept he wasn't technically a doctor (he had allowed his license to lapse) when he issued the report. A doctor so inept he once described a person he autopsied as having "unremarkable" testes. The person was a woman.
Siebert claimed that after being hit, manhandled and choked by guards Jan. 5 at a so-called boot camp in Panama City, Fla., the 14-year-old Anderson died of sickle cell trait, a genetic blood disorder carried by 1 in 12 Americans of African heritage. That finding has been roundly hooted by real doctors, who say it is unlikely in the extreme the condition could lead to death. Recently, a new autopsy told a different story. Dr. Vernard Adams, Tampa's chief medical examiner, found that the teen died because guards covered his mouth and forced him to inhale ammonia.
Just so you know, Martin Lee Anderson was an A and B student, good at math. He wound up in the boot camp after he took his grandmother's car for a joy ride.
In other words, hardly the second coming of Al Capone.
As it happens, news of how he died came almost simultaneously with news of another appalling mistreatment of children in detention. According to a report from an advocacy group, the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, more than 100 teenagers were left locked in a flooded prison in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They had to scramble to the top bunks to avoid drowning. They went up to five days with nothing to eat or drink. Some drank floodwater. Many had not been convicted of any crime.
And, the vast majority was, like Anderson, black. While New Orleans was about 67 percent black, the report says the prison was well over 95 percent black. No surprise. Human Rights Watch reports that black people are more than eight times as likely to wind up behind bars as whites.
It is telling how mutely we absorb that fact, which gives tacit approval to this means of controlling a population whose mere existence we have historically found threatening and inconvenient.
In the Jim Crow years, the institutions of government and society could hardly have been more brazen in pursuit of that goal. White teachers told black students they should aspire to no goal higher than to work as janitors and cooks. White cops turned black suspects over to lynch mobs.
It could never happen that way in this enlightened era, of course. And yet, it happens in other ways. A 2002 report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says black kids are labeled as emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded and shipped off to special-education classes at rates of up to four times those of white kids. A 2000 study co-sponsored by the Justice Department tells us that, of people who've never done time in juvenile facilities, a black drug defendant is 48 times more likely to be jailed than a white one with the same record.
The means have changed, but the end--repression, control--remains the same.
Granted, there may have been some white kids in that fetid, flooded prison. There were certainly some in that brutal boot camp. Yet, it's no accident African-American children are always so well represented in those lousy places.
So our concern for them now feels--well, let's call it belated. And self-deluding.
Those children were right where we wanted them to be.
----------
E-mail: lpitts@miamiherald.com
By Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist based in Washington: Tribune Media Services
Published May 16, 2006
So now we know how Martin Lee Anderson died.
We can forget the original autopsy report filed by Charles Siebert, a doctor so inept he wasn't technically a doctor (he had allowed his license to lapse) when he issued the report. A doctor so inept he once described a person he autopsied as having "unremarkable" testes. The person was a woman.
Siebert claimed that after being hit, manhandled and choked by guards Jan. 5 at a so-called boot camp in Panama City, Fla., the 14-year-old Anderson died of sickle cell trait, a genetic blood disorder carried by 1 in 12 Americans of African heritage. That finding has been roundly hooted by real doctors, who say it is unlikely in the extreme the condition could lead to death. Recently, a new autopsy told a different story. Dr. Vernard Adams, Tampa's chief medical examiner, found that the teen died because guards covered his mouth and forced him to inhale ammonia.
Just so you know, Martin Lee Anderson was an A and B student, good at math. He wound up in the boot camp after he took his grandmother's car for a joy ride.
In other words, hardly the second coming of Al Capone.
As it happens, news of how he died came almost simultaneously with news of another appalling mistreatment of children in detention. According to a report from an advocacy group, the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, more than 100 teenagers were left locked in a flooded prison in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They had to scramble to the top bunks to avoid drowning. They went up to five days with nothing to eat or drink. Some drank floodwater. Many had not been convicted of any crime.
And, the vast majority was, like Anderson, black. While New Orleans was about 67 percent black, the report says the prison was well over 95 percent black. No surprise. Human Rights Watch reports that black people are more than eight times as likely to wind up behind bars as whites.
It is telling how mutely we absorb that fact, which gives tacit approval to this means of controlling a population whose mere existence we have historically found threatening and inconvenient.
In the Jim Crow years, the institutions of government and society could hardly have been more brazen in pursuit of that goal. White teachers told black students they should aspire to no goal higher than to work as janitors and cooks. White cops turned black suspects over to lynch mobs.
It could never happen that way in this enlightened era, of course. And yet, it happens in other ways. A 2002 report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says black kids are labeled as emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded and shipped off to special-education classes at rates of up to four times those of white kids. A 2000 study co-sponsored by the Justice Department tells us that, of people who've never done time in juvenile facilities, a black drug defendant is 48 times more likely to be jailed than a white one with the same record.
The means have changed, but the end--repression, control--remains the same.
Granted, there may have been some white kids in that fetid, flooded prison. There were certainly some in that brutal boot camp. Yet, it's no accident African-American children are always so well represented in those lousy places.
So our concern for them now feels--well, let's call it belated. And self-deluding.
Those children were right where we wanted them to be.
----------
E-mail: lpitts@miamiherald.com
Canadians suspect CSIS investigations affected by ethnicity
Canadians suspect CSIS investigations affected by ethnicity
James Gordon
CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
OTTAWA - A majority of Canadians believe the country's spy service might treat citizens differently because of their ethnicity, an internal poll has found.
The survey conducted for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) by Ekos Research Associates last October found 52 per cent of people interviewed thought race could affect how the agency interacts with people.
That finding, which appears under the headline "concerns" in a summary of survey results, comes amid sustained accusations by Canadian Muslims that the service engages in racial profiling.
CSIS spokeswoman Barbara Campion denied CSIS engages in racial profiling, suggesting in an interview Monday that people shouldn't read too much into the results, given the vague wording of the question.
"The term 'differently' wasn't defined very clearly during the polling, so it's difficult to draw a definite conclusion from that result," she argued.
"We target individuals based on their activities, not at all based on anything else.''
She confirmed it is still a concern for the agency, however.
"CSIS is aware that it needs to do some work with respect to building bridges and forging strong relationships, especially with the Muslim community in this country," she said, noting the service regularly attends meetings with various ethno-cultural groups across Canada to provide information and dispel "misconceptions" about what CSIS does.
Other poll findings include:
- A majority (65 per cent) of people were aware the service existed, while about one in three had never heard of it;
- Visible minorities were less likely to know about CSIS (55 per cent) than non-visible minorities (68 per cent);
- Thirty-seven per cent of those polled had a positive view of the service, compared with 14 who held a negative impression. Forty-three per cent were neutral.
Campion said the agency is "very pleased" with the overall results.
She pointed out 79 per cent of Canadians believe it is "very important" that a service like CSIS exists, adding a majority of youth under age 25 have a positive view of the agency.
Yet accusations of racial profiling leveled mostly by Canadian Islamic groups continue to dog CSIS and the RCMP.
Last summer, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) released a study claiming both CSIS and the RCMP regularly intimidate and threaten community members in their hunt for terrorists.
CAIR-CAN spokeswoman Halima Mautbur said there hasn't been much improvement since.
"Unfortunately, we still continue to receive complaints about CSIS, and I think the perception within the community is still largely the same," she said Monday.
Mautbur added while CSIS has been participating in some community meetings, the outreach efforts lag behind those of the RCMP.
"It just hasn't resulted in anything yet" beyond a stated willingness to improve relations, she said.
The poll was conducted Oct. 21 to 31, 2005, and the analysis is based on telephone surveys with 1,010 Canadians. It is considered accurate to within 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Ottawa Citizen
© CanWest News Service 2006
James Gordon
CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
OTTAWA - A majority of Canadians believe the country's spy service might treat citizens differently because of their ethnicity, an internal poll has found.
The survey conducted for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) by Ekos Research Associates last October found 52 per cent of people interviewed thought race could affect how the agency interacts with people.
That finding, which appears under the headline "concerns" in a summary of survey results, comes amid sustained accusations by Canadian Muslims that the service engages in racial profiling.
CSIS spokeswoman Barbara Campion denied CSIS engages in racial profiling, suggesting in an interview Monday that people shouldn't read too much into the results, given the vague wording of the question.
"The term 'differently' wasn't defined very clearly during the polling, so it's difficult to draw a definite conclusion from that result," she argued.
"We target individuals based on their activities, not at all based on anything else.''
She confirmed it is still a concern for the agency, however.
"CSIS is aware that it needs to do some work with respect to building bridges and forging strong relationships, especially with the Muslim community in this country," she said, noting the service regularly attends meetings with various ethno-cultural groups across Canada to provide information and dispel "misconceptions" about what CSIS does.
Other poll findings include:
- A majority (65 per cent) of people were aware the service existed, while about one in three had never heard of it;
- Visible minorities were less likely to know about CSIS (55 per cent) than non-visible minorities (68 per cent);
- Thirty-seven per cent of those polled had a positive view of the service, compared with 14 who held a negative impression. Forty-three per cent were neutral.
Campion said the agency is "very pleased" with the overall results.
She pointed out 79 per cent of Canadians believe it is "very important" that a service like CSIS exists, adding a majority of youth under age 25 have a positive view of the agency.
Yet accusations of racial profiling leveled mostly by Canadian Islamic groups continue to dog CSIS and the RCMP.
Last summer, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) released a study claiming both CSIS and the RCMP regularly intimidate and threaten community members in their hunt for terrorists.
CAIR-CAN spokeswoman Halima Mautbur said there hasn't been much improvement since.
"Unfortunately, we still continue to receive complaints about CSIS, and I think the perception within the community is still largely the same," she said Monday.
Mautbur added while CSIS has been participating in some community meetings, the outreach efforts lag behind those of the RCMP.
"It just hasn't resulted in anything yet" beyond a stated willingness to improve relations, she said.
The poll was conducted Oct. 21 to 31, 2005, and the analysis is based on telephone surveys with 1,010 Canadians. It is considered accurate to within 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Ottawa Citizen
© CanWest News Service 2006
The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again
The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again
By Greg Palast
05/12/06 -"ICH" - -I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?
ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.
"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.
But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).
But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.
"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.
It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.
The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.
But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.
And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.
Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War, out June 6. You can order it now.
By Greg Palast
05/12/06 -"ICH" - -I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?
ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.
"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.
But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).
But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.
"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.
It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.
The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.
But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.
And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.
Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War, out June 6. You can order it now.
US releases film of September 11 attack on Pentagon
You ever get a day when you don't even know where to begin taking something apart?
This "evidence" comes out HOW LONG after?
You'd think the boys at the Pentagon would have cobbled something together a little quicker than this, and what do we see, a nose?
For a mythical plane?
Like the rest of the stills already out there, I'm waiting until we get a nice good look at it, so we can find out who's got a really good PhotoShop program running at the Pentagon. I've been meaning to have some photos retouched of mine, you know how those family dinner shots that never really turn out right. I wonder if one of those whizzes at the pentagon could maybe fix up my nose in a couple of those pics.
Some days the propaganda from the US govt gets to be a little heady, even for me....EG:)
quotes from the article....
by Jim Mannion
Washington (AFP) May 16, 2006
This "evidence" comes out HOW LONG after?
You'd think the boys at the Pentagon would have cobbled something together a little quicker than this, and what do we see, a nose?
For a mythical plane?
Like the rest of the stills already out there, I'm waiting until we get a nice good look at it, so we can find out who's got a really good PhotoShop program running at the Pentagon. I've been meaning to have some photos retouched of mine, you know how those family dinner shots that never really turn out right. I wonder if one of those whizzes at the pentagon could maybe fix up my nose in a couple of those pics.
Some days the propaganda from the US govt gets to be a little heady, even for me....EG:)
quotes from the article....
Although the two video clips last about two minutes, the nose of the jet is seen for only a fraction of a second in one film before the explosion.
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said the videos appeared to show the same scene as a sequence of still images previously shown on US television tracking the American Airlines jet's trajectory into the building.
by Jim Mannion
Washington (AFP) May 16, 2006
Venezuela says Iran might be buyer for its F16s
Venezuela says Iran might be buyer for its F16s
by Staff Writers
Caracas (AFP) May 16, 2006
A Venezuelan general said Tuesday that Iran might be interested in buying Venezuela's US F16 fighter jets that he has recommended selling.
 A popular export product for both the manufacturer and resellers alike |
Caracas (AFP) May 16, 2006
A Venezuelan general said Tuesday that Iran might be interested in buying Venezuela's US F16 fighter jets that he has recommended selling.
The comment by General Alberto Muller Rojas, a member of the Venezuelan chiefs of staff, came a day after the United States ordered an arms sales ban against Venezuela, accusing Caracas of failing to provide assistance in the "war on terror".
The US administration highlighted Venezuela's ties with Iran and communist led Cuba in justifying its move.
The Venezuelan foreign ministry responded by issuing a statement accusing the United States of creating the conditions to "attack" the South American country.
Venezuela is a key oil supplier to the United States, but tensions between the two countries have increased in recent months. Washington has regularly expressed concern about the activities of the leftwing President Hugo Chavez.
Amid the new tussle over the US military sanctions, General Rojas said Venezuela is considering selling its ageing American F16 jets and to replace them with Russian Sukhoi-35s.
Rojas told AFP: "I made a proposal to the defence minister today to sell the F16s, whole or in parts, and to use the technology (from the planes) to attract people around the world who might be interested."
He added: "Many countries, such as Iran, would be interested in buying the material." Rojas said countries in Africa or Chile, which also uses F16s, might also be possible customers.
Venezuela's F16s are more than 20 years old and the United States now refuses to maintain them.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said there was little hope that the United States would agree to Venezuela selling the fighters to Iran, another arch-foe of the US administration.
McCormack told reporters: "Any time you have the sale of US military equipment to a foreign government, there are clauses and there are agreements that are signed. And part of those agreements are that, without the written consent of the United States, you can't transfer these defense articles, and in this case F16s, to a third country.
"And I would expect that, even if such a request were made, that it would not be forthcoming from the US government."
The US administration on Monday imposed a ban on arm sales and technology transfers to Venezuela, and accused Chavez's government of failing to cooperate in the US-led "war on terror".
In announcing the ban, McCormack cited US concerns over Venezuela's ties with Iran and Cuba, which Washington considers state sponsors of terrorism, and their "intelligence-sharing relationship, which has made it very difficult for the United States to work on anti-terrorism efforts with them."
McCormack alleged on Tuesday that Venezuela has "developed a much closer and stronger intelligence-sharing relationship with the intelligence agencies of Iran and Cuba."
The United States also was concerned that Caracas had failed to stop the transit of suspects and arms through its territory and had links to leftist paramilitaries in Colombia, the spokesman said.
The Venezuelan foreign ministry responded by saying the US government is seeking to "isolate Venezuela, destabilize its democratic government and prepare the political conditions for an attack."
It said the arms ban was designed to prevent Venezuela from being able to defend itself.
President Chavez on Monday slammed the US action as "a demonstration of the empire's policy against Earth's smaller countries", but said he would not suspend oil exports to the United States.
Is Bush nuts?
Is Bush nuts?
By JAY AMBROSE
May 17, 2006, 02:42
President Bush proposes that we allow most of the 11 million illegal aliens in the country to stay, and he also wants a guest worker program. Why?
Does he also want still more unemployment among the nation's least educated, most impoverished young people, and still lower wages? Does he want to continue widening the gap between rich and poor here? Does he want to go on inflicting pain and exploitation on the illegal workers themselves?
The president's idea of temporarily rotating 6,000 members of the National Guard to border duty may prove useful, and will certainly send a signal that the United States is getting more serious about the constant assault on our democratically derived immigration laws. Even if it is more for show than a long-term solution, this action appears on the right track.
And Bush is on the right track in wanting to get tougher with employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, though he does not seem to be willing to get tough enough. There may be merit to his notion of having an ID card for foreign workers, but let's don't suppose that a great many employers are in ignorance of what they are doing right now, or that it would be an overwhelming feat to catch many of them if the government makes up its mind to do so.
The really, truly difficult issue is what to do about the millions of illegal aliens living in the country at this moment with no intention of departing. Many have been here for years and have families and roots in their communities, as the president said. They are roughly equivalent in number to the population of the state of Ohio. You can't just go out and round them up and ship all of them away in a week or two or three, or even a year or two or three.
But we should remember, too, that we had an amnesty program in the 1980s, and the number of illegal aliens living in this country has tripled since then. Letting the illegals get in line for citizenship as Bush suggests might well send a message that if you can sneak in and hide out for a while, you can be a citizen, too. Can we can get so good at guarding the border that we can prevent aliens from sneaking in if such an incentive is left in place? Probably not. There is perplexity enough here to choke a think tank, but it does not follow that the issue is unsolvable _ that there is no humane, practical way out better than what Bush has suggested.
As for guest workers, forget it, at least on any major scale. Yes, there may be some places where great hardship would be worked without them, such as picking lettuce in California, but it has by now been amply demonstrated that it is by and large a fiction that Americans won't take the jobs that illegal aliens are taking.
In fact, scholars such as Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston have shown that illegal aliens are increasing unemployment among our poorest citizens. They are also depressing wages, and what we're ending up with among the illegals themselves is the growth of an exploited, impoverished class that widens the gap between rich and poor. On top of that, they consume far more in public services than are matched by the taxes they pay.
Liberals ought to unite with conservatives on this. If they do care about the native poor and the exploited aliens, if they get it that the competitive advantage of the United States resides in increasing the numbers of skilled workers, not unskilled workers, and if they can get past the stupidity that anyone who wants to fix this thing is a racist and a xenophobe, they should join with those who are already speaking out forcibly and help make ours a stronger, better land.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
By JAY AMBROSE
May 17, 2006, 02:42
President Bush proposes that we allow most of the 11 million illegal aliens in the country to stay, and he also wants a guest worker program. Why?
Does he also want still more unemployment among the nation's least educated, most impoverished young people, and still lower wages? Does he want to continue widening the gap between rich and poor here? Does he want to go on inflicting pain and exploitation on the illegal workers themselves?
The president's idea of temporarily rotating 6,000 members of the National Guard to border duty may prove useful, and will certainly send a signal that the United States is getting more serious about the constant assault on our democratically derived immigration laws. Even if it is more for show than a long-term solution, this action appears on the right track.
And Bush is on the right track in wanting to get tougher with employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, though he does not seem to be willing to get tough enough. There may be merit to his notion of having an ID card for foreign workers, but let's don't suppose that a great many employers are in ignorance of what they are doing right now, or that it would be an overwhelming feat to catch many of them if the government makes up its mind to do so.
The really, truly difficult issue is what to do about the millions of illegal aliens living in the country at this moment with no intention of departing. Many have been here for years and have families and roots in their communities, as the president said. They are roughly equivalent in number to the population of the state of Ohio. You can't just go out and round them up and ship all of them away in a week or two or three, or even a year or two or three.
But we should remember, too, that we had an amnesty program in the 1980s, and the number of illegal aliens living in this country has tripled since then. Letting the illegals get in line for citizenship as Bush suggests might well send a message that if you can sneak in and hide out for a while, you can be a citizen, too. Can we can get so good at guarding the border that we can prevent aliens from sneaking in if such an incentive is left in place? Probably not. There is perplexity enough here to choke a think tank, but it does not follow that the issue is unsolvable _ that there is no humane, practical way out better than what Bush has suggested.
As for guest workers, forget it, at least on any major scale. Yes, there may be some places where great hardship would be worked without them, such as picking lettuce in California, but it has by now been amply demonstrated that it is by and large a fiction that Americans won't take the jobs that illegal aliens are taking.
In fact, scholars such as Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston have shown that illegal aliens are increasing unemployment among our poorest citizens. They are also depressing wages, and what we're ending up with among the illegals themselves is the growth of an exploited, impoverished class that widens the gap between rich and poor. On top of that, they consume far more in public services than are matched by the taxes they pay.
Liberals ought to unite with conservatives on this. If they do care about the native poor and the exploited aliens, if they get it that the competitive advantage of the United States resides in increasing the numbers of skilled workers, not unskilled workers, and if they can get past the stupidity that anyone who wants to fix this thing is a racist and a xenophobe, they should join with those who are already speaking out forcibly and help make ours a stronger, better land.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
Support Our Troops, Anybody?
Support Our Troops, Anybody?
By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 17 May 2006
So Long as I Am Your Commander in Chief
As the violence in Iraq continues to escalate, at least 2,450 US soldiers have been killed, with roughly ten times that number seriously wounded since the beginning of the Invasion in March 2003. If current trends continue, May will be one of the deadliest months of the occupation yet for troops, with an average of over three being killed per day. 54 coalition soldiers have been killed in the first 16 days of May alone.
This probably explains why 72% of US troops in Iraq think the US should exit the country within the next year, and over 25% think the US should exit immediately. The same poll found that only one in five troops in Iraq want to heed War Criminal Bush's call for them to "stay as long as they are needed."
The occupation, now well into its fourth year and going strong, has already produced 550,000 Iraq war veterans. Troop morale is lower than ever before and dropping as fast as Bush's approval ratings. Further adding to the deteriorating situation is the mindless adherence to the highly absurd pledges of the "commander in chief."
"To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander in chief. Most Americans want two things in Iraq: They want to see our troops win and they want to see our troops come home as soon as possible," he says, ad nauseum, "And those are my goals as well. I will settle for nothing less than complete victory." Just as he settled for nothing less than complete exemption from military service in Vietnam, a fact his soldiers are all too aware of.
Meanwhile, troops returning from Iraq are finding little comfort in the hollow rhetoric of their chief chicken-hawk. The medical attention necessary to support the troops is becoming scarcer with each passing tax-cut.
When soldiers come home from Iraq, the support they need in order to physically and mentally recover from the hell of Iraq is way out of reach for most. With their pay and benefits cut, health care, already scarce in many cases, is soon to become even more difficult to access.
A case in point is Marine Lance Cpl. James Crosby. He left Iraq strapped to a gurney after his legs were paralyzed and his innards lacerated by shrapnel. When he exited the combat zone to head back home for treatment, he realized the military cut his pay by 50%. "Before you leave the combat zone, they swipe your ID card through a computer, and you go back to your base pay," he said.
Of Course He Supports the Troops
Veterans are a different matter, as a growing number of them are beginning to realize, waking up to the fact that there is an ever-widening gap between what their "commander in chief" says and what he does. While Mr. Bush is busy telling reporters that he supports the troops in Iraq, even military web sites are posting stories like one from February 28 of this year titled "Vets May Be Denied Health Care," which stated:
At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half - if the White House is serious about its proposed budget. After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.
In the same story, Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas, the top Democrat on the panel overseeing the VA's budget, said: "Either the administration is proposing gutting VA health care over the next five years or it is not serious about its own budget."
Disturbingly and more recently, on March 21st, a House Budget Committee Report shows us that this does indeed appear to be the Bush plan for "supporting the troops":
The President's 2007 budget provides $36.1 billion for appropriated veterans programs, which is $2.9 billion above the amount enacted for 2006 and $1.8 billion above the amount needed to maintain purchasing power at the 2006 level.
Beyond 2007, however, veterans funding is cut in almost every year. Over five years, the budget cuts funding $10.0 billion below the level the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates is needed to maintain purchasing power at the 2006 level.
Thus, their "commander in chief" will cut the veterans discretionary budget by $10 billion over the next five years.
Supporting Troops, Pentagon Style
To save the troops from lack of health care, our government has devised an ingenious solution, which is to let them continue in combat. Last week the US military was found to be violating its own rules concerning mentally ill troops by sending them back into combat. A recent news piece by the Hartford Courant stated:
US military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.
Citing records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviews of families and military personnel, the newspaper reported "numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq." The piece tells us that 22 US soldiers have committed suicide in Iraq last year, which is the highest suicide rate since the war began.
The article goes on to say that some of the service members who killed themselves during 2004 and 2005 had been kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, and had been prescribed antidepressants after little or no mental health counseling.
Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, minces no words: "I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on [antidepressants], when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal. You're creating chemically activated time bombs."
The article also quotes Dr. Arthur Blank Jr., a psychiatrist who assisted in having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War: "I'm concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country."
Turning Troops Into Time Bombs
Among medical professionals, there is an unstated urgency that soldiers receive adequate treatment promptly upon returning home. "If we don't get intervention within the first five years, the veteran is set up for a lifetime of problems," says John Wilson, a psychology professor at Cleveland State University. In an Associated Press (AP) story from April 30, Professor Wilson also adds, "Iraq is a nonstop, 24-seven, hostile environment, so what happens is that these guys are incredibly wired all the time. One of the things we learned from Vietnam is that once that hyper arousal response develops, it doesn't go off."
The tragic death of Andres Raya, a 19-year-old US Marine, demonstrates this condition. The young man decided to commit suicide by inducing a gun battle with police officers in his hometown of Ceres, California, with the apparent motive of avoiding an impending return to duty in Iraq.
Raya, who fought in the April 2004 US assault on the city of Fallujah, had returned to the US on January 8, 2005, for a holiday. His mother later described his condition to the Modesto Bee thus: "He came back different."
He told his family on several occasions he did not want to go back to Iraq. According to local police, Raya went to a liquor store in Ceres wearing a poncho and "talking about how much he hated the world." He asked the store owner to call the police. Police officer Sam Ryno responded. He arrived to find Raya pulling the assault weapon from under his poncho. He shot Ryno, causing serious injuries. When another police officer arrived in the liquor store parking lot, Raya shot him twice in the back of the head, killing him, and then disappeared. Three police departments, the California Highway Patrol, and SWAT officers had to search the area for the distraught veteran. When they found him, after a brief but fierce gun battle, Raya was dead, with over 60 bullets in his body.
An article in the Modesto Bee described the final battle as Raya "shooting military style at the officers," while using "some of the same darting and dodging techniques we have seen in reports from Iraq." The police chief of Ceres told the Bee, "It was premeditated, planned, an ambush.... It was suicide by cop."
PTSD: "Post" for a Reason
Veterans who make it home alive from Iraq are immediately faced with the task of reconstructing their lives as they battle the effects of PTSD, which include anger, rage, isolation, sleeplessness, anxiety and anti-social behavior. In another AP story from April 28 of this year, the body of Spc. Robert Hornbeck, 23, was found in a hotel in Savannah, Georgia, after he had been missing for 12 days.
"A body found with items belonging to a Fort Benning soldier … was discovered … at a downtown hotel after guests complained of a foul odor in the lobby," read the story. Hornbeck had spent a year in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division and was to be married to his college sweetheart this July. Instead, due to lack of treatment for PTSD, "A maintenance worker at the De Soto Hilton hotel found the body of a man inside a large piece of air-conditioning equipment. Firefighters wearing hazard suits removed the body several hours later." His father believed that Hornbeck was highly intoxicated at the time of his death.
Then there are the soldiers who come home,suffering massive trauma from their experience in Iraq. Joshua Omvig, a soldier from Iowa, returned home and killed himself in front of his mother, due primarily to lack of assistance in dealing with his PTSD. The distraught parents of the 22-year-old veteran decided to deal with their loss by creating a web site in his memory, where his mother described the emails they receive from other soldiers: "It's been hundreds a day - so many heartbreaking stories. It's like the same story over and over again, just different names, different towns. A lot of them will make you cry, there's so much pain."
A 2004 study of several Army and Marine units returning from Iraq and Afghanistan that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine found that only between 23 and 40 percent of those with PTSD had sought treatment. And post-traumatic stress is called "post" for a reason - its most serious symptoms usually emerge long after the trauma is over.
Confessions From the Accountability Office and Others
Last week the Government Accountability Office announced that "less than one quarter of the US military's Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who show signs of post-traumatic stress are referred for additional mental health treatment or evaluation, according to a government study."
Nonetheless, the VA has admitted that a staggering 35% of veterans who served in Iraq have already sought treatment in the VA system for emotional problems from the war. This statistic was also confirmed by a US Army study.
A piece written by Judith Coburn for TomDispatch entitled "Shortchanging the Wounded," posted this April, reveals many of the following startling statistics.
Nearly one in three veterans have been hospitalized at the VA, or visited a VA outpatient clinic, due to an initial diagnosis of a mental-health disorder, according to the VA itself. These numbers are consistent with a recent Army study on soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such a rate might add up over time (depending on how long these occupations last) to what could be over half a million veterans who need treatment.
The VA admits its disability system was overburdened even before the administration invaded Iraq; and, by 2004, it had a backlog of 300,000 disability claims. Now, the VA reports that the backlog has nearly doubled, at 540,122. By April 2006, 25% of the rating claims took six months to process. So veterans wounded severely enough to be unable to work are left high and dry for up to half a year. Worse yet, an appeal of a rejected claim frequently takes years to settle. One hundred twenty-three thousand disability claims have been filed so far by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in its budget requests, the Bush administration has constantly resisted Congressional demands to increase the number of VA staffers processing such claims. Here is what the VA's national advisory board on PTSD says in a report released in February, 2006:
[The] VA cannot meet the ongoing needs of veterans of past deployments while also reaching out to new combat veterans of [Iraq and Afghanistan] and their families within current resources and current models of treatment.
How many Iraqi veterans will eventually join the ranks of the 400,000 troops-turned homeless vets already on the streets of American cities?
Support Our Troops: Anybody?
When answering a question following a speech he gave on March 20th, the day after the three year anniversary of the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, Bush said, "... the best way you can help is to support our troops. You find a family who's got a child in the United States military, tell them you appreciate them. Ask them if you can help them."
Now is the time to stand up and be counted. It is going to take a little more than pasting stickers of yellow ribbons that read "Support Our Troops" on the bumpers of your SUVs and cars. Are the patriotic citizens of the United States of America willing to support our troops? Because their "commander in chief" sure as hell is not going to.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006. He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.
By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 17 May 2006
So Long as I Am Your Commander in Chief
As the violence in Iraq continues to escalate, at least 2,450 US soldiers have been killed, with roughly ten times that number seriously wounded since the beginning of the Invasion in March 2003. If current trends continue, May will be one of the deadliest months of the occupation yet for troops, with an average of over three being killed per day. 54 coalition soldiers have been killed in the first 16 days of May alone.
This probably explains why 72% of US troops in Iraq think the US should exit the country within the next year, and over 25% think the US should exit immediately. The same poll found that only one in five troops in Iraq want to heed War Criminal Bush's call for them to "stay as long as they are needed."
The occupation, now well into its fourth year and going strong, has already produced 550,000 Iraq war veterans. Troop morale is lower than ever before and dropping as fast as Bush's approval ratings. Further adding to the deteriorating situation is the mindless adherence to the highly absurd pledges of the "commander in chief."
"To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander in chief. Most Americans want two things in Iraq: They want to see our troops win and they want to see our troops come home as soon as possible," he says, ad nauseum, "And those are my goals as well. I will settle for nothing less than complete victory." Just as he settled for nothing less than complete exemption from military service in Vietnam, a fact his soldiers are all too aware of.
Meanwhile, troops returning from Iraq are finding little comfort in the hollow rhetoric of their chief chicken-hawk. The medical attention necessary to support the troops is becoming scarcer with each passing tax-cut.
When soldiers come home from Iraq, the support they need in order to physically and mentally recover from the hell of Iraq is way out of reach for most. With their pay and benefits cut, health care, already scarce in many cases, is soon to become even more difficult to access.
A case in point is Marine Lance Cpl. James Crosby. He left Iraq strapped to a gurney after his legs were paralyzed and his innards lacerated by shrapnel. When he exited the combat zone to head back home for treatment, he realized the military cut his pay by 50%. "Before you leave the combat zone, they swipe your ID card through a computer, and you go back to your base pay," he said.
Of Course He Supports the Troops
Veterans are a different matter, as a growing number of them are beginning to realize, waking up to the fact that there is an ever-widening gap between what their "commander in chief" says and what he does. While Mr. Bush is busy telling reporters that he supports the troops in Iraq, even military web sites are posting stories like one from February 28 of this year titled "Vets May Be Denied Health Care," which stated:
At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half - if the White House is serious about its proposed budget. After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.
In the same story, Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas, the top Democrat on the panel overseeing the VA's budget, said: "Either the administration is proposing gutting VA health care over the next five years or it is not serious about its own budget."
Disturbingly and more recently, on March 21st, a House Budget Committee Report shows us that this does indeed appear to be the Bush plan for "supporting the troops":
The President's 2007 budget provides $36.1 billion for appropriated veterans programs, which is $2.9 billion above the amount enacted for 2006 and $1.8 billion above the amount needed to maintain purchasing power at the 2006 level.
Beyond 2007, however, veterans funding is cut in almost every year. Over five years, the budget cuts funding $10.0 billion below the level the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates is needed to maintain purchasing power at the 2006 level.
Thus, their "commander in chief" will cut the veterans discretionary budget by $10 billion over the next five years.
Supporting Troops, Pentagon Style
To save the troops from lack of health care, our government has devised an ingenious solution, which is to let them continue in combat. Last week the US military was found to be violating its own rules concerning mentally ill troops by sending them back into combat. A recent news piece by the Hartford Courant stated:
US military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.
Citing records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviews of families and military personnel, the newspaper reported "numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq." The piece tells us that 22 US soldiers have committed suicide in Iraq last year, which is the highest suicide rate since the war began.
The article goes on to say that some of the service members who killed themselves during 2004 and 2005 had been kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, and had been prescribed antidepressants after little or no mental health counseling.
Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, minces no words: "I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on [antidepressants], when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal. You're creating chemically activated time bombs."
The article also quotes Dr. Arthur Blank Jr., a psychiatrist who assisted in having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War: "I'm concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country."
Turning Troops Into Time Bombs
Among medical professionals, there is an unstated urgency that soldiers receive adequate treatment promptly upon returning home. "If we don't get intervention within the first five years, the veteran is set up for a lifetime of problems," says John Wilson, a psychology professor at Cleveland State University. In an Associated Press (AP) story from April 30, Professor Wilson also adds, "Iraq is a nonstop, 24-seven, hostile environment, so what happens is that these guys are incredibly wired all the time. One of the things we learned from Vietnam is that once that hyper arousal response develops, it doesn't go off."
The tragic death of Andres Raya, a 19-year-old US Marine, demonstrates this condition. The young man decided to commit suicide by inducing a gun battle with police officers in his hometown of Ceres, California, with the apparent motive of avoiding an impending return to duty in Iraq.
Raya, who fought in the April 2004 US assault on the city of Fallujah, had returned to the US on January 8, 2005, for a holiday. His mother later described his condition to the Modesto Bee thus: "He came back different."
He told his family on several occasions he did not want to go back to Iraq. According to local police, Raya went to a liquor store in Ceres wearing a poncho and "talking about how much he hated the world." He asked the store owner to call the police. Police officer Sam Ryno responded. He arrived to find Raya pulling the assault weapon from under his poncho. He shot Ryno, causing serious injuries. When another police officer arrived in the liquor store parking lot, Raya shot him twice in the back of the head, killing him, and then disappeared. Three police departments, the California Highway Patrol, and SWAT officers had to search the area for the distraught veteran. When they found him, after a brief but fierce gun battle, Raya was dead, with over 60 bullets in his body.
An article in the Modesto Bee described the final battle as Raya "shooting military style at the officers," while using "some of the same darting and dodging techniques we have seen in reports from Iraq." The police chief of Ceres told the Bee, "It was premeditated, planned, an ambush.... It was suicide by cop."
PTSD: "Post" for a Reason
Veterans who make it home alive from Iraq are immediately faced with the task of reconstructing their lives as they battle the effects of PTSD, which include anger, rage, isolation, sleeplessness, anxiety and anti-social behavior. In another AP story from April 28 of this year, the body of Spc. Robert Hornbeck, 23, was found in a hotel in Savannah, Georgia, after he had been missing for 12 days.
"A body found with items belonging to a Fort Benning soldier … was discovered … at a downtown hotel after guests complained of a foul odor in the lobby," read the story. Hornbeck had spent a year in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division and was to be married to his college sweetheart this July. Instead, due to lack of treatment for PTSD, "A maintenance worker at the De Soto Hilton hotel found the body of a man inside a large piece of air-conditioning equipment. Firefighters wearing hazard suits removed the body several hours later." His father believed that Hornbeck was highly intoxicated at the time of his death.
Then there are the soldiers who come home,suffering massive trauma from their experience in Iraq. Joshua Omvig, a soldier from Iowa, returned home and killed himself in front of his mother, due primarily to lack of assistance in dealing with his PTSD. The distraught parents of the 22-year-old veteran decided to deal with their loss by creating a web site in his memory, where his mother described the emails they receive from other soldiers: "It's been hundreds a day - so many heartbreaking stories. It's like the same story over and over again, just different names, different towns. A lot of them will make you cry, there's so much pain."
A 2004 study of several Army and Marine units returning from Iraq and Afghanistan that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine found that only between 23 and 40 percent of those with PTSD had sought treatment. And post-traumatic stress is called "post" for a reason - its most serious symptoms usually emerge long after the trauma is over.
Confessions From the Accountability Office and Others
Last week the Government Accountability Office announced that "less than one quarter of the US military's Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who show signs of post-traumatic stress are referred for additional mental health treatment or evaluation, according to a government study."
Nonetheless, the VA has admitted that a staggering 35% of veterans who served in Iraq have already sought treatment in the VA system for emotional problems from the war. This statistic was also confirmed by a US Army study.
A piece written by Judith Coburn for TomDispatch entitled "Shortchanging the Wounded," posted this April, reveals many of the following startling statistics.
Nearly one in three veterans have been hospitalized at the VA, or visited a VA outpatient clinic, due to an initial diagnosis of a mental-health disorder, according to the VA itself. These numbers are consistent with a recent Army study on soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such a rate might add up over time (depending on how long these occupations last) to what could be over half a million veterans who need treatment.
The VA admits its disability system was overburdened even before the administration invaded Iraq; and, by 2004, it had a backlog of 300,000 disability claims. Now, the VA reports that the backlog has nearly doubled, at 540,122. By April 2006, 25% of the rating claims took six months to process. So veterans wounded severely enough to be unable to work are left high and dry for up to half a year. Worse yet, an appeal of a rejected claim frequently takes years to settle. One hundred twenty-three thousand disability claims have been filed so far by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in its budget requests, the Bush administration has constantly resisted Congressional demands to increase the number of VA staffers processing such claims. Here is what the VA's national advisory board on PTSD says in a report released in February, 2006:
[The] VA cannot meet the ongoing needs of veterans of past deployments while also reaching out to new combat veterans of [Iraq and Afghanistan] and their families within current resources and current models of treatment.
How many Iraqi veterans will eventually join the ranks of the 400,000 troops-turned homeless vets already on the streets of American cities?
Support Our Troops: Anybody?
When answering a question following a speech he gave on March 20th, the day after the three year anniversary of the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, Bush said, "... the best way you can help is to support our troops. You find a family who's got a child in the United States military, tell them you appreciate them. Ask them if you can help them."
Now is the time to stand up and be counted. It is going to take a little more than pasting stickers of yellow ribbons that read "Support Our Troops" on the bumpers of your SUVs and cars. Are the patriotic citizens of the United States of America willing to support our troops? Because their "commander in chief" sure as hell is not going to.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006. He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.
United 93: "Let’s Roll" The Official Conspiracy Theory
United 93: "Let’s Roll" The Official Conspiracy Theory
Written by Rob Williams
Wednesday, 17 May 2006
The first images we see are of intent-looking Arab men, their mission in the making. The first words we hear are those in whispered Arabic, prayers to Allah. The first two places we encounter: Newark International, where San Francisco-bound United Flight 93 is boarding all passengers, and the National Air Traffic Control Center (NATCC), home to the most sophisticated aircraft tracking system on the planet.
So begins director Paul ("Bourne Supremacy") Greengrass’s "United 93," one of the most gripping celluloid thrillers to come along in some time. And it’s a brilliant propaganda piece.
The genius of this film lies in its narrative style – the hand-held shaky cam, quick edits, wide range of camera angles, and the generous use of rack shots all work together to keep the viewer off balance. Of course, this is no ordinary flying film, but a movie purportedly based on the events surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks.
As the film begins and the NATCC readies for another busy day of "pushing tin," it becomes apparent that a lone aircraft - American Airlines flight 11 from Boston to L.A - may be involved in a possible hijack situation. Shortly thereafter, another plane – United 175 out of Boston – begins to fly off course. And then, American flight 77 out of Dulles goes missing, on its way to LAX. "Hijacking?" says one controller half jokingly to another in the heat of the moment. "We haven’t had a hijacking in forty years."
"We’re trying to get the military involved," says the NATCC head into the phone. "We can’t reach anyone in headquarters."
What’s going on? No one seems to know. Questions abound. And you won’t get any answers here.
"United 93" reveals absolutely nothing about either the movie’s hijackers or the individual passengers, not even their names, but this is not a film about character development. This is a movie designed, consciously or not, to help embed in the public mind an official version of the events surrounding 9/11’s doomed Flight 93, legitimizing for a global movie-going audience the official 9/11 "conspiracy theory" story: 19 knife and box cutter-wielding Middle Eastern Muslim religious fanatics single-handedly hijacking four U.S. commercial aircraft and flying three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon while successfully confounding the most powerful intelligence and military force in the world.
The fourth aircraft – Flight 93 – allegedly ended up in pieces in a Pennsylvania field. While the official version of the 9/11 story mentioned above doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, "United 93: The Movie" covers up real questions surrounding the events of 9/11, events that, out of respect for both the victims of the 9/11 attacks and the truth itself, we ought to be demanding answers to.
Here are but five:
1. Why were both civilian and military air traffic controllers unable to effectively respond to the hijackings on September 11?
Forget Hollywood for a moment. In the world of real life, the NATCC and NORAD have an explicit set of agreed-upon procedures they immediately follow whenever any airplane in U.S. air space drifts from its designated flight plan. Working in tandem, civilian and military air control authorities successfully land dozens and dozens of rogue airplanes every year in the United States. You’d never know this from "United 93," which uses montage techniques to compress into just a few fleeting moments significant chunks of time in which, under normal circumstances, apparently incompetent U.S. air traffic controllers could have easily responded to an emerging threat.
This "incompetence" narrative is in keeping with the official 9/11 story, though, to date, not a single person within the NATCC, the FAA or NORAD has been so much as reprimanded for poor 9/11 management. Odd, given that 9/11 was the single most devastating day of hijackings in all of US aviation history.
2. Why weren’t any military aircraft able to intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes?
Based on research done by Crossing the Rubicon author Michael Ruppert and others, evidence suggests that U.S. military planners decided to stage more than one dozen military simulations for September 11 – the same day (coincidently?) as the hijackings – effectively removing many east coast-based U.S. air force fighter jets from the picture. Again, the movie simply suggests a communication breakdown between civilian and military chains of command. The truth appears much more insidious.
3. How did Flight 93 crash?
The movie: "United 93" explicitly argues that the doomed jet crashed into the ground at 10:03 a.m. in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after courageous passengers stormed the cockpit and wrested control from the hijackers. The evidence: An eight-mile long trail of airplane debris and numerous eye-witnesses present at the scene suggest, instead, that Flight 93 may have been shot down, most likely by U.S. military aircraft.
One web site – www.letsroll911.org - goes so far as to name the pilot who committed the deed. But of course, like the FBI, it is but one source of information.
4. Who gave the "shoot down" order?
When Flight 93 crashed at 10:03 a.m., "the nearest fighter jets were 100 miles away," concludes the film. "At 10:18 a.m," the movie asserts, "the President ordered the military to engage hijacked air craft." Fifteen minutes too late, in other words. Investigative evidence, based on sourced documents, suggests that Vice President Dick Cheney gave the shoot-down order, possibly to prevent Flight 93 from landing successfully and revealing some damning evidence that disproved the "19 hijackers acting alone" theory.
5. Did Flight 93 actually crash at all?
Based on eye-witnesses, the makers of the Google-driven 9/11 film phenomenon "Loose Change" suggest that Flight 93 may have landed in Cleveland, Ohio later on that fateful morning. In other words, whatever happened in and around Shanksville was smoke and mirrors.
Before you dismiss any of this as conspiratorial rantings, I suggest doing some research of your own. Begin with David Ray Griffin’s readable The New Pearl Harbor, and then move on to the official 911 Commission Report and its essential companion volume, Griffin’s Omissions and Distortions. Michael Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon is also an invaluable resource.
I don’t profess to know the truth about what actually happened on 9/11, but I’m reasonably convinced that the official 9/11 "conspiracy theory" story, helped along by propaganda pieces like "United 93," are deliberately muddying the waters at a time when what we need more than anything in our troubled country is clarity, honesty, and a new vision for our common future as we confront global Peak Oil, rampant militarism, electoral fraud, corporate corruption, and a "war that will not end in our lifetimes" (to quote the U.S. Vice President).
But don’t take my word for it. During May 2006’s first week, as "United 93" pulled in $11.5 million in ticket sales to become the second most-watched film in the United States, the White House’s current occupant, not yet having seen the film, noted in a televised CNBC financial news network interview that the 9/11 Flight 93 passenger "revolt" against the hijackers had struck the first blow of "World War III."
"Let’s roll" onward with those words in mind.
Read more at http://www.robwilliamsmedia.com
Written by Rob Williams
Wednesday, 17 May 2006
The first images we see are of intent-looking Arab men, their mission in the making. The first words we hear are those in whispered Arabic, prayers to Allah. The first two places we encounter: Newark International, where San Francisco-bound United Flight 93 is boarding all passengers, and the National Air Traffic Control Center (NATCC), home to the most sophisticated aircraft tracking system on the planet.
So begins director Paul ("Bourne Supremacy") Greengrass’s "United 93," one of the most gripping celluloid thrillers to come along in some time. And it’s a brilliant propaganda piece.
The genius of this film lies in its narrative style – the hand-held shaky cam, quick edits, wide range of camera angles, and the generous use of rack shots all work together to keep the viewer off balance. Of course, this is no ordinary flying film, but a movie purportedly based on the events surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks.
As the film begins and the NATCC readies for another busy day of "pushing tin," it becomes apparent that a lone aircraft - American Airlines flight 11 from Boston to L.A - may be involved in a possible hijack situation. Shortly thereafter, another plane – United 175 out of Boston – begins to fly off course. And then, American flight 77 out of Dulles goes missing, on its way to LAX. "Hijacking?" says one controller half jokingly to another in the heat of the moment. "We haven’t had a hijacking in forty years."
"We’re trying to get the military involved," says the NATCC head into the phone. "We can’t reach anyone in headquarters."
What’s going on? No one seems to know. Questions abound. And you won’t get any answers here.
"United 93" reveals absolutely nothing about either the movie’s hijackers or the individual passengers, not even their names, but this is not a film about character development. This is a movie designed, consciously or not, to help embed in the public mind an official version of the events surrounding 9/11’s doomed Flight 93, legitimizing for a global movie-going audience the official 9/11 "conspiracy theory" story: 19 knife and box cutter-wielding Middle Eastern Muslim religious fanatics single-handedly hijacking four U.S. commercial aircraft and flying three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon while successfully confounding the most powerful intelligence and military force in the world.
The fourth aircraft – Flight 93 – allegedly ended up in pieces in a Pennsylvania field. While the official version of the 9/11 story mentioned above doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, "United 93: The Movie" covers up real questions surrounding the events of 9/11, events that, out of respect for both the victims of the 9/11 attacks and the truth itself, we ought to be demanding answers to.
Here are but five:
1. Why were both civilian and military air traffic controllers unable to effectively respond to the hijackings on September 11?
Forget Hollywood for a moment. In the world of real life, the NATCC and NORAD have an explicit set of agreed-upon procedures they immediately follow whenever any airplane in U.S. air space drifts from its designated flight plan. Working in tandem, civilian and military air control authorities successfully land dozens and dozens of rogue airplanes every year in the United States. You’d never know this from "United 93," which uses montage techniques to compress into just a few fleeting moments significant chunks of time in which, under normal circumstances, apparently incompetent U.S. air traffic controllers could have easily responded to an emerging threat.
This "incompetence" narrative is in keeping with the official 9/11 story, though, to date, not a single person within the NATCC, the FAA or NORAD has been so much as reprimanded for poor 9/11 management. Odd, given that 9/11 was the single most devastating day of hijackings in all of US aviation history.
2. Why weren’t any military aircraft able to intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes?
Based on research done by Crossing the Rubicon author Michael Ruppert and others, evidence suggests that U.S. military planners decided to stage more than one dozen military simulations for September 11 – the same day (coincidently?) as the hijackings – effectively removing many east coast-based U.S. air force fighter jets from the picture. Again, the movie simply suggests a communication breakdown between civilian and military chains of command. The truth appears much more insidious.
3. How did Flight 93 crash?
The movie: "United 93" explicitly argues that the doomed jet crashed into the ground at 10:03 a.m. in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after courageous passengers stormed the cockpit and wrested control from the hijackers. The evidence: An eight-mile long trail of airplane debris and numerous eye-witnesses present at the scene suggest, instead, that Flight 93 may have been shot down, most likely by U.S. military aircraft.
One web site – www.letsroll911.org - goes so far as to name the pilot who committed the deed. But of course, like the FBI, it is but one source of information.
4. Who gave the "shoot down" order?
When Flight 93 crashed at 10:03 a.m., "the nearest fighter jets were 100 miles away," concludes the film. "At 10:18 a.m," the movie asserts, "the President ordered the military to engage hijacked air craft." Fifteen minutes too late, in other words. Investigative evidence, based on sourced documents, suggests that Vice President Dick Cheney gave the shoot-down order, possibly to prevent Flight 93 from landing successfully and revealing some damning evidence that disproved the "19 hijackers acting alone" theory.
5. Did Flight 93 actually crash at all?
Based on eye-witnesses, the makers of the Google-driven 9/11 film phenomenon "Loose Change" suggest that Flight 93 may have landed in Cleveland, Ohio later on that fateful morning. In other words, whatever happened in and around Shanksville was smoke and mirrors.
Before you dismiss any of this as conspiratorial rantings, I suggest doing some research of your own. Begin with David Ray Griffin’s readable The New Pearl Harbor, and then move on to the official 911 Commission Report and its essential companion volume, Griffin’s Omissions and Distortions. Michael Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon is also an invaluable resource.
I don’t profess to know the truth about what actually happened on 9/11, but I’m reasonably convinced that the official 9/11 "conspiracy theory" story, helped along by propaganda pieces like "United 93," are deliberately muddying the waters at a time when what we need more than anything in our troubled country is clarity, honesty, and a new vision for our common future as we confront global Peak Oil, rampant militarism, electoral fraud, corporate corruption, and a "war that will not end in our lifetimes" (to quote the U.S. Vice President).
But don’t take my word for it. During May 2006’s first week, as "United 93" pulled in $11.5 million in ticket sales to become the second most-watched film in the United States, the White House’s current occupant, not yet having seen the film, noted in a televised CNBC financial news network interview that the 9/11 Flight 93 passenger "revolt" against the hijackers had struck the first blow of "World War III."
"Let’s roll" onward with those words in mind.
Read more at http://www.robwilliamsmedia.com
Bush Reverses Stand on Spy Program Oversight
Bush Reverses Stand on Spy Program Oversight
Will Allow Full Senate and House Intelligence Committees to Review Surveillance
By David Morgan, Reuters
WASHINGTON (May 17) -
The White House, in an abrupt reversal, has agreed to let the full Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees review President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, lawmakers said on Tuesday.
The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House panels disclosed the shift two days before a Senate confirmation hearing for Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden as the new CIA director, which is expected to be dominated by concern over the program.
The chairmen said separately that Bush had agreed to full committee oversight of his Terrorist Surveillance Program rather than the more limited briefings allowed up to now.
The White House, under political pressure, did agree to conduct a set of briefings for the two full committees earlier this year, but those sessions did not disclose operational details about the eavesdropping.
Initiated after the September 11 attacks, the program lets the National Security Agency eavesdrop without a court warrant on international phone calls and e-mails made by U.S. citizens if one party is suspected to have links with terrorism.
It has stirred an outcry among rights groups and lawmakers who believe Bush overstepped his constitutional authority.
The White House has sought to avoid full committee oversight by limiting briefings to subcommittees from each panel. Initially, the administration shared program details only with the chairmen and vice chairmen of the committees and party leaders in the House and Senate.
"It became apparent that in order to have a fully informed confirmation hearing, all members of my committee needed to know the full width and breadth of the president's program," Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who heads the 15-member Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement.
Democrats, who have long pushed for full hearings, said the change would bring the White House into compliance with the National Security Act of 1947, which requires the executive branch to keep Congress informed on intelligence matters.
"The White House, for the first time, is showing signs that they are serious about oversight," said Democrat Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the Senate panel's vice chairman.
A full Senate committee briefing was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.
Full oversight was expected to replace subcommittee reviews that have been in place since earlier this year, said committee staff members from both chambers.
CONFIRMATION HEARING
Hayden, who was the program's architect as NSA director from 1999 to 2005, was expected to face a blizzard of questions on NSA spying at a Thursday confirmation hearing before Roberts' committee.
Republicans and Democrats have said Hayden's confirmation would depend on his answers would be.
A congressional aide who deals with intelligence matters said the change in policy on NSA oversight would allow Hayden to speak about the program during the classified segment of his confirmation hearing.
The aide predicted that broader oversight could also pave the way for bringing the program under federal law.
Hayden has signaled possible support for this during meetings with members of Congress. Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said full oversight would eliminate what he called politically driven rumors.
Bush has defended the program by saying the intelligence activities he authored are lawful and necessary to protect Americans from further harm.
Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan
Will Allow Full Senate and House Intelligence Committees to Review Surveillance
By David Morgan, Reuters
WASHINGTON (May 17) -
The White House, in an abrupt reversal, has agreed to let the full Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees review President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, lawmakers said on Tuesday.
The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House panels disclosed the shift two days before a Senate confirmation hearing for Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden as the new CIA director, which is expected to be dominated by concern over the program.
The chairmen said separately that Bush had agreed to full committee oversight of his Terrorist Surveillance Program rather than the more limited briefings allowed up to now.
The White House, under political pressure, did agree to conduct a set of briefings for the two full committees earlier this year, but those sessions did not disclose operational details about the eavesdropping.
Initiated after the September 11 attacks, the program lets the National Security Agency eavesdrop without a court warrant on international phone calls and e-mails made by U.S. citizens if one party is suspected to have links with terrorism.
It has stirred an outcry among rights groups and lawmakers who believe Bush overstepped his constitutional authority.
The White House has sought to avoid full committee oversight by limiting briefings to subcommittees from each panel. Initially, the administration shared program details only with the chairmen and vice chairmen of the committees and party leaders in the House and Senate.
"It became apparent that in order to have a fully informed confirmation hearing, all members of my committee needed to know the full width and breadth of the president's program," Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who heads the 15-member Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement.
Democrats, who have long pushed for full hearings, said the change would bring the White House into compliance with the National Security Act of 1947, which requires the executive branch to keep Congress informed on intelligence matters.
"The White House, for the first time, is showing signs that they are serious about oversight," said Democrat Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the Senate panel's vice chairman.
A full Senate committee briefing was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.
Full oversight was expected to replace subcommittee reviews that have been in place since earlier this year, said committee staff members from both chambers.
CONFIRMATION HEARING
Hayden, who was the program's architect as NSA director from 1999 to 2005, was expected to face a blizzard of questions on NSA spying at a Thursday confirmation hearing before Roberts' committee.
Republicans and Democrats have said Hayden's confirmation would depend on his answers would be.
A congressional aide who deals with intelligence matters said the change in policy on NSA oversight would allow Hayden to speak about the program during the classified segment of his confirmation hearing.
The aide predicted that broader oversight could also pave the way for bringing the program under federal law.
Hayden has signaled possible support for this during meetings with members of Congress. Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said full oversight would eliminate what he called politically driven rumors.
Bush has defended the program by saying the intelligence activities he authored are lawful and necessary to protect Americans from further harm.
Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Bush's Immigration Speech Is Bad Policy, Bad Politics
Bush's Immigration Speech Is Bad Policy, Bad Politics
By Marc Cooper
truthdig.com
Monday 15 May 2006
One of the nation's leading experts on immigration policy writes that Bush's May 15 speech "had nothing to do with actual border policy and everything to do with domestic electoral politics."
Let's get a couple of things straight about the immigration speech President George W. Bush unreeled Monday night from the Oval Office.
His address had nothing to do with actual border policy and everything to do with domestic electoral politics.
The real mission of the 6,000 National Guard troops he has called out is to quell the rebellion on the president's right flank, the flaring mutiny of his own conservative base. Indeed, if the president were being honest, the mobilized troops would be taken off the federal payroll and moved onto the books of the 2006 national Republican campaign.
They certainly aren't going to be stopping illegal immigration. Most of the Guard will be unarmed. They will be barred from patrolling the border itself, as well as from confronting, apprehending or even guarding the undocumented. The troops will be given solely behind-the-scenes, low-profile, mostly invisible tasks of pushing paper, driving vans and manning computers. Bush could have saved the taxpayers a load and sent a few battalions of Boy Scouts to do this job.
I've spent oodles of hours and days on the border over the last five years, having multiple contacts and visits with the Border Patrol, and I've yet to bump into a single one of the 350 National Guard members already deployed on the border.
Of course, "sending troops to the border" sounds great - if you are among those who actually believe there is a technological or military fix possible for our busted - out immigration policy. That's what Bush is hoping, at least: that conservatives who are fed up with him, especially on what they see as his failure to stop the human tide of poor people washing across the desert, will be revitalized by the manufactured fantasy of crew-cut, uniformed young Americans standing shoulder-to-shoulder from Yuma to El Paso.
Chances are Bush's border move will be no more successful than his management of the war in Iraq or his response to Katrina. The close-the-border faction of his own party is highly unlikely to accept Monday night's sop. They know, just as the governors of New Mexico and California know, just as local law enforcement on the border knows, that Bush's gesture is but a photo-op political stunt. They want the border closed, period. And their political representatives in the House-the Sensenbrenners and the Tancredos-are showing no signs of softening their resistance to both a guest worker plan and a legalization path for the illegals already here.
And even those who bought the get-tough portion of the president's speech also heard him endorse "comprehensive immigration reform" and a "temporary worker program," i.e. precisely the sort of measures scorned and denounced as an "amnesty." So much for placating the right. Likewise, as I wrote before the speech ("Bush Bull: Troops on the Border"), Bush's dispatch of troops-no matter how empty and symbolic-contains enough reality to rankle the more liberal forces in the pro-immigration coalition.
In short, the president has now managed to alienate himself further from his own base as well as from some of his more reluctant and expedient allies on immigration. Heckuvajob, Dubya.
Bush's plan may, however, provide short-term benefit to some very nervous and endangered Republican House incumbents, offering them short-term political cover. But the longer-term risk seems enormous. A growing number of Republican strategists know that the Latino vote will loom ever more crucial in deciding which party will command governing majorities. And they are worried that the long-term damage of the president pandering to the anti-immigration forces could be devastating.
What a media spectacle was whipped up, by the way, over this totally forgettable speech. CNN treated the speech with all the gravitas of the launching of a manned mission to Mars, complete with a countdown clock and rolling all-day coverage. With boundless shamelessness, the all-news network ensconced the sputtering Lou Dobbs as one of its color commentators for this artificially constructed event, something akin to having asked George Wallace to objectively narrate the Great March on Washington. I don't fault Dobbs, a modern-day Ted Baxter who has found a lucrative niche as CNN's resident Minuteman. But, please, let us heap industrial amounts of shame on the babbling Wolf Blitzer, who repeatedly deferred to Dobbs as if the latter was the font of all authority on this issue.
A phalanx of reporters will now head to the border, seeking to file feature stories on newly arrived Guard members. And one can expect the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to accommodate the media spoon-feeding. The safe bet, though, is that this speech, in spite of the cable hype, will soon evaporate into the mists of memory.
The truth be told, the totality of Bush's speech was rather reasonable. Stripping away the political theatrics and the empty phrasing, and putting aside the undue emphasis on deployment of the Guard, the president did endorse the sort of bipartisan reforms proposed by a coalition stretching from John McCain and the Chamber of Commerce to Ted Kennedy and the Service Employees International Union. And he called directly on both houses of Congress to finally agree upon and pass a bill that reflects that consensus. Problem is that Bush should have been speaking out forcefully in favor of these moves ever since he raised comprehensive reform as a priority in his 2004 State of the Union speech. Unfortunately, he hid under his desk on this issue for the last two years. Only after the right wing of his base rebelled and only after the pro-immigrant movement blossomed in the streets-that is, only after the White House was completely overtaken by events-did the president act. And as usual, it was too little, too late.
--------
Marc Cooper has reported on international and domestic American politics for dozens of publications, and is Senior Fellow for Border Justice at USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism. He is the author of several books, including a memoir about his time as translator for Chile's President Salvador Allende and surviving the 1973 military coup.
Go to Original
10,000 US Troops to Be Sent to Mexican Border
By Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian UK
Tuesday 16 May 2006
Bush courts the right with immigration crackdown. Forces overstretched, say critics on both sides.
George Bush, scrambling to hold on to an increasingly disaffected conservative Republican base, said last night that he was deploying thousands of troops on America's border with Mexico to crack down on illegal immigration.
With opinion polls charting a steep decline in support from the conservatives who have been the president's bedrock, Mr Bush promised to deploy as many as 6,000 national guard troops along the 2,000-mile frontier as part of a $1.9bn (£1.01bn) programme to seal off America's border. He also plans to increase the border patrol force.
"We do not yet have full control of the border and I am determined to change that," Mr Bush said in prepared remarks. "I am calling on Congress to provide funding for dramatic improvements in manpower and technology on the border."
Last night's address was intended to disarm conservative opposition to legislation coming before the Senate this week for a guest worker programme that would allow many of the 11 million illegal immigrants already in the US a chance at becoming citizens.
Mr Bush plans to follow up his address with a visit on Thursday to the border in Arizona to further press his case. He is also expected to call on immigrants to learn English if they want to gain US passports.
In addition to the national guard, which will play a supporting role to the border patrol forces, the plan unveiled by Mr Bush last night calls for an increase in detention centres for illegal immigrants.
The tough talk on border security was intended to reassure conservatives who have agitated for harsher treatment of illegal immigrants. But Mr Bush faced a delicate balancing act, reeling in his conservative base while not alienating the increasingly important Hispanic voting bloc. "We will fix the problems created by illegal immigration and we will deliver a system that is secure, orderly and fair," Mr Bush said.
Earlier yesterday Karl Rove, the White House adviser, reached out to both constituencies. In a speech to a conservative thinktank, he said: "We have got a border that is so porous, who knows whether that is simply an illegal immigrant looking to get a job in a landscaping company, or somebody who wants to do something worse?" But he went on to say a guest worker programme was a necessity.
Last night's speech marked the first phase of a concerted effort by the White House to shore up a conservative base whose support for Mr Bush has declined from 80% to 50%. But Democratic as well as Republican leaders lined up to express their doubts. "The national guard already is stretched to the limit by repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as from providing disaster assistance in their own states," said Edward Kennedy, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
Although Mr Rove was upbeat yesterday about the Republicans' prospects in next November's elections, he admitted that Mr Bush's popularity had declined.
Asked about the Republican party's prospects in the midterm elections, Mr Rove said: "Look, we're in a sour time. Being in the middle of a war where people turn on their TV sets and see brave men and women dying is not something that makes people happy and optimistic and upbeat."
In an attempt to turn things around, Mr Bush will hold a signing ceremony at the White House for an extension of his tax cuts later this week. Next month Congress is expected to return to the controversial issue of gay rights, with a vote on a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriages.
-------
By Marc Cooper
truthdig.com
Monday 15 May 2006
One of the nation's leading experts on immigration policy writes that Bush's May 15 speech "had nothing to do with actual border policy and everything to do with domestic electoral politics."
Let's get a couple of things straight about the immigration speech President George W. Bush unreeled Monday night from the Oval Office.
His address had nothing to do with actual border policy and everything to do with domestic electoral politics.
The real mission of the 6,000 National Guard troops he has called out is to quell the rebellion on the president's right flank, the flaring mutiny of his own conservative base. Indeed, if the president were being honest, the mobilized troops would be taken off the federal payroll and moved onto the books of the 2006 national Republican campaign.
They certainly aren't going to be stopping illegal immigration. Most of the Guard will be unarmed. They will be barred from patrolling the border itself, as well as from confronting, apprehending or even guarding the undocumented. The troops will be given solely behind-the-scenes, low-profile, mostly invisible tasks of pushing paper, driving vans and manning computers. Bush could have saved the taxpayers a load and sent a few battalions of Boy Scouts to do this job.
I've spent oodles of hours and days on the border over the last five years, having multiple contacts and visits with the Border Patrol, and I've yet to bump into a single one of the 350 National Guard members already deployed on the border.
Of course, "sending troops to the border" sounds great - if you are among those who actually believe there is a technological or military fix possible for our busted - out immigration policy. That's what Bush is hoping, at least: that conservatives who are fed up with him, especially on what they see as his failure to stop the human tide of poor people washing across the desert, will be revitalized by the manufactured fantasy of crew-cut, uniformed young Americans standing shoulder-to-shoulder from Yuma to El Paso.
Chances are Bush's border move will be no more successful than his management of the war in Iraq or his response to Katrina. The close-the-border faction of his own party is highly unlikely to accept Monday night's sop. They know, just as the governors of New Mexico and California know, just as local law enforcement on the border knows, that Bush's gesture is but a photo-op political stunt. They want the border closed, period. And their political representatives in the House-the Sensenbrenners and the Tancredos-are showing no signs of softening their resistance to both a guest worker plan and a legalization path for the illegals already here.
And even those who bought the get-tough portion of the president's speech also heard him endorse "comprehensive immigration reform" and a "temporary worker program," i.e. precisely the sort of measures scorned and denounced as an "amnesty." So much for placating the right. Likewise, as I wrote before the speech ("Bush Bull: Troops on the Border"), Bush's dispatch of troops-no matter how empty and symbolic-contains enough reality to rankle the more liberal forces in the pro-immigration coalition.
In short, the president has now managed to alienate himself further from his own base as well as from some of his more reluctant and expedient allies on immigration. Heckuvajob, Dubya.
Bush's plan may, however, provide short-term benefit to some very nervous and endangered Republican House incumbents, offering them short-term political cover. But the longer-term risk seems enormous. A growing number of Republican strategists know that the Latino vote will loom ever more crucial in deciding which party will command governing majorities. And they are worried that the long-term damage of the president pandering to the anti-immigration forces could be devastating.
What a media spectacle was whipped up, by the way, over this totally forgettable speech. CNN treated the speech with all the gravitas of the launching of a manned mission to Mars, complete with a countdown clock and rolling all-day coverage. With boundless shamelessness, the all-news network ensconced the sputtering Lou Dobbs as one of its color commentators for this artificially constructed event, something akin to having asked George Wallace to objectively narrate the Great March on Washington. I don't fault Dobbs, a modern-day Ted Baxter who has found a lucrative niche as CNN's resident Minuteman. But, please, let us heap industrial amounts of shame on the babbling Wolf Blitzer, who repeatedly deferred to Dobbs as if the latter was the font of all authority on this issue.
A phalanx of reporters will now head to the border, seeking to file feature stories on newly arrived Guard members. And one can expect the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to accommodate the media spoon-feeding. The safe bet, though, is that this speech, in spite of the cable hype, will soon evaporate into the mists of memory.
The truth be told, the totality of Bush's speech was rather reasonable. Stripping away the political theatrics and the empty phrasing, and putting aside the undue emphasis on deployment of the Guard, the president did endorse the sort of bipartisan reforms proposed by a coalition stretching from John McCain and the Chamber of Commerce to Ted Kennedy and the Service Employees International Union. And he called directly on both houses of Congress to finally agree upon and pass a bill that reflects that consensus. Problem is that Bush should have been speaking out forcefully in favor of these moves ever since he raised comprehensive reform as a priority in his 2004 State of the Union speech. Unfortunately, he hid under his desk on this issue for the last two years. Only after the right wing of his base rebelled and only after the pro-immigrant movement blossomed in the streets-that is, only after the White House was completely overtaken by events-did the president act. And as usual, it was too little, too late.
--------
Marc Cooper has reported on international and domestic American politics for dozens of publications, and is Senior Fellow for Border Justice at USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism. He is the author of several books, including a memoir about his time as translator for Chile's President Salvador Allende and surviving the 1973 military coup.
Go to Original
10,000 US Troops to Be Sent to Mexican Border
By Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian UK
Tuesday 16 May 2006
Bush courts the right with immigration crackdown. Forces overstretched, say critics on both sides.
George Bush, scrambling to hold on to an increasingly disaffected conservative Republican base, said last night that he was deploying thousands of troops on America's border with Mexico to crack down on illegal immigration.
With opinion polls charting a steep decline in support from the conservatives who have been the president's bedrock, Mr Bush promised to deploy as many as 6,000 national guard troops along the 2,000-mile frontier as part of a $1.9bn (£1.01bn) programme to seal off America's border. He also plans to increase the border patrol force.
"We do not yet have full control of the border and I am determined to change that," Mr Bush said in prepared remarks. "I am calling on Congress to provide funding for dramatic improvements in manpower and technology on the border."
Last night's address was intended to disarm conservative opposition to legislation coming before the Senate this week for a guest worker programme that would allow many of the 11 million illegal immigrants already in the US a chance at becoming citizens.
Mr Bush plans to follow up his address with a visit on Thursday to the border in Arizona to further press his case. He is also expected to call on immigrants to learn English if they want to gain US passports.
In addition to the national guard, which will play a supporting role to the border patrol forces, the plan unveiled by Mr Bush last night calls for an increase in detention centres for illegal immigrants.
The tough talk on border security was intended to reassure conservatives who have agitated for harsher treatment of illegal immigrants. But Mr Bush faced a delicate balancing act, reeling in his conservative base while not alienating the increasingly important Hispanic voting bloc. "We will fix the problems created by illegal immigration and we will deliver a system that is secure, orderly and fair," Mr Bush said.
Earlier yesterday Karl Rove, the White House adviser, reached out to both constituencies. In a speech to a conservative thinktank, he said: "We have got a border that is so porous, who knows whether that is simply an illegal immigrant looking to get a job in a landscaping company, or somebody who wants to do something worse?" But he went on to say a guest worker programme was a necessity.
Last night's speech marked the first phase of a concerted effort by the White House to shore up a conservative base whose support for Mr Bush has declined from 80% to 50%. But Democratic as well as Republican leaders lined up to express their doubts. "The national guard already is stretched to the limit by repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as from providing disaster assistance in their own states," said Edward Kennedy, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
Although Mr Rove was upbeat yesterday about the Republicans' prospects in next November's elections, he admitted that Mr Bush's popularity had declined.
Asked about the Republican party's prospects in the midterm elections, Mr Rove said: "Look, we're in a sour time. Being in the middle of a war where people turn on their TV sets and see brave men and women dying is not something that makes people happy and optimistic and upbeat."
In an attempt to turn things around, Mr Bush will hold a signing ceremony at the White House for an extension of his tax cuts later this week. Next month Congress is expected to return to the controversial issue of gay rights, with a vote on a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriages.
-------
Lack of Surprise Greets Word of U.S.-Libya Ties
Lack of Surprise Greets Word of U.S.-Libya Ties
Democracy No Longer Seen as Top Priority
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 16, 2006; A12
**good, I'm not the only one completely unsurprised by this move....**
CAIRO, May 15 -- The normalization of U.S.-Libya relations is a natural marriage of an American administration desperate for friends and oil in the Middle East and a government that needs to open its economy to the outside world, Arab and exiled Libyan observers said Monday.
The announcement was called proof that promotion of democracy is no longer a top priority of the Bush administration, which is grappling to hold Iraq together and has turned attention toward building alliances against a hostile Iran over its nuclear program. Libya has been ruled by Moammar Gaddafi since he seized power in 1969.
"The timing can be explained by a need for the United States to have a positive breakthrough in the Middle East," said Mohamed Sayed Said, a political analyst at the Egyptian government-run Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "With Libya, Washington gets a regime that has converted itself from radicalism to accommodation."
"It's self-evident," Said went on, "that there is a retreat from democracy and that in the current atmosphere, the United States is aligning itself with nondemocratic regimes. Democracy is not going to be the point of departure for relations between the United States and governments in the region."
Analysts expressed a lack of surprise over the U.S.-Libya rapprochement, saying it had been inevitable since Gaddafi gave up Libya's nuclear weapons program three years ago. Restoring full diplomatic relations was merely icing on the cake, observers said.
The United States lifted its economic embargo against Libya in 2004, and since then, at least six U.S. oil companies have resumed drilling and exploration that had been suspended in 1986. Libya possesses the world's eighth-largest oil reserves, but the U.S. embargo had driven down production by keeping new equipment and technology out of the country.
On Monday, a top Libyan official said that relations would benefit not just Libya but also the United States. "It is a result of mutual interests, agreements and understandings. In politics there is no such thing as a reward, but there are interests," Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam told the Associated Press. "This will certainly open a new chapter in the relations of the two countries."
Libya is still regularly listed by human rights groups as having one of the world's most repressive governments. A recent survey by Freedom House, a U.S.-based organization that promotes democracy worldwide, placed Libya in the bottom five countries in terms of the free flow of information.
Libyan exiles reacted with ambivalence to the U.S. outreach to their homeland. "It might be good for the Libyan people. It might be easier to get rid of Gaddafi in a Libya that is more open," said Mohammed Zayan, a democracy activist exiled in London. In any case, Libyans did not put much stock in U.S. pressure for democracy, he said: "No one was gambling on it."
Suleiman Bouchuiguir, general secretary of the Geneva-based Libyan League for Human Rights, said with resignation: "It's not pertinent as regards human rights. Opening relations is strictly an issue of U.S. interests. The democracy drive is being undermined by the problems in Iraq."
How far Libya might go in aligning itself with the United States could become clear on Tuesday, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is scheduled to visit Tripoli, the Libyan capital.
Chavez has set himself up as South America's leading anti-American politician and has spearheaded a drive on the continent to reduce the influence of foreign companies. Gaddafi, in contrast, is trying to attract U.S. and European petroleum companies to explore Libya's reserves and increase production.
Democracy No Longer Seen as Top Priority
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 16, 2006; A12
**good, I'm not the only one completely unsurprised by this move....**
CAIRO, May 15 -- The normalization of U.S.-Libya relations is a natural marriage of an American administration desperate for friends and oil in the Middle East and a government that needs to open its economy to the outside world, Arab and exiled Libyan observers said Monday.
The announcement was called proof that promotion of democracy is no longer a top priority of the Bush administration, which is grappling to hold Iraq together and has turned attention toward building alliances against a hostile Iran over its nuclear program. Libya has been ruled by Moammar Gaddafi since he seized power in 1969.
"The timing can be explained by a need for the United States to have a positive breakthrough in the Middle East," said Mohamed Sayed Said, a political analyst at the Egyptian government-run Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "With Libya, Washington gets a regime that has converted itself from radicalism to accommodation."
"It's self-evident," Said went on, "that there is a retreat from democracy and that in the current atmosphere, the United States is aligning itself with nondemocratic regimes. Democracy is not going to be the point of departure for relations between the United States and governments in the region."
Analysts expressed a lack of surprise over the U.S.-Libya rapprochement, saying it had been inevitable since Gaddafi gave up Libya's nuclear weapons program three years ago. Restoring full diplomatic relations was merely icing on the cake, observers said.
The United States lifted its economic embargo against Libya in 2004, and since then, at least six U.S. oil companies have resumed drilling and exploration that had been suspended in 1986. Libya possesses the world's eighth-largest oil reserves, but the U.S. embargo had driven down production by keeping new equipment and technology out of the country.
On Monday, a top Libyan official said that relations would benefit not just Libya but also the United States. "It is a result of mutual interests, agreements and understandings. In politics there is no such thing as a reward, but there are interests," Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam told the Associated Press. "This will certainly open a new chapter in the relations of the two countries."
Libya is still regularly listed by human rights groups as having one of the world's most repressive governments. A recent survey by Freedom House, a U.S.-based organization that promotes democracy worldwide, placed Libya in the bottom five countries in terms of the free flow of information.
Libyan exiles reacted with ambivalence to the U.S. outreach to their homeland. "It might be good for the Libyan people. It might be easier to get rid of Gaddafi in a Libya that is more open," said Mohammed Zayan, a democracy activist exiled in London. In any case, Libyans did not put much stock in U.S. pressure for democracy, he said: "No one was gambling on it."
Suleiman Bouchuiguir, general secretary of the Geneva-based Libyan League for Human Rights, said with resignation: "It's not pertinent as regards human rights. Opening relations is strictly an issue of U.S. interests. The democracy drive is being undermined by the problems in Iraq."
How far Libya might go in aligning itself with the United States could become clear on Tuesday, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is scheduled to visit Tripoli, the Libyan capital.
Chavez has set himself up as South America's leading anti-American politician and has spearheaded a drive on the continent to reduce the influence of foreign companies. Gaddafi, in contrast, is trying to attract U.S. and European petroleum companies to explore Libya's reserves and increase production.
Bringing in Guard Raises Concerns Of Militarization
Bringing in Guard Raises Concerns Of Militarization
By Sylvia Moreno and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 16, 2006; A08
LAREDO, Tex., May 15 -- For years, Mayor Elizabeth G. Flores has been asking Washington for more help in controlling not only illegal immigration but also drug trafficking here at the nation's second-busiest border crossing. More Border Patrol. Better technology. More federal resources.
But militarize the border with National Guardsmen? That is where she draws the line.
"We have over 300 Border Patrol officers from here serving in Iraq. Why doesn't [President Bush] bring them home to do the job they were trained to do?" said Flores as she walked inside City Hall, which overlooks Texas and U.S. flags out front and the Mexican flag about a quarter-mile away at the border. This seat of government sits in one of "los dos Laredos," the two Laredos, as locals say -- Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, through which 4.4 million pedestrians, 6.3 million vehicles and 1.4 million trucks pass yearly.
"The National Guard is trained to protect us from deadly people," said Flores, a Democrat who has been in office 8 1/2 years. "People crossing over here to work are not our deadly enemy. . . . I think this is all about discrimination and nothing else."
To assuage such concerns over a militarized border, Bush in his nationally televised address Monday stressed that the National Guard troops would play a strictly supporting role, saying, "The Border Patrol will remain in the lead."
But the front-line fears of some local officials reflect only a few of the broader questions about how the new National Guard role will work. Apart from whether the Guard is the right force to use, Guard officials themselves wonder how their forces, stretched by war-zone deployments and homeland defense, will tackle a new mission, what skills it will demand and -- perhaps most critical -- for how long.
Bush said as many as 6,000 Guard troops will be deployed along the border for at least a year to help operate surveillance systems, to analyze intelligence, to install fences, to build patrol roads and to train. Guard units will reduce their numbers as the Border Patrol gains strength, he said, and will not be directly involved in law enforcement.
Defense and Guard officials said the new mission would create challenges for the Guard but should be feasible as long as it remains temporary. "I personally think we can handle it," said Maj. Gen. Roger P. Lempke, president of the Adjutants General Association of the United States. But he said he hoped the mission would last no longer than one year. "As long as we are there and visible, there will be pressure to get the final solution done," he said.
The 440,000-strong National Guard has had more than 280,000 troops federally mobilized for overseas missions and homeland defense since 2001. Nearly 71,000 are currently deployed, with 17,000 of them in Iraq.
In the most likely scenario, Guard troops sent to the border would remain under the command of governors but be paid for with federal funds, officials said.
The additional troops for the border would be drawn from around the nation, defense officials said, although initially most would come from states on or near the border or from underused units. Guard units could also perform their required annual training on the border, a defense official said.
The Guard could also expand the 400-strong force of full-time Guard members now assisting border security personnel in countering drug trafficking and narco-terrorism in the four border states. This force, the Southwest State Joint Counterdrug Task Force, has existed since 1989 but has shrunk from about 1,000 people in 1999 because of a 44 percent cut in its budget, according to Guard figures.
"We could very quickly ramp up and double the effort if the funding was available," said a National Guard counter-drug official at the National Guard Bureau who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the new policy was not finalized. "You are using the same techniques to find illegal drug traffickers or to find a person."
The Counterdrug Task Force operates four RC-26 aircraft and 15 to 20 OH-58 helicopters equipped with infrared radars and high-powered lights that can photograph and track movements of vehicles and people crossing the border.
The task force also uses military ground sensors to detect people coming over the border and gamma ray imagers to inspect vehicles and cargo. Guard engineers have helped build roads and fences. The task force also assists with intelligence analysis such as reviewing license plates and phone call records, tracks money laundering, and provides Spanish-speaking military linguists who translate recordings and documents.
About 10,000 Border Patrol agents are deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border, and patrol hours climbed about 167 percent between 1997 and 2005. But there is no clear link between staffing and arrests, or between arrests and a reduction in the flow of illegal immigration, analysts say.
Estimates of how many agents are needed vary. In 1999, one estimate given the House projected that 16,000 were needed on the southern border. In 2004, Congress authorized the hiring of 10,000 more and is slowly funding them.
But in Laredo, although some officials agreed on the need for more border forces, they voiced fear that military deployment could send the wrong message.
"It's showing your teeth before you reach out your hand," said the president of Texas A&M International University here, Ray Keck. Keck said federal officials do not understand the interdependence of U.S. border cities and their Mexican counterparts, noting that 10 percent of his university's students are Mexican nationals.
The Mexican consul in Laredo, Daniel Hernandez Joseph, said he welcomed proposals to increase border security. But he said that deploying the National Guard would "not be seen as a friendly act."
"Do they understand that every Hispanic is not illegal?" Hernandez said of the National Guard. "The Border Patrol has that training."
Tyson reported from Washington. Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.
By Sylvia Moreno and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 16, 2006; A08
LAREDO, Tex., May 15 -- For years, Mayor Elizabeth G. Flores has been asking Washington for more help in controlling not only illegal immigration but also drug trafficking here at the nation's second-busiest border crossing. More Border Patrol. Better technology. More federal resources.
But militarize the border with National Guardsmen? That is where she draws the line.
"We have over 300 Border Patrol officers from here serving in Iraq. Why doesn't [President Bush] bring them home to do the job they were trained to do?" said Flores as she walked inside City Hall, which overlooks Texas and U.S. flags out front and the Mexican flag about a quarter-mile away at the border. This seat of government sits in one of "los dos Laredos," the two Laredos, as locals say -- Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, through which 4.4 million pedestrians, 6.3 million vehicles and 1.4 million trucks pass yearly.
"The National Guard is trained to protect us from deadly people," said Flores, a Democrat who has been in office 8 1/2 years. "People crossing over here to work are not our deadly enemy. . . . I think this is all about discrimination and nothing else."
To assuage such concerns over a militarized border, Bush in his nationally televised address Monday stressed that the National Guard troops would play a strictly supporting role, saying, "The Border Patrol will remain in the lead."
But the front-line fears of some local officials reflect only a few of the broader questions about how the new National Guard role will work. Apart from whether the Guard is the right force to use, Guard officials themselves wonder how their forces, stretched by war-zone deployments and homeland defense, will tackle a new mission, what skills it will demand and -- perhaps most critical -- for how long.
Bush said as many as 6,000 Guard troops will be deployed along the border for at least a year to help operate surveillance systems, to analyze intelligence, to install fences, to build patrol roads and to train. Guard units will reduce their numbers as the Border Patrol gains strength, he said, and will not be directly involved in law enforcement.
Defense and Guard officials said the new mission would create challenges for the Guard but should be feasible as long as it remains temporary. "I personally think we can handle it," said Maj. Gen. Roger P. Lempke, president of the Adjutants General Association of the United States. But he said he hoped the mission would last no longer than one year. "As long as we are there and visible, there will be pressure to get the final solution done," he said.
The 440,000-strong National Guard has had more than 280,000 troops federally mobilized for overseas missions and homeland defense since 2001. Nearly 71,000 are currently deployed, with 17,000 of them in Iraq.
In the most likely scenario, Guard troops sent to the border would remain under the command of governors but be paid for with federal funds, officials said.
The additional troops for the border would be drawn from around the nation, defense officials said, although initially most would come from states on or near the border or from underused units. Guard units could also perform their required annual training on the border, a defense official said.
The Guard could also expand the 400-strong force of full-time Guard members now assisting border security personnel in countering drug trafficking and narco-terrorism in the four border states. This force, the Southwest State Joint Counterdrug Task Force, has existed since 1989 but has shrunk from about 1,000 people in 1999 because of a 44 percent cut in its budget, according to Guard figures.
"We could very quickly ramp up and double the effort if the funding was available," said a National Guard counter-drug official at the National Guard Bureau who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the new policy was not finalized. "You are using the same techniques to find illegal drug traffickers or to find a person."
The Counterdrug Task Force operates four RC-26 aircraft and 15 to 20 OH-58 helicopters equipped with infrared radars and high-powered lights that can photograph and track movements of vehicles and people crossing the border.
The task force also uses military ground sensors to detect people coming over the border and gamma ray imagers to inspect vehicles and cargo. Guard engineers have helped build roads and fences. The task force also assists with intelligence analysis such as reviewing license plates and phone call records, tracks money laundering, and provides Spanish-speaking military linguists who translate recordings and documents.
About 10,000 Border Patrol agents are deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border, and patrol hours climbed about 167 percent between 1997 and 2005. But there is no clear link between staffing and arrests, or between arrests and a reduction in the flow of illegal immigration, analysts say.
Estimates of how many agents are needed vary. In 1999, one estimate given the House projected that 16,000 were needed on the southern border. In 2004, Congress authorized the hiring of 10,000 more and is slowly funding them.
But in Laredo, although some officials agreed on the need for more border forces, they voiced fear that military deployment could send the wrong message.
"It's showing your teeth before you reach out your hand," said the president of Texas A&M International University here, Ray Keck. Keck said federal officials do not understand the interdependence of U.S. border cities and their Mexican counterparts, noting that 10 percent of his university's students are Mexican nationals.
The Mexican consul in Laredo, Daniel Hernandez Joseph, said he welcomed proposals to increase border security. But he said that deploying the National Guard would "not be seen as a friendly act."
"Do they understand that every Hispanic is not illegal?" Hernandez said of the National Guard. "The Border Patrol has that training."
Tyson reported from Washington. Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.
Italian Pay-off From Niger Forgery?
Italian Pay-off From Niger Forgery?
By Jeffrey Klein and Paolo Pontoniere, New America Media
Posted on May 15, 2006, Printed on May 16, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/36183/
Italian journalists and parliamentary investigators are hot on the trail of how pre-Iraq War Italian forged documents were delivered to the White House alleging that Saddam Hussein had obtained yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.
New links implicating Italian companies and individuals with then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now raise the question of whether Berlusconi received a payback as part of the deal -- namely, a Pentagon contract to build the U.S. president's special fleet of helicopters.
The yellowcake story in the United States has long been linked to the ongoing investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame's diplomat husband Joe Wilson had probed the Niger connection and concluded that the Bush administration was twisting intelligence reports to fit its case for war.
Two people -- Carlo Rossella and Giovanni Castellaneta -- are at the center of Italian inquiries into the transfer of the yellowcake dossier from the SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency, to the White House.
According to the influential Rome-based La Repubblica, Carlo Rossella -- at the time editor-in-chief of Berlusconi's Panorama, one of Italy's largest weeklies -- delivered the dossier in the autumn of 2002 to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Rossella's actions were puzzling because its top investigative reporter, Elisabetta Burba, was in the midst of discounting the file as a gross falsification.
Besides directing Panorama, Rossella -- once a foreign policy advisor to Berlusconi -- had been considered a candidate to direct RAI, Italy's state broadcasting system.
A more direct connection to Berlusconi is Giovanni Castellaneta, current Italian ambassador to the United States and Berlusconi's former national security adviser.
According to La Repubblica, Nicola Pollari, the head of SISMI, tried to dispel the CIA's misgivings about the authenticity of the yellowcake papers and failed. Castellaneta then arranged for Pollari to bypass the CIA and meet directly with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, Rice's chief deputy and currently national security advisor. The meeting took place on Sept. 9, 2002, in the White House, and has been confirmed by White House officials.
It was after this meeting that the story of the yellowcake uranium ore from Niger took off. In late September, CIA director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the attempted yellowcake purchase from Niger in separate classified hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In advance of President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address, Hadley asked for the CIA's approval to include the Niger claim in the president's speech. Even though the CIA had explicitly excised the claim from a prior address given by the president and now repeated its misgivings to Hadley, Bush ended up saying in his speech that, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush attributed this intelligence to the British government. No mention was made of any connections between the Italian and American governments.
What did the Berlusconi government get in return for providing the Bush administration with a convenient "smoking gun" to attack Iraq? At the end of the yellowcake trail may be the prestigious contract an Italian firm won to manufacture Marine One -- the fleet of presidential helicopters. In January 2005, the U.S. Navy awarded the contract for the construction of 23 new Marine One helicopters to AgustaWestland. Marketing itself as an Anglo-Italian firm, AgustaWestland is wholly owned by Finmeccanica, Italy's largest defense conglomerate.
The choice of AgustaWestland for Marine One surprised most industry observers because U.S.-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. was the heavy favorite. Sikorsky patented the first helicopter design in 1939 and built virtually every president's helicopter since 1957. President Eisenhower regularly flew in a Sikorsky to his Gettysburg farm, and the Sikorsky that Nixon boarded when he resigned from the White House is now being restored for permanent display at the Nixon Library.
Not only did Sikorsky lose, but it lost to a foreign firm that has no problems selling its helicopters to the United States' adversaries. (See side bar, "Choppers for Sale, to Everyone")
As with the yellowcake dossier, the key figure in the Marine One contract is Gianni Castellaneta. When the Pentagon put the Marine One contract out for bid, Castellaneta was deputy chair of Finmeccanica and national security advisor to Prime Minister Berlusconi. By the time the contract was awarded, Castellaneta had been appointed Italy's ambassador to the United States.
Castellaneta proudly told U.S. Italia Weekly, "At noon President Bush received me for the official delivery of credentials. He didn't make me wait a single day. An exceptional courtesy."
Castellaneta's role in obtaining the Marine One contract has never been examined before, but according to Affari Italiani, Italy's first online daily, and disarmo.org, an Italian arms control advocacy group, Castellaneta has long managed the most sensitive dossiers in U.S.-Italian bilateral relations.
When Ambassador Castellaneta was asked about his role, the embassy press officer, Luca Ferrari said, "In his capacity as ambassador, representing all of Italy in the United States, the ambassador does not care to speak any more about Finmeccanica."
"Castellaneta's double role as ambassador and corporate businessman has come under scrutiny at various junctures," says Carlo Bonini, an Italian journalist who has extensively investigated the yellowcake affair. "His duality has inspired animated debate in the Italian Parliament, but due to the absolute majority of seats held by Berlusconi, the matter could never be fully discussed."
With center-left opposition leader Romano Prodi taking the helm of Italy's new government, the newly reconfigured Parliament is expected to open a probe into the "Yellowcake One" affair. For Italians, the main question is whether Berlusconi personally profited from the helicopter deal. For Americans, the question is whether the Bush administration paid the Italians back for providing the false intelligence that helped justify launching the war in Iraq.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/36183/
By Jeffrey Klein and Paolo Pontoniere, New America Media
Posted on May 15, 2006, Printed on May 16, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/36183/
Italian journalists and parliamentary investigators are hot on the trail of how pre-Iraq War Italian forged documents were delivered to the White House alleging that Saddam Hussein had obtained yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.
New links implicating Italian companies and individuals with then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now raise the question of whether Berlusconi received a payback as part of the deal -- namely, a Pentagon contract to build the U.S. president's special fleet of helicopters.
The yellowcake story in the United States has long been linked to the ongoing investigation into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame's diplomat husband Joe Wilson had probed the Niger connection and concluded that the Bush administration was twisting intelligence reports to fit its case for war.
Two people -- Carlo Rossella and Giovanni Castellaneta -- are at the center of Italian inquiries into the transfer of the yellowcake dossier from the SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency, to the White House.
According to the influential Rome-based La Repubblica, Carlo Rossella -- at the time editor-in-chief of Berlusconi's Panorama, one of Italy's largest weeklies -- delivered the dossier in the autumn of 2002 to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Rossella's actions were puzzling because its top investigative reporter, Elisabetta Burba, was in the midst of discounting the file as a gross falsification.
Besides directing Panorama, Rossella -- once a foreign policy advisor to Berlusconi -- had been considered a candidate to direct RAI, Italy's state broadcasting system.
A more direct connection to Berlusconi is Giovanni Castellaneta, current Italian ambassador to the United States and Berlusconi's former national security adviser.
According to La Repubblica, Nicola Pollari, the head of SISMI, tried to dispel the CIA's misgivings about the authenticity of the yellowcake papers and failed. Castellaneta then arranged for Pollari to bypass the CIA and meet directly with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, Rice's chief deputy and currently national security advisor. The meeting took place on Sept. 9, 2002, in the White House, and has been confirmed by White House officials.
It was after this meeting that the story of the yellowcake uranium ore from Niger took off. In late September, CIA director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the attempted yellowcake purchase from Niger in separate classified hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In advance of President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address, Hadley asked for the CIA's approval to include the Niger claim in the president's speech. Even though the CIA had explicitly excised the claim from a prior address given by the president and now repeated its misgivings to Hadley, Bush ended up saying in his speech that, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush attributed this intelligence to the British government. No mention was made of any connections between the Italian and American governments.
What did the Berlusconi government get in return for providing the Bush administration with a convenient "smoking gun" to attack Iraq? At the end of the yellowcake trail may be the prestigious contract an Italian firm won to manufacture Marine One -- the fleet of presidential helicopters. In January 2005, the U.S. Navy awarded the contract for the construction of 23 new Marine One helicopters to AgustaWestland. Marketing itself as an Anglo-Italian firm, AgustaWestland is wholly owned by Finmeccanica, Italy's largest defense conglomerate.
The choice of AgustaWestland for Marine One surprised most industry observers because U.S.-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. was the heavy favorite. Sikorsky patented the first helicopter design in 1939 and built virtually every president's helicopter since 1957. President Eisenhower regularly flew in a Sikorsky to his Gettysburg farm, and the Sikorsky that Nixon boarded when he resigned from the White House is now being restored for permanent display at the Nixon Library.
Not only did Sikorsky lose, but it lost to a foreign firm that has no problems selling its helicopters to the United States' adversaries. (See side bar, "Choppers for Sale, to Everyone")
As with the yellowcake dossier, the key figure in the Marine One contract is Gianni Castellaneta. When the Pentagon put the Marine One contract out for bid, Castellaneta was deputy chair of Finmeccanica and national security advisor to Prime Minister Berlusconi. By the time the contract was awarded, Castellaneta had been appointed Italy's ambassador to the United States.
Castellaneta proudly told U.S. Italia Weekly, "At noon President Bush received me for the official delivery of credentials. He didn't make me wait a single day. An exceptional courtesy."
Castellaneta's role in obtaining the Marine One contract has never been examined before, but according to Affari Italiani, Italy's first online daily, and disarmo.org, an Italian arms control advocacy group, Castellaneta has long managed the most sensitive dossiers in U.S.-Italian bilateral relations.
When Ambassador Castellaneta was asked about his role, the embassy press officer, Luca Ferrari said, "In his capacity as ambassador, representing all of Italy in the United States, the ambassador does not care to speak any more about Finmeccanica."
"Castellaneta's double role as ambassador and corporate businessman has come under scrutiny at various junctures," says Carlo Bonini, an Italian journalist who has extensively investigated the yellowcake affair. "His duality has inspired animated debate in the Italian Parliament, but due to the absolute majority of seats held by Berlusconi, the matter could never be fully discussed."
With center-left opposition leader Romano Prodi taking the helm of Italy's new government, the newly reconfigured Parliament is expected to open a probe into the "Yellowcake One" affair. For Italians, the main question is whether Berlusconi personally profited from the helicopter deal. For Americans, the question is whether the Bush administration paid the Italians back for providing the false intelligence that helped justify launching the war in Iraq.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/36183/
Fear Is the Coin of the Realm
Fear Is the Coin of the Realm
by Jacob G. Hornberger, May 15, 2006
by Jacob G. Hornberger, May 15, 2006
Fear, of course, has been the coin of the realm for oppressive and dictatorial governments throughout history. Frighten the citizenry and they’ll practically beg you to take away their freedom.
Isn’t it ironic that we have the most powerful empire in history, whose very own policies have often produced the things we’re supposed be afraid of, and yet, at the same time, the most frightened grownups in the world?
Isn’t that grand? Just implement the policies that produce the problem, which creates the crisis, which engenders the fear, which causes grown-ups to quiver and quake and beg the government to protect them by taking away their freedoms.
Uh, oh! A new study reveals that “fears that the deadly strain of bird flu would move through Africa and Europe in flocks of wild birds have so far proven unfounded....” That means one less fear that the feds can use to frighten grown-up American men and women as an excuse for more federal power-grabbing.
Fear, of course, has been the coin of the realm for oppressive and dictatorial governments throughout history. Frighten the citizenry and they’ll practically beg you to take away their freedom. That’s in fact how Hitler convinced the German parliament to give him temporary dictatorial powers after terrorists firebombed the German parliament building.
When Soviet communism, which had been used for decades to justify ever-increasing budgets for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department, expired with the fall of the Berlin Wall, new official fears had to be found. And fast! Federal power and federal budgets depended on it. There were, for example, the drug lords, who were coming to get us and put us on drugs. My favorite though was — “an unsafe world,” which was enough to scare anyone to death.
Along came Saddam, who had been a good friend and ally of U.S. officials. His invasion of Kuwait provided them with more than a decade of fear-mongering (and ever-growing budgets), ultimately culminating in the deep (and baseless) fear that this “new Hitler” was about to unleash an imminent WMD attack on the United States.
No one can deny that 9/11 has been the biggest power-grabbing bonanza for power-loving federal politicians and bureaucrats since the Civil War. The terrorists, who are reacting to the power-grabbers’ own foreign policies, are coming to get us! Don’t even read the USA PATRIOT Act — just enact it! Turn those airports over to the feds — fast!
There was also an endless array of other new Hitlers and dangerous regimes for Americans to be scared of — Osama (another former friend and ally of U.S. officials), Chavez, Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, and China.
Fear. Fear. Fear.
Isn’t it ironic that we have the most powerful empire in history, whose very own policies have often produced the things we’re supposed be afraid of, and yet, at the same time, the most frightened grownups in the world?
Isn’t that grand? Just implement the policies that produce the problem, which creates the crisis, which engenders the fear, which causes grown-ups to quiver and quake and beg the government to protect them by taking away their freedoms.
Is it really surprising that 63 percent of Americans support the government’s illegal and unconstitutional monitoring of people’s telephone records? The sheeplings are bleating to the power-grabbing wolves, “Please, do whatever is necessary to protect me from the big bad terrorists. Take away my freedoms if you have to because I am so scared. I love you and I trust you.”
The libertarian battle to restore liberty to our country lies not only in opposing the big-government conservatives and liberals who infect our land. It lies also in stiffening the spines of millions of American sheeplings who have done what people throughout history have done — succumbed to the endless array of fears engendered by the government power-grabbers as a way to take away the freedoms of all of us.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.
The Real Assault on America
The Real Assault on America
by Paul Craig Roberts
The neoconservative Bush regime has adroitly used 9/11 to create a fear of terrorism among Americans that blinds Americans to the Bush regime's assault on our constitutional system. Americans have meekly acquiesced to the Bush regime's brutal assaults on civil liberties, human rights, the separation of powers, and statutory law, because Americans have been brainwashed to believe that the "war on terror" takes precedence and cannot be waged under the rules established by the Founding Fathers.
By elevating its "war on terror" above the U.S. Constitution, the neoconservative Bush regime has made itself a far greater threat to Americans than are foreign terrorists. Two constitutional scholars, Timothy Lynch and Gene Healy, document the Bush regime's forceful assault on the U.S. Constitution in "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush" released May 3 by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Lynch and Healy show that Bush has failed in his most important responsibility "to preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution and, thus, is in violation of his sworn oath of office. The two scholars document the Bush regime's "ceaseless push for power, unchecked by either the courts or Congress" on issues ranging from war powers, habeas corpus, and federalism to free speech and unwarranted surveillance. Bush's assault on the Constitution "should disturb people from across the political spectrum."
Alas, it doesn't. Many Americans believe that Bush's dictatorial powers will only be applied to terrorists. This belief is extremely foolish, because it means that "the liberty of every American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White House."
It has become commonplace to hear Americans dismiss the Bush regime's illegal and unconstitutional exercise of power on the grounds that only those implicated in terrorism have anything to fear. These Americans need to ask themselves why, if only evildoers have anything to fear from government, the Founding Fathers bothered to write the Constitution?
If we can trust the government the way Americans seem prepared to trust the Bush regime, we don't need the Constitution. Indeed, why is a president inaugurated with his oath to defend the Constitution if we don't need the Constitution to protect us from our government? If we can trust government, why go to all the trouble to have elections? Why not just get a dictator or a king or contract with a company to provide government?
The question presents itself: Are Americans guilty of treason when they turn their backs on the Constitution? Treason is betrayal of country. And what defines country? In the United States, the Constitution defines country. The Bush regime's assault on the Constitution is an assault on America.
Moreover, it is a far more dangerous and deadly assault than a terrorist assault on buildings.
Ask yourself, gentle reader, what are we without the Constitution? Without the Constitution, how do we differ from the hapless subjects sent to Soviet and Nazi death camps? The Constitution protects our rights, and without our rights we are nothing.
It has been widely reported, apparently without causing Americans any unease, that the Bush regime has awarded Halliburton $385 million to build concentration camps in the United States. Who are to be the inmates? Certainly not terrorists. The Bush regime has proven inept at catching terrorists, and those few who are captured are kept offshore out of the reach of the courts where they can be tortured and abused. The camps are certainly not for illegal aliens who both political parties want to give amnesty and citizenship.
Concentration camps epitomize the horrors and inhumanity of the Stalin and Nazi era. Why is the Bush regime building concentration camps in America?
The Bush regime's war on terror is the equivalent to the Nazi regime's Reichstag fire. It serves to blind people to the real assault.
According to Bush, America is under terrorist attack because "they hate our freedoms." But, as Lynch and Healy show, it is the Bush regime that is attacking our freedoms, removing their institutional protections, and making our liberties subject to the grace of the executive.
by Paul Craig Roberts
The neoconservative Bush regime has adroitly used 9/11 to create a fear of terrorism among Americans that blinds Americans to the Bush regime's assault on our constitutional system. Americans have meekly acquiesced to the Bush regime's brutal assaults on civil liberties, human rights, the separation of powers, and statutory law, because Americans have been brainwashed to believe that the "war on terror" takes precedence and cannot be waged under the rules established by the Founding Fathers.
By elevating its "war on terror" above the U.S. Constitution, the neoconservative Bush regime has made itself a far greater threat to Americans than are foreign terrorists. Two constitutional scholars, Timothy Lynch and Gene Healy, document the Bush regime's forceful assault on the U.S. Constitution in "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush" released May 3 by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Lynch and Healy show that Bush has failed in his most important responsibility "to preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution and, thus, is in violation of his sworn oath of office. The two scholars document the Bush regime's "ceaseless push for power, unchecked by either the courts or Congress" on issues ranging from war powers, habeas corpus, and federalism to free speech and unwarranted surveillance. Bush's assault on the Constitution "should disturb people from across the political spectrum."
Alas, it doesn't. Many Americans believe that Bush's dictatorial powers will only be applied to terrorists. This belief is extremely foolish, because it means that "the liberty of every American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White House."
It has become commonplace to hear Americans dismiss the Bush regime's illegal and unconstitutional exercise of power on the grounds that only those implicated in terrorism have anything to fear. These Americans need to ask themselves why, if only evildoers have anything to fear from government, the Founding Fathers bothered to write the Constitution?
If we can trust the government the way Americans seem prepared to trust the Bush regime, we don't need the Constitution. Indeed, why is a president inaugurated with his oath to defend the Constitution if we don't need the Constitution to protect us from our government? If we can trust government, why go to all the trouble to have elections? Why not just get a dictator or a king or contract with a company to provide government?
The question presents itself: Are Americans guilty of treason when they turn their backs on the Constitution? Treason is betrayal of country. And what defines country? In the United States, the Constitution defines country. The Bush regime's assault on the Constitution is an assault on America.
Moreover, it is a far more dangerous and deadly assault than a terrorist assault on buildings.
Ask yourself, gentle reader, what are we without the Constitution? Without the Constitution, how do we differ from the hapless subjects sent to Soviet and Nazi death camps? The Constitution protects our rights, and without our rights we are nothing.
It has been widely reported, apparently without causing Americans any unease, that the Bush regime has awarded Halliburton $385 million to build concentration camps in the United States. Who are to be the inmates? Certainly not terrorists. The Bush regime has proven inept at catching terrorists, and those few who are captured are kept offshore out of the reach of the courts where they can be tortured and abused. The camps are certainly not for illegal aliens who both political parties want to give amnesty and citizenship.
Concentration camps epitomize the horrors and inhumanity of the Stalin and Nazi era. Why is the Bush regime building concentration camps in America?
The Bush regime's war on terror is the equivalent to the Nazi regime's Reichstag fire. It serves to blind people to the real assault.
According to Bush, America is under terrorist attack because "they hate our freedoms." But, as Lynch and Healy show, it is the Bush regime that is attacking our freedoms, removing their institutional protections, and making our liberties subject to the grace of the executive.
FBI Acknowledges: Journalists Phone Records are Fair Game
FBI Acknowledges: Journalists Phone Records are Fair Game
May 15, 2006 7:18 PM
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters' phone records in leak investigations.
"It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official.
The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.
The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being "tracked."
"Think of it more as backtracking," said a senior federal official.
But FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA.
In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records.
"The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information," the statement said.
Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.
Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).
The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.
May 15, 2006 7:18 PM
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters' phone records in leak investigations.
"It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official.
The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.
The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being "tracked."
"Think of it more as backtracking," said a senior federal official.
But FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA.
In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records.
"The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information," the statement said.
Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.
Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).
The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.
Karl Rove Indictment an elaborate Hoax? Did Jason Leopold get Rolled?
Karl Rove Indictment an elaborate Hoax? Did Jason Leopold get Rolled?
Most of US Media Waiting to see with Held Breath
By Steven Leser
Despite right wing media and blogosphere accusations, Jason Leopold has been a reliable source for some time. For now, I am willing to take it on faith that he has numerous well placed sources that did in fact tell him that Karl Rove had been indicted. As a journalist for Truthout ( http://www.truthout.org ), Jason has broken numerous stories ahead of the rest of the media which up until now have all proven to be true. If his story on the Rove indictment is incorrect, and I want to stress that we do not know either way right now, I have a theory as to what might have happened. Admittedly, like many theories, mine has several assumptions and ‘what ifs’ but each reader will have to decide for themselves what they believe. Eventually the truth will come out anyway.
We know that the Bush White House detests leaks perhaps more than any other administration in history. It is a relative certainty that Leopold’s past articles have gotten the attention of many in the administration. Assume for a moment that an internal White House investigation was conducted to ferret out those leaking information to Leopold. Once discovered, these individuals would be an excellent avenue with which to discredit Leopold by providing them false information which would then be transferred to the reporter. Again, I am making assumptions and I want to dutifully make that clear. Now, assuming the White House had accurately identified the leakers. Let us take it one step further. Let us assume the White House sat on that information until an opportune moment presented itself. Such an opportune moment presented itself when it became clear that an embarrassing piece of evidence regarding Vice President Cheney was going to be submitted in a filing by Fitzgerald. The administration could provide a tasty bit of disinformation to Leopold’s sources and the attention of the reporter along with a fair amount of the progressive press would be turned to a story that would turn out to be false. This story and the rapid discovery that it was a hoax would overshadow the embarrassing filing by Prosecutor Fitzgerald. Indeed, it would overshadow the entire CIA Leak-Gate investigation or at least the reporting thereof for some time.
Again, we do not know at this point whether Leopold’s story is accurate or not and it if is not, we do not know why but I want to point out that if it turns out to not be accurate, there are a lot of possibilities. Rushing to a negative judgment of Jason is unfair until all the facts come out.
Authors Bio: Steven Leser is a freelance journalist specializing in Politics, Science & Health, and Entertainment topics. He has held positions within the Democratic Party including District Chair and Public Relations Chair within county organizations. His coverage of the Ohio Presidential Recount in 2004 was distinguished by interviews with Carlo Loparo, spokesperson for the Ohio Secretary of State, along with Supervisors of Elections of several Ohio counties. Similar efforts on other topics to get first hand information from sources separate Mr. Leser from many of his contemporaries. Mr Leser was the journalist who broke the story of the Bush Impeachment Resolution being drafted in the Illinois General Assembly. The story was printed right here on OpEdNews.com
Most of US Media Waiting to see with Held Breath
By Steven Leser
Despite right wing media and blogosphere accusations, Jason Leopold has been a reliable source for some time. For now, I am willing to take it on faith that he has numerous well placed sources that did in fact tell him that Karl Rove had been indicted. As a journalist for Truthout ( http://www.truthout.org ), Jason has broken numerous stories ahead of the rest of the media which up until now have all proven to be true. If his story on the Rove indictment is incorrect, and I want to stress that we do not know either way right now, I have a theory as to what might have happened. Admittedly, like many theories, mine has several assumptions and ‘what ifs’ but each reader will have to decide for themselves what they believe. Eventually the truth will come out anyway.
We know that the Bush White House detests leaks perhaps more than any other administration in history. It is a relative certainty that Leopold’s past articles have gotten the attention of many in the administration. Assume for a moment that an internal White House investigation was conducted to ferret out those leaking information to Leopold. Once discovered, these individuals would be an excellent avenue with which to discredit Leopold by providing them false information which would then be transferred to the reporter. Again, I am making assumptions and I want to dutifully make that clear. Now, assuming the White House had accurately identified the leakers. Let us take it one step further. Let us assume the White House sat on that information until an opportune moment presented itself. Such an opportune moment presented itself when it became clear that an embarrassing piece of evidence regarding Vice President Cheney was going to be submitted in a filing by Fitzgerald. The administration could provide a tasty bit of disinformation to Leopold’s sources and the attention of the reporter along with a fair amount of the progressive press would be turned to a story that would turn out to be false. This story and the rapid discovery that it was a hoax would overshadow the embarrassing filing by Prosecutor Fitzgerald. Indeed, it would overshadow the entire CIA Leak-Gate investigation or at least the reporting thereof for some time.
Again, we do not know at this point whether Leopold’s story is accurate or not and it if is not, we do not know why but I want to point out that if it turns out to not be accurate, there are a lot of possibilities. Rushing to a negative judgment of Jason is unfair until all the facts come out.
Authors Bio: Steven Leser is a freelance journalist specializing in Politics, Science & Health, and Entertainment topics. He has held positions within the Democratic Party including District Chair and Public Relations Chair within county organizations. His coverage of the Ohio Presidential Recount in 2004 was distinguished by interviews with Carlo Loparo, spokesperson for the Ohio Secretary of State, along with Supervisors of Elections of several Ohio counties. Similar efforts on other topics to get first hand information from sources separate Mr. Leser from many of his contemporaries. Mr Leser was the journalist who broke the story of the Bush Impeachment Resolution being drafted in the Illinois General Assembly. The story was printed right here on OpEdNews.com
Bush bans arms sales to Chávez
Bush bans arms sales to Chávez
Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Duncan Campbell
Tuesday May 16, 2006
Guardian
The US finally reacted to goading by the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, by slapping a full arms ban on the country last night, claiming it had failed to cooperate in the fight against terrorism.
Janelle Hironimus, a state department spokeswoman, said Venezuela had forged close relations with Iran and Cuba, both classified by the US as state sponsors of terrorism. She said: "Venezuela has publicly championed the Iraqi insurgency."
Mr Chávez, in London yesterday on a two-day private visit, dismissed suggestions that he supported terrorism. He told the Guardian: "Washington has said I am a modern-day Hitler." The Bush administration had accused him of terrorism because it was unhappy with his government's success, he said. "They are very concerned, that is why they say these things." He brushed aside the arms embargo, saying "this doesn't matter to us at all". Venezuela would not respond with punitive measures against the US, he said. The US was "an irrational empire" that "has a great capacity to do harm".
Among reasons given for the ban, the state department referred to Venezuela's "nearly total lack of cooperation with antiterrorist efforts over the past year" and claimed that it provided a safe haven for Colombian "narco-terrorists".
The US, according to the latest congressional figures, sold $8m (£4.25m) in arms to Venezuela in 2004, mainly pistols, rifles, ammunition and riot-control equipment, and $51m in the three years prior to that. But it will try to put the squeeze on other countries that have been engaged in arms sales to Venezuela worth billions.
Ms Hironimus said the arms ban would apply to new equipment and spare parts. She said Venezuela would feel the impact when it wanted to buy parts for its planes.
Relations between the US and Venezuela have deteriorated sharply since Mr Chávez became president. Mr Chávez has described Mr Bush as a "terrorist" and criticised the invasion of Iraq. He has claimed that the US may invade Venezuela, and that it has bought planes from Brazil, ships from Spain and helicopters and assault rifles from Russia.
When announcing the ban, the US made no mention of oil. It is a big importer of Venezuelan oil and cannot afford to cut off that supply. But the arms ban highlights the extent to which the US is being challenged by Venezuela and Bolivia. A string of elections in Latin America has tipped the balance towards leftwing or centrist governments.
Venezuela denies aiding Colombian terrorists and claims it has cooperated with the Colombian government. But the state department claims two Colombian guerrilla groups, Farc and the National Liberation Army, operate out of safe areas in Venezuela, which they use for rest and resupply "with little concern they will be pursued by Venezuelan security forces".
Ms Hironimus said: "Weapons and ammunitions from official Venezuelan stockpiles and facilities had turned up in the hands of Colombian-based terrorists.
The state department also referred to Venezuela's challenges to UN security council resolutions setting out steps countries had to take to stop weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.
Yesterday Mr Chávez met Labour MPs and union leaders and was a lunch guest of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone. Last night he was due to leave the UK for Algeria and Libya. At the weekend he was one of nearly 60 leaders who met in Vienna for a summit on relations between the EU and Latin-American and Caribbean countries. Tony Blair was also at the meeting but the two did not meet in London.
Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Duncan Campbell
Tuesday May 16, 2006
Guardian
The US finally reacted to goading by the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, by slapping a full arms ban on the country last night, claiming it had failed to cooperate in the fight against terrorism.
Janelle Hironimus, a state department spokeswoman, said Venezuela had forged close relations with Iran and Cuba, both classified by the US as state sponsors of terrorism. She said: "Venezuela has publicly championed the Iraqi insurgency."
Mr Chávez, in London yesterday on a two-day private visit, dismissed suggestions that he supported terrorism. He told the Guardian: "Washington has said I am a modern-day Hitler." The Bush administration had accused him of terrorism because it was unhappy with his government's success, he said. "They are very concerned, that is why they say these things." He brushed aside the arms embargo, saying "this doesn't matter to us at all". Venezuela would not respond with punitive measures against the US, he said. The US was "an irrational empire" that "has a great capacity to do harm".
Among reasons given for the ban, the state department referred to Venezuela's "nearly total lack of cooperation with antiterrorist efforts over the past year" and claimed that it provided a safe haven for Colombian "narco-terrorists".
The US, according to the latest congressional figures, sold $8m (£4.25m) in arms to Venezuela in 2004, mainly pistols, rifles, ammunition and riot-control equipment, and $51m in the three years prior to that. But it will try to put the squeeze on other countries that have been engaged in arms sales to Venezuela worth billions.
Ms Hironimus said the arms ban would apply to new equipment and spare parts. She said Venezuela would feel the impact when it wanted to buy parts for its planes.
Relations between the US and Venezuela have deteriorated sharply since Mr Chávez became president. Mr Chávez has described Mr Bush as a "terrorist" and criticised the invasion of Iraq. He has claimed that the US may invade Venezuela, and that it has bought planes from Brazil, ships from Spain and helicopters and assault rifles from Russia.
When announcing the ban, the US made no mention of oil. It is a big importer of Venezuelan oil and cannot afford to cut off that supply. But the arms ban highlights the extent to which the US is being challenged by Venezuela and Bolivia. A string of elections in Latin America has tipped the balance towards leftwing or centrist governments.
Venezuela denies aiding Colombian terrorists and claims it has cooperated with the Colombian government. But the state department claims two Colombian guerrilla groups, Farc and the National Liberation Army, operate out of safe areas in Venezuela, which they use for rest and resupply "with little concern they will be pursued by Venezuelan security forces".
Ms Hironimus said: "Weapons and ammunitions from official Venezuelan stockpiles and facilities had turned up in the hands of Colombian-based terrorists.
The state department also referred to Venezuela's challenges to UN security council resolutions setting out steps countries had to take to stop weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.
Yesterday Mr Chávez met Labour MPs and union leaders and was a lunch guest of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone. Last night he was due to leave the UK for Algeria and Libya. At the weekend he was one of nearly 60 leaders who met in Vienna for a summit on relations between the EU and Latin-American and Caribbean countries. Tony Blair was also at the meeting but the two did not meet in London.
Iraq documentary may trigger mental health problems
Iraq doc may trigger mental health problems
Army warns HBO’s ‘Baghdad ER’s’ graphic scenes may disturb soldiers
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:01 p.m. ET May 15, 2006
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army is warning soldiers and their families that a new film about an Iraq war medical unit may trigger mental health problems for some who view it.
Army brass have sent a cautionary warning to military medical personnel about the soon-to-be-aired HBO documentary “Baghdad ER,” which gives a graphic view of the Iraq war through the eyes of trauma doctors and nurses, even filming during an amputation.
Despite many disturbing scenes, filmmaker Jon Alpert said the film had actually been toned down.
“Some of the real raw scenes were just a little bit too brutal. My first two days there, I witnessed four amputations,” said Alpert.
A private screening was held in Washington on Monday, and the film will air on HBO on Sunday.
Around the United States, it will be shown at 22 U.S. military installations, but military medical officers are concerned that it may spark adverse reactions among those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Army Surgeon General, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, sent out a memo last week warning the film may prompt flashbacks or nightmares among some veterans.
“It’s gritty, it’s graphic at times, and those who have a loved one deployed or may have lost a loved one might find certain scenes to be such that it might be something they would want to be careful about in viewing,” said Army spokesman Paul Boyce.
Boyce said the memo was designed as a sort of “viewer discretion” warning within the ranks, “particularly for those viewers for whom this may strike very close to home.”
“We want to make certain that people know what to expect,” he said.
The film records two months at the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Iraq, where medical teams treat those injured by improvised explosive devices.
Filmmakers Alpert and Matthew O’Neill were given access to the hospital, and the result, Alpert said, “is a very patriotic film.”
**in other words, a propaganda flick **
“It shows the true consequences of war. Americans haven’t had the chance to be able to see some of the consequences. It shows the heroism of the soldiers, and you can’t understand the heroism of the doctors and soldiers unless you see the horror that they face every day,” said Alpert.
The filmmaker said he has since spoken to many of those featured in the movie who told him they are proud to have been a part of it.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
© 2006 MSNBC.com
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12806353/
Army warns HBO’s ‘Baghdad ER’s’ graphic scenes may disturb soldiers
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:01 p.m. ET May 15, 2006
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army is warning soldiers and their families that a new film about an Iraq war medical unit may trigger mental health problems for some who view it.
Army brass have sent a cautionary warning to military medical personnel about the soon-to-be-aired HBO documentary “Baghdad ER,” which gives a graphic view of the Iraq war through the eyes of trauma doctors and nurses, even filming during an amputation.
Despite many disturbing scenes, filmmaker Jon Alpert said the film had actually been toned down.
“Some of the real raw scenes were just a little bit too brutal. My first two days there, I witnessed four amputations,” said Alpert.
A private screening was held in Washington on Monday, and the film will air on HBO on Sunday.
Around the United States, it will be shown at 22 U.S. military installations, but military medical officers are concerned that it may spark adverse reactions among those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Army Surgeon General, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, sent out a memo last week warning the film may prompt flashbacks or nightmares among some veterans.
“It’s gritty, it’s graphic at times, and those who have a loved one deployed or may have lost a loved one might find certain scenes to be such that it might be something they would want to be careful about in viewing,” said Army spokesman Paul Boyce.
Boyce said the memo was designed as a sort of “viewer discretion” warning within the ranks, “particularly for those viewers for whom this may strike very close to home.”
“We want to make certain that people know what to expect,” he said.
The film records two months at the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Iraq, where medical teams treat those injured by improvised explosive devices.
Filmmakers Alpert and Matthew O’Neill were given access to the hospital, and the result, Alpert said, “is a very patriotic film.”
**in other words, a propaganda flick **
“It shows the true consequences of war. Americans haven’t had the chance to be able to see some of the consequences. It shows the heroism of the soldiers, and you can’t understand the heroism of the doctors and soldiers unless you see the horror that they face every day,” said Alpert.
The filmmaker said he has since spoken to many of those featured in the movie who told him they are proud to have been a part of it.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
© 2006 MSNBC.com
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12806353/
'Scanning' the Darkness of Our War on Drugs
'Scanning' the Darkness of Our War on Drugs
Posted on May 14, 2006
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| Courtesy Warner Independent Pictures |
In the upcoming science fiction movie “A Scanner Darkly” Keanu Reeves plays an undercover drug agent who loses his grip on reality as he navigates the underworld of an America that has lost the war on drugs. |
Editor’s note: In what is sure to be this summer’s most talked-about movie, “A Scanner Darkly,” Keanu Reeves stars as an undercover narcotics agent losing his grip on reality in an America that has lost the war on drugs. And were this film just a warning call, that would be one thing. But as Truthdig contributor Steven Kotler argues, the best science fiction can be both predictive and prescriptive. So it’s worth asking: Might this film inadvertently channel us toward the very dystopia it is warning against?
IF THE BEST science-fictional dystopias are the ones that seem all too believable, this summer’s movie version of “A Scanner Darkly” seems poised to take its place next to Orwell’s “1984,” Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Andrew Niccol’s “Gattaca.”
Based on a 1977 novel by the late Philip K. Dick (author of works that inspired the movies “Minority Report” and “Total Recall”) and directed by Richard Linklater (“School of Rock,” “Dazed and Confused”), “Scanner” gives us our first look at a post-drug-war America. Twenty percent of the population is addicted to “Substance D”—D for death—a drug that’s 100% addictive and 100% debilitating.
To fight the plague, our government has turned the lemon of the drug war into the lemonade of totalitarian control. With narco-spies on every corner and informants in every cupboard, Linklater’s movie presents a land where paranoia reigns supreme. Unlike Orwell’s Big Brother iron fist, “A Scanner Darkly” gives us governmental oppression that’s two-thirds mind-fuck and one-third surreal tragedy—in other words, something very akin to what we’re seeing from the Bush administration.
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Not that this should be too surprising to anyone. But that, at least, may be part of the problem. There is a peculiar and longstanding trend for science fiction to play both a predictive and a prescriptive role in our world. That is, in addition to being a warning call about the police-state possibilities of an ever-escalating drug war, “Scanner” may actually be showing us the way.
Take our conception of robots, for example. When Carnegie Mellon created its Robot Hall of Fame, one of the earliest inductees was Robbie the Robot from the 1956 MGM flick “Forbidden Planet.” While the term “robot” was coined in 1921 by writer Karl Capek in his play “R.U.R” (Rossum’s Universal Robot), a derivation of the Czech word robata, meaning forced labor, it didn’t creep into popular usage until MGM threw $1.9 million behind “Forbidden Planet” (a blockbuster sum in those days), turning Robbie into the iconic face of a then-burgeoning field. But his impact—the suddenly popular notion that robots must take a humanoid form—influenced the field far more than anticipated. As Wired magazine recently pointed out, “for decades the word robot was synonymous with Robbie’s bulbous figure.” For this reason, scientists spent much of the latter half of the 20th century trying to build machines that fit this cinematic projection, before realizing the fundamental flaws in the humanoid approach (it wasn’t until Honda debuted its android ASIMO in 2000 that anyone got close). Fred Barton, who sits on the Robot Hall of Fame inductee board, sums this up nicely when he says, “It’s been 50 years, but Robbie is still the most imitated and sought-after robot of all time, despite the fact that he was originally the product of a movie studio.”
Related Links
 “A Scanner Darkly” the book (at Amazon)
 Author Steven Kotler’s home page
 Steven Kotler’s new book “West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origin of Belief”
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Nor is this phenomenon limited to the cinema. Back in 1982, William Gibson wrote “Burning Chrome,” a short story that ran in the now defunct futurist magazine Omni. In that story he posited the notion of “cyberspace” as a sort of mass “consensual hallucination.” This was a good 15 years before the Worldwide Web went worldwide, but a good number of technophiles have argued that Gibson’s predictive fantasy became the model upon which the Internet was built.
The online treasure trove Wikipedia explains further:
While cyberspace should not be confused with the real Internet, the term is often used simply to refer to objects and identities that exist largely within the computing network itself, so that a web site, for example, might be metaphorically said to “exist in cyberspace.” According to this interpretation, events taking place on the Internet are not therefore happening in the countries where the participants or the servers are physically located, but “in cyberspace”. This becomes a reasonable viewpoint once distributed services (e.g. Freenet or bittorrent) become widespread, and the physical identity and location of the participants become impossible to determine due to anonymous or pseudonymous communication. The laws of any particular nation state would therefore not apply.
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And in a peculiar combination of mediums, Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” became a very different story in Ridley Scott’s movie “Blade Runner,” but both predicted a bleak environmental future where animals are so rare that robots have replaced pets and a vast underground black market churns on the sale of exotic species. Well, here we are in 2006, and Sony’s AIBO has become the best-selling robot in history and the current Interpol estimate of the exotic pet trade runs to $10 billion a year—an illegal trade figure surpassed only by that of drug dealing.
Which brings us back to “Scanner.” Dick’s dark prophecy stems not only from his own experiences as an addict but also from his living through the early years of our drug war. In 1972 President Nixon appointed the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse to investigate the country’s burgeoning desire for altered states. The commission suggested that the answer to our woes lay in decriminalization of marijuana and a policy of control based on medical risk. Unfortunately, since Nixon had been elected on a talk-tough, act-rough platform, this was not quite the solution he had in mind. Instead, he militarized the problem, declaring war on drugs and breaking all kinds of laws in an effort to win that fight.
It seems little has changed. Last week, after what the New York Times reported as “intense pressure from the U.S.,” Mexican President Vicente Fox decided to “reconsider” his desire to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, heroin and cocaine. Never mind that experts on both side of the border felt that such a law would make great strides toward dealing with Mexico’s horrible corruption problem (primarily a graft system built upon its drug war) and addiction problem (Mexico treats addiction as a legal matter, rather than a medical matter). The United States, locked blindly into its zero-tolerance policy against drug possession, and determined to eschew any semblance of creativity or fresh thinking in the fight against drugs, prevailed upon Mexico to abandon its experiment. As always, American puritanical militarization prevails over common sense.
In the nearly 30 years between Dick’s book and Linklater’s film (the 30 years where sci-fi’s prescriptive tendency would have gone to work), America has amassed a track record of human rights violations to rival most dictatorships in its prosecution of the drug war. Countless people have died or have been incarcerated, and the problem still festers. Today, drugs are cheaper, purer and more readily available than ever before. According to Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, “The U.S. is currently experiencing record levels of overdose deaths, record mentions of drugs in emergency rooms and a 50 percent increase in adolescent drug abuse since 1990,” and all this while the police are reporting record numbers of drug arrests and the largest prison population in world history. Not to mention that we continue to spend about $30 billion a year on a war that the vast majority of experts feel cannot be won.
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As far as the other elements of Dick’s dystopia, well, businesses, schools and government jobs increasingly demand drug tests. Police departments across the country are still using illegal wiretaps and surveillance methods, while undercover stings based on bribery of informants, entrapment and false arrest have become par for the course. The Supreme Court lately held that those illegal searches and invalid warrants do not render the evidence inadmissible so long as the police act in “good faith.” And a good thing too, since last week USA Today reported that the National Security Agency “has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.” As for property rights, it was U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) who recently summed things up nicely: “Federal and state officials now have the power to seize your business, home, bank account, records and personal property all without indictment, hearing or trial.”
While we have not yet reached the “Scanner” point where our troops are invading foreign countries under the “auspices” of substance control, we are damn close. Back in 1996, then-“drug czar” Barry McCaffrey, a retired general, said of the drug war, “It makes us all very uncomfortable to see uniformed military units getting heavily involved.” These days they’re certainly involved. Eighty-nine percent of police departments now have paramilitary units. The National Guard currently has more counter-narcotics officers than the DEA has agents on duty. And, according to the defense contractor trade publication National Defense, DynCorp, a $1.4-billion, 20,000-employee government contractor, “supports drug war operations at both the front and back ends—from airborne crop-dusting in Colombia to asset forfeiture experts who work at 385 Justice Department sites in the United States.” And there are the recent words of then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft: “I want to escalate the war on drugs. I want to renew it. I want to refresh it, re-launch it if you will.”
So was Dick just reading the tea leaves or was he, instead, showing us the path of least resistance? Does Linklater’s movie serve as a warning or a way? And will the release of the film pave the way for even more acceptance of abuses of our civil liberties at the hands of authorities? These are perhaps the hard metaphysical questions that surround illicit substances, but before they’re dismissed out of hand, remember that last January the Supreme Court ruled that if you’re pulled over for speeding or not wearing a seat belt or any other negligible driving offense, the cops can bring out drug dogs to further investigate without violating the Fourth Amendment. As writer Thomas Pynchon, himself a sci-fi dabbler, once pointed out, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”
Steven Kotler is a freelance writer whose 2000 novel “The Angle Quickest for Flight” was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. His work has appeared in 31 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Wired, Discover, Details and Men’s Journal. His second book, a nonfiction work, “West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origin of Belief,” goes on sale in June.
UK And Australian Prime Ministers Both Knew There Were No WMDs
UK And Australian Prime Ministers Both Knew There Were No WMDs
by John C.K. Daly
UPI International Correspondent
Washington (UPI) May 16, 2006
A former U.N. biological weapons specialist is asserting that the prime ministers of Australia and Britain knew at the time that pre-war intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was false.
 Australian Prime Minster John Howard (L) gestures as his British counterpart Tony Blair looks on during a press conference at the Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, 28 March 2006. Photo courtesy of Rob Griffith and AFP. |
UPI International Correspondent
Washington (UPI) May 16, 2006
A former U.N. biological weapons specialist is asserting that the prime ministers of Australia and Britain knew at the time that pre-war intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was false.
Rod Barton, an Australian, worked as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq for a decade. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on May 13 that Barton turned whistleblower over the machinations of American, British and Australian politicians distorting pre-war intelligence in order to justify the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In March 2004, Barton and fellow Australian, foreign affairs disarmament specialist John Gee, resigned in protest from the Iraq Survey Group.
Following the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense established the Iraq Survey Group to locate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Following its efforts, the group issued a final report, usually referred to as the Duelfer Report, compiled by the ISG's 1,400-member international team.
In his new book "The Weapons Detective," Barton goes into detail about his work for the Defense Intelligence Organization, which he joined in 1972 as a microbiologist. Baton asserts that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard both knew before the invasion that the intelligence on Iraqi WMDs was false.
Barton says that U.S. President George W. Bush may not have known, because his intelligence agencies were reporting what he wanted to hear.
When shown the pre-war Iraqi WMD Australian intelligence assessment, Howard even asked, "Is that all there is?"
Barton said, "I knew that blowing the whistle would bring some penalties, but not to this extent. Was I that much a threat to the security of Australia when -- what was it I spoke out about: prisoner abuse?"
Barton's security clearance has been withdrawn, and after pressure the prime minister's staff, Barton and Gee were dropped from the 2005 guest list for the Australia Group's 20th anniversary meeting in Sydney, a forum of intelligence specialists from 38 countries on chemical and biological weapons, which Barton and Gee had helped to found in 1985.
Source: United Press International
US Restores Full Diplomatic Relations With Libya
US Restores Full Diplomatic Relations With Libya
by Staff Writers
Washington (AFNS) May 16, 2006
Three years after Libya renounced terrorism and abandoned its program to acquire weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Monday that the United States is restoring full diplomatic relations with the North African country and soon will open an embassy in Tripoli.
Full Text of Secretary Rice's Statement
 Now that Libya is friends again with the US - what will they do with all their missiles? |
Washington (AFNS) May 16, 2006
Three years after Libya renounced terrorism and abandoned its program to acquire weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Monday that the United States is restoring full diplomatic relations with the North African country and soon will open an embassy in Tripoli.
In a written statement, Rice added that the United States intends to remove Libya from the list of designated state sponsors of terrorism. Libya also will be omitted from the annual certification of countries not cooperating fully with U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.
**wonder what the US asked for in return? EG:) **
"We are taking these actions in recognition of Libya's continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism and the excellent cooperation Libya has provided to the United States and other members of the international community in response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since September 11, 2001," Rice said in her statement.
"Today's announcements are tangible results that flow from the historic decisions taken by Libya's leadership in 2003 to renounce terrorism and to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs. As a direct result of those decisions we have witnessed the beginning of that country's re-emergence into the mainstream of the international community."
Just as 2003 marked a turning point for the Libyan people, Rice noted, so too could 2006 mark turning points for the peoples of Iran and North Korea.
"Libya is an important model as nations around the world press for changes in behavior by the Iranian and North Korean regimes -- changes that could be vital to international peace and security," Rice said. "We urge the leadership of Iran and North Korea to make similar strategic decisions that would benefit their citizens."
Re-establishing diplomatic relations with Libya, Rice said, opens the door to better discussion on other issues of importance, including protection of universal human rights, promotion of freedom of speech and expression, and expansion of economic and political reform consistent with President Bush's freedom agenda.
Related Links
Full Text of Secretary Rice's Statement
Monday, May 15, 2006
Teacher regrets murderous essay assignment
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Monday, May 15, 2006 · Last updated 3:49 a.m. PT
Teacher regrets murderous essay assignment
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. -- A high school teacher has apologized for asking students to write about who they would kill and how they would do it, and officials said he will likely keep his job.
Michael Maxwell, who teaches industrial technology at Central High School, said his request that students in his beginning drafting class describe how they would carry out a murder was merely a writing prompt. It was not clear why he asked the drafting class to write fiction.
**why on earth would he be asking them such a thing in the first place? I can ...MAYBE... see if it was some sort of writing class or a sociology class of some sort, but a DRAFTING class? This sounds like something else altogether....EG:)**
"I made a horrible mistake that I regret," Maxwell said. "I want to apologize to my students, my colleagues and to the community."
The April 21 writing request, which Maxwell said was not a formal assignment, came to the attention of administrators when a parent of one of the students filed a complaint with Principal Barton Albright.
Albright expressed regret and apologized for Maxwell's "lapse of judgment."
"He's an exemplary person ... this is very out of character," the principal said.
St. Joseph School District spokesman Steve Huff declined to discuss possible disciplinary measures because the matter is considered a personnel issue. But he said the incident probably isn't serious enough to cost Maxwell his job.
About 25 to 30 students from ninth through 12th grades were in the class, Albright said.
Monday, May 15, 2006 · Last updated 3:49 a.m. PT
Teacher regrets murderous essay assignment
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. -- A high school teacher has apologized for asking students to write about who they would kill and how they would do it, and officials said he will likely keep his job.
Michael Maxwell, who teaches industrial technology at Central High School, said his request that students in his beginning drafting class describe how they would carry out a murder was merely a writing prompt. It was not clear why he asked the drafting class to write fiction.
**why on earth would he be asking them such a thing in the first place? I can ...MAYBE... see if it was some sort of writing class or a sociology class of some sort, but a DRAFTING class? This sounds like something else altogether....EG:)**
"I made a horrible mistake that I regret," Maxwell said. "I want to apologize to my students, my colleagues and to the community."
The April 21 writing request, which Maxwell said was not a formal assignment, came to the attention of administrators when a parent of one of the students filed a complaint with Principal Barton Albright.
Albright expressed regret and apologized for Maxwell's "lapse of judgment."
"He's an exemplary person ... this is very out of character," the principal said.
St. Joseph School District spokesman Steve Huff declined to discuss possible disciplinary measures because the matter is considered a personnel issue. But he said the incident probably isn't serious enough to cost Maxwell his job.
About 25 to 30 students from ninth through 12th grades were in the class, Albright said.
Conflicting polls on NSA spy program
Conflicting polls on NSA spy program
Few topics have inspired as many passionate responses this year as the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance and data mining operations. For all the rhetoric, however, the nation's collective opinion about the program remains anything but clear.
NSA
"A majority of Americans disapprove of a massive Pentagon database containing the records of billions of phone calls made by ordinary citizens," by a margin of 51 percent to 43 percent, according to USA Today survey released today. But just Friday, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that "a majority of Americans support the NSA program, with 63 percent saying they found it to be "an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort."
So which is it ? Given the inexact science of polling and the complexity of the NSA program, we may never know.
Blog community response:
"The polls are interesting, but I have a hard time believing that people can actually digest what was revealed over the last few days, especially when many legal 'experts' can't even make a clear argument about whether the government access to telecom records is legal or not."
--Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy
"The exposure of warrantless invasion of privacy of tens of millions of innocent Americans could well be the tipping point for impeachment of Bush and Cheney...but public reaction is a bit delayed."
--Machine Gun Keyboard
"This NSA program isn't something that should bother anyone except the tinfoil hat crowd and those that are actively working to destroy the United States."
--Iowa Voice
Posted by Mike Yamamoto
Few topics have inspired as many passionate responses this year as the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance and data mining operations. For all the rhetoric, however, the nation's collective opinion about the program remains anything but clear.
NSA
"A majority of Americans disapprove of a massive Pentagon database containing the records of billions of phone calls made by ordinary citizens," by a margin of 51 percent to 43 percent, according to USA Today survey released today. But just Friday, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that "a majority of Americans support the NSA program, with 63 percent saying they found it to be "an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort."
So which is it ? Given the inexact science of polling and the complexity of the NSA program, we may never know.
Blog community response:
"The polls are interesting, but I have a hard time believing that people can actually digest what was revealed over the last few days, especially when many legal 'experts' can't even make a clear argument about whether the government access to telecom records is legal or not."
--Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy
"The exposure of warrantless invasion of privacy of tens of millions of innocent Americans could well be the tipping point for impeachment of Bush and Cheney...but public reaction is a bit delayed."
--Machine Gun Keyboard
"This NSA program isn't something that should bother anyone except the tinfoil hat crowd and those that are actively working to destroy the United States."
--Iowa Voice
Posted by Mike Yamamoto
Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 14 May 2006
When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.
This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.
Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.
The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposŽ "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."
Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.
Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.
Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.
Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.
Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."
What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.
Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 - "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one - and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."
If Democrats - and, for that matter, Republicans - let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.
-------
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 14 May 2006
When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.
This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.
Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.
The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposŽ "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."
Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.
Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.
Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.
Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.
Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."
What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.
Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 - "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one - and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."
If Democrats - and, for that matter, Republicans - let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.
-------
Dean Baker: "The Conservative Nanny State"
Dean Baker: "The Conservative Nanny State"
t r u t h o u t | Release
Monday 15 May 2006
To download a free electronic copy of book, visit: www.conservativenannystate.org.
By distributing the book online at no cost, Baker hopes to spark public debate about the most effective mechanism for supporting the writing and designing of books and other forms of intellectual work. Paperback copies are available for a fee that covers printing and shipping costs.
Book Excerpt
"The key flaw in the stance that most progressives have taken on economic issues is that they have accepted a framing whereby conservatives are assumed to support market outcomes, while progressives want to rely on the government. This framing leads progressives to futilely lash out against markets, rather than examining the factors that lead to undesirable market outcomes. The market is just a tool, and in fact a very useful one. It makes no more sense to lash out against markets than to lash out against the wheel." (Excerpted from Preface)
--------
The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer
Published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC.
Creative Commons (cc) 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4116-9395-1
Dean Baker is a macroeconomist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is co-author of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot, University of Chicago Press, 1999), co-author of The Benefits of Full Employment (with Jared Bernstein, Economic Policy Institute, 2004), and author of The History of the United States Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2006). He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. His blog, Beat the Press, provides commentary on economic reporting [ http://beatthepress.blogspot.com ].
The Center for Economic and Policy Research is an independent, nonpartisan think tank that was established to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives. CEPR's Advisory Board of Economists includes Nobel Laureate economists Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz, and Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
-------
t r u t h o u t | Release
Monday 15 May 2006
Washington, DC: In his new book, "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer," well-known economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. The book examines a variety of "nanny state" policies that make the rich richer while leaving most Americans worse off. Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, candidly rejects current political truisms, proposes alternatives, and encourages readers to openly debate the way forward.
How the wealthy use the government to stay rich and get richer
To download a free electronic copy of book, visit: www.conservativenannystate.org.
By distributing the book online at no cost, Baker hopes to spark public debate about the most effective mechanism for supporting the writing and designing of books and other forms of intellectual work. Paperback copies are available for a fee that covers printing and shipping costs.
Book Excerpt
"The key flaw in the stance that most progressives have taken on economic issues is that they have accepted a framing whereby conservatives are assumed to support market outcomes, while progressives want to rely on the government. This framing leads progressives to futilely lash out against markets, rather than examining the factors that lead to undesirable market outcomes. The market is just a tool, and in fact a very useful one. It makes no more sense to lash out against markets than to lash out against the wheel." (Excerpted from Preface)
--------
The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer
Published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC.
Creative Commons (cc) 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4116-9395-1
Dean Baker is a macroeconomist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is co-author of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot, University of Chicago Press, 1999), co-author of The Benefits of Full Employment (with Jared Bernstein, Economic Policy Institute, 2004), and author of The History of the United States Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2006). He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. His blog, Beat the Press, provides commentary on economic reporting [ http://beatthepress.blogspot.com ].
The Center for Economic and Policy Research is an independent, nonpartisan think tank that was established to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives. CEPR's Advisory Board of Economists includes Nobel Laureate economists Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz, and Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
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Welcome to the Impossible World
Welcome to the Impossible World
By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch.com
Sunday 14 May 2006
Commencement address to the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley.
Some of you here today receiving degrees took time off to explore the world, work for a cause, or earn enough money to get to college, but I suspect the great majority of you went straight through from high school and thus were likely born in 1984. What does it mean to be born in 1984, the ominous year that hung over humanity for 36 years after George Orwell made those four numbers a synonym for totalitarianism; what does it mean to be born atop the high wall at the end of the grim future of the imagination?
I thought of that as soon as I was invited to give this talk, thought about the enormous gap between when Orwell, on the beautiful isle of Jura in Scotland, wrote this bleakest of anti-utopian novels in 1948, and the actual 1984, as well as the no less profound chasm between 1984, real and imagined, and the present moment. To contemplate those chasms is to recognize, in the most literal sense, just how utterly unpredictable the future is. To recognize that is to realize that a rapidly changing world requires an ability to appreciate uncertainty, and what in books we call wild plot twists, at least as much as the wobbly gift of prophesy.
I thought of these things with the tools with which we English majors graduate into the world - not the tools that enable you to splice genes, cantilever bridges, or make piles of money, but those that enable you to analyze, to see patterns, to acquire a personal philosophy rather than a jumble of unexamined, hand-me-down notions; those that enable you not to make a living but maybe to live. This least utilitarian of educations prepares you to make sense of the world and maybe to make meaning; for one way to describe the great struggle of our time is as the endeavor to become a producer of meanings rather than a consumer of them - in an age when meaning as advertising and marketing, as others' definitions of pleasure and terror, is daily forced down our throats.
To make meaning, to change the world, or just to read it thoughtfully (which can itself be insurrectionary)… And never has our world been so overloaded, so rapidly changing, and so full of surprises that require us to change our minds, rethink possibilities, and then do so again; never has it required such careful reading. In my own case, the kind of critical reading I first learned to do with books, then with works of art, turned out to be transferable to national parks, atomic bombs, revolutions, marches, the act of walking - a skill transferred not only to feed my writing but my larger path through the world.
Books themselves sometimes change the world directly: you can talk about nonfiction like Diderot's Encyclopedia, about the Communist Manifesto, The Origin of Species, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, about an essay that mattered a great deal only a very long time after it was written, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," and about a book in that Thoreauvian vein whose practical impact we might actually be able to measure.
In 1975, Edward Abbey published his novel about a charming bunch of what the Department of Homeland Security would now call domestic terrorists, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The novel changed the English language in a small way by popularizing monkey-wrenching as a verb for sabotage, but it did more. (And here, being an English major and thus a lover of obscure scraps of information, let me mention that the word sabotage itself comes from the wooden shoes French workers - actually peasants just off the land - wore. Not so long after the Industrial Revolution, such workers would sabotage machinery by throwing their wooden shoes, or sabots, into it, and so jamming up the works.) Anyway, in the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the protagonists plan to blow up Glen Canyon Dam, the huge and ultimately useless structure strangling the Colorado River upstream from the Grand Canyon.
The novel helped prompt the founding of Earth First! - which has not always been perfect but has sometimes been useful, even heroic, in the protection of the environment. In 1981 Earth First! announced its arrival on the scene by rolling an immense length of plastic painted to resemble a crack down the wall of Glen Canyon Dam, saying with this that the dam was neither immutable, nor inevitable. From its creation in the early Sixties until then, the dam had seemed just that; since then it has become ever less crazy and hopeless to dream, think about, even work for the opening of its sluice gates and the rebirth of the wild river.
The same is true of another dam that famously broke another writer's heart, Hetch-Hetchy Dam inside Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada, built in the teens of the last century. That praise-singer of peaks and Sierra Club cofounder John Muir mourned its construction; you young Californians may live to see its dismantling. I can't say nobody imagined we would come to such a pass, but I can say that few did, maybe not even Muir and Abbey.
Let me reach for another book, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, to cite the Red Queen's reprimand of Alice's rational assertion that "one can't believe impossible things." The Queen replies, "I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
You might want to take up the Red Queen's practice. For we are impossible people living in an impossible world - or at least inconceivable to the great majority not so long ago. The year 2006 would certainly have been even more unimaginable from the perspective of 1984 than 1984 was from the perspective of 1948. Who would have believed it if you had told someone in, say, 1954, or even 1974, of our world as it is now in all its scientific, genetic, social, political, environmental, and sexual transformation, this melting, mutating, tainted world that still holds such hope? Various forms of federal collapse and repression have long been anticipated, but a dynamic and vocal Latino population, same-sex marriage, radical food activism? Oddly enough, I don't think that science fiction is particularly good at teaching you to anticipate such unexpected change, but perhaps fiction in general and poetry can indeed provide lessons in unpredictability.
For me one of the great pleasures of writing nonfiction is that real life supplies coincidences and upheavals too improbable for novels. The amazing thing about the novel 1984 is that Orwell could invent the Ministry of Truth, Big Brother, thought crimes, and the Memory Hole, but in his book women are still hanging cloth diapers on clotheslines. It's easier to prophesy global politics than laundry, but our lives are shaped by both. And fiction and poetry, as well as movies, music, and conversations, help generate the changes that don't come as revolutions or reforms but as shifts in how people think about their daily lives and acts - and by this I mean not just changes in sensibility but in what people consume, who they support, embrace, even love. You can see, for example, that the arts have led the battle against homophobia and other kinds of intolerance. As the San Francisco poet Diane DiPrima likes to say, "The only war that counts is the war against the imagination," and every creative act, every thoughtful inquiry, every opening of a mind is a triumph for our side in that war.
Books matter. Stories matter. People die of pernicious stories, are reinvented by new stories, and make stories to shelter themselves. Though we learned from postmodernism that a story is only a construct, so is a house, and a story can be more important as shelter: the story that you have certain inalienable rights and immeasurable value, the story that there is an alternative to violence and competition, the story that women are human beings. Sometimes people find the stories that save their lives in books.
The stories we live by are themselves like characters in books: Some we will outlive us; some will betray us; some will bring us joy; some will lead us to places we could never have imagined. George Orwell's 1984 wasn't a story to shelter in, but a story meant to throw open the door and thrust us into the strong winds of history; it was a warning in the form of a story. Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang was an invitation in the form of a story, but even its author didn't imagine how we might take up that invitation or that Glen Canyon Dam might have taken on a doomed look by 2006. "The universe,? said the radical American poet Muriel Rukeyser, "is made of stories, not atoms." I believe that being able to recognize stories, to read them, and to tell them is what it takes to have a life, rather than just make a living. This is the equipment you should have received.
The good thing about being born in 1984 is that it should inoculate you against nostalgia. The actual 1984 was no Arcadian daydream, no uneventful utopia; it hovers back there in no golden haze. This week in 1984, Ronald Reagan was campaigning for his second term against a feeble Democratic candidate; democracy and human-rights activists from Poland to the Philippines were being imprisoned and otherwise repressed for daring to demand something better than dictatorship; AIDS was a big new disease and political issue with no effective treatment; and all across the U.S. deregulated savings and loans were beginning to collapse, taking people's hard-earned savings with them. Thanks to related policies, a new American subgroup that had hardly existed in the 1970s was beginning to appear, the mass of people we call the homeless. And the U.S. was busily intervening in the worst possible way in the politics of Central America. What the Middle East is to Bush Jr., Central America was to Ronald Reagan, a place to assert U.S. might with ruthless disregard for human rights.
Those who imagine that the American torturers in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib are some appalling new aberration need to remember that, in El Salvador and Guatemala in 1984, the most hideous kinds of torture were in widespread use. Although these were generally not directly inflicted by U.S. troops, they were carried out with U.S. training and funding, and often with CIA direction. The U.S. also had a powerful anti-intervention movement defending the right of Nicaragua's Sandinista Government that had overthrown the U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, and the rights of the rebellious in Guatemala and El Salvador, those rebelling against brutal regimes in blood-soaked civil wars.
At the same time, President Reagan had just stepped up the nuclear arms race and many in that moment anticipated an end-of-the-world nuclear war any time, a war with what Reagan called the Evil Empire, aka the Soviet Union. This generated a powerful antinuclear movement that changed quite a few things around the world, a movement that, sadly, dissipated when the Cold War came to an end and we failed to seize the fabled "peace dividend." The sudden vanishing of the Soviet Union was one of the most impossible things the Red Queen could have imagined before breakfast.
You who were born in 1984 would have been entering second grade as the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War went on hold - only to be reborn as the War on Terror. Now, there are two ways I can bring this story of where we were then and where we are now forward. One you probably know; and, if you have been in too many graduate seminars, you also know that it could be called a declensionist narrative: Reagan was bad; Bush is worse; we have lost a lot of wilderness, polar ice, species, rainforest, battles, independent media outlets, family farms, and so forth; while gaining a lot of weapons systems, marketing strategies, TV channels, genetically modified organisms, and pavement. This is all true, and the reason why I seldom bother telling this story myself is that it is told so well, even exhaustively, by so many of my compañeros on the left. There's "another way of telling," as the great writer John Berger says, and a lot more stories.
When I consider the state of the world I go back to those Dickens novels in which so many characters are onstage that there can be no single conclusion. Think of Great Expectations, in many ways the most purely tragic of his novels, with Pip and Estella forever separated and forever saddened by the hard lessons they have learned. (At least in the unsweetened original ending.) Tragedy, my splendid undergraduate English professor told me, ends in exile, comedy in marriage. But remember that Dickens in all his multifarious generosity gave us many stories in one book. After all, in Great Expectations, Biddie and Joe seemed to be living as happily ever after as Pip's great friend Herbert and his dear girl. Great Expectations is a tragedy, but only for the major figures, and perhaps these millennial years are a tragedy for the U.S.A. and a few other giant countries like Russia, but not for all smaller countries. Bolivia and Chile, for example, have begun to bloom, and India is most certainly in both the best and the worst of times.
For others and elsewhere it has been an era of miracles, if not of paradises. You have probably heard all too many mythologizing stories about "the Sixties," you who were born in the late 1970s and 1980s, but you have not heard nearly enough about the ferocious and sometimes very powerful activism of the 1980s and 1990s. While there is little to be nostalgic for in 1984 itself, there is in the later 1980s, which may well have been the greatest era of revolution this world has ever seen. Certainly, 1989 was a year to compare with 1789 and 1848. Those Polish and Filipino activists who were being squelched in 1984 triumphed a little later, as did the Koreans, grasping democracy from the bottom up from the military autocrats who had ruled over them for so long. The U.S.-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown by a defecting army and what came to be called "people power" twenty years ago this spring.
Poland's Solidarity labor movement was only part of a great surge of boldness that ultimately toppled the Soviet empire in the fall of 1989 in a series of breathtaking events that let Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland be free and, two years later, resulted in the full dismantling of the Soviet Union. Its sudden vanishing was one of the most impossible things the Red Queen could have imagined. The CIA and other U.S. intelligence pros never for a second anticipated that such a thing might happen, even as Eastern European and Russian writers, artists, union organizers, and others dreamed it and organized it into being. The student uprising in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1989 ended in tanks and Orwellian oppression, but the spark it lit may not be extinguished.
1992 brought a deeper revolution reaching back farther in time, one that throws open the doors of my own imagination. This revolution was lovingly crafted by scholars, by poets, by tribal leaders and ceremonial elders, by speakers of endangered languages, organizers, and activists - mostly indigenous ones because this was the great indigenous reclamation that transformed the quincentennial of Columbus's bumbling arrival in the Americas from a sugar-coated commemoration of conquest into an anticolonial insurrection. Back then, the native people of the Americas were supposed to be conquered, silenced, even extinct - many of us non-natives were raised to believe that they were, especially those of us who grew up earlier than you did on the old textbooks that reduced the extraordinary richness of languages and cultures in Native California to a handful of primitive diggers, rooting up grubs to eat with sharpened sticks. Stories matter, and here the stories and the circumstances have changed, unbelievably.
In 1994, an indigenous army walked out of the remote Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, in Mexico's poorest and southernmost state, and staged a revolution, not only in what the status of Indians would be in that country but in the nature of revolution too. These were the Zapatistas, named after an earlier Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata. Their mouthpiece was a nonnative guy who called himself Subcommandante Marcos and who reinvented the language of politics as something poetic, paradoxical, playful - who found another story to tell. The Zapatistas burst onto the world stage on January 1, 1994, when you would have been going on 10 years old, in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which went into effect that day. That measure made so many Mexicans so much more desperately poor and has everything to do with the millions of Mexican migrants arriving here today.
The Zapatista response to NAFTA was the beginning of a remarkable, unforeseen, and still-raging war against corporate globalization. As it happened, they had been inspired to rise fifteen months before by the indigenous questioning of the quincentennial. Even the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez couldn't anticipate the Zapatistas but writers like the Uruguayan history-poet Eduardo Galeano and John Berger welcomed them. And when they arrived, the story of what was possible changed.
Twelve years later, on January 22 of this very year, the poor, mostly indigenous nation of Bolivia elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, a story that has taken 514 years to come not to its happy ending but to at least an auspicious, audacious new beginning. President Morales was an impossibility a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty years ago, when only a Red Queen would have believed in him.
In Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, from the mid-1970s into at least the late 1980s, most countries were governed by military juntas, by dictators, by regimes that relied on terror and torture to thwart the will of the people. One by one in the past twenty-two years, those regimes have been overthrown, voted out, gradually transformed, so that Latin America, that former continent of carnage and fear, is now a beacon of hope for the rest of the world and many of its governments lead the fight against corporate globalization. That seemed impossible in 1984.
What, then, is impossible in 2006 that you who are still so young will live to see become actuality? More atrocities, more miracles and shocks, much that is now unimaginable.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." The state of the world is always a jumble of opposing ideas, of uprisings and crackdowns, of wonder and horror. Fitzgerald's forgotten next sentence is, "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
Hopeless is one story, otherwise is another; go tell it on your mountain or internship or wherever you're headed, but never forget that you know how to dismantle stories, how to question them, how to compare and contrast them, and maybe sometimes how to invent or reinvent them. This is vital, since your task as the young being cut loose at this moment of graduation from what we, the old, have to give is to reinvent the universe, the universe made out of stories - to change the stories, to tell them, to bury them, and to give birth to them. A difficult task, but not an impossible one. Not if you remember, as readers and scholars might, that we are living in an impossible world already.
-------
Rebecca Solnit's Tomdispatch-generated Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities is out in a new and expanded edition. Her most recent book is A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
This is the text of the 2006 commencement address for the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley.
By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch.com
Sunday 14 May 2006
Commencement address to the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley.
Some of you here today receiving degrees took time off to explore the world, work for a cause, or earn enough money to get to college, but I suspect the great majority of you went straight through from high school and thus were likely born in 1984. What does it mean to be born in 1984, the ominous year that hung over humanity for 36 years after George Orwell made those four numbers a synonym for totalitarianism; what does it mean to be born atop the high wall at the end of the grim future of the imagination?
I thought of that as soon as I was invited to give this talk, thought about the enormous gap between when Orwell, on the beautiful isle of Jura in Scotland, wrote this bleakest of anti-utopian novels in 1948, and the actual 1984, as well as the no less profound chasm between 1984, real and imagined, and the present moment. To contemplate those chasms is to recognize, in the most literal sense, just how utterly unpredictable the future is. To recognize that is to realize that a rapidly changing world requires an ability to appreciate uncertainty, and what in books we call wild plot twists, at least as much as the wobbly gift of prophesy.
I thought of these things with the tools with which we English majors graduate into the world - not the tools that enable you to splice genes, cantilever bridges, or make piles of money, but those that enable you to analyze, to see patterns, to acquire a personal philosophy rather than a jumble of unexamined, hand-me-down notions; those that enable you not to make a living but maybe to live. This least utilitarian of educations prepares you to make sense of the world and maybe to make meaning; for one way to describe the great struggle of our time is as the endeavor to become a producer of meanings rather than a consumer of them - in an age when meaning as advertising and marketing, as others' definitions of pleasure and terror, is daily forced down our throats.
To make meaning, to change the world, or just to read it thoughtfully (which can itself be insurrectionary)… And never has our world been so overloaded, so rapidly changing, and so full of surprises that require us to change our minds, rethink possibilities, and then do so again; never has it required such careful reading. In my own case, the kind of critical reading I first learned to do with books, then with works of art, turned out to be transferable to national parks, atomic bombs, revolutions, marches, the act of walking - a skill transferred not only to feed my writing but my larger path through the world.
Books themselves sometimes change the world directly: you can talk about nonfiction like Diderot's Encyclopedia, about the Communist Manifesto, The Origin of Species, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, about an essay that mattered a great deal only a very long time after it was written, Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," and about a book in that Thoreauvian vein whose practical impact we might actually be able to measure.
In 1975, Edward Abbey published his novel about a charming bunch of what the Department of Homeland Security would now call domestic terrorists, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The novel changed the English language in a small way by popularizing monkey-wrenching as a verb for sabotage, but it did more. (And here, being an English major and thus a lover of obscure scraps of information, let me mention that the word sabotage itself comes from the wooden shoes French workers - actually peasants just off the land - wore. Not so long after the Industrial Revolution, such workers would sabotage machinery by throwing their wooden shoes, or sabots, into it, and so jamming up the works.) Anyway, in the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the protagonists plan to blow up Glen Canyon Dam, the huge and ultimately useless structure strangling the Colorado River upstream from the Grand Canyon.
The novel helped prompt the founding of Earth First! - which has not always been perfect but has sometimes been useful, even heroic, in the protection of the environment. In 1981 Earth First! announced its arrival on the scene by rolling an immense length of plastic painted to resemble a crack down the wall of Glen Canyon Dam, saying with this that the dam was neither immutable, nor inevitable. From its creation in the early Sixties until then, the dam had seemed just that; since then it has become ever less crazy and hopeless to dream, think about, even work for the opening of its sluice gates and the rebirth of the wild river.
The same is true of another dam that famously broke another writer's heart, Hetch-Hetchy Dam inside Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada, built in the teens of the last century. That praise-singer of peaks and Sierra Club cofounder John Muir mourned its construction; you young Californians may live to see its dismantling. I can't say nobody imagined we would come to such a pass, but I can say that few did, maybe not even Muir and Abbey.
Let me reach for another book, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, to cite the Red Queen's reprimand of Alice's rational assertion that "one can't believe impossible things." The Queen replies, "I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
You might want to take up the Red Queen's practice. For we are impossible people living in an impossible world - or at least inconceivable to the great majority not so long ago. The year 2006 would certainly have been even more unimaginable from the perspective of 1984 than 1984 was from the perspective of 1948. Who would have believed it if you had told someone in, say, 1954, or even 1974, of our world as it is now in all its scientific, genetic, social, political, environmental, and sexual transformation, this melting, mutating, tainted world that still holds such hope? Various forms of federal collapse and repression have long been anticipated, but a dynamic and vocal Latino population, same-sex marriage, radical food activism? Oddly enough, I don't think that science fiction is particularly good at teaching you to anticipate such unexpected change, but perhaps fiction in general and poetry can indeed provide lessons in unpredictability.
For me one of the great pleasures of writing nonfiction is that real life supplies coincidences and upheavals too improbable for novels. The amazing thing about the novel 1984 is that Orwell could invent the Ministry of Truth, Big Brother, thought crimes, and the Memory Hole, but in his book women are still hanging cloth diapers on clotheslines. It's easier to prophesy global politics than laundry, but our lives are shaped by both. And fiction and poetry, as well as movies, music, and conversations, help generate the changes that don't come as revolutions or reforms but as shifts in how people think about their daily lives and acts - and by this I mean not just changes in sensibility but in what people consume, who they support, embrace, even love. You can see, for example, that the arts have led the battle against homophobia and other kinds of intolerance. As the San Francisco poet Diane DiPrima likes to say, "The only war that counts is the war against the imagination," and every creative act, every thoughtful inquiry, every opening of a mind is a triumph for our side in that war.
Books matter. Stories matter. People die of pernicious stories, are reinvented by new stories, and make stories to shelter themselves. Though we learned from postmodernism that a story is only a construct, so is a house, and a story can be more important as shelter: the story that you have certain inalienable rights and immeasurable value, the story that there is an alternative to violence and competition, the story that women are human beings. Sometimes people find the stories that save their lives in books.
The stories we live by are themselves like characters in books: Some we will outlive us; some will betray us; some will bring us joy; some will lead us to places we could never have imagined. George Orwell's 1984 wasn't a story to shelter in, but a story meant to throw open the door and thrust us into the strong winds of history; it was a warning in the form of a story. Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang was an invitation in the form of a story, but even its author didn't imagine how we might take up that invitation or that Glen Canyon Dam might have taken on a doomed look by 2006. "The universe,? said the radical American poet Muriel Rukeyser, "is made of stories, not atoms." I believe that being able to recognize stories, to read them, and to tell them is what it takes to have a life, rather than just make a living. This is the equipment you should have received.
The good thing about being born in 1984 is that it should inoculate you against nostalgia. The actual 1984 was no Arcadian daydream, no uneventful utopia; it hovers back there in no golden haze. This week in 1984, Ronald Reagan was campaigning for his second term against a feeble Democratic candidate; democracy and human-rights activists from Poland to the Philippines were being imprisoned and otherwise repressed for daring to demand something better than dictatorship; AIDS was a big new disease and political issue with no effective treatment; and all across the U.S. deregulated savings and loans were beginning to collapse, taking people's hard-earned savings with them. Thanks to related policies, a new American subgroup that had hardly existed in the 1970s was beginning to appear, the mass of people we call the homeless. And the U.S. was busily intervening in the worst possible way in the politics of Central America. What the Middle East is to Bush Jr., Central America was to Ronald Reagan, a place to assert U.S. might with ruthless disregard for human rights.
Those who imagine that the American torturers in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib are some appalling new aberration need to remember that, in El Salvador and Guatemala in 1984, the most hideous kinds of torture were in widespread use. Although these were generally not directly inflicted by U.S. troops, they were carried out with U.S. training and funding, and often with CIA direction. The U.S. also had a powerful anti-intervention movement defending the right of Nicaragua's Sandinista Government that had overthrown the U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, and the rights of the rebellious in Guatemala and El Salvador, those rebelling against brutal regimes in blood-soaked civil wars.
At the same time, President Reagan had just stepped up the nuclear arms race and many in that moment anticipated an end-of-the-world nuclear war any time, a war with what Reagan called the Evil Empire, aka the Soviet Union. This generated a powerful antinuclear movement that changed quite a few things around the world, a movement that, sadly, dissipated when the Cold War came to an end and we failed to seize the fabled "peace dividend." The sudden vanishing of the Soviet Union was one of the most impossible things the Red Queen could have imagined before breakfast.
You who were born in 1984 would have been entering second grade as the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War went on hold - only to be reborn as the War on Terror. Now, there are two ways I can bring this story of where we were then and where we are now forward. One you probably know; and, if you have been in too many graduate seminars, you also know that it could be called a declensionist narrative: Reagan was bad; Bush is worse; we have lost a lot of wilderness, polar ice, species, rainforest, battles, independent media outlets, family farms, and so forth; while gaining a lot of weapons systems, marketing strategies, TV channels, genetically modified organisms, and pavement. This is all true, and the reason why I seldom bother telling this story myself is that it is told so well, even exhaustively, by so many of my compañeros on the left. There's "another way of telling," as the great writer John Berger says, and a lot more stories.
When I consider the state of the world I go back to those Dickens novels in which so many characters are onstage that there can be no single conclusion. Think of Great Expectations, in many ways the most purely tragic of his novels, with Pip and Estella forever separated and forever saddened by the hard lessons they have learned. (At least in the unsweetened original ending.) Tragedy, my splendid undergraduate English professor told me, ends in exile, comedy in marriage. But remember that Dickens in all his multifarious generosity gave us many stories in one book. After all, in Great Expectations, Biddie and Joe seemed to be living as happily ever after as Pip's great friend Herbert and his dear girl. Great Expectations is a tragedy, but only for the major figures, and perhaps these millennial years are a tragedy for the U.S.A. and a few other giant countries like Russia, but not for all smaller countries. Bolivia and Chile, for example, have begun to bloom, and India is most certainly in both the best and the worst of times.
For others and elsewhere it has been an era of miracles, if not of paradises. You have probably heard all too many mythologizing stories about "the Sixties," you who were born in the late 1970s and 1980s, but you have not heard nearly enough about the ferocious and sometimes very powerful activism of the 1980s and 1990s. While there is little to be nostalgic for in 1984 itself, there is in the later 1980s, which may well have been the greatest era of revolution this world has ever seen. Certainly, 1989 was a year to compare with 1789 and 1848. Those Polish and Filipino activists who were being squelched in 1984 triumphed a little later, as did the Koreans, grasping democracy from the bottom up from the military autocrats who had ruled over them for so long. The U.S.-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown by a defecting army and what came to be called "people power" twenty years ago this spring.
Poland's Solidarity labor movement was only part of a great surge of boldness that ultimately toppled the Soviet empire in the fall of 1989 in a series of breathtaking events that let Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland be free and, two years later, resulted in the full dismantling of the Soviet Union. Its sudden vanishing was one of the most impossible things the Red Queen could have imagined. The CIA and other U.S. intelligence pros never for a second anticipated that such a thing might happen, even as Eastern European and Russian writers, artists, union organizers, and others dreamed it and organized it into being. The student uprising in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1989 ended in tanks and Orwellian oppression, but the spark it lit may not be extinguished.
1992 brought a deeper revolution reaching back farther in time, one that throws open the doors of my own imagination. This revolution was lovingly crafted by scholars, by poets, by tribal leaders and ceremonial elders, by speakers of endangered languages, organizers, and activists - mostly indigenous ones because this was the great indigenous reclamation that transformed the quincentennial of Columbus's bumbling arrival in the Americas from a sugar-coated commemoration of conquest into an anticolonial insurrection. Back then, the native people of the Americas were supposed to be conquered, silenced, even extinct - many of us non-natives were raised to believe that they were, especially those of us who grew up earlier than you did on the old textbooks that reduced the extraordinary richness of languages and cultures in Native California to a handful of primitive diggers, rooting up grubs to eat with sharpened sticks. Stories matter, and here the stories and the circumstances have changed, unbelievably.
In 1994, an indigenous army walked out of the remote Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, in Mexico's poorest and southernmost state, and staged a revolution, not only in what the status of Indians would be in that country but in the nature of revolution too. These were the Zapatistas, named after an earlier Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata. Their mouthpiece was a nonnative guy who called himself Subcommandante Marcos and who reinvented the language of politics as something poetic, paradoxical, playful - who found another story to tell. The Zapatistas burst onto the world stage on January 1, 1994, when you would have been going on 10 years old, in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which went into effect that day. That measure made so many Mexicans so much more desperately poor and has everything to do with the millions of Mexican migrants arriving here today.
The Zapatista response to NAFTA was the beginning of a remarkable, unforeseen, and still-raging war against corporate globalization. As it happened, they had been inspired to rise fifteen months before by the indigenous questioning of the quincentennial. Even the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez couldn't anticipate the Zapatistas but writers like the Uruguayan history-poet Eduardo Galeano and John Berger welcomed them. And when they arrived, the story of what was possible changed.
Twelve years later, on January 22 of this very year, the poor, mostly indigenous nation of Bolivia elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, a story that has taken 514 years to come not to its happy ending but to at least an auspicious, audacious new beginning. President Morales was an impossibility a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty years ago, when only a Red Queen would have believed in him.
In Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, from the mid-1970s into at least the late 1980s, most countries were governed by military juntas, by dictators, by regimes that relied on terror and torture to thwart the will of the people. One by one in the past twenty-two years, those regimes have been overthrown, voted out, gradually transformed, so that Latin America, that former continent of carnage and fear, is now a beacon of hope for the rest of the world and many of its governments lead the fight against corporate globalization. That seemed impossible in 1984.
What, then, is impossible in 2006 that you who are still so young will live to see become actuality? More atrocities, more miracles and shocks, much that is now unimaginable.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." The state of the world is always a jumble of opposing ideas, of uprisings and crackdowns, of wonder and horror. Fitzgerald's forgotten next sentence is, "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
Hopeless is one story, otherwise is another; go tell it on your mountain or internship or wherever you're headed, but never forget that you know how to dismantle stories, how to question them, how to compare and contrast them, and maybe sometimes how to invent or reinvent them. This is vital, since your task as the young being cut loose at this moment of graduation from what we, the old, have to give is to reinvent the universe, the universe made out of stories - to change the stories, to tell them, to bury them, and to give birth to them. A difficult task, but not an impossible one. Not if you remember, as readers and scholars might, that we are living in an impossible world already.
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Rebecca Solnit's Tomdispatch-generated Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities is out in a new and expanded edition. Her most recent book is A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
This is the text of the 2006 commencement address for the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley.
Federal source: Government tracking major media phone numbers to root out confidential sources
Federal source: Government tracking major media phone numbers to root out confidential sources
Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling
May 15, 2006 10:33 AM
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for th
Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling
May 15, 2006 10:33 AM
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for th