'Maybe they just need to have their civil war'

'Maybe they just need to have their civil war'
Fueling Sectarian Violence in Iraq
by Gareth Porter; TomDispatch; January 27, 2006

Since last summer, the ad-jingle-style centerpiece of the U.S. mission
in Iraq, as defined by George Bush, has been: "As Iraqis stand up, we
will stand down." In recent months, that "standing up" of Iraqi
security forces to gradually replace American occupation troops has
become even more important in administration pronouncements on the war.
The objective is now accepted as self-evident wisdom in the mainstream
media and among the punditocracy, the only question being whether it
can be successfully accomplished. The Democratic Party leadership has
not challenged this goal in any way, even as Democrats complain that it
is simply not being done fast enough or effectively enough.
 
Given Iraq's well documented descent into sectarian violence in 2005,
however, the question that should be asked is not whether the United
States can put enough Iraqi troops into the field with enough training;
it is whether, in arming and deploying Shiites and Kurds to fight
Sunnis, it is actually stoking the fires of sectarian and ethnic civil
war.
 
The administration has gone to great lengths to avoid such questions.
When Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who was, until recently, responsible for
training the new Iraqi military, was asked at a briefing last February
what the religious-ethnic breakdown of Iraq's security forces might be,
he claimed to have no such numbers. He was, however, being
disingenuous. The U.S. command may not have had precise figures on the
subject, but he certainly knew that the units being sent into largely
Sunni cities and towns in the most rebellious parts of Iraq were
overwhelmingly, provocatively, Shiite and Kurdish in their make-up.
 
Petraeus also deliberately misled the reporters at the briefing by
stating that "regional forces, both local police and ... the Iraqi
National Guard ... tend to reflect the ethnic makeup of their
community." What he did not say is that this only applied to the
Kurdish and Shiite sections of the country. In Sunni cities and towns,
the real policing was not being done by local Sunni forces but by
Shiite and Kurdish commandos from elsewhere.
 
Throughout 2005, Bush administration speeches and communications to
Congress systematically obscured the fact that the U.S. command was
carrying out a battle plan calling for reliance on units filled
exclusively, or nearly exclusively, with Shiite and Kurds to occupy
Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere in the "Sunni triangle."
 
That policy guaranteed the acceleration of already growing tendencies
in Iraqi society toward sectarian and ethnic violence -- and possibly
toward civil war as well as forms of "ethnic cleansing." Many of the
Shiite troops and officers in the military and police commando units of
the new Iraqi military are, in fact, motivated by hatred not just of
Sunni insurgents but of the Sunni population as a whole. One fine
reporter in Iraq, Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter has, in fact, explored
this new Iraqi reality on the ground in ways no other American reporter
has thought to do. Last October, he "embedded" himself for a week in a
unit of Lt. Gen. Petraeus's new military, the all-Shiite 1st Brigade,
the first Iraqi unit to be given its own area of operations and often
considered the template for the future of the army. What he discovered
was a purely sectarian outfit obsessed with revenge against Sunnis. His
is a chilling account of the violent Shiite hatred of Sunnis that
drives Iraqi military operations in Sunni neighborhoods and essentially
guarantees that the insurgency will only grow fiercer in response.
 
Lasseter found that Shiite officers and troops want to inflict death on
a far broader swath of Sunnis than simply those insurgents they can
identify. Their motive is clearly to intimidate the Sunni population
into silence and acquiescence, while at the same time satisfying their
own lust for revenge for past acts of oppression by the formerly
powerful Sunni minority. One sergeant told Lasseter that, in 2006, the
Shiites would "do what Saddam did -- start with five people from each
neighborhood and kill them in the streets and go from there."
 
In December, Lasseter traveled to Kurdish areas of Iraq where he
reported:
 
"Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia
members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the
groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and
possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the
borders of an independent Kurdistan ... The interviews with Kurdish
troops ... suggested that as the American military transfers more bases
and areas of control to Iraqi units, it may be handing the nation to
militias that are bent more on advancing ethnic and religious interests
than on defeating the insurgency and preserving national unity."
 
His eyewitness accounts make it clear that sending either Shiite or
Kurdish units into Sunni neighborhoods is likely only to create a
dynamic of retaliation and revenge that will quickly spread to the
larger communities on both sides. This, then, is the open secret of the
Bush administration's present policy toward what has already become a
dirty war on a massive scale.
 
The Roots of a Future Civil War?
 
As is true of practically everything about the U.S. occupation of Iraq,
the strategy of pitting Shiites and Kurds against Sunnis was not the
result of careful planning. Its origins were, in fact, in a purely
military response to the most important turning point in the occupation
of Iraq -- the complete collapse of Sunni security forces in which the
U.S. command had placed such high hopes.
 
During an April 2004 offensive launched by the insurgents, most Sunni
military units simply disappeared overnight. According to a June 2004
Government Accounting Office report, the number of Civil Defense Corps
troops in Western Iraq, which included the Sunni strongholds of
Fallujah and Ramadi, was estimated to have fallen by over 80% -- from
5,600 to about 1,000 -- largely because of "collective desertion of
units."
 
The US command's response to this debacle was a decision that summer to
create a special "Fallujah Brigade." It consisted of 1,600 Sunni troops
recruited to patrol that restive city, led by the former Baathist
officer whom the Americans had picked to head Iraq's intelligence
service. This force was meant to be the alternative to a bloody U.S.
assault on Fallujah that the U.S. military preferred to avoid. But the
brigade collaborated with the insurgents in Fallujah, turning over to
them the 800 assault rifles, 27 pickup trucks, and 50 radios provided
by the U.S. command. The Fallujah Brigade was quietly dissolved by the
command in September 2004.
 
In November 2004, when the insurgents launched their next offensive in
Mosul and Ramadi, there was yet another mass defection, this time in
Mosul. The Sunni police force largely went over to the other side.
Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of US troops in Northern Iraq told
reporters that 3,200 of the 4,000 policemen in Mosul helped the
insurgents to weapons, radios, police uniforms, and 50 police cars
before leaving their posts. Ham admitted that there had been
"premeditated infiltration" of police recruits by the insurgents. In
Ramadi, the Americans were so distrustful of the Sunni police that they
unilaterally disbanded the entire force when the insurgent offensive
began.
 
In the third week of November, with Mosul in insurgent hands, the U.S.
turned to its Kurdish allies for help. It brought in nearly 2,000
Kurdish peshmurga militiamen to control Mosul, and five battalions of
predominantly Shiite troops, with a smattering of Kurds, to police
Ramadi. Hundreds of Shiite troops from Baghdad and southern areas of
the country were also sent into Samara and Fallujah.
 
This Shiite and Kurdish occupation of Sunni cities, which has only
grown more pronounced, was certain to intensify sectarian-ethnic
hatreds. In Mosul, there was already a long history of intense
animosity between the Kurdish parties and Baath party loyalists who
made up a large part of the Sunni population of the city. The Sunni
Arab majority were afraid the Kurds planned to take over the city and
add it to Kurdistan. There was also talk among Arab residents about
taking revenge against Kurdish militiamen who had been blamed for
widespread looting in the city immediately after the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein.
 
Once they had consolidated control over Mosul and the surrounding area,
the Kurds imposed what essentially was a police state on the Sunni
majority in Nineveh province. Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru of the
Washington Post reported last August that Kurdish security forces had
abducted hundreds of Sunni Arabs and Turkmen from the city,
transferring them to secret prisons in Kurdistan. The Post quoted a
June State Department memo noting that Kurdish abductions had "greatly
exacerbated tensions along purely ethnic lines."
 
American officers in Mosul, however, were not concerned with ethnic
strife but with winning a war, or at least staunching their losses, and
the peshmerga seemed like the only effective Iraqi instrument in sight
for doing so. "They're well-organized, fierce and get the job done," a
U.S. company commander in Mosul rhapsodized about them.
 
Later, the Kurdish militiamen would be joined by the fierce Shiite
"Wolf Brigade," whose founder reportedly considered the Sunni members
of the Association of Muslim Scholars to be "infidels." That unit
tortured innocent Sunnis to force them to confess to being part of
insurgent organizations -- confessions which the local authorities
recognized as having been coerced once the Brigade left the city.
Nevertheless, in December 2005, NBC's Richard Engel reported that the
Wolf Brigade was considered to have been effective in Mosul.
 
The US command still prefers Shiites and Kurds to police Sunni cities
and towns. According to journalist Chris Allbritton, for instance,
members of the city council in Fallujah requested the responsible U.S.
commander to allow local people to replace Shiite units from the south
that are still occupying the city and substituting for the police. The
Americans refused, charging that local officials were still "turning a
blind eye to insurgent activities." In November, local Sunni leaders in
Ramadi demanded that U.S. troops be withdrawn from the city and be
replaced with security forces raised by local tribal leaders. Instead,
the U.S. command sent the Wolf Brigade into Ramadi in advance of the
December elections.
 
Not only the Embassy but the U.S. military was quite conscious of the
serious consequences of its sectarian-ethnic strategy. Last May, for
instance, Washington Post reporter Ann Scott Tyson wrote that "U.S.
military analysts" conceded that, "by pitting Iraqis from different
religious sects, ethnic groups and tribes against each other," the U.S.
strategy "aggravates the underlying fault lines in Iraqi society,
heightening the prospects of civil strife."
 
With the Sunni community even more overwhelmingly behind the
anti-occupation armed struggle than was the case a year ago, the U.S.
command feels it has no choice but to depend on just such sectarian or
ethnic units to help put down the Sunni insurgency. But even if they do
not explicitly admit it, U.S. commanders know that this is a brutal and
cynical policy. Thus, they have had to find a way to justify it to
themselves. In October, a "senior military official in Baghdad" was
quoted in another Tom Lasseter piece saying, "Maybe they just need to
have their civil war. In this part of the world it's almost a way of
life." That official was unconsciously echoing the words of General
William Westmoreland, the former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam,
who rationalized the hundreds of thousands of deaths inflicted on the
Vietnamese by the U.S. intervention in an infamous statement: "The
Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a
Westerner.... Life is cheap in the Orient."
 
There is no doubt that the history of violence among the Sunnis, the
Shiites, and the Kurds made for strong tendencies toward
sectarian-ethnic violence in post-Saddam Iraq. But the fact that a
senior American military official would resort to such a racist
explanation to evade responsibility for creating civil-war conditions
in Iraq only underlines the depths to which the United States has
descended.
 
 
Gareth Porter, a historian and political analyst, now writes regularly
on Iraq. He is the author of several books on the Vietnam War, most
recently Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in
Vietnam

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED EIGHTY ONE

lenses party mutated: "thicknesses obscured cowering"

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towering sting breed: "yarn ferocious senseless."

-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

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----

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-Peter K. Niven

The Evidence

The Evidence

excerpted from the book
In the Name of Democracy
American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond
edited by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith
Metropolitan Books, 2005, paper

p1
Opening statement of Justice Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor
at the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1945

The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a
system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible
to law.

p1
John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, nominated 2005 for American
ambassador to the United Nations

It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law
even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so-because, over
the long term, the goal of those who think that international law
really means anything are those who want to constrict the United
States.

p4
The devastation associated with World War II led to the recognition of
a new category of international crimes, crimes against humanity, which
involved acts of violence against a persecuted group in either war or
peacetime. The Nuremberg Charter defined these acts as "murder,
extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts
committed against civilian populations, before or during the war; or
persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of
or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the
Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the
country where perpetrated." The definition of crimes against humanity
has since been expanded to include rape and torture.

p5
War crimes have several characteristics that make them different from
other crimes. War criminals are subject to universal jurisdiction,
meaning that they can be tried not just in their own country but
anywhere in the world. War crimes are likely to be the acts of high
government officials, and such officials are likely to be in a position
to prevent the courts of their own country from bringing them to
justice. While international law prefers that each country deal with
its own war criminals, international tribunals and the courts of other
nations have been given authority to try war crimes cases where
national courts fail to act.

p5
Justice Robert Jackson proclaimed at Nuremberg
"No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It
is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

p7
The military technology the United States is using in Iraq, such as
cluster bombs and depleted uranium, may be illegal in itself. Under
Article 85 of the Geneva Conventions it is a war crime to launch "an
indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population in the
knowledge that such an attack will cause an excessive loss of life or
injury to civilians." A UN weapons commission described cluster bombs
as "weapons of indiscriminate effects." A reporter for the Mirror
(United Kingdom)" wrote from a hospital in Hillah, "Among the 168
patients I counted, not one was being treated for bullet wounds. All of
them, men, women, children, bore the wounds of bomb shrapnel. It
peppered their bodies. Blackened their skin. Smashed heads. Tore limbs.
A doctor reported that 'All the injuries you see were caused by duster
bombs'. . . The majority of the victims were children who died because
they were outside."

The third set of questions has to do with the torture and abuse of
prisoners in U.S. custody. This has been a huge but unresolved issue
since it was first indelibly engraved in the public mind by the photos
from Abu Ghraib prison. Cascading disclosures have revealed that
torture and other forms of prisoner abuse have been endemic not only in
Iraq but in Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and many other U.S. operations
around the world.

 

CULPABILITY

One of the most important principles established at Nuremberg is that
individuals are responsible for their own actions, even if they were
obeying orders, and that those in a position to give orders are
responsible for the actions of those under them. "Complicity in the
commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against
humanity" is "a crime under international law." Furthermore, "the fact
that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under
international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government
official does not relieve him of responsibility under international
law."

In those few instances where the Bush administration has admitted that
wrongdoing may have occurred in connection with Iraq and the war on
terror, it has consistently blamed low-level personnel and denied its
own responsibility. But there are growing indications that, from the
initial manipulation of evidence to justify the attack on Iraq to the
latest cover-up of memos justifying torture, highest levels of the Bush
administration have been involved.

.... As International Herald Tribune columnist William Pfaff wrote,
"Proposals to authorize torture were circulating even before there was
anyone to torture. Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration
made it known that the United States was no longer bound by
international treaties, or by American law and established U.S.
military standards concerning torture and the treatment of prisoners."
In January 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales advised the
president that if he "simply declared 'detainees' in Afghanistan
outside the protection of the Geneva conventions, the 1996 U.S. War
Crimes Act-which carries a possible death penalty for Geneva
violations-would not apply." Later a legal task force from the
Department of Defense concluded that the president, as commander in
chief, had the authority "to approve any technique needed to protect
the nation's security." As Pfaff observed, "Subsequent legal memos to
civilian officials in the White House and Pentagon dwelt in morbid
detail on permitted torture techniques, for practical purposes
concluding that anything was permitted that did not (deliberately) kill
the victim."

p9
The United States has promoted war crimes prosecutions starting with
the Nuremberg trials after World War II and continuing to the recent
trials in Rwanda, the current trials of Slobodan Milosevik, and the
impending trial of Saddam Hussein. These trials have all emphasized the
accountability of top officials for acts committed under their
authority. Is there any reason the same standard should not be applied
to the top officials in the Bush administration?

 

p9
The Bush administration's security doctrine, as articulated in the
2002, National Security Strategy, declared a war on terror "of
uncertain duration." It enunciated a doctrine of preventive war in
which "the United States will act against such emerging threats before
they are fully formed." It "will not hesitate to act alone, if
necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting
preemptively." As Senator Robert Byrd commented, "Under this strategy,
the President lays claim to an expansive power to use our military to
strike other nations first, even if we have not been threatened or
provoked."

p11
Bob Herbert, "It's Called Torture," New York Times, February 28, 2005

"As a nation, does the United States have a conscience? Or is anything
and everything O.K. in post-9/11 America? If torture and denial of due
process are O.K., why not murder? ... Where is the line that we, as a
nation, dare not cross?"

p23
CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNALS

PRINCIPLE VI: (a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression
or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or
assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the
accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned in (i).

 

PRINCIPLE VII: Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a
war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is
a crime under international law.

p27
Nuremberg Ban on Preventive War

Preventive war is unequivocally illegal. In 1946, the International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg rejected Germany's argument that it had
been compelled to attack Norway and Denmark in self-defense to prevent
a future Allied invasion." The Tribunal concluded that these attacks
violated customary law limits on self-defense and instead constituted
wars of aggression whose prohibition was demanded by the conscience of
the world. As the Tribunal stated:

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an
international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing
only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole."

Nuremberg's condemnation of preventive war was incorporated into the
U.N. Charter, affirmed by the General Assembly,' and accepted by the
Security Council. In 1978, the U.S. mobilized the Security Council to
condemn Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia and overthrow of the violently
repressive Khmer Rouge regime, terming it a breach of the Charter and
an act of aggression in violation of international law. Similarly, in
1981, the Council unanimously condemned Israel's "preventive" attack
against an Iraqi nuclear plant as a "clear violation of the Charter of
the UN and the norms of international conduct." A Council member
explained the consensus:

The concept of preventive war, which for many years served as a
justification for the abuses of powerful States, since it left to their
discretion to define what constituted a threat to them, was
definitively abolished by the Charter of the U.N.'

 

The German argument in favor of preventive war was judged and condemned
by the Nuremberg Tribunal, and German leaders held individually
accountable as war criminals. Any return to this doctrine by powerful
states such as the U.S. and U.K. would undermine world public order,
and in the process encourage states and non-state actors alike to
launch unilateral acts of aggression unconstrained by longstanding
principles of international law.

 

Humanitarian Intervention

The U.S. and U.K. have also sought to justify war under the legally
dubious doctrine of humanitarian intervention, a new concept that

has not gained the support of the international law community. This
doctrine-recently advocated by several Western countries and human
rights organizations-proposes that the international community has the
right and duty to use military force for humanitarian purposes such as
stopping egregious violations of human rights." This concept has
aroused considerable skepticism from most international lawyers, in
part because it circumvents well-established procedures and principles
of the U.N. Charter and international law.' Even supporters concede
that humanitarian intervention is a moral argument rather than a legal
right.

The attraction of humanitarian intervention lies in its capacity to
redress gross human rights abuses that otherwise might fall outside the
scope of Security Council action-the genocide in Rwanda, for example.
However, this is a misreading of the Council's authority. Major crises
like the Rwandan genocide have regional and international
repercussions. The Council is therefore already empowered, under
Chapter VII, to respond with force if necessary as a final resort to
maintain peace and security and uphold the U.N.'s fundamental purposes,
which include "encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental
freedoms."" As a matter of historical record, the Security Council did
consider military intervention in Rwanda but was blocked repeatedly by
its permanent members, including the U.S., the U.K, and France.'

The obvious danger of humanitarian intervention is that it enables
individual states to intervene wherever and whenever they perceive a
compelling humanitarian necessity, unaccountable to established legal
limits on the use of force. There is no safeguard to prevent states
from manipulating this concept to serve narrow political interests
rather than universal humanitarian concerns. From the standpoint of
preventing human rights abuses, it would seem more effective, morally
and legally, to promote principled and consistent enforcement of the
existing legal framework of the U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and international law in
general.

p37
... Amnesty International issued an urgent report titled Iraq:
Civilians Under Fire, calling for "an immediate moratorium on the use
of cluster bombs by the U.S./U.K. forces ... that are inherently
indiscriminate." Such weapons are illegal under the Geneva Conventions,
which expressly forbid "arms, projectiles or materials calculated to
cause unnecessary suffering" to civilians.'

p39
CLUSTER BOMBS AND OTHER INDISCRIMINATE WEAPONS
by Amnesty International

The scenes at al-Hula's hospital on 1 April showed that something
terrible had happened. The bodies of the men, women and children - both
dead and alive - brought to the hospital were punctured with shards of
shrapnel from cluster bombs. Videotape of the victims was judged by
Reuters and Associated Press editors as being too awful to show on
television. Independent newspaper journalists reported that the
pictures showed babies cut in half and children with their limbs blown
off. Two lorry-loads of bodies, including women in flowered dresses,
were seen outside the hospital.

Injured survivors told reporters how the explosives fell 'like grapes"
from the sky, and how bomblets bounced through the windows and doors of
their homes before exploding. A doctor at al-Hilla's hospital said that
almost all the patients were victims of cluster bombs.

Many of the cluster bombs reportedly dropped from the air by U.S.
forces on a civilian area of al-Hilla were of the type BLU 97 A. Each
canister contains 202 small bomblets the size of a soft drink can.
These cluster bombs scatter and spray over a large area about the size
of two football fields. At least 5 per cent of the bomblets do not
explode on impact, turning them into de facto anti-personnel mines as
they continue to pose a threat to people, including civilians, who come
into contact with them.

The devastating consequences of using cluster bombs in civilian areas
are utterly predictable. If, as accounts suggest, U.S. forces dropped
cluster bombs in residential areas of al-Hula, even if they were
directed at military targets, such an action could constitute a
disproportionate attack. This would be a grave breach of international
humanitarian law. An independent and thorough investigation must be
held and those found responsible for any violations of the laws of war
should be brought to justice. The U.S. and U.K. authorities should
order the immediate halt to further use of cluster bombs.

The rules of war prohibit the use of inherently indiscriminate weapons.
These are weapons which are incapable of being used in a manner that
complies with the obligation to distinguish between civilians and
combatants.

p43
U.S. Forces' Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Is "Illegal"
by Neil Mackay

American forces are using depleted uranium (DU) shells in the war
against Iraq and flouting a United Nations resolution which classifies
the munitions as illegal weapons of mass destruction.

DU contaminates land, causes ill-health and cancers among the soldiers
using the weapons, the armies they target and civilians, leading to
birth defects.

Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's depleted uranium
project and onetime U.S. army colonel who was tasked by the U.S.
department of defense with the post-first Gulf war depleted uranium
desert clean-up, said use of DU was a "war crime."

Rokke said: "There is a moral point to be made here. This war was about
Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction-yet we are using
weapons of mass destruction ourselves." He added: "Such
double-standards are repellent."

According to a August 2002 report by the UN [Subcommission on the
Promotion and Protection of Human Rights], laws which are breached by
the use of DU shells include: the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the
Convention Against Torture; [and] the four Geneva Conventions of 1949,
which expressly forbid employing "poison or poisoned weapons" and
"arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary
suffering." All of these laws are designed to spare civilians from
unwarranted suffering in armed conflicts.

Rokke told the Sunday Herald: "A nation's military personnel cannot
willfully contaminate any other nation, cause harm to persons and the
environment and then ignore the consequences of their actions... To do
so is a crime against humanity."

p45
U.S. Admits It Used Napalm Bombs in Iraq
by Andrew Buncombe

American pilots dropped the controversial incendiary agent napalm on
Iraqi troops during the advance on Baghdad. The attacks caused massive
fireballs that obliterated several Iraqi positions.

The Pentagon denied using napalm at the time, but Marine pilots and
their commanders have confirmed that they used an upgraded version of
the weapon against dug-in positions.

The upgraded weapon, which uses kerosene rather than petrol, was used
in March and April, when dozens of napalm bombs were dropped near
bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris River, south of Baghdad.

"We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches," said Colonel " James
Alles, commander. "Unfortunately there were people there... you could
see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It's no
great way to die. The generals love napalm."

At the time, the Pentagon insisted the report was untrue. "We completed
destruction of our last batch of napalm on 4 April, 2001," it said.

The Pentagon said it had not tried to deceive. It drew a distinction
between traditional napalm, first invented in 1942, and the weapons
dropped in Iraq, which it calls Mark 77 firebombs.

Officials said that if journalists had asked about the firebombs their
use would have been confirmed. A spokesman admitted they were
"remarkably similar" to napalm.

John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org,
said: "The U.S. is the only country that has used napalm for a long
time."

Election Theft Emergency

Election Theft Emergency

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on January 27, 2006, Printed on January 27, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/31217/

For GOP voters, the 2004 presidential election was little short of
miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College even on the afternoon of
the vote, the Bush-Cheney ticket staged a stunning comeback. Usually
reliable exit polls turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5
percent in swing states. Conservatives argued, and the media agreed,
that "moral values" had made the difference.

In his latest book, Fooled Again: How The Right Stole The 2004
Election, And Why They'll Steal The Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them),
Mark Crispin Miller argues that it wasn't moral values which swung the
election -- it was theft.

TERRENCE McNALLY: You're a professor of media studies. According to
your bio, you write about "film, television, propaganda, advertising
and the culture industries …" Why did you write this book?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Out of a sense of civic emergency. I believe that
"Fooled Again" makes the case quite persuasively that there is actually
no convincing evidence that Bush and Cheney won re-election.

This is a civic story of the utmost importance. It has to do with the
dire need for election reform in the United States. But it's also a
story about the colossal failure of the American press to do precisely
the kind of job that the framers had in mind when they wrote the First
Amendment. What they had in mind was that the press would function as a
reliable check on executive power. It would keep the people informed
about what their government was up to, and it would keep them
politically engaged in national debate.

The newspapers, as limited and defective as they were in the 18th
century, did perform that function, and I believe they performed that
function for much of our history. We now have a corporate media system
that is not answerable to the people nor concerned about the people,
but [is] in the service of its pay masters. And it is far too close to
the government for the health of anything like a democratic system.

One of the points of "Fooled Again" is that this is a story of
tremendous importance, as far as a democracy is concerned. Yet the
press has for the most part ridiculed those who have come up with very
solid evidence of fraud. They've been in the business less of talking
about the situation than of preventing anybody else from talking about
it. And this includes some of the progressive media as well. In fact,
the most hostile reviews that I've received have been in Mother Jones
and Salon.

TM: I read the transcript of you on Democracy Now! with Mark
Hertsgaard, a progressive journalist who has been fairly dismissive of
those questioning Bush's victory. By the end he seemed to be agreeing
that everything should be more fully investigated.

I would think that the 2004 election story, if tracked and broken,
would be huge for whoever breaks it. Any other thoughts about why it's
so ignored?

MCM: We have to understand that for some decades the press has served
basically an establishmentarian function. They have the reputation, and
they certainly have the self-image, of being terribly skeptical, prone
to disrespectful questions, probing dark matters that authority would
just as soon have them leave alone. That's a very flattering view of
the press but completely undeserved. The press will not deal with any
story that goes beyond a particular scandal to cast doubt on the very
viability of the entire system. The press in this country will
studiously ignore any story that too violently rocks the boat, whose
implications are too shattering.

This is not new. Watergate was a story that the press avoided for
months and months. Only the Washington Post pursued that story;
everybody else made fun of it. Now we look back on Watergate with
tremendous nostalgia and self-congratulation, telling ourselves the
press saved the system. But since Watergate the press has preferred to
deal with meaningless and trivial scandals like the Clinton scandals.
They will not talk about 9/11, they will not talk about the theft of
the last three elections.

TM: You also include the 2002 congressional election. That one also
broke too consistently against predictions?

MCM: That's exactly right. In Colorado, in Minnesota, in Georgia, and
in a couple of other states -- there was what we might call "Diebold
magic" everywhere. In all these states, you had far-right-wing
politicians predicted to lose by pre-election newspaper polls and by
exit polls, and all of them won.

TM: Why do you believe the two successive Democratic candidates have
given in so easily?

MCM: I think basically Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry this last time
are far too concerned with establishment opinion, far too worried that
they'll seem to be sore losers, conspiracy theorists, etc. They have
therefore refused to go public with what they actually believe. Kerry
told me personally on October 28th at a fundraising party that he
believes the election was probably stolen.

TM: He then disavowed that in the press, didn't he?

MCM: Exactly -- a few hours after the story broke. The Democratic Party
is as much a part of the problem as the Republican Party.

TM: Are there exceptions among the ranks of mainstream politicians? I
think of Barbara Boxer and John Conyers. Any others?

MCM: Tom Daschle has told me he thinks very highly of the book and has
given me permission to quote him to that effect. Stephanie Tubbs Jones,
Rush Holt. There are growing numbers of Democratic politicians who are
willing to take the risks of facing the truth on this issue.

Let's put it less dogmatically. All right, maybe I haven't proven that
the election was stolen, but I am completely confident that I've
provided ample grounds for a serious investigation of what went on last
year. It seems to me that any Democrat who refuses to even go for that
kind of inquiry is really failing his or her constituency.

TM: -- and failing the voters. As a citizen, it bothers me that we
leave it to a Gore or a Kerry, who's thinking about his future
reputation or his future career, to stage the protest. I don't care
about their careers. I care about my vote getting counted or
discounted.

What's the statement that you're willing to make in "Fooled Again"
about the 2004 election: stolen? worthy of investigation? evidence
clearly shows in six states …?

MCM: The evidence in Ohio, as anyone who followed the story knows, is
copious. Bush allegedly won that state by 118,000 votes. As I point out
-- and this part of the book is largely based on John Conyers' report
to the House Judiciary Committee -- the various stratagems, tricks and
tactics used to prevent people from registering, to prevent them from
voting, to throw away provisional ballots -- all these add up to a
number far greater than 118,000.

TM:: That's news to me. Many people have said, yes, there were long
lines, yes, there was disproportionate distribution of voting machines,
yes, there was trouble with provisional ballots, yes, there was
intimidation -- but the margin was 120,000. You're saying that they add
up to over 120,000?

MCM: Oh easily, easily. It was in the urban parts of Ohio that most of
this stuff went down. All the urban centers in Ohio were Democratic. If
people want to get a strong sense of what was happening at the
grassroots level coast to coast last year, go to a website called the
Election Incident Reporting System, EIRS. Then type in the name of a
state or a county, and you'll get a transcript of all the complaints
that were lodged that day by people who called 1-866-MY-VOTE.

Now a lot of them couldn't get through because it was understaffed, but
those who did get through left messages. You can find copious firsthand
evidence of what the average person had to go through to try to vote
against Bush. This didn't happen only in Ohio. Electronic touchscreen
machines flipped Kerry votes into Bush votes in at least 11 states.

TM: You say similar practices (and occasionally worse ones) were
applied in several other key states -- Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania,
New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and even New York?

MCM: In New Mexico, for example, we're told that Bush won by some 7,000
votes. We know of over 17,000 Democratic voters who were unable to cast
a vote for president because the touchscreen machines in their
districts refused to record a vote for president.

These 17,000-plus New Mexicans turned out to vote in Democratic areas,
and they didn't record a vote for president. Seventeen thousand is
10,000 more than 7,000. That glitch alone can account for the
ostensible victory margin of Bush over Kerry in New Mexico. Greg
Palast's new book will have a whole chapter on New Mexico. It's
hair-raising stuff, and we haven't heard a word about it. The same kind
of thing happened in Iowa, where Bush supposedly won by under 10,000
votes.

Tom Daschle was supposedly beaten in South Dakota by 4,500 votes. There
was so much chicanery going on there, that it's easy to argue that John
Thunes should not have won. I know Daschle believes he was robbed.

This isn't only a matter of the White House, it's also a matter of the
Congress. I don't believe that this government represents the people of
this country. The people of this country, however frightened some of
them may be by terrorism, are essentially not theocratically inclined.
They don't want a Christian republic. They were not happy with the way
the government dealt with the Terry Schiavo case. Americans basically
believe in the American system of government. Checks and balances, the
separation of church and state.

The press kept telling us after the election that a huge outpouring of
religious voters account for Bush's miraculous victory. Well that's
nothing more than a talking point that the religious right itself put
out after the election. There is no statistical evidence whatsoever
that there was any increase in the number of religious voters.

TM: The big thing that people seized on was one particular exit poll in
which people, when given a choice of a few things, said moral values
was the No. 1 reason for their vote. More people answered moral values
in 1996 and in 2000 than in 2004. There was actually a drop in the
number of people who attributed their vote to moral values in 2004, not
a rise.

Let me check a couple of things with you. I've heard that exit polls
were most inaccurate -- by a big margin -- in those areas that used
electronic voting machines with no paper trail. True?

MCM: That's basically true, and it was particularly noticeable in five
swing states. There's a lot of stuff floating around out there in
cyberspace about the exit polls. The question of the exit polls has
been very badly muddied by a lot of disingenuous argument. Now a lot of
people think that it's not a reliable gauge, it doesn't tell us
anything. That's actually the result of propaganda obfuscation. The
exit polls' sudden divergence, sudden wrongness in these five states is
really a remarkable deviation from the norm.

The guy doing the best work on that particular issue is a statistician
at the University of Pennsylvania named Steve Freeman, who will have a
book coming out in a few months primarily about the exit poll question.

Bogus reasons for why the exit polls were so wrong include the
reluctant responder argument, which holds that Bush voters were
strangely reluctant to tell exit pollsters how they voted. Well,
Freeman has read the raw data at precinct level and has discovered
that, as a matter of fact, if anyone showed a greater reluctance to
come forward and say honestly who they voted for when confronted with
an exit pollster, it was actually the Democrats. There's no evidence of
any numerical kind that can support the view that somehow Republicans
wouldn't fess up.

TM: I would assume that the very ones being referred to as reluctant
are the ones who would be proud to say they voted for God's candidate.

MCM: One of the weirdest things about this whole election business is
that one of the two parties has, for over the last year and longer,
been vociferously complaining about the dangers of election fraud, and
that's the Republican party.

TM: Thus the ID card in Georgia, right?

MCM: Exactly. They're the ones who are always screaming about
Democratic fraud, but the Republicans in this last race were really the
only ones engaging in election fraud.

This has to do with the peculiarly paranoid quality of the crusading
mindset. I believe this theft was to a great extent carried out thanks
to a kind of crusader mentality. I've got plenty of evidence in the
book that the religious right played an enormously large role in the
theft of the election last year.

TM: I think first of Diebold, I think of the Ken Blackwells or the
Kathryn Harrises. How does the religious right itself play a role
beyond mobilizing its own troops?

MCM: That mobilization is significant when you consider that a lot of
those troops have actually become embedded inside the election system.

TM: Local polling officials, that sort of thing?

MCM: One Democratic election judge tried to observe the vote count in
Pima County, Arizona. A roomful of polling personnel who all belonged
to the same evangelical church in the area started to call him a
liberal demon, a liberal scum.

TM: When you talk about a crusader mentality, you basically mean that
if you do not support my candidate you are an infidel -- and the ends
justify the means?

MCM: Precisely. See, all these crimes that I attest to in the book were
committed with impunity by people who regard their political
adversaries as demons. And that's not an exaggeration. You know, this
government is to a great extent dominated by people who have that
metaphysical view of the current political situation.

It is a very serious mistake I believe to think that all of this is
happening only because of the excessive greed of certain corporate
powers. That greed is decisive It played an enormous role. There is no
question about it. But it could not have succeeded without the vigorous
grassroots assistance of a lot of people who are religious true
believers. And I think that they include the likes of Tom DeLay and
others.

TM: I've heard that almost all irregularities worked in Bush's favor.
True?

MCM: Absolutely true. I have not yet heard of a single example of a
touchscreen voting machine flipping a Bush vote into a Kerry vote. This
does not mean it never happened. I'm just saying I haven't heard about
it if it has.

TM: I've read that in New Hampshire, Ralph Nader's Green Party campaign
paid for an actual recount. They picked the precincts they thought were
suspicious, and the hand recount confirmed the actual vote totals and
showed that the exit polls were, in fact, wrong. What do you say to
that?

MCM: Well, the recount that they paid for found no evidence of fraud in
that particular case.

TM: It confirmed the hand recount, showing that the exit polls were in
fact wrong. So how does that fit your analysis of the whole scheme?

MCM: The only thing one can say about that with any scientific
certainty is that the particular hand count that they carried out did
not reveal any evidence of fraud. That does not mean that no fraud was
committed. This is a very fine point, but when we're dealing with
questions of electoral honesty and accuracy, I think we have the right
to make fine points. The distinction must be made -- that particular
hand count involved a sample, that sample revealed no fraud, but that
does not mean that we can then sit back and say, well, OK, so the exit
polls were wrong.

TM: To the question "What is the point of revisiting the last
election?" you point out that there has never been a great reform that
was not driven by a major scandal. Do you believe that true election
reform is not going to happen until the people and the media finally
wake up to this?

MCM: I think it's going to depend on the people. It's going to depend
on the people simply and irresistibly insisting that the media finally
deal with this subject. That's why I wrote the book.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los
Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED EIGHTY

hairpin shark volume: "of rhythm sheriff"

cubic freely cinders: "three harmony mucus"

compulsory paperback twisting: "audio defying savior"

swish chicken godfather: "opposing ensemble doodles"

gossamer methane trim: "wide superimposition agile"

bone stratagem speculation: "lid ring phantoms"

diaphanous thumb humus: "mallets ear tone"

haggard frisk invigorate: "heads sheer embossed"

doohickey tempest fetish: "round shattering switch"

savor unit decamp: "antique invention pulsar"

muscle cad fat: "bell free public"

tarrifs spasmodic parrot: "drums circulation terrapin."


-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

----

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Interventions

Interventions
Bush Administration interventions in 2004
in addition to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti
excerpted from the book
Freeing the World to Death
essays on the american empire
by William Blum
Common Courage Press, 2005, paper

p165

Eastern Europe, an ongoing intervention

It has been observed that there was a very good reason for the
much-publicized comment by US Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld that
France and Germany are "old Europe," and that the "center of gravity is
shifting to the east." The reason is that the United States is already
winning the battle for influence in the "new Europe."

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States has laid claim
to Moscow's former republics and satellites. Apart from its 1999
bombings and other military operations in the former Yugoslavia,
Washington has used the weapons of political and economic subversion
for its interventions into Eastern Europe.

The standard operating procedure in a particular country has been to
send in teams of specialists from US government agencies,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), American labor unions, or
private organizations funded by American corporations and foundations;
leading examples are the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Agency
for International Development (AID), and the Open Society organizations
of George Soros, American citizen and billionaire. These teams go in
with as much financial resources as needed and numerous carrots and
sticks to wield; they hold conferences and seminars, hand out tons of
papers, manuals and CDs, and fund new NGOs, newspapers and other media,
all to educate government employees and other selected portions of the
population on the advantages and joys of privatizing and deregulating
the economy, teaching them how to run a capitalist society, how to
remake the country so that it's appealing to foreign investors.

The American teams have been creating a new class of managers to manage
a new market economy, as welt as providing the capital and good ol'
American know-how for winning elections against the non-believers. In
the process, they pass information and experience from one country to
another; thus the Soros organization-which has offices throughout the
former Soviet Union-had people from Serbia, who had been involved in
the successful campaign to oust Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, share their
experiences with people in Georgia who were seeking to oust Eduard
Shevardnadze in 2003, and were likewise successful. This transfer of
techniques, including an acclaimed video shown on Georgian independent
television, was cited by participants in Georgia as playing a vital
role in their toppling of Shevardnadze.

In Russia and in the other countries, the "success" of such
globalization programs has typically resulted in the mass of the
population being left in great want, much worse off than they were
under communism, while a wealthy elite class is created and the country
is gradually thrown open to foreign investment and control.

The reduction in the standard of living of the people in the region
since 1990 can scarcely be exaggerated. The European Children's Trust
reported in October 2000 that based on key indicators-such as infant
mortality, life expectancy, tuberculosis, and Gross Domestic Product
per capita-conditions in Central and Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union were worse or no better than those in many so-called
developing countries.' From Bulgaria to Poland, from Slovenia to
Lithuania, the citizens have left their homes to become the guest
workers, the illegal workers, the migrants, the refugees, and the
prostitutes of Western Europe.

However, these countries are now honored members of NATO, proud
possessors of a couple of billion dollars worth of useless military
hardware they were obliged to buy from multinationals, they have the
right to send their youth to the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan
to support US wars, the American flag flies over American military
bases in their lands, globalized free enterprise is king, and the
wealthy elite have a lot more in common with the likes of Dick Cheney
than with the great majority of their countrymen. Some prominent
excommunist apparatchiks across the region repeat oaths of fealty to
America as once they parroted the Brezhnev line. Poland's president,
Aleksander Kwasniewski, who was a Communist minister in the 1980s, now
declares: "If it is President Bush's vision, it is mine."

The Eastern European mentality implied by the above was burgeoning even
before the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The intellectual
equation that was arrived at, consciously or unconsciously, was that if
the Soviet Union was "bad", it must be "all bad". And therefore, the
Soviet's principal foe must be "all good". Thus, if the Soviet command
economy had multiple shortcomings, the market economy is guaranteed to
bring prosperity and justice. How many Eastern Europeans, to this day,
know that most of what they may see as Western benefits flowing
automatically from the market's "invisible hand", in actuality had to
be wrested from capitalism by social movements and labor unions with
much attendant suffering?

All in all, NATO-occupied Eastern Europe, until recently the home of
"socialist republics," has become a much more congenial place for
royalty. Bulgaria's King Simeon (now prime minister), came back to
reclaim his domain, as did Romania's King Michael, Yugoslavia's King
Presumptive Alexander, and Albania's King Leka (son of Hitler's and
Mussolini's ally, King Zog).

***

Slovakia 2002

Vladimir Meciar is not a true believer in globalization. He had been a
marked man in Washington since 1994 when he became prime minister as
the head of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (MDS), the main
party in a coalition that won the election on a strong anti-capitalist
platform. After being unseated in the 1998 elections by Mikulás
Dzurinda, a man much more comfortable with opening up the country to
foreign capital, Meciar was again a candidate in 2002.

Elections were scheduled for September, but Washington began its
anti-Meciar campaign in February when the American ambassador, Ronald
Weiser, issued a warning to the people of Slovakia that electing Meciar
once again would hurt their chances of entry into the European Union
and NATO. "If the situation repeats itself, there will not be an
invitation," warned the ambassador.'

In March, Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, arrived in
Bratislavia, the Slovak Capital, and issued his own warning, reminding
Slovakians that the United States had blocked Slovakia's entry into
NATO in 1997 because of Meciar and could do it again. Washington still
viewed Mr. Meciar as an authoritarian anti-West leader, he said. "The
former government, we believe, did not demonstrate a commitment to
democracy and the rule of law."

To put Burns' remarks in perspective, we should keep in mind that when
the United States does not want to support a particular government
because that government is not receptive to the forces of globalization
and/or other objectives of US foreign policy, it can always find
reasons for not doing so stated in terms of democracy and freedom;
conversely, Washington can find justification for supporting an
ideologically-compatible regime no matter how oppressive or corrupt it
may be or how much its elections may be of dubious purity; Indonesia,
Mexico, Pakistan, and Peru are some examples of this in the several
years preceding this period.

The Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED)-the
long-time front for the CIA-was also present in Slovakia, expending
some $417,000 in the 12 months leading up to the election on media,
electoral, youth and other projects. NED typically paints such projects
in generalized, non-ideological, non-partisan colors; in Slovakia, its
programs were referred to by terms such as "election-related political
and organizational skills"; "voter education and mobilization
activities"; and producing and distributing "a series of
get-out-the-vote materials." Such programs sound straight out of an
American high-school textbook on civics, but they're carefully designed
to aid Washington's chosen organizations, parties and individuals. The
National Democratic Institute (NDI), one of NED's four principal arms,
admitted that it excluded Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia
from those political parties receiving aid. NDI maintained that MDS
lacked "internal democracy" and "threaten(s) the participatory and
representative nature of democracy."

According to NED's annual report, NDI oversaw training in Slovakia that
"targeted young party members, women and Roma [Gypsies]; three
participants in its 'Youth in Politics' program were elected to
Parliament."'

The main English-language newspaper in Slovakia, The Slovak Spectator,
which was opposed to Meciar, nonetheless contended that the NED aid was
a violation of Slovakian law aimed at keeping foreign influences out of
elections. "Slovakia's law on political parties forbids foreign
citizens or foreign legal entities, with the exception of foreign
foundations and partner political parties, from supporting domestic
political parties."

This kind of prohibition would of course apply to NED activities in
almost every country they're active in, but, inasmuch as they're backed
by the US government-indeed, they are the US government-it's rare that
any complaint against their activities gets anywhere.

Ambassador Weiser also advised some Slovak political parties not to
cooperate with another political party in the event the latter got
enough votes to win seats in the legislature. When questioned about
this after the election, Weiser was reluctant to discuss his
initiative, saying he felt it was a dead issue given that the party in
question did not get into parliament.

In the end, Dzurinda kept power. Although Meciar's party won the most
votes, no other political party would form a coalition with them." One
does not have to be terribly cynical to surmise that fear of
antagonizing Washington lay behind this.

After the election, The Washington Post reported: "Politicians and
analysts here said the campaign to increase voter participation
improved turnout, which in turn probably improved the vote for Dzurinda
and his allies,"

Two months later, in November, Slovakia declared that its airspace
would be open to over-flights by US aircraft in the event of an attack
on Iraq, and in February 2003, the government agreed to assist any US
operation against Iraq and to join any US military operation."

***

Latin America Nicaragua 2001

As Sandinista presidential candidate Daniel Ortega was doing well in
the polls for the November election, the Bush administration was
setting out to campaign against him.

In June, US Acting Assistant Secretary of State Lino Gutiérrez, the
State Department's No. 2 diplomat for Latin America, made it clear in a
talk in Managua that the United States would not look kindly upon the
return to power of the socialist- oriented Sandinistas. He blasted
Ortega's ties to people such as Fidel Castro of Cuba and Libyan leader
Moammar Gadhafi. Subsequently, State Department spokeswoman Eliza Koch
criticized the Sandinistas for alleged contact with Iraq, the FARC
rebels in Colombia, and the ETA separatist movement in Spain.

This last accusation was made less than two months after the September
11 attacks, when any association at all with "terrorists" was being
promoted by Washington as the ultimate sin. Koch further singled out
the continuing presence in the Sandinista inner circle of three
so-called "hardliners"-Tomas Borge, Lenin Cerna and Alvaro Baltodano.
All three, she said, "have tong histories of grossly violating civil
and human rights and suppressing democratic activities." Another State
Department official, John Keane, added to the invective by asserting
that the Sandinistas still had in their fold hard-liners who were
responsible for "abominations" of human and civil rights." These
remarks were coming from the government that ran the infamous army of
thugs known as the Contras, which plagued the people of Nicaragua with
genuine abominations throughout the 1980s.19 Apart from being shameless
interference in Nicaraguan politics, the State Department remarks are
further testimony that the US government can say anything it cares to
about Officially Designated Enemies (ODE) without ever being called to
back up their charges.

There was also US Ambassador Oliver Garza, who went around handing out
bags of rice with Enrique Bolaños, Ortega's main opponent, at his side.
The Miami Herald reported that "Garza shrugged off reporters'
suggestions that the two were out stumping together-even though it was
a publicity-generating event held during the home stretch of a heated
campaign season and Garza took the opportunity to call the opposing
Sandinistas 'robbers'."

Frederick Denton, senior analyst in Nicaragua for pollsters CID-Gallup
was moved to declare: "Never in my whole life have I seen a sitting
ambassador get publicly involved in a sovereign country's electoral
process, nor have I ever heard of it."

Former US president Jimmy Carter was of a like mind. He headed an
international delegation of electoral observers and criticized the
strong statements coming from Washington. "I personally disapprove of
statements or actions by any country that might tend to influence the
vote of people in another sovereign nation," he said."

The US also exerted relentless pressure on the Conservative Party and
succeeded in making them withdraw from the election so as to avoid
splitting the conservative vote against the Sandinistas, Gutierrez
personally visiting the country to make this appeal.

Six days before the election, a full-page advertisement appeared in La
Prensa, Nicaragua's leading newspaper, signed by First Brother Jeb
Bush, governor of Florida; it was laid out thusly: In small blue
letters: "The Brother of the President of the United States"., .then a
super large headline in blaring red: "GEORGE W. BUSH SUPPORTS ENRIQUE
BOLAOS". This was all on white background, and the whole page was
bordered in red, white and blue. The effect was to give the impression
that the ad was inserted by the US president himself. Among other
things, the ad said "Ortega has a relationship of more than thirty
years with states and individuals who shelter and condone international
terrorism."

At the close of the campaign, Bolaflos announced: "If Ortega comes to
power, that would provoke a closing of aid and investment, difficulties
with exports, visas and family remittances. I'm not just saying this.
The United States says this, too. We cannot close our eyes and risk our
well-being and work. Say yes to Nicaragua, say no to terrorism."

In the end, the Sandinistas lost the election by about ten percentage
points after steadily leading in the polls during much of the campaign.

For many Nicaraguans, it was a painful reminder of the 1990 election in
which Washington had also engaged in serious interference, leading
then, too, to a Sandinista defeat. In both elections, the impoverished
people of Nicaragua were warned that a Sandinista victory would mean
severe economic hostility from Washington; in 1990 they were also
warned that it would mean a resumption of US military hostility as
well.

It is worth observing that Nicaragua and Haiti are the nations in the
Western Hemisphere that the United States has intervened in the most in
the 20th and 21st centuries, including long occupations. And they are
today the poorest in the hemisphere, wretchedly so.

***

Bolivia 2002

Running for the Bolivian presidency on an anti-neoliberal, anti-big
business, and anti-coca eradication campaign, for a party called
Movement Toward Socialism (MTS), former member of Congress Evo Morales
was clearly not the kind of Third Worlder the United States takes to
its heart. Before the June 30 first round election, US Ambassador
Manuel Rocha stated: "The Bolivian electorate must consider the
consequences of choosing leaders somehow connected with drug
trafficking and terrorism." As seen above, since September 11, 2001,
painting Officially Designated Enemies with the terrorist brush was de
rigueur US foreign policy rhetoric.

After the first round-in which Morales came in second to Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada and thus made it to the congressional runoff vote
August 3-US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs
Otto Reich warned that American aid to the country would be in danger
if Mr. Morales was chosen. Then Ambassador Rocha and other US officials
met with key figures from Bolivia's main political parties in an effort
to shore up support for Sanchez de Lozada. Morales lost the vote.

It should be noted that Bolivia, with 60 percent of its population
living in poverty, was not anxious to adhere to the desires of
Washington, whose supply-side war on drugs had failed to benefit
Bolivian peasants, to whom coca is important both economically and
culturally.

***

Venezuela 2002

Jacobo Arbenz, Cheddi Jagan, Fidel Castro, Jao Goulart, Juan Bosch,
Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Maurice Bishop, Daniel Ortega,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Hugo Chavez... all Latin American leaders of
the past half century, all progressive, all condemned to suffer the
torments of hell for their beliefs by the unrelenting animosity of the
United States.

Chavez had been elected president by a wide margin in 1998, breaking a
lock on power by the two establishment parties that had dominated
Venezuelan politics for decades. He repeated the strong electoral
showing in 2000. But in the eyes of Washington officials, Chavez was no
more than a man guilty of the following offenses:

He branded the post-September 11 US attacks on Afghanistan as "fighting
terrorism with terrorism," demanding an end to "the slaughter of
innocents"; holding up photographs of children said to have been killed
in the American bombing attacks, he said their deaths had "no
justification, just as the attacks in New York did not, either." In
response, the Bush Administration temporarily withdrew its ambassador.
When she returned to Venezuela, she had what one US official called a
"very difficult meeting" with Chavez, in which she told him "to keep
his mouth shut on these important issues."

He was very friendly with Fidel Castro and sold oil to Cuba at discount
rates or in exchange for medical and other services. Chavez called for
an end to the US embargo against Cuba.

His defense minister asked the permanent US military mission in
Venezuela to vacate its offices in the military headquarters in
Caracas, saying its presence was an anachronism from the Cold War.

Chavez did not cooperate to Washington's satisfaction with the US war
against the Colombian guerrillas.

He denied Venezuelan airspace to US counter-drug flights.

He refused to provide US intelligence agencies with information on the
country's large Arab community.

He promoted a regional free-trade bloc and united Latin American
petroleum operations as ways to break free from US economic dominance.

Chavez also opposed the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a
globalization program high on Washington's agenda.

He visited Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gaddafi in Libya.
Secretary of State Cohn Powell testified to Congress that Chavez visits
"some of the strangest countries," referring to the Venezuelan's visits
to Iran, Iraq and Cuba-all on the US list of alleged state sponsors of
terrorism. Chavez supporters noted that Libya, Iran and Iraq are
members with Venezuela of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC), in which Chavez has played a leading role.

And more in the same vein, which the Washington aristocracy is
unaccustomed to encountering from the servant class. Uncle Sam has been
inspired to topple numerous governments which displayed considerably
less disrespect for him than Venezuela did.

Chavez, moreover, had been trying to institute all manner of reforms to
relieve the suffering of the poor (who comprise about 80 percent of the
population), a program not likely to win favor with a class-conscious,
privatization-minded US government and Venezuelan upper and middle
classes: restructuring the state-owned oil company, which he regarded
as having become a state-within-a-state, to achieve greater national
control over oil resources; reinforcing a constitutional ban on the
privatization of the oil company; changing the agreements with foreign
oil companies that were excessively generous to the companies;
establishing a new progressive constitution; numerous ecological
community development projects; enrolling over one million students in
school who were previously excluded; increasing the minimum wage and
public sector salaries; halting the previous government's initiative to
privatize Venezuela's social security system; reducing unemployment;
introducing a credit program for women and the poor; reforming the tax
system to spare the poor; making health care much more available;
towering infant mortality; greatly expanding literacy courses; land
redistribution in a society where two percent of the population
controlled 60 percent of the land.

The coup

On April 11, a military coup toppled Chavez, who was taken to a remote
location. Pedro Carmona, the chairman of Venezuela's largest chamber of
commerce, was installed as president. He proceeded to dissolve the
legislature, the Supreme Court, the attorney general's office, the
national electoral commission, and the state governorships. Carmona
then decreed that the 1999 constitution, which had been written by a
constitutional assembly and ratified by a wide majority of voters,
following the procedures outlined in the previous constitution, was to
be suspended. On top of all this, the new regime raided the homes of
various Chavez supporters.

And what was the reaction of the US government to this sharp slap in
the face of democracy, civil liberties and law, that fits the textbook
definition of dictatorship?

The Bush administration did not call it a coup. The White House term of
choice was "a change of government." They blamed Chavez for what had
taken place, maintaining that his ouster was prompted by peaceful
protests and justified by the Venezuelan leader's own actions. It
occurred, said White House spokesman An Fleischer, "as a result of the
message of the Venezuelan people."

The State Department also expressed its support for the coup, declaring
that "undemocratic actions committed or encouraged by the Chavez
administration provoked yesterday's crisis in Venezuela."

And the US ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS),
Roger Noreiga, declared that "The people of Venezuela, loyal to their
republican tradition and their fight for independence, peace and
liberty, will not accept any regime, legislation or authority which
contradict values, principles and democratic guarantees. "41

But Noriega was ignoring the fact that the previous September the OAS
had adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which expressly
condemns the overthrow of democratically elected governments among its
member states and requires specific actions by all members when this
occurs.

The New York Times penned its own love note to the new government. In
an editorial, the paper stated: "Venezuelan democracy is no longer
threatened by a would-be dictator,.. [because] the military intervened
and handed power to a respected business leader."

Veritable grass-roots democracy the coup was.

Reversal of the coup

The coupmakers had bitten off more than they could chew by seriously
underestimating the opposition to the coup and to the instant
totalitarianism which followed; they had believed their own propaganda
about Chavez lacking support-huge rallies in his favor erupted-an
illusion on their own part no doubt prompted by the heavy concentration
of the media in the hands of the opposition, which regularly blacked
out news favorable to Chavez. The post-coup support for Chavez induced
elements of the military, including some who had taken part in the
coup, to step in, retrieve Chavez, and bring him back triumphant to
Caracas. He had been gone about 48 hours.

"Decisions to toss out the constitution and hunt down allies of
Chavez," wrote the Washington Post, "reinforced lingering fears held by
many Venezuelans, including members of the military, that what had
occurred was not a popular revolt but a coup by the business elite."

The Bush administration voiced no misgivings about its support of the
coup. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice quickly declared: "We
do hope that Chavez recognizes that the whole world is watching and
that he takes advantage of this opportunity to right his own ship,
which has been moving, frankly, in the wrong direction for quite a long
time." She added that Chavez "needs to respect constitutional
processes."

Or as Monty Python legend, Terry Jones, put it: Chavez was ousted in "a
free and fair democratic coup, only to be returned to office two days
later on what seems to have been little more than the whim of the
people."

Prelude to the coup

Immediately after the coup, members of the military and of the new
government said that the decision to force Chavez from power had been
made six months earlier by a group of dissident officers in the
Venezuelan navy and air force.

As the coup was being hatched, the United States met with all the key
players, either in Venezuela or in Washington: Pedro Carmona, who
became president; Vice Admiral Carlos Molina, Air Force Col. Pedro
Soto, and several others who in February had publicly demanded Chavez's
removal; opposition legislators, and others. A US diplomat revealed
that Molina and Soto had each received $100,000 from a Miami bank
account for denouncing Chavez.

"We felt we were acting with U.S. support," Molina said of the coup.
"We agree that we can't permit a communist government here. The U.S.
has not let us down yet. This fight is still going on because the
government is illegal."

The officers who took part in the overthrow of Chavez "understood the
U.S. State Department's repeated statements of concern over the Chavez
administration as a tacit endorsement of their plans to remove him from
office if the opportunity arose." ... "The State Department had always
expressed its preoccupation with Chavez," retired military officer
Fernando Ochoa said after the coup. "We interpreted that as" an
endorsement of his removal.

However, American officials endeavored to make the point afterward that
they had not been encouraging a coup. The White House spokesperson said
that such meetings and conversations with dissidents were "a normal
part of what diplomats do." And the Washington Post reported:

Members of the country's diverse opposition had been visiting the U.S.
embassy here in recent weeks, hoping to enlist U.S. help in toppling
Chavez. The visitors included active and retired members of the
military, media leaders and opposition politicians. "The opposition has
been coming in with an assortment of 'what ifs," said a U.S. official
familiar with the effort. "What if this happened? What if that
happened? What if you held it up and looked at it sideways? To every
scenario we say no. We know what a coup looks like, and we won't
support it.

Of course, if the United States had been against the coup it would have
informed the Venezuelan government of what was being planned and who
was doing the planning and that would have been the end of it. Inasmuch
as Washington normally equates democracy with free elections, here was
a chance to strike a blow on behalf of democracy by saving a government
that came to power through free elections on two separate occasions.

And Washington would not have financed the plotters.

Financing the coup

The National Endowment for Democracy was on the scene, as it has been
for so many other Washington destabilization operations. In their
reporting year ending September 30, 2000, in a clear attempt to weaken
Chavez's federal power, NED gave, amongst other Venezuelan grants,
$50,000 to PRODEL, a Venezuelan organization, "To promote and defend
decentralization in Venezuela. PRODEL will establish and train a
network of national and state legislators and mayors to monitor
government decentralization activities, advocate for the rights and
responsibilities of state and local government in Venezuela, and
analyze and debate pending legislation affecting local government."

The following year, announcing that it was expanding its program in
Venezuela in response to "a process of profound political change"
embarked on by Chavez. NED channeled more than $877,000 in grants to
American and Venezuelan groups, none of whom supported Chavez,
including $339,998 to provide training in political party and coalition
building, and $154,377 to the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers
(CTV).

The CTV, long an anti-leftist, Cold War asset of US foreign policy
through the AFL-CIO, is run by old-guard, corrupt labor leaders,
angered by Chavez's attempt to reform them. The organization was a key
force in the work stoppages and protest demonstrations which galvanized
opposition to Chavez. As in Chile in 1973, before the overthrow of
Salvador Allende, large crowds of civilians were used to create the
feeling of chaos, and to establish a false picture of Chavez as a
dictator, providing some of the rationale and incitement for the
military to then make a coup "for the sake of the country."

As Mr. Chavez's reform programs clashed with various business, labor
and media groups, the Endowment stepped up its assistance, providing
some $1,100,000 for the year ending September 30, 2002, including
$232,526 to the CTV.

CTV leader, Carlos Ortega, worked closely with Pedro Carmona in
challenging the government and was invited by a NED affiliate to
Washington in February where he met with Otto Reich, assistant
secretary of state for Western Hemispheric Affairs, who was likely one
of the masterminds of the move to topple Chavez.

Inasmuch as Venezuela is the fifth largest oil producer in the world,
and the third largest supplier to the United States, it appears
plausible to conclude that oil must be a significant factor in the US
drive to effect regime change in the country. Yet Washington has
opposed governments and movements throughout Latin America and
elsewhere in the world with equal determination, without oil or any
other resource being a factor. Hugo Chavez is against the excesses of
US foreign policy and globalization and has let the world know this,
which makes it plain to Washington that he's not of suitable client
material. For the empire to let him get away with this would be to set
a very bad example for other non-believers.

Postscript

Since the debacle of 2002, Chavez's natural enemies at home and in
Washington have not relaxed their crusade against him. Opponents have
been trying to unseat him through a recall referendum, a drive that is
funded in part, if not in full, by, yes, the National Endowment for
Democracy. NED gave a grant of $53,400 to an organization called
Sümate, which appears to be running the referendum campaign. The NED
grant document, after castigating Chavez for polarizing Venezuelan
society, specifies that Sümate will "Develop a net of volunteers and
[apartidistas] trained to work in elections and in a referendum...
[and] promote popular support for the referendum."

Imagine if during the recent referendum in California it was disclosed
that the Venezuelan government was funding the movement to recall the
governor.

A few weeks before the recall was to take place on August 15, 2004,
former president Carlos Andres Perez, a leading member of the old
guard, said in a newspaper interview that "the referendum would fail
and that violence was the only way for the opposition to get rid of
Chavez."

***

El Salvador 2004

The March 21 election for the presidency had on one side Schafik
Handal, candidate of the FMLN, the leftist former guerrilla group,
which the previous year had won the largest bloc in Congress with 31 of
the 84 seats and held nearly half the offices of mayor in the country.
His opponent was Tony Saca of the incumbent Arena Party, a pro-US,
pro-free market organization of the extreme right, which in the bloody
civil war days had featured death squads and the infamous assassination
of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Handal said he would withdraw El Salvador's 380 troops from Iraq as
well as reviewing other pro-US policies; he would also take another
look at the privatizations of Salvadoran industries, and would
reinstate diplomatic relations with Cuba.

If all this wasn't reason enough for the United States to intervene in
the election, there was the FMLN's announced opposition to the proposed
Central American Free Trade Agreement, that Washington hoped to see
become a reality in 2004.

During a February visit to the country, Roger Noriega, the US Assistant
Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, met all the
presidential candidates except Handal. He warned of possible
repercussions in US-Salvadoran relations if Handal were elected. Three
Republican congressmen threatened to block the renewal of annual work
visas for some 300,000 Salvadorans in the United States if El Salvador
opted for the FMLN. And Congressman Thomas Tancredo of Colorado stated
that if the FMLN won, "it could mean a radical change" in US policy on
remittances to El Salvador.

Washington's attitude was exploited by Arena and the generally
conservative Salvadoran press, and it became widely believed that a
Handal victory could result in mass deportations of Salvadorans from
the United States and a drop in remittances. At a rally, Saca asked the
crowd to imagine what would happen to their remittances if Handal were
to win. "Remittances! Dollars!" he bellowed to the crowd. "The
administration that assures tranquility for our brothers in the United
States is Arena and Tony Saca, because we have good relations with the
United States."

The statistics are remarkable: As many as two million Salvadorans live
in the United States, sending home between $1.7 and two billion a year,
a significant portion of the country's economy.

"In a political advertisement on Salvadoran television, an elderly
woman reads a letter from her son who lives in the United States. He
tells her he might not be able to send her more money. The camera
focuses tightly on her left cheek. A single tear slowly succumbs to
gravity. The son says that if leftist candidate Schafik Handal is
elected president on Sunday, Salvadorans living in the United States
could lose their work visas."

The scare campaign included warnings that the FMLN would abolish
"democracy", institute "communism", and would turn El Salvador into
"another Cuba." It was as if the civil war and the Cold War had never
ended.

Saca updated the campaign of threats by accusing his rival of links to
Islamic terrorists, repeating the story that demonstrators allegedly
aligned with the FMLN had burned a US flag and chanted slogans in
support of Osama bin Laden just after the September 11 attacks.

Arena won the election with about 57 percent of the vote to some 36
percent for the FMLN.

After the election, the US ambassador, Hugh Douglas Barclay, declared
that Washington's policies concerning immigration and remittances had
nothing to do with any election in El Salvador. There appears to be no
record of such a statement being made in public before the election
when it might have had a profound positive effect for the FMLN.
Although Barclay said that the embassy had in fact made such a
statement before the election, he offered no details, 68 and may have
been referring to a comment he made to at least one American journalist
whose articles were not published in El Salvador.

*****

Hiroshima

Needless Slaughter, Useful Terror

[This essay first appeared in CovertAction Quarterly, Summer 1995]

Does winning World War II and the Cold War mean never having to say
you're sorry? The Germans have apologized to the Jews and to the Poles.
The Japanese have apologized to the Chinese and the Koreans, and to the
United States for failing to break off diplomatic relations before
attacking Pearl Harbor. The Russians have apologized to the Poles for
atrocities committed against civilians, and to the Japanese for abuse
of prisoners. The Soviet Communist Party even apologized for foreign
policy errors that "heightened tension with the West."

Is there any reason for the United States to apologize to Japan for
atomizing Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Those on opposing sides of this question are lining up in battle
formation for the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bombs on
August 6 and 9, 1945. During last year's heated controversy surrounding
the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit on the Enola Gay, the B-29 that
dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, US veterans went ballistic. They
condemned the emphasis on the ghastly deaths caused by the bomb and the
lingering aftereffects of radiation, and took offense at the portrayal
of Japanese civilians as blameless victims. An Air Force group said
vets were "feeling nuked."

In Japan, too, the anniversary has rekindled controversy. The mayors of
the two Japanese cities in question spoke out about a wide "perception
gap" between the two countries.' Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima,
surmounting a cultural distaste for offending, called the bombings "one
of the two great crimes against humanity in the 20th Century, along
with the Holocaust".

Defenders of the US action counter that the bomb actually saved lives:
It ended the war sooner and obviated the need for a land invasion.
Estimates of the hypothetical saved-body count, however, which range
from 20,000 to 1.2 million, owe more to political agendas than to
objective projections.

But in any event, defining the issue as a choice between the A-bomb and
a land invasion is an irrelevant and wholly false dichotomy. By 1945,
Japan's entire military and industrial machine was grinding to a halt
as the resources needed to wage war were all but eradicated. The navy
and air force had been destroyed ship by ship, plane by plane, with no
possibility of replacement. When, in the spring of 1945, the island
nation's lifeline to oil was severed, the war was over except for the
fighting. By June, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in charge of the air attacks, was
complaining that after months of terrible firebombing, there was
nothing left of Japanese cities for his bombers but "garbage can
targets". By July, US planes could fly over Japan without resistance
and bomb as much and as long as they pleased. Japan could no longer
defend itself.

After the war, the world learned what US leaders had known by early
1945: Japan was militarily defeated long before Hiroshima. It had been
trying for months, if not for years, to surrender; and the US had
consistently ignored these overtures. A May 5 cable, intercepted and
decoded by the US, dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were
eager to sue for peace. Sent to Berlin by the German ambassador in
Tokyo, after he talked to a ranking Japanese naval officer, it read:

Since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large
sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an
American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard.

As far as is known, Washington did nothing to pursue this opening.
Later that month, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson almost capriciously
dismissed three separate high-level recommendations from within the
Truman (Roosevelt had just died) administration to activate peace
negotiations. The proposals advocated signaling Japan that the US was
willing to consider the all-important retention of the emperor system;
i.e., the US would not insist upon "unconditional surrender."'

Stimson, like other high US officials, did not really care in principle
whether or not the emperor was retained. The term "unconditional
surrender" was always a propaganda measure; wars are always ended with
some kind of conditions. To some extent the insistence was a domestic
consideration-not wanting to appear to "appease" the Japanese. More
important, however, it reflected a desire that the Japanese not
surrender before the bomb could be used. One of the few people who had
been aware of the Manhattan Project from the beginning, Stimson had
come to think of it as his bomb-"my secret", as he called it in his
diary.' On June 6, he told President Truman he was "fearful" that
before the A-bombs were ready to be delivered, the Air Force would have
Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon "would not have a fair
background to show its strength."° In his later memoirs, Stimson
admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered,
to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb."

Meeting at Potsdam

And to be successful, that effort could have been minimal. In July,
before the leaders of the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union met
at Potsdam, the Japanese government sent several radio messages to its
ambassador, Naotake Sato, in Moscow, asking him to request Soviet help
in mediating a peace settlement. "His Majesty is extremely anxious to
terminate the war as soon as possible", said one communication.
"Should, however, the United States and Great Britain insist on
unconditional surrender, Japan would be forced to fight to the bitter
end.""

On July 25, while the Potsdam meeting was taking place, Japan
instructed Sato to keep meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Molotov
to impress the Russians "with the sincerity of our desire to end the
war [and] have them understand that we are trying to end hostilities by
asking for very reasonable terms in order to secure and maintain our
national existence and honor" (a reference to retention of Emperor
Hirohito).

Having broken the Japanese code years earlier, Washington did not have
to wait to be informed by the Soviets of these peace overtures; it knew
immediately, and did nothing. Indeed, the National Archives in
Washington contains US government documents reporting similarly
ill-fated Japanese peace overtures as far back as 1943.

Thus, it was with full knowledge that Japan was frantically trying to
end the war, that President Truman and his hardline Secretary of State,
James Byrnes, included the term "unconditional surrender" in the July
26 Potsdam Declaration. This "final warning" and expression of
surrender terms to Japan was in any case a charade. The day before it
was issued, Harry Truman had approved the order to release a 15 kiloton
atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima."

Many US military officials were less than enthusiastic about the demand
for unconditional surrender or use of the atomic bomb. At the time of
Potsdam, Gen. Hap Arnold asserted that conventional bombing could end
the war. Adm. Ernest King believed a naval blockade alone would starve
the Japanese into submission. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, convinced that
retaining the emperor was vital to an orderly transition to peace, was
appalled at the demand for unconditional surrender. Adm. William Leahy
concurred. Refusal to keep the emperor "would result only in making the
Japanese desperate and thereby increase our casualty lists," he argued,
adding that a nearly defeated Japan might stop fighting if
unconditional surrender were dropped as a demand. At a loss for a
military explanation for use of the bomb, Leahy believed that the
decision "was clearly a political one", reached perhaps "because of the
vast sums that had been spent on the project." Finally, we have Gen.
Dwight Eisenhower's account of a conversation with Stimson in which he
told the secretary of war that:

Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely
unnecessary .... I thought our country should avoid shocking world
opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no
longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief
that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with
a minimum loss of "face". The secretary was deeply perturbed by my
attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick
conclusions.

If, as appears to be the case, the US decision to drop the A-bombs was
based on neither the pursuit of the earliest possible peace nor it
being the only way to avoid a land invasion, we must look elsewhere for
the explanation.

Target Soviet Union

It has been asserted that dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much
the last military act of the Second World War as the first act of the
Cold War. Although Japan was targeted, the weapons were aimed straight
to the red heart of the USSR. For more than 70 years, the determining
element of US foreign policy, virtually its sine qua non, has been "the
communist factor". World War II and a battlefield alliance with the
Soviet Union did not bring about an ideological change in the
anti-communists who owned and ran America. It merely provided a partial
breather in a struggle that had begun with the US invasion of Russia in
1918.18 It is hardly surprising then, that 25 years later, as the
Soviets were sustaining the highest casualties of any nation in World
War II, the US systematically kept them in the dark about the A-bomb
project, while sharing information with the British.

According to Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, Secretary of
State Byrnes had said that the bomb's biggest benefit was not its
effect on Japan but its power to "make Russia more manageable in
Europe.'

General Leslie Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project, testified in
1954: "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took
charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our
enemy, and that the Project was conducted on that basis."

The United States was thinking post-war. A Venezuelan diplomat reported
to his government after a May 1945 meeting that Assistant Secretary of
State Nelson Rockefeller "communicated to us the anxiety of the United
States Government about the Russian attitude". US officials, he said,
were "beginning to speak of Communism as they once spoke of Nazism and
are invoking continental solidarity and hemispheric defense against
it."

Churchill, who had known about the weapon before Truman, understood its
use: "Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War," he said
about the bomb, and added, thinking of Russian advances into Europe,
"and perhaps to much else besides .... We now had something in our
hands which would redress the balance with the Russians,"

Referring to the immediate aftermath of Nagasaki, Stimson wrote of what
came to be known as "atomic diplomacy

In the State Department there developed a tendency to think of the bomb
as a diplomatic weapon. Outraged by constant evidence of Russian
perfidy, some of the men in charge of foreign policy were eager to
carry the bomb for a while as their ace-in-the-hole .... American
statesmen were eager for their country to browbeat the Russians with
the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip.

"The psychological effect on Stalin [of the bombs] was twofold,"
observed historian Charles L. Mee, Jr. "The Americans had not only used
a doomsday machine; they had used it when, as Stalin knew, it was not
militarily necessary. It was this last chilling fact that doubtless
made the greatest impression on the Russians."

After the Enola Gay released its cargo on Hiroshima on August 6, common
sense-common decency wouldn't apply here-would have dictated a pause
long enough to allow Japanese officials to travel to the city, confirm
the extent of the destruction, and respond before the US dropped a
second bomb. At 11 o'clock in the morning of August 9, Prime Minister
Kintaro Suzuki addressed the Japanese Cabinet: "Under the present
circumstances I have concluded that our only alternative is to accept
the Potsdam Proclamation and terminate the war," Moments later, the
second bomb fell on Nagasaki." Some hundreds of thousands of Japanese
civilians died in the two attacks; many more suffered terrible injury
and permanent genetic damage.

After the war, His Majesty the Emperor still sat on his throne, and the
gentlemen who ran the United States had absolutely no problem with
this. They never had.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 concluded:

It seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air
supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring
about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based
on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the
testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the
Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all
probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even
if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not
entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or
contemplated.

It has been argued, to the present day, that it wouldn't have mattered
if the United States had responded to the Japanese peace overtures
because the emperor was merely a puppet of the military, and the
military would never have surrendered without the use of the A-bombs.
However, "the emperor as puppet" thesis was a creation out of whole
cloth by General MacArthur, the military governor of Japan, to justify
his personal wish that the emperor not be tried as a war criminal along
with many other Japanese officials.

In any event, this does not, and can not, excuse the United States
government for not at least trying what was, from humanity's point of
view, the clearly preferable option, replying seriously to the Japanese
peace overtures. No matter how much power the military leaders had, the
civil forces plainly had the power to put forth the overtures and their
position could only have been enhanced by a positive American response.

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED SEVENTY NINE

pellucid chick whites: "cow music nowadays"

hammer tears periodontal: "part after ultimate"

scoop josh wickiup: "sizes apart level"

gaffer teeth partners: "to exemplify groups"

engineering milk gang: "two defined excess"

deadness camera humidor: "wires jazz process"

dolly sundial spender: "with energy order"

bastard cramped humidor: "one gun nirvana"

curry locked penny: "speakers history sonically"

titter ageless anon: "copper raw structure"

tsunami turncoat sophocles: "bowls power personal"

mutate tucks okay: "knives blast experience."

-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

Chocolate City?

Chocolate City?
January 28, 2006
By Tim Wise

If you're looking to understand why discussions between blacks and
whites about racism are often so difficult in this country, you need
only know this: when the subject is race and racism, whites and blacks
are often not talking about the same thing. To white folks, racism is
seen mostly as individual and interpersonal--as with the uttering of a
prejudicial remark or bigoted slur. For blacks, it is that too, but
typically more: namely, it is the pattern and practice of policies and
social institutions, which have the effect of perpetuating deeply
embedded structural inequalities between people on the basis of race.
To blacks, and most folks of color, racism is systemic. To whites, it
is purely personal.

These differences in perception make sense, of course. After all,
whites have not been the targets of systemic racism in this country, so
it is much easier for us to view the matter in personal terms. If we
have ever been targeted for our race, it has been only on that
individual, albeit regrettable, level.

But for people of color, racism has long been experienced as an
institutional phenomenon. It is the experience of systematized
discrimination in housing, employment, schools or the justice system.
It is the knowledge that one's entire group is under suspicion, at risk
of being treated negatively because of stereotypes held by persons with
the power to act on the basis of those beliefs (and the incentive to do
so, as a way to retain their own disproportionate share of that power
and authority).

The differences in white and black perceptions of the issue were on
full display recently, when whites accused New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin
of racism for saying that New Orleans should be and would be a
"chocolate city" again, after blacks dislocated by Katrina had a chance
to return. To one commentator after the other -- most of them white,
but a few blacks as well -- the remark was by definition racist, since
it seemed to imply that whites weren't wanted, or at least not if it
meant changing the demographics of the city from mostly African
American (which it was before the storm) to mostly white, which it is
now, pending the return of black folks.

To prove how racist the comment was, critics offered an analogy. What
would we call it, they asked, if a white politician announced that
their town would or should be a "vanilla" city, meaning that it was
going to retain its white majority? Since we would most certainly call
such a remark racist in the case of the white pol, consistency requires
that we call Nagin's remark racist as well.

Seems logical enough, only it's not. And the reason it's not goes to
the very heart of what racism is and what it isn't--and the way in
which the different perceptions between whites and blacks on the matter
continue to thwart rational conversations on the subject.

Before dealing with the white politician/vanilla city analogy, let's
quickly examine a few simple reasons why Nagin's remarks fail the test
of racism. First, there is nothing to suggest that his comment about
New Orleans retaining its black majority portended a dislike of whites,
let alone plans to keep them out. In fact, if we simply examine Nagin's
own personal history -- which has been obscured by many on the right
since Katrina who have tried to charge him with being a liberal black
Democrat -- we would immediately recognize the absurdity of the charge.
Nagin owes his political career not to New Orleans' blacks, but New
Orleans' white folks. It was whites who voted for him, at a rate of
nearly ninety percent, while blacks only supported him at a rate of
forty-two percent, preferring instead the city's chief of police (which
itself says something: black folks in a city with a history of police
brutality preferring the cop to this guy).

Nagin has always been, in the eyes of most black New Orleanians, pretty
vanilla: he was a corporate vice-President, a supporter of President
Bush, and a lifelong Republican prior to changing parties right before
the Mayoral race.

Secondly, given the ways in which displaced blacks especially have been
struggling to return -- getting the run-around with insurance payments,
or dealing with landlords seeking to evict them (or jacking up rents to
a point where they can't afford to return) -- one can safely intuit
that all Nagin was doing was trying to reassure folks that they were
wanted back and wouldn't be prevented from re-entering the city.

And finally, Nagin's remarks were less about demography per se, than an
attempt to speak to the cultural heritage of the town, and the desire
to retain the African and Afro-Caribbean flavor of one of the world's
most celebrated cities. Fact is, culturally speaking, New Orleans is
what New Orleans is, because of the chocolate to which Nagin referred.
True enough, many others have contributed to the unique gumbo that is
New Orleans, but can anyone seriously doubt that the predominant flavor
in that gumbo has been that inspired by the city's black community? If
so, then you've never lived there or spent much time in the city (and
no, pissing on the street during Mardi Gras or drinking a badly-made
Hurricane at Pat O'Brian's doesn't count).

If the city loses its black cultural core (which is not out of the
question if the black majority doesn't or is unable to return), then
indeed New Orleans itself will cease to exist, as we know it. That is
surely what Nagin was saying, and it is simply impossible to think that
mentioning the black cultural core of the city and demanding that it
will and should be retained is racist: doing so fits no definition of
racism anywhere, in any dictionary, on the planet.

As for the analogy with a white leader demanding the retention of a
vanilla majority in his town, the two scenarios are not even remotely
similar, precisely because of how racism has operated, historically,
and today, to determine who lives where and who doesn't. For a white
politician to demand that his or her city was going to remain, in
effect, white, would be quite different, and far worse than what Nagin
said. After all, when cities, suburbs or towns are overwhelmingly
white, there are reasons (both historic and contemporary) having to do
with discrimination and unequal access for people of color. Restrictive
covenants, redlining by banks, racially-restrictive homesteading
rights, and even policies prohibiting people of color from living in an
area altogether -- four things that whites have never experienced
anywhere in this nation (as whites) -- were commonly deployed against
black and brown folks throughout our history. James Loewen's newest
book, Sundown Towns, tells the story of hundreds of these efforts in
communities across the nation, and makes clear that vanilla suburbs and
towns have become so deliberately.

On the other hand, chocolate cities have not developed because whites
have been barred or even discouraged from entry (indeed, cities often
bend over backwards to encourage whites to move to the cities in the
name of economic revival), but rather, because whites long ago fled in
order to get away from black people. In fact, this white flight was
directly subsidized by the government, which spent billions of dollars
on highway construction (which helped whites get from work in the
cities to homes in the 'burbs) and low-cost loans, essentially
available only to whites in those newly developing residential spaces.
The blackness of the cities increased as a direct result of the
institutionally racist policies of the government, in concert with
private sector discrimination, which kept folks of color locked in
crowded urban spaces, even as whites could come and go as they pleased.

So for a politician to suggest that a previously brown city should
remain majority "chocolate" is merely to demand that those who had
always been willing to stay and make the town their home, should be
able to remain there and not be run off in the name of gentrification,
commercial development or urban renewal. It is to demand the
eradication of barriers for those blacks who otherwise might have a
hard time returning, not to call for the erection of barriers to
whites--barriers that have never existed in the first place, and which
there would be no power to impose in any event (quite unlike the
barriers that have been set up to block access for the black and
brown).

In short, to call for a vanilla majority is to call for the
perpetuation of obstacles to persons of color, while to call for a
chocolate majority in a place such as New Orleans is to call merely for
the continuation of access and the opportunity for black folks to live
there. Is that too much to ask?

Funny how Nagin's comments simply calling for the retention of a
chocolate New Orleans bring down calls of racism upon his head, while
the very real and active planning of the city's white elite -- people
like Joe Cannizaro and Jimmy Reiss -- to actually change it to a
majority white town, elicits no attention or condemnation whatsoever
from white folks. In other words, talking about blacks being able to
come back and make up the majority is racist, while actually engaging
in ethnic cleansing -- by demolishing black neighborhoods like the
lower ninth ward, the Treme, or New Orleans East as many want to do --
is seen as legitimate economic development policy.

It's also interesting that whites chose the "chocolate city" part of
Nagin's speech, delivered on MLK day, as the portion deserving
condemnation as racist, rather than the next part--the part in which
Nagin said that Katrina was God's wrath, brought on by the sinful ways
of black folks, what with their crime rates, out-of-wedlock childbirths
and general wickedness.

In other words, if Nagin casts aspersions upon blacks as a group --
truth be told, the textbook definition of racism -- whites have no
problem with that. Hell, most whites agree with those kinds of
anti-black views, according to polling and survey data. But if Nagin
suggests that those same blacks -- including, presumably the "wicked"
ones -- be allowed to come back and live in New Orleans, thereby
maintaining a black majority, that becomes the problem for whites, for
reasons that are as self-evident as they are (and will remain)
undiscussed.

Until white folks get as upset about racism actually limiting the life
choices and chances of people of color, as we do about black folks
hurting our feelings, it's unlikely things will get much better. In the
end, it's hard to take seriously those who fume against this so-called
reverse racism, so petty is the complaint, and so thin the ivory skin
of those who issue it.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a
Privileged Son (Soft Skull, 2005) and Affirmative Action: Racial
Preference in Black and White (Routledge, 2005).

----

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-Peter K. Niven

----

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-Peter K. Niven

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-Jim Leftwich & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

The Anti-Empire Report

The Anti-Empire Report

excerpted from the book
Freeing the World to Death
essays on the american empire
by William Blum
Common Courage Press, 2005, paper
May 12, 2004

God, country and torture

On October 21, 1994, the United States became a State Party to the
"Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment". Article 2, section 2 of the Convention
states: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of
war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other
public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture."

"If you open the window [of torture], even just a crack, the cold air
of the middle ages will fill the whole room."

"The thing with the soldiers there, they think because we're Americans,
you can do whatever you want," said Spc. Ramon Leal, an MP who served
at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"You get a burning in your stomach, a rush, a feeling of hot lead
running through your veins, and you get a sense of power," said another
soldier. "Imagine wearing point-blank body armor, an M-16 and all the
power in the world, and the authority of God. That power is very
addictive."'

America and God...Bush, Cheney, Rice, and other eminences of the
imperial mafia know well how to invoke these feelings; with the help of
the rest of flag-wavin' and biblewavin' America the proper emotions can
be easily imparted down to the ranks. The American part-the mystique of
"America"-can also be exported, and has been for decades. Here's Chief
Inspector Basil Lambrou, one of Athens' well- known torturers under the
infamous Greek junta of 1967-74. Hundreds of prisoners listened to this
little speech given by the Inspector, who sat behind his desk which
displayed the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid,
He tried to show the prisoners the absolute futility of resistance:
"You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The
world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on
this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else.
What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the
government is NATO, / behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we
are Americans."

And here's Cohn Powell at the 1996 Republican Convention: America is "a
country where the best is always yet to come, a country that exists by
divine providence." He then punched his fist into the air and shouted
out, "America!"

Defenders of the American soldiers accused of abusing the prisoners in
Iraq have been insisting that the soldiers were only following orders.
At the end of the Second World War, however, we read moral lectures to
the German people on the inadmissibility of pleading that their
participation in the Holocaust was in obedience to their legitimate
government. To prove that we were serious, we hanged the leading
examples of such patriotic loyalty and imprisoned many of the rest.

Said the International Military Tribunal: "The very essence of the
Charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend
the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.
He who violates the laws of war cannot obtain immunity while acting in
pursuance of the authority of the state if the state in authorizing
action moves outside its competence under international law .... The
fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of
a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be
considered in mitigation of punishment."

*
What songs are the Iraqis singing?

On February 17, 2003, a month before the US bombing began, I posted to
the Internet an essay entitled "What Do the Imperial Mafia Really
Want?" concerning the expected war against Iraq. Included in this were
the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official then at the
American Enterprise Institute, one of the leading drum-beaters for
attacking Iraq: "If we just let our own vision of the world go forth,
and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece
together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a
total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our
children will sing great songs about us years from now."

I could not resist. I recently sent Mr. Ledeen an email reminding him
of his words and saying simply: "I'd like to ask you what songs your
children are singing these days."

I received no reply.

Has there ever been an empire that didn't tell itself and the world
that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to
plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?

***

April 3, 2004
The Israeli lobby

Philip Zelikow is of the type of whom it is customarily said: "He has
impeccable establishment credentials". He is currently executive
director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the
United States, a body created by Congress. Between 2001 and 2003 he
served on the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which
reports directly to the president. Before his appointment to the FlAB
he was part of the Bush transition team in January 2001. And in 1995 he
coauthored a book with Condoleezza Rice.

It's recently been revealed that in 2002 he publicly stated that a
prime motive for the upcoming invasion of Iraq was to eliminate a
threat to Israel.

"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?" he
asked a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002.
"I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been
since 1990-it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that
dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about
that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government
doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a
popular sell."

And this seems to be the story that dare not speak its name. The story
was revealed on March 29 by Inter Press Service, a major international
news agency that is mainly published outside the United States. An
extensive search of the Lexis-Nexis database revealed that only one
English-language news source in the world picked up the story: another
news agency, United Press International, on March 30. There thus
appears to be no mainstream newspaper or broadcast medium that used it,
though many subscribe to UPI. Can anything other than fear of the
Israeli lobby account for this?

*
Guinea pigs fighting for freedom and democracy

Jessica Horjus, a member of the US Air Force, refused to take the
anthrax vaccine before deploying to a base in Kuwait, about 30 miles
from Iraq, primarily because no anthrax has been found in Iraq; the
vaccine, moreover, is a product that has accumulated thousands of
reports of adverse reactions ranging from headaches and vomiting to
severe autoimmune and neurological problems. Despite this and despite
four years service and commendations and Good Conduct Medals, Horjus'
commander demoted her and cut her pay in half.

In February, she declined a second and third order. In March, the young
mother accepted the Air Force's offer of an other-than-honorable
discharge. Some who have declined the vaccine have been imprisoned;
others have been threatened with up to 10 years in prison, more than
even rape or drug charges may bring in the military. Soldiers, citizen
groups and members of Congress are increasingly calling upon defense
officials to stop the vaccinations, which have been declined by
numerous members of the armed services. All to no avail.

What lies behind the military's obstinate refusal to bend and its
desire to severely punish? Could it be that the Pentagon wants the
vaccinations to continue so that statistics can be further compiled and
refined about the effects of the vaccine? This would of course be using
members of the armed forces as guinea pigs, but this is a practice
which has a long tradition in the US military... GIs marched to nuclear
explosion sites, subjected to chemical and biological weapons
experiments, radiation experiments, behavior modification experiments
that washed their brains with LSD, the list goes on... literally
millions of experimental subjects, seldom given a choice or adequate
information, often with disastrous effects to their physical and/or
mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even monitoring.

***

March 10, 2004
Make him an offer he can't refuse

Statement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, President of Haiti, March 5, 2004,
from exile in the Central African Republic:

"The 28th of February, at night, suddenly, American military personnel
who were already all over Port-au-Prince descended on my house in
Tabarre to tell me first that all the American security agents who have
contracts with the Haitian government [to protect Aristide] only have
two options. Either they leave immediately to go to the United States,
or they fight to die. Secondly, they told me the remaining 25 of the
American security agents hired by the Haitian government who were to
come in on the 29th of February as reinforcements were under
interdiction, prevented from coming. Thirdly, they told me the
foreigners and Haitian terrorists alike, loaded with heavy weapons,
were already in position to open fire on Port-au-Prince. And right
then, the Americans precisely stated that they will kill thousands of
people and it will be a bloodbath. That the attack is ready to start,
and when the first bullet is fired nothing will stop them and nothing
will make them wait until they take over, therefore the mission is to
take me dead or alive .... Faced with this tragedy, I decided to ask,
'What guarantee do I have that there will not be a bloodbath if I
decided to leave?'

"In reality, all this diplomatic gymnastics did not mean anything
because these military men responsible for the kidnapping operation had
already assumed the success of their mission. What was said was done.
This diplomacy, plus the forced signing of the letter of resignation,
was not able to cover the face of the kidnapping."

A search of the Lexis-Nexis database on March 10 failed to turn up any
article in an American newspaper or broadcast medium which discussed
the contents of Aristide's statement; this despite news of it being
carried by the Associated Press. Several papers in Canada and the UK
did carry stories about the statement.

Thus it was that Aristide went into exile. And then Colin Powell, in
the sincerest voice he could muster, told us that "He was not
kidnapped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the
airplane willingly. And that's the truth." Powell sounded as sincere as
he had sounded a year earlier when he gave the UN a detailed inventory
of the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq. He did not
explain why the United States did not protect Aristide from the rebels,
which the US could have done with the greatest of ease, without so much
as firing a single shot. Neither did Powell explain why Aristide would
"willingly" give up his presidency.

Despite all the dishonesty surrounding Iraq, I'd guess that most
Americans tend to believe Bush officials concerning Haiti because of a
couple of reasons. One: Many of the media accounts of the past few
months have mentioned that in 1994 the US military returned Aristide to
power. That sounds pretty impressive; it indicates that concerning
Haiti and Aristide the United States has its heart in the right place.
But "the US military returned Aristide to power in 1994" is just the
headline. If one reads the story below the headline the picture looks
remarkably different. It's simply not the same story any longer. It can
be read online.

A second reason the public may support US policy in Haiti is that
they've been fed one story after another about Aristide's government
being brutal and corrupt and Aristide himself being mentally unstable
and largely responsible for the current crisis. That's typical before
the US moves to overthrow a foreign government. It's actually rather
easy to plant such stories in the media, with or without their
cooperation. In 1994, a similar story of Aristide being mentally
unstable, a murderer and psychopath, was created and disseminated by a
CIA official named Brian Latell, without any evidence to back up the
charges.

When a government or an individual becomes an ODE - Officially
Designated Enemy - of the United States, one should take everything one
hears about that government or person with a very large block of salt.

Of course to Washington officials it wouldn't matter if Aristide were a
saint. He's on record as not being a great lover of globalization or
capitalism. This is not the kind of man the imperial mafia wanted in
charge of the assembly plant of the Western hemisphere. They wanted him
out, and out he went.

So in the end, a democratically elected government was overthrown by
the combined effort of the United States and France, with the help of
Canada. Three of the big boys had something against one of the little
boys... and we all know how such things wind up in this world; the way
they always have, smooth as can be. And as usual, the rest of the big
boys of the world said nothing, not a peep out of the European Union or
NATO about this body blow to democracy, a subject they never tire of
preaching about. France of course is a member of both.

***

February 17, 2004

George W. Bush, November 19, 2002

"I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting
thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me
why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an
explanation."

***

July 22, 2004
Preaching to the converted

"Preaching to the converted Preaching to the choir"...That's what
speakers and writers and other activists are repeatedly told they're
doing; i.e., saying the same old thing to the same old people, just
spinning their wheels. But long experience as speaker, writer and
activist in the area of foreign policy tells me it just ain't so.

From the questions and comments I regularly get from my audiences, via
email and in person, and from other people's audiences where I'm in
attendance, I can plainly see that there are numerous significant gaps
and misconceptions in the choir's thinking, often leaving them
confused, unable to understand or see through the next government lie
or shell game, unknowing or forgetful of what happened in the past that
illuminates the present, or knowing the facts but unable to apply them
at the appropriate moment, vulnerable to being led astray by the next
person who offers a specious argument that opposes what they currently
believe, or think they believe.

As cynical as others or themselves may think they are, they frequently
are not cynical enough about the power elite's motivations,
underestimating the government's capacity for perfidy, clinging to the
belief that their government means well and doesn't lie directly in
their face; while others of the choir are much too cynical, conspiracy
theorists to a ridiculous degree-their inability to access my website
at any time must be the work of the CIA, they inform me; hardly any
political figure ever dies a natural death; any US policy toward any
country is based on oil (or some similar manifestation of "vulgar
Marxism").

In sum, with all of the above, their hearts may be in the right place,
but their heads need working on. And in any event, very few people are
actually born into the choir; they achieve choir membership only after
being preached to, multiple times.

***

Dec 1, 2003
The mystique of America

We now know that Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United
States to avoid the American invasion in March. Iraqi officials,
including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted
Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction
and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search;
they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli
peace process and handing over a man accused of being involved in the
World Trade Center bombing in 1993, If this is about oil, they said,
they would also talk about US oil concessions.

What is most surprising about this is not the offers per se, but the
naiveté-undoubtedly fueled by desperation-on the part of the Iraqis
that apparently led them to believe that the Americans were open to
negotiation, to discussion, to being reasonable. The Iraqis apparently
were sufficiently innocent about the fanaticism of the Bush
administration that at one point they pledged to hold UN-supervised
free elections; surely free elections is something the United States
believes in, the Iraqis reasoned, and will be moved by.

Other countries have harbored similar illusions about American leaders.
Over the years, a number of Third World leaders, under imminent
military and/or political threat by the United States, have made
appeals to Washington officials, even to the president in person, under
the apparently hopeful belief that it was all a misunderstanding, that
America was not really intent upon crushing them and their movements
for social change.

The Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana
in 1961, and Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983 all made their appeals
to Washington to be left in peace." All were crushed. In 1961, Che
Guevara offered a Kennedy aide several important Cuban concessions if
Washington would call off the dogs of war. To no avail. In 1994, it was
reported that the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico,
Subcommander Marcos, said that "he expects the United States to support
the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement
is not influenced by Cubans or Russians." "Finally," Marcos said, "they
are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and
true causes." Yet for many years, the United States has been providing
the Mexican military with all the training and tools needed to kill
Marcos' followers and, most likely, before long, Marcos himself.

And in 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that ousted Hugo Chavez, some
of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush
administration. Chavez learned of this visit and was so distressed by
it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in
Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that
the coup took place shortly thereafter.

In a similar vein, in 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a
genuine admirer of America, wrote at least eight letters to President
Truman and the State Department asking for America's help in winning
Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was
being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he
requested that "the four powers" (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain)
intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the
Indochinese issue before the United Nations." He received no reply, for
he was some sort of communist.

Syria today appears to be the latest example of this belief that
somewhere in Washington, somehow, there is a vestige of human-like
reasonableness that can be tapped. The Syrians turn over suspected
terrorists to the United States and other countries and accept
prisoners delivered to them by the US for the clear purpose of them
being tortured to elicit information. The Syrians make it clear that
they do these things in the hope of appeasing the American beast; this
while the United States continues speaking openly of overthrowing the
Syrian government and imposes strict sanctions against the country.

Was there anything Czechoslovakia could have done to prevent a Nazi
invasion in 1938? Or Poland in 1939?

***

November 7, 2003
Interventionism revisionism

George W. recently designated Otto Reich, his Special Envoy for Western
Hemisphere Initiatives, to lead a delegation to attend the
commemoration ceremony of the 20th Anniversary of "the restoration of
democracy to Grenada". Bad enough that Reich has on his resumé abetting
anti-Castro Cuban terrorists who bombed a plane out of the air killing
73 people, bad enough that what actually happened in October 1983 in
Grenada was the US overthrowing another government which was not a
threat to anyone and covering it up with a campaign of lies that stood
unmatched until the present-day Iraq fiasco, but here's what "the
restoration of democracy to Grenada" looked like at the time:

In 1984, former Premier Herbert Blaize was elected prime minister, his
party capturing 14 of the 15 parliamentary seats. Blaize, who in the
wake of the invasion had proclaimed to the United States: "We say thank
you from the bottom of our hearts," had been favored by the Reagan
administration. The candidate who won the sole opposition seat
announced that he would not occupy it because of what he called "vote
rigging and interference in the election by outside forces."

One year later, the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs
reported on Grenada as part of its annual survey of human rights
abuses:

Reliable accounts are circulating of prisoners being beaten, denied
medical attention and confined for long periods without being able to
see lawyers. The country's new US-trained police force has acquired a
reputation for brutality, arbitrary arrest and abuse of authority.

The report added that an offending all-music radio station had been
closed and that US-trained counter-insurgency forces were eroding civil
rights.

By the late 1980s, the government began confiscating many books
arriving from abroad, including Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana and
Nelson Mandela Speaks. In April 1989, it issued a list of more than 80
books which were prohibited from being imported.

Four months later, Prime Minister Blaize suspended Parliament to
forestall a threatened no-confidence vote resulting from what his
critics called "an increasingly authoritarian style".

***
April 14, 2003
The Warmongers' need for a justification for the devastation

When you wage a war that is strongly opposed by the great majority of
those on the planet who think about such things, when your own people
are becoming increasingly militant against your unilateral waging of
that war, when you know well that your war is palpably and
embarrassingly illegal, immoral, illogical and unjust, when you can't
admit the real reasons for

the war... then you have a consuming need to find a moral-sounding and
credible selling point-"Regime change", to remove the evil Saddam, the
Iraqi people will welcome us with flowers and music!

Thus was it mortifying for the warmongers that for more than the first
two weeks of the war the Iraqi images shown to the world were largely
of the dead, the wounded, the grief=stricken, the immense piles of
rubble, the bombing-produced homeless, those bitterly angry at the
United States. How could it be otherwise? What kind of people like
their loved ones torn apart by missiles, their children without a limb,
their homes, hospitals, schools and jobs destroyed?

The US-military told its hapless soldiers and its embedded media that
any negative reaction, or lack of a positive one, was all because the
people were afraid of Saddam, as if one of his agents was standing
behind each Iraqi citizen, gun at the ready. Why did at least hundreds
of thousands of people fight and resist, many to the death, instead of
surrendering, defecting, anything to show their gratitude for their
"liberation"?

Now, any teenager flashing a victory sign, anyone climbing upon a
toppled statue of Saddam or smiling for a camera is an American media
star and evidence of the nobility of the war. But what portion of the
Iraqi people are happy about the invasion-happy about all its effects?
What are they happy about other than the removal of Saddam? And many
Iraqis supported him. Of those "celebrating", how many have been
touched by the death and destruction? How many even know about it? The
US bombed Iraqi and Arabic TV off the air fairly early on for most of
the country. Much of the telephone system was another early victim.
When the Iraqis who were kept in the dark discover the horror will the
American media be there to record the disappeared smiles?

As an American, I would also celebrate if the cruel and ignorant tyrant
calling himself my leader were overthrown. But not if my city were
bombed and my house demolished. No changes in Iraq justify the American
onslaught. What kind of world would we have if any country could invade
any other country because it didn't like the leader of that country?

In any event, the United States was not motivated at all by Saddam
Hussein, or his evilness, or his alleged weapons of mass destruction,
or his alleged threat to the United States. American officials made it
explicitly clear before the invasion that the US intervention would
take place even if Saddam resigned or chose to go into exile.

***

April 1, 2003
Do unto others before others do unto you

Here's one of the empire's arrogances which may have escaped your
attention. First we have Robert Kagan, a leading light of the American
foreign-policy establishment and an intellectual architect of an
interventionism that seeks to impose a neo-conservative agenda upon the
world, by force if necessary. Kagan declares that the United States
must refuse to abide by certain international conventions, like the
international criminal court and the Kyoto accord on global warming.
The US, he says, "must support arms control, but not always for itself.
It must live by a double standard."

Now we have Robert Cooper, a senior British diplomat and key foreign
policy advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair. Cooper writes: "The
challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double
standards .... When dealing with more old- fashioned kinds of states
outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the
rougher methods of an earlier era-force, pre-emptive attack, deception,
whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the
nineteenth century world of every state for itself." His expression,
"every state for itself", can be better understood as simply that some
state, somewhere, is not doing what the American Empire and its junior
partner in London wish. So there we have it. The double standard is in.
The golden rule of do unto others as you would have others do unto you
is out.

Noam Chomsky has spoken of "the principle of universality: if an on is
right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who
do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the
standards they apply to others plainly cannot be taken seriously when
they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good
and evil."

Robert Kagan and Robert Cooper and their ilk of course know this. A
7-year-old child, with his or her acute sense of unfairness, knows it
very well. It's usually called hypocrisy. So why do the empire's
intellectuals peddle this double-standard silliness? I'd put it this
way: They, like most people, have a vision for the kind of world they'd
like to live in; let's call it a laissez-faire, globalized,
Judeo-Christian, law and order, white -man's-burden, ridding the planet
of all governments not subservient to Washington, world. Now most of
the world's people have experienced this stuff quite enough already,
thank you. The imperial mafia thus have a very difficult time selling
or defending their utopia on the basis of legal, moral, ethical or
fairness standards. So what to do? Aha! They decide that they're not
bound by such standards. But the rest of the world is.

***

2000
Americans exempt from war crimes

The new International Criminal Court is the culmination of a campaign
for a permanent war crimes tribunal that began with the Nuremberg
trials after World War II. But the US government has refused to join,
claiming that they're afraid of it being used "frivolously" to charge
US soldiers with war crimes for actions during an American
intervention. But I think their real concern is not that it will be
used frivolously, but that it will be used seriously; and not against
soldiers, but against leaders in Washington, and there are quite a few
who would qualify.

The new court will not have any powers to judge past behavior, but
based on the past, on the recent past, one can see why the powers that
be in the United States would be uneasy. Of those that are still
living, you have people like Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Cohn
Powell and Caspar Weinberger and Elliot Abrams and a whole bunch of
other people who can easily have a case made against them for war
crimes or crimes against humanity.

In any event, a reading of the court's charter makes it clear that
"frivolous prosecutions" was a danger thought of in advance and enough
safeguards are provided to prevent such from happening.

*****
p93
Terrorists in their own words

Former US president Jimmy Carter told the New York Times in a 1989
interview:

We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to
Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many
people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and
unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers-women and children and
farmers and housewives-in those villages around Beirut .... As a result
of that... we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are
deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of our hostages
and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks.

Colin Powell has also revealed that he knows better. Writing of this
same Lebanon debacle in his memoir, he forgoes clichés about terrorists
hating democracy: "The U.S.S. New Jersey started hurling 16-inch shells
into the mountains above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were
softening up the beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion.
What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will
react much as we would."

The ensuing terrorist attack against US Marine barracks in Lebanon took
the lives of 241 American military personnel.

The bombardment of Beirut in 1983 and 1984 is but one of many examples
of American violence against the Middle East and/or Muslims since the
1980s. The record includes:

o the shooting down of two Libyan planes in 1981
o the bombing of Libya in 1986
o the bombing and sinking of an Iranian ship in 1987
o the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988
o the shooting down of two more Libyan planes in 1989
o the massive bombing of the Iraqi people in 1991
o the continuing bombings and sanctions against Iraq for the next 12
years
o the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998
o the habitual support of Israel despite the routine devastation and
torture it inflicts upon the Palestinian people
o the habitual condemnation of Palestinian resistance to this
o the abduction of "suspected terrorists" from Muslim countries, such
as Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Albania, who are then taken to
places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where they are tortured
o the large military and hi-tech presence in Islam's holiest land,
Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region
o the support of undemocratic, authoritarian Middle East governments
from the Shah of Iran to the Saudis.

"How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is
vitriolic hatred for America?" asked George W. "I'll tell you how I
respond: I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there's such misunderstanding of
what our country is about that people would hate us. I am-like most
Americans, I just can't believe it because I know how good we are.""

p96
The Iraqi resistance

The official Washington mentality about the motivations of individuals
they call terrorists is also manifested in current US occupation policy
in Iraq. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld has declared that there are
five groups opposing US forces-looters, criminals, remnants of Saddam
Hussein's government, foreign terrorists and those influenced by Iran."
An American official in Iraq maintains that many of the people shooting
at US troops are "poor young Iraqis" who have been paid between $20 and
$100 to stage hit-and-run attacks on US soldiers. "They're not
dedicated fighters," he said. "They're people who wanted to take a few
potshots."22

With such language do American officials avoid dealing with the idea
that any part of the resistance is composed of Iraqi citizens who are
simply demonstrating their resentment about being bombed, invaded,
occupied, and subjected to daily humiliations.

Some officials convinced themselves that it was largely the most loyal
followers of Saddam Hussein and his two sons who were behind the daily
attacks on Americans, and that with the capture or killing of the evil
family, resistance would die out; tens of millions of dollars were
offered as reward for information leading to this joyful prospect. Thus
it was that the killing of the sons elated military personnel. US Army
trucks with loudspeakers drove through small towns and villages to
broadcast a message about the death of Hussein's sons. "Coalition
forces have won a great victory over the Baath Party and the Saddam
Hussein regime by killing Uday and Qusay Hussein in Mosul," said the
message broadcast in Arabic. "The Baath Party has no power in Iraq.
Renounce the Baath Party or you are in great danger." It called on all
officials of Hussein's government to turn themselves in."

What followed was several days of some of the deadliest attacks against
American personnel since the guerrilla war began. Unfazed, American
officials in Washington and Iraq continue to suggest that the
elimination of Saddam will write finis to anti-American actions.

Another way in which the political origins of terrorism are obscured is
by the common practice of blaming poverty or repression by Middle
Eastern governments (as opposed to US support for such governments) for
the creation of terrorists. Defenders of US foreign policy cite this
also as a way of showing how enlightened they are. Here's Condoleezza
Rice:

[The Middle East] is a region where hopelessness provides a fertile
ground for ideologies that convince promising youths to aspire not to a
university education, a career or family, but to blowing themselves up,
taking as many innocent lives with them as possible. We need to address
the source of the problem.

Many on the left speak in a similar fashion, apparently unconscious of
what they're obfuscating. This analysis confuses terrorism with
revolution.

In light of the several instances mentioned above, among others which
could be cited, of US officials giving the game away, in effect
admitting that terrorists and guerrillas may be, or in fact are,
reacting to actual hurts and injustices, it may be that George W. is
the only true believer among them, if in fact he is one. The thought
may visit leaders of the American Empire, at least occasionally, that
all their expressed justifications for invading Iraq and Afghanistan
and for their "War on Terrorism" are no more than fairy tales for young
children and grown-up innocents. But officialdom doesn't make
statements to represent reality. It constructs stories to legitimize
the pursuit of interests. And the interests here are irresistibly
compelling: creating the most powerful empire in all history, enriching
their class comrades, remaking the world in their own ideological
image.

Being the target of terrorism is just one of the prices you pay for
such prizes, and terrorist attacks provide a great excuse for the next
intervention, the next expansion of the empire, the next expansion of
the military budget.

 

A while ago, I heard a union person on the radio proposing what he
called "a radical solution to poverty-pay people enough to live on."

Well, I'd like to propose a radical solution to antiAmerican
terrorism-stop giving terrorists the motivation to attack America. As
long as the imperial mafia insist that antiAmerican terrorists have no
good or rational reason for retaliation against the United States for
anything the US has ever done to their countries, as long as US foreign
policy continues with its bloody and oppressive interventions, the "War
on Terrorism" is as doomed to failure as the war on drugs has been.

If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the
United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize-very
publicly and very sincerely-to all the widows and orphans, the
impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other
victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce to every corner
of the world that America's global military interventions have come to
an end. I would then inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state
of the union but-oddly enough-a foreign country. Then I would reduce
the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay
reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American
bombings, invasions and sanctions. There would be more than enough
money. One year's military budget in the United States is equal to more
than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.
That's one year.

That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the
fourth day, I'd be assassinated.

*****

p108
There's the story from the Cold War about a group of Russian writers
touring the United States. They were astonished to find, after reading
the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on
all the vital issues were the same. "In our country," said one of them,
"to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We
torture them. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What's the
secret?

p114
Following their bombing of Iraq in 1991, the United States wound up
with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and
the United Arab Emirates.

Following their bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the United States wound
up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia,
Hungary, Bosnia, and Croatia.

Following their bombing of Afghanistan, the United States appears on
course to wind up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere in the
area.

p117
What Do the Imperial f Mafia Really Want.?
[written Feb. 17, 2003; the invasion of Iraq took place on March 20]

Which is the more remarkable-that the United States can openly announce
to the world its determination to invade a sovereign nation and
overthrow its government in the absence of any attack or threat of
attack from the intended target? Or that for an entire year the world
has been striving to figure out what the superpower's real intentions
are?

There are of course those who accept at face value Washington's stated
motivations of "liberating" the people of Iraq from a dictatorship and
bestowing upon them a full measure of democracy, freedom, prosperity
and other eternal joys which are the stuff of American folklore. In
light of a century of well-documented US foreign policy which reveals a
virtually complete absence of such motivations, along with repeated
opposite consequences resulting from such policies, we can dispense
with this endeavor to appeal to the terminal gullibility of the
American people; similarly with the government's attempt at humor by
warning us that Iraq is an imminent military threat.

Presented here are some reflections about several of the causes that
make the hearts of the imperial mafia beat faster in regard to Iraq,
which may be helpful in arguing the anti-war point of view:

Expansion of the American Empire: adding more military bases and
communications listening stations to the Pentagon's portfolio, setting
up a command post from which to better monitor, control and intimidate
the rest of the Middle East.

Idealism: the imperial mafia fundamentalists remaking the world in
America's image, with free enterprise, belief in a political system
straight out of an American high-school textbook, and
Judeo-Christianity as core elements. They assume that US moral
authority is as absolute and unchallengeable as its military power.
Here is Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, now at the American
Enterprise Institute (one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking
Iraq): "If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we
embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together
clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war
against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children
will sing great songs about us years from now."

Oil: to be in full control of Iraq's vast reserves, with Saudi oil and
Iranian oil waiting defenselessly next door; OPEC will be stripped of
its independence from Washington and will no longer think about
replacing the dollar with the Euro as its official currency, as Iraq
has already done; oil-dependent Europe may think twice next time about
challenging Washington's policies; the emergence of the European Union
as a competing superpower may be slowed down.

Globalization: Once relative security over the land, people and
institutions has been established, the transnational corporations will
march into Iraq ready to privatize everything at fire-sale prices,
followed closely by the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization and
the rest of the international financial extortionists.

Arms industry: As with each of America's endless wars, military
manufacturers will rake in their exorbitant profits, then deliver their
generous political contributions, inspiring Washington leaders to yet
further warfare, each war also being the opportunity to test new
weapons and hand out contracts for the rebuilding of the country just
demolished. As an added bonus, Pentagon officers have jobs waiting for
them with the same companies when they retire.

Israel: The men driving Bush to war include long-time militant
supporters of Israel, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and
Douglas Feith, who, along with the rest of the powerful American-
Israeli lobby, have advocated striking Iraq for years. Israel has been
playing a key role in the American military buildup to the war. Besides
getting rid of its arch enemy, Israel may have the opportunity after
the war to carry out its final solution to the Palestinian
question-transferring them to Jordan, ("liberated") Iraq, and anywhere
else that expanded US hegemony in the Middle East will allow. At the
same time, Iraq's abundant water could be diverted to relieve a parched
Israel and an old Iraqi-to-Israel oil pipeline could be rejuvenated.

p121
Setting a High (Double) Standard
Supplying Saddam Hussein with Weapons of Mass Destruction
[A version of this essay appeared in The Progressive, April 19981

After her now-infamous 1996 remark that the "price" of American
sanctions against Iraq-the death of half a million children-"is worth
it", Secretary of State Madeleine Albright travels around the world to
gather support for yet more punishment of a country where American
bombings and seven years of sanctions have left about a million men,
women and children dead and a previously well-off nation plunged into
poverty, disease, and malnutrition.

Their crime? They have a leader who refuses to cede all sovereignty to
the United States (acting under its usual United Nations cover) which
demands that every structure in Iraq, including the presidential
palaces, be available for inspection for "weapons of mass destruction".
After more than six years of these inspections, and significant
destruction of stocks of forbidden chemical, biological, and nuclear
weapon material, as well as weapons research and development programs,
the UN team still refuses to certify that Iraq is clean enough.

Inasmuch as the country is larger than California, it's understandable
that the inspectors cannot be certain that all prohibited weapons have
been uncovered. It's equally understandable for Iraq to claim that the
United States can, and will, continue to find some excuse not to give
Iraq the certification needed to end the sanctions. Indeed, President
Clinton has said more than once that the US will not allow sanctions to
be lifted as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power.

It can be said that the United States has inflicted more vindictive
punishment and ostracism upon Iraq than upon Germany or Japan after
World War II.

The Saddam Hussein regime must wonder at the high (double) standard set
by Washington. Less than a year ago, the US Senate passed an act to
implement the "Convention on the Prohibition of the Development,
Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their
Destruction" (Short title: Chemical Weapons Convention), an
international treaty which had been ratified by more than 100 nations
in its five-year life.

The Senate act, Section 307, stipulates that "the President may deny a
request to inspect any facility in the United States in cases where the
President determines that the inspection may pose a threat to the
national security interests of the United States." Saddam has asked for
no more than that for Iraq. Presumably, under the Senate act, the White
House, Pentagon, etc. would be off limits, as Saddam insists his
presidential palaces should be, as well as the military unit
responsible for his personal security, which an American colonel
demanded to visit.

Moreover, Section 303 states that "Any objection by the President to an
individual serving as an inspector... shall not be reviewable in any
court." Again, this echoes a repeated complaint from the Iraqis-a
recent team of 16 inspectors included 14 from the US and Britain,
Saddam's two principal adversaries who are, at this very moment, busily
planning new bombing raids on Iraq. The team was led by a US Marine
Corps captain, a veteran of the Gulf War, who has been accused of
spying by Iraq. But the Iraqis do not have a corresponding right of
exclusion. The same section of the Senate act also provides that an FBI
agent "accompanies each inspection team visit" in the United States.

The wishes of the Iraqi government to place certain sites off limits
and to have less partisan inspectors have been dismissed out of hand by
US government spokespersons and the American media. The prevailing
attitude has been: "What do they have to hide?" (chuckle, chuckle).

The hypocrisy runs deeper yet. In his recent State of the Union
address, President Clinton spoke of how we must "confront the new
hazards of chemical and biological weapons and the outlaw states,
terrorists and organized criminals seeking to acquire them." He
castigated Saddam Hussein for "developing nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons" and called for strengthening the Biological Weapons
Convention. "You cannot defy the will of the world," the president
proclaimed to Hussein. "You have used weapons of mass destruction
before. We are determined to deny you the capacity to use them again."

Who among the president's listeners knew, who among the media reported,
that the United States had been the supplier to Iraq of much of the
source biological and other materials and equipment Saddam's scientists
required to create biological and chemical warfare programs?

According to a Senate Report of 19942: From 1985, if not earlier,
through 1989, a veritable witch's brew of biological materials was
exported to Iraq by private American suppliers pursuant to application
and licensing by the US Department of Commerce. Amongst these
materials, which often produce slow and agonizing deaths, were:

o Bacillus Anthrocis, cause of anthrax. o Clostridium Botulinum, a
source of botulinum toxin. o Histoplasma Capsulatam, cause of a disease
attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord and heart. o Brucella Melitensis, a
bacteria that can damage major organs. o Clotsridium Perfringens, a
highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness. o Clostridium tetani,
highly toxigenic. o Also, Escherichia Coli (E.Coli); genetic materials;
human and bacterial DNA.

Dozens of other pathogenic biological agents were shipped to Iraq
during the 1980s. The Senate Report pointed out: "These biological
materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of
reproduction."' "It was later learned," the committee stated, "that
these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to
those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi
biological warfare program." Additionally, United States exports to
Iraq in this period included:

o Chemical warfare agent precursors. o Chemical warfare agent
production facility plans and technical drawings. o Chemical warhead
filling equipment.

These exports continued to at least November 28, 1989 despite the fact
that Iraq had been reported to be engaging in chemical warfare and
possibly biological warfare against Iranians, Kurds, and Shiites since
the early 1980s.

During the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-88, the United States gave military
aid and intelligence information to both sides, hoping that each would
inflict severe damage on the other, in line perhaps with what Noam
Chomsky has postulated:

It's been a leading, driving doctrine of US foreign policy since the
1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf
region will be effectively dominated by the United States and its
clients, and, crucially, that no independent, indigenous force will be
permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil
production and price.

This policy, as well as financial considerations, were likely the
motivating forces behind selling Iraq the biological and chemical
materials. (Iran was at that time regarded as the greater threat to the
seemingly always threatened US national security.)

Indeed, there is evidence that Washington encouraged Iraq to attack
Iran and ignite the war in the first place. A recently discovered
Department of State document from Secretary of State Alexander Haig to
President Reagan about Haig's trip to the Middle East in April 1981,
said: "It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave
the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd
[Saudi Arabia's crown prince, later king]."'

As the American public and media are being prepared to accept and
cheerlead the next bombing of the people of Iraq, the stated rationale,
the official party line, is that Iraq is an "outlaw" state (or "rogue"
state, or "pariah" state-the media obediently repeats all the White
House and State Department buzz words), which is ignoring a United
Nations Security Council resolution. Israel, however, has ignored many
such resolutions without the US bombing Tel Aviv, imposing sanctions,
or even cutting back military aid. But by some arcane ideological
alchemy, Israel is not deemed an "outlaw" state by Washington.

Neither does the United States regard itself as such for turning its
back on a ruling of the U.N.'s World Court in 1984 to cease its hostile
military actions against Nicaragua, or for the numerous times the US
has totally ignored overwhelming General Assembly resolutions, nor for
its repeated use of chemical and biological agents against Cuba since
the 1960s.

In any event, the weapons monitoring disagreement is between Iraq and
the United Nations, not Iraq and the United States. And the U.N. has
not authorized any of its members to use force.

"What gives Britain and the United States the right to go it alone on
this?" asked an unusually brave reporter at a February 6 Clinton/Blair
press conference.

President Clinton offered no direct reply to the question. Prime
Minister Blair gave no reply at all.

The bombing looks to be inevitable; the boys are busy moving all their
toys into position. Of course, no one knows what it will accomplish
besides more death and destruction, and perhaps distracting the media
from L'Affaire Clinton-Lewinsky. Saddam will remain in power. He'll be
more stubborn than ever about the inspections. There may be one
consolation for the Iraqi people. Discussing Secretary of Defense
William Cohen's view of the matter, the press said: "U.S. officials
remain wary as he recalled they were during the 1991 war that evicted
Iraqi forces from Kuwait-of doing so much military damage to Iraq to
weaken its regional role as a counterweight to Iran."

 

p144
Madeleine Albright, Ethically Challenged
[written 1998-1999} 1)

1) "Asked if it is not hypocritical to punish Burma for human rights
violations while refraining from sanctions on China for similar
actions, Albright replied, 'We have consistent principles and flexible
tactics'."

The same "flexible tactics" (English translation: hypocrisy) are
evident in the policies embraced by Albright toward Cuba, Libya, Iraq,
et al, as opposed to the policies toward Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico,
Peru, and Colombia.

2) At a "Town Hall" meeting, held in Columbus, Ohio, February 18, 1998,
concerning impending American bombing strikes against Iraq, Aibright
was heckled and asked critical, and perhaps uncomfortable, questions.
At one point, her mind and her integrity could come up with no better
response than to make something up: "I really am surprised," she
declared, "that people feel that it is necessary to defend the rights
of Saddam Hussein,"

At another point, a besieged Albright was moved to yell: "We are the
greatest country in the world and what we are doing is serving the role
of the indispensable nation to see what we can do to make the world
safer for our children and grandchildren and for those people around
the world who follow the ç rules."' On TV the next morning, she
reiterated: "If we have to ) use force, it is because we are America!
We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further into
the future,"

Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, though her words
didn't quite have the ring of "Deutschland über alles" or "Rule
Britannia".

Finally, unable to provide answers that satisfied or quieted the
questioners at the Town Hall, Aibright stated that she would meet with
some of them after the meeting to answer their questions. But as soon
as the meeting ended, the Secretary of State was out of there,
posthaste. Her offer, it would seem, had just been a tactic to try and
pacify the hostile crowd.

3) Television interview, "60 Minutes", May 12, 1996:
Lesley Stahl, speaking of US sanctions against lraq: "We have heard
that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children
than died in Hiroshima. And-and you know, is the price worth it?"

Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the
price-we think the price is worth it."

Yet, at the Town Hall meeting referred to above, Aibright was seemingly
not embarrassed to declare: "I am willing to make a bet to anyone here
that we care more about the Iraqi people than Saddam Hussein does. He
does not care a fig."

4) Albright in Guatemala, talking to a group of impoverished children:
"Why would [I] and the United States care about what is happening here?
The reason is we are all one family and when one part of our family is
not happy or suffers, we all suffer."

Thus spaketh the principal foreign policy officer of the country
directly responsible for bringing more than 40 years of poverty,
torture, death squads, massacres and disappeared people to Guatemala,
all extremely well documented.

5) "To a student who asked [Aibrighti whether the United States was not
spending too much of its resources on being the world's policeman and
too little on more pressing domestic concerns, Albright asked him in
return to estimate what share of the federal budget goes to foreign
policy. When he guessed 15 or 20 percent, Aibright pounced."

"It's 1 percent, 1 percent of the entire budget," Aibright said.

Her reply was conspicuously disingenuous. At best, she was referring to
the budget of only the State Department, concealing what everyone
knows, even the teenage student she browbeat-US foreign policy
expenditures must include the Defense Department, the CIA, the National
Security Agency, and a host of other government agencies. Together they
consume more than 50 percent of the budget.
6) In February 1996, as UN ambassador, Albright reacted with righteous
indignation against the Cuban pilots who expressed satisfaction after
shooting down two planes of Cubans from Florida which were headed
toward Cuba. "This one won't miss around any more," one of the
attacking pilots is reported to have exclaimed.

"I was struck by the joy of these pilots in committing cold-blooded
murder," Albright said, accusing the Cuban pilots of "cowardice."

What, one may ask, did she think of the American pilots who, while
bombing and strafing helpless retreating Iraqis in 1991, exclaimed: "we
toasted him"..."we hit the jackpot"... "a turkey shoot", "shooting fish
in a barrel"... "basically just sitting ducks"... "There's just nothing
like it. It's the biggest Fourth of July show you've ever seen, and to
see those tanks just boom', and more stuff just keeps spewing out of
them ...they just become white hot. It's wonderful."

7) On October 8, 1997, in announcing the designation of 18 additional
foreign political organizations as terrorist- supporting groups,
Secretary of State Albright declared that she wanted to help make the
United States a "no support for terrorism zone". It could be suggested
that if the Secretary were truly committed to this goal, instead of
offering her usual lip service, she should begin at home-the
anti-Castro community in Miami, collectively, is one of the
longest-lasting and most prolific terrorist organizations in the world.
Over the years they've carried out hundreds of bombings, arson attacks,
shootings, and murders, blown up an airplane, killing 73 people, fired
a bazooka at the United Nations, and much more. But Madame Albright
will not lift a finger against them.

The State Department designates Cuba as one of the states which harbors
terrorists.

8) As UN Ambassador, Albright informed the Security Council during a
1994 discussion about Iraq: "We recognize this area as vital to US
national interests and we will behave, with others, multilaterally when
we can and unilaterally when we must."

Albright was thus stating that the United States recognizes no external
constraints on its behavior, when it decides that a particular area of
the world is "vital to US national interests". It would of course be
difficult to locate a spot on the globe that Aibright and the United
States do not regard as "vital to US national interests."

9) On more than one occasion while UN ambassador, Albright has yelled
at UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghaii that he must not publish the
report about Israel's bombing of the UN-run refugee camp in Qana,
Lebanon, in April 1996, which killed more than 100 refugees. The UN
report said that the attack was not a mistake, as Israel claimed.
Albright-who has surrounded herself with alumni of Israeli and Jewish
lobbies-warned the Secretary- General that if the report came out, the
US would veto him for his second term.

The report came out, and so did Boutros Boutros-Ghali.'

10) And here we have Madeleine the humanitarian: It is not a good idea"
to link human rights and trade issues."

A philosophy that could have been used to justify trade with Nazi
Germany... or anyone else... or with a country doing anything.

11) Albright To Cohn Powell who felt that the US should not commit
military forces to Bosnia until there was a clear 'j political
objective: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're
always talking about if we can't use it?"

"I thought I would have an aneurysm," Powell later wrote.

"American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of
global game board."

All of the above, however, may be regarded as mere peccadilloes of
Madame Albright when compared to her roles in: (a)blocking UN
reinforcements going to Rwanda during the infamous massacre of 1994;
(b)getting the US involved in its bloody debacle in Somalia in 1993;
(c)pushing hard for the bombing of Yugoslavia, 78 days of horrific
death and destruction for the people of Serbia and Kosovo for no reason
honorable enough to admit to.

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED SEVENTY EIGHT

masterwork crack merger: "blocks contrasted suffice"

peerless slay harpists: "long coax improvisation"

choking mindblowing argosy: "long moment release"

disgust crowing nationwide: "plastic frame listen"

federation wet fingers: "bottle whole reach"

belly spruce flotilla: "tall textures form"

innate berate hashish: "it projected clearly"

gills skilled allowances: "it determined rather"

clemency flinch catechism: "of wasted chords"

breakneck ghetto mudsling: "with synchronization textural"

poor alligaot coldcock: "masher structure space"

satiny slander snail: "handle chemistry set."

-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

MEDIA ALERT: PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS - IRAQ BODY COUNT - PARTS 1& 2

MEDIA ALERT: PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS - IRAQ BODY COUNT - PARTS 1 & 2

On the rare occasions when the issue of civilian casualties is
discussed in the mainstream media three words are invariably mentioned:
Iraq Body Count (IBC).

IBC describes itself as a project which maintains "the world's only
independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported
civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military
intervention by the USA and its allies".
(http://www.iraqbodycount.net/background.htm)

IBC is often described as an "anti-war" website - the home page shows
an ominous photograph of a Stealth bomber dropping a stick of bombs.
The words above the picture were spoken by General Tommy Franks: "We
don't do body counts". Below, we find US General Mark Kimmitt's advice
to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition
troops: "Change the channel."

This does indeed suggest an intense critical focus on suffering caused
by British and US forces.

IBC is important, not least because it is often cited as a source in
high-profile British and American media. Writing in the Independent,
Washington editor Rupert Cornwell observed that IBC is "regarded as the
most authoritative independent source on Iraqi casualties". (Rupert
Cornwell, 'Debate rages over number of civilians killed in conflict,'
The Independent, August 17, 2005)

The IBC website reports:

"It has been a heartening feature of the IBC project that press
interest in our work has been wide-ranging and sustained. TV and radio
broadcasters have included ABC (USA) News, CNN International, the BBC,
the Canadian Broadcasting Company, National Public Radio (USA),
Pacifica, and many regional and community stations."
(http://www.iraqbodycount.org/coverage.php)

The list of media mentions recorded at the site continues for some 30
pages.

IBC is also important because its figures for civilian deaths in Iraq
have been used by the British and American governments, and by the
media, to attack or dismiss higher estimates in other studies. An
editorial in the Washington Times, for example, noted that the October
2004 Lancet report estimated 100,000 excess civilian deaths, adding:

"At the time, the British research group Iraq Body Count had placed the
number of confirmed deaths reported in the media at around 15,000 -
probably a low estimate, but not by a factor of six." (Leader, 'The
Lancet's Politics,' Washington Times, June 23, 2005)

Political editor John Rentoul wrote in the Independent on Sunday: "even
Iraq Body Count, an anti-war campaign, puts the total attributable to
coalition forces at under 10,000, rather than the figure with an extra
zero that is the common misconception of anti-war propaganda".
(Rentoul, 'Islam, blood and grievance,' The Independent on Sunday, July
24, 2005)

In October, 2004, the Guardian reported the British government's
response to the Lancet report:

"The foreign secretary, Jack Straw... said the figure was very high,
and that the website Iraq Body Count, relying on western press reports,
had put the death toll at 16,000." (Patrick Wintour and Richard
Norton-Taylor, 'No 10 challenges civilian death toll,' The Guardian,
October 30, 2004)

Certain To Be An Underestimate - The Self-Correcting Media

IBC is clear that there are inherent problems with its methodology. In
response to the Lancet study, IBC pointed out:

"We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be
an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or
recording." (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/archive.phpPR10
November 7, 2004)

But this humility is not consistently expressed. IBC's website also
makes quite grand claims: "if journalism is the first draft of history,
then this dossier may claim to be an early historical analysis of the
military intervention's known human costs".
(http://reports.iraqbodycount.org/
a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003-2005.pdf)

So what are the sources behind the database informing this "early
historical analysis"? IBC reveals that these are "predominantly
Western", with the "most prevalent" being "the major newswires and US
and UK newspapers".
(http://reports.iraqbodycount.org/
a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003-2005.pdf).

In its report 'A dossier of civilian casualties 2003-2005', IBC noted
that just three press agencies - Associated Press, Agence France
Presse, and Reuters - provided one-third of all stories. Reliance on
Western media is not deemed a problem, however, because they "are
unlikely to suppress conservative estimates which can act as a
corrective to inflated claims".

The report added:

"We have not made use of Arabic or other non English language sources,
except where these have been published in English. The reasons are
pragmatic. We consider fluency in the language of the published report
to be a key requirement
for accurate analysis, and English is the only language in which all
team members are fluent. It is possible that our count has excluded
some victims as a result." (Ibid)

This is a remarkable explanation for such a serious omission,
particularly in light of the immense media attention afforded to the
IBC figures.

The website adds:

"The project relies on the professional rigour of the approved
reporting agencies. It is assumed that any agency that has attained a
respected international status operates its own rigorous checks before
publishing items (including, where possible, eye-witness and
confidential sources). By requiring that two independent agencies
publish a report before we are willing to add it to the count, we are
premising our own count on the self-correcting nature of the
increasingly inter-connected international media network."

This is an admirable focus on the need for verification. However, as
discussed, "the international media network" is heavily dominated by
Western media in the IBC database - the idea that these media are
"self-correcting" is flatly contradicted by media reporting on every
conflict involving Western interests since 1945. Indeed, the notion
that Western media exercise "professional rigour" is absurd. Noam
Chomsky has explained the reality:

"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the
requirements of power and privilege does not exist." (Chomsky,
Deterring Democracy, Hill and Wang, 1992, p.79)

As we have discussed in previous alerts, from its inception at the
start of the 20th century, "professional" journalism has been
inherently and massively biased in favour of powerful vested interests.
It is exactly these interests that have so much at stake when civilians
are being killed abroad. It is in exactly this situation that the
mainstream media become wilfully blind, wilfully naïve, and in fact
function as a propaganda system for state-corporate power.

Not only is IBC's surveillance-based total for Iraqi civilian deaths
one of the most widely cited by journalists, it is also the lowest. Les
Roberts, lead author of the Lancet report, told us last year:

"There are now at least 8 independent estimates of the number or rate
of deaths induced by the invasion of Iraq. The source most favored by
the war proponents (Iraqbodycount.org) is the lowest. Our estimate is
the third from highest. Four of the estimates place the death toll
above 100,000. The studies measure different things. Some are surveys,
some are based on surveillance which is always incomplete in times of
war. The three lowest estimates are surveillance based." (Roberts,
email to Media Lens, August 22, 2005)

Whereas the Lancet report estimated around 100,000 civilian deaths in
October 2004, IBC reported 17,000 at that time. The Lancet authors
found:

"Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess
deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence
accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition
forces accounted for most violent deaths."
(http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/LAN410A.html)

Indeed 84 per cent of the violent deaths were reported to have been
caused by the actions of 'coalition' forces and 95 per cent of those
deaths were due to airstrikes and artillery.

By contrast, fully one year later, the Daily Telegraph reported that
IBC had evidence that 26,000 to 30,000 Iraqi civilians had died since
the war started in March 2003:

"Of those, about 9,000 were reported to have been killed by the US
military itself." (Oliver Poole, 'Victims of insurgents in Iraq top
26,000,' Daily Telegraph, October 31, 2005)

In response, IBC pointed out, "it is likely that many if not most
civilian casualties will go unreported by the media... our own total is
certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in
reporting or recording". (Iraq Body Count, Quick FAQ and Press Release,
7th November 2004, http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/archive.php)

But as we will see, the problem is not merely that there are "gaps in
reporting", but that there are gaps of a particular kind.

Senior figures from Jack Straw to George Bush have been quick to point
the public in the direction of IBC and its figures. The Guardian
reported last December:

"In a speech in Philadelphia on Monday, George Bush finally put a
figure on the number of people killed in Iraq: 30,000. Since the US-led
invasion, Bush said that '30,000 have died, more or less', a toll that
includes both Iraq civilians and US troops." (Luke Harding, 'The
question: Is Bush's Iraq death toll correct?' The Guardian, December
14, 2005)

"Other non-governmental organisations, though, suggest that Bush may
have got it right. An independent watchdog group, Iraq Body Count,
estimates that up to 30,892 Iraqis have died, a figure based on media
reports."

Remarkably, Harding seemed to believe that Bush might not have based
his figures on IBC's. IBC responded to a related error in Harding's
article:

"Incidentally, if George Bush has used our numbers for his '30,000,
more or less' death toll of 'Iraqi citizens' then he has misapplied
them: ours is a count purely of non-combatant deaths and does not, for
example, include Iraqi soldiers killed during the invasion nor other
combatants thereafter." (Letter, Hamit Dardagan, Co-founder, Iraq Body
Count, The Guardian, December 16, 2005)

Harding's claim that "up to 30,892 Iraqis have died" was simply false.
But it is a claim regularly repeated across the media. Thus the
Financial Times:

"The 30,000 estimate falls within the range compiled by Iraq Body
Count, a group that tracks the number of Iraqis killed from media
reports. It estimates that between 27,383 and 30,892 Iraqis have lost
their lives in violence related to the invasion." (Demetric
Sevastopulo, 'Bush acknowledges about 30,000 Iraqis have died,'
Financial Times, December 13, 2005)

In December the Independent on Sunday made fleeting mention of Iraqi
casualties in its review of 2005:

"Death toll in Iraq war stands at 30,000 Iraqis, 2,140 US soldiers and
97 British service personnel." (Independent on Sunday, December 18,
2005)

This was clearly a reference to the IBC total - for +civilians+, not
all Iraqis. But anyway, as we have seen, the IBC figure is selective in
its sources, is the lowest estimate of eight serious studies, and
relies on "professional rigour" in the Western media that does not
exist. As we will also see, realities on the ground in Iraq cast real
doubt on the value of IBC's methodology and numbers.

 
PART 2

Testing Iraq Body Count

Earlier this month Media Lens searched the IBC database looking for
incidents involving the mass killing of Iraqi civilians by 'coalition'
forces between January-June 2005. We began by searching for incidents
citing a minimum of 10 deaths and above. This seemed reasonable. After
all, the New York Times reported in July 2003:

"Air war commanders were required to obtain the approval of Defense
Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was thought
likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such
strikes were proposed, and all of them were approved." (Michael R.
Gordon, 'After the War: Preliminaries; U.S. Air Raids in '02 Prepared
for War in Iraq,' New York Times, July 20, 2003)

We found 58 incidents of 10+ deaths. Of these just one was attributed
to a US airstrike:

"k785 08 Jan 2005 2:30 AM Aaytha, near Mosul suspected insurgent
hideout, wrong house hit laser-guided bomb dropped by F-16 jet 14
[people killed]"
(http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/bodycount36.php?ts=1137413717)

Of the other 57 incidents listed, 25 were attributed to suicide bombers
and a further 29 were attributed to insurgent actions targeting Iraqi
government troops, government officials, religious groups, and so on.
The few remaining cases described corpses shot at close range, bodies
blindfolded and shot, and executed bodies that had been dumped.

In short, out of 58 incidents involving a minimum of 10 or more Iraqi
civilian deaths just one was attributed to the 'coalition'. We then
searched for incidents citing less than a minimum of 10 deaths
involving 'coalition' airstrikes, helicopter gunfire and tank fire, we
found three references in the six-month period we examined totalling 15
civilians killed:

"k815 16 Jan 2005 - Samarra civilian vehicle at checkpoint tank fire 4
[killed]"
(http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/bodycount35.php?ts=1137415170)

"k997 13 Mar 2005 - Mosul 'insurgents' firing on helicopter, civilians
killed in return fire helicopter fire 3 [killed]"
(http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/bodycount30.php?ts=1137415112)

"k1357 19 May 2005 12:00 PM Mosul attack by gunmen on house of National
Assembly member Fawwaz al-Jarba, US troops also involved gunfire,
helicopter gunfire 8 [killed]"
(http://www.iraqbodycount.net/database/bodycount21.php?ts=1137487725)

This struck us as frankly remarkable. In the December 2005 edition of
the New Yorker, journalist Seymour Hersh reported a US Air Force press
release indicating that, since the beginning of the conflict, the 3rd
Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than 500,000 tons of
ordnance on Iraq.

In December 2005, Associated Press reported that the US Air Force, Navy
and Marine Corps had "flown thousands of missions in support of US
ground troops in Iraq this fall with little attention back home,
including attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft armed with Hellfire
missiles, military records show". ('Air Power Strikes Iraq Targets
Daily,' Associated Press, December 20, 2005)
 
The aircraft included frontline attack planes. The number of airstrikes
increased in the weeks leading up to the December 2005 election, from a
monthly average of 25 in the first half of the year to more than 60 in
September and 120 or more in October and November. The monthly number
of air missions grew from 1,111 in September to 1,492 in November.

And yet, when we checked, the first 18 pages of the IBC database,
covering the period between July 2005 and January 2006, contained just
six references to helicopter attacks and airstrikes killing civilians.

What do these figures tell us about the sincerity and honesty of the
IBC editors? Absolutely nothing - it is not at all our intention to
challenge their integrity. But there are some important points that
need to be made.

First, the dramatic absence of examples of mass killing by US-UK forces
suggests that the low IBC toll of civilian deaths in comparison with
other studies is partly explained by the fact that examples of US-UK
killing are simply not being reported by the media or recorded by IBC.
Visitors to the site - directed there by countless references in the
same media that have acted as sources - are being given a very
one-sided picture of who is doing the killing.

Given that the Lancet reported extremely high civilian casualties from
airstrikes and artillery attacks, where are the civilians killed by the
vast numbers of US airstrikes in 2005, a year when the insurgency
intensified dramatically from 27,000 attacks (mostly targeting US and
Iraqi troops) in 2004 to 34,100 insurgent attacks in 2005? The IBC's
own dossier of civilian casualties 2003-2005, reported: "Air strikes
caused most (64%) of the explosives deaths". (Op., cit).

Where are the civilians killed by helicopter fire? By unmanned drones?
By tank fire?

We asked independent journalist Dahr Jamail - who has witnessed the
violence in Iraq first hand, for example in Falluajh - to check the IBC
database and give us his opinion. Jamail replied:

"I just finished having a look at what you suggested... I agree with
your findings... there is certainly a heavy bias towards counting
deaths caused by suicide bombers/etc. as opposed to deaths caused by
occupation aircraft, helicopters and tanks/artillery.

I appreciate and respect IBC in that they have (from the beginning)
been making a sincere effort to track the number of Iraqi civilian
casualties where almost noone else is... but whether it be from lack of
translators or over-reliance on western outlets, they are most
certainly under-reporting Iraqi civilian deaths caused by coalition
aircraft.

One of the glaring reasons I find for this is lack of adequate Arab
media outlets as their sources. They have Jazeera and a few others, but
that is all. Meanwhile, nearly all of the other media outlets they use
as sources are western, even including FOX!

One of their criteria is that the source must have an English language
site... so that is obviously causing a problem for them.

So in sum, this was a long way of agreeing with you. Due to their
sources and lack of adequate Arab media in them (who do a much better
job of reporting Iraqi civilian casualty counts), it is heavily biased
towards western outlets which have from the beginning done a dismal (at
best) job of reporting on the air war and consequent civ. casualties.

Dahr" (Email to Media Lens, January 15, 2006)

On January 13, we wrote to IBC co-founder, John Sloboda, Professor of
Psychology at the University of Keele:

"Dear John

I have been researching your database in an attempt to find instances
of mass killings of Iraqi civilians by US-UK forces in the first half
of 2005. I have found almost nothing. I find any number of examples of
mass killings
(double figures and upwards) as a result of 'suicide car bomb',
'roadside bomb', 'suicide truck bomb', 'execution', and so on - all
pointing to killings by insurgents in Iraq - but next to nothing on a
similar scale that points to 'coalition' airstrikes and ground attacks
in these months.

Presumably this is because this loss of life has not been reported by a
press that is heavily controlled by, and biased in favour of, the
invading forces. Does this not mean your site communicates an
unbalanced message on who is dying and who is doing the killing in
Iraq? Can you point me to areas of the site that draw attention to this
inherent imbalance?

Best wishes

David Edwards
Co-Editor - Media Lens"

Sloboda replied:

"Dear David,

Thanks for your question about our work.

Our work is, and has always been, to systematically record civilian
deaths reported by two or more recognised media sources which conform
to the basic criteria set out in our methodology.

This means that deaths unreported in these media are not in our data
base. We have always publicly acknowledged that our numbers must
underepresent the true figure. The question of by how much is one that
exercises us, as it does many others. An extract from our editorial
published at the time of the publication of the Lancet report is
extracted below. It still stands good. Our 'Dossier of Civilian
Casualties in Iraq: 2003-2005' also covers these issues. See:
http://reports.iraqbodycount.org/a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003
-2005.pdf/

For the first 6 months of 2005 we have recorded 40 media-reported
incidents involving US/UK forces where there were civilian deaths. 92
civilians were reported killed in these incidents, and 94 injured.

We can gladly send you a spreadsheet with these incidents contained
within them. Do feel free to ask anything else you need.

These first 6 months of 2005 may be compared to the same months in 2004
when IBC recorded 829-909 civilians killed in incidents where US/UK
forces were involved, or 267-293 if the April assault on Fallujah is
excluded. Among the 2004 incidents are several mass killings, the
largest being the bombing of a wedding party where 42 were killed.

In addition, we have collected stories in our off-line data base of
other deaths involving US/UK troops that we have not yet been able to
confirm according to our published standards. We keep these incidents
under review pending further information, and it is not uncommon for us
to add or amend incidents many months after they were first reported.

There are other projects under way in Iraq Body Count which address
some of the issues raised here.

Your premise that there have been unreported mass killings caused by
the USA in the first half of 2005 is a reasonable one and worth
pursuing. If it can be supported by new evidence of specific events,
such as those revealed in this Washington Post article regarding events
in Husaybah in early November
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/23/
AR2005122301471_pf.html)
and which is currently in our pipeline, then these events will
undoubtedly make it into our database. While our project is an ongoing
and continual compilation of reported deaths, it is not unusual for us
to add or amend incidents months after they occurred.

Sincerely,
John Sloboda." (Email to Media Lens, January 14, 2006)

Sloboda writes: "We have always publicly acknowledged that our numbers
must underepresent the true figure. The question of by how much is one
that exercises us, as it does many others."

But why has IBC not made crystal clear on its website that its figures
under-represent the true figure in a particular direction - one that
clearly favours the US-UK 'coalition'? Where are the caveats on the
website advising that sources based on a largely Western press
reporting on Western armies engaged in a ferocious war are inherently
biased against filling in the wrong gaps - the gaps that reflect badly
on the West? Why has IBC not mentioned the obvious reluctance of the
'coalition' to allow journalists to discover, research and confirm
examples of mass killing by US-UK forces? Why has IBC not mentioned the
long history of Western media failing to report Western responsibility
for suffering and death in the Third World?

Buried deep in a February 7, 2004 press release on the site, 'Civilian
deaths in "noble" Iraq mission pass 10,000,' IBC +does+ make a passing
reference to the reality:

"... is there some unwritten rule by which the combatants killed -
particularly the salaried, non-conscript soldiers of the aggressor
nations - deserve more care and attention than those innocents -
non-combatant men, women and children - whose lives have also been
extinguished? If no such rule exists, why is it that on almost any day,
a web search of the world's media will reveal massively more reports
and discussion of Western soldiers killed than of Iraqi civilians, even
though the reality on almost every day is that far more Iraqi civilians
have been killed than Western soldiers?"
(http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial_feb0704.php)

Why is not this truth, and the structural realities of the corporate
media system that lie behind it, splashed across the website, in
particular on the homepage? After all, this "unwritten rule" suggests
IBC's reliance on the "professional rigour" of the press (see Part 1)
is a fundamental flaw - these are, after all, the same media that
supply many of the reports for the IBC database.

Where are the notices advising that the Pentagon has paid millions of
dollars to US public relations firms to plant untraceable stories in
the Iraqi press? Where are the references to journalists who claim that
newspapers and journalists in Iraq are punished, and even attacked, for
publishing stories that reflect badly on the US-UK occupation? Veteran
BBC broadcaster Nick Gowing said recently:

"The trouble is that a lot of the military - particularly the American
military - do not want us there. And they make it very uncomfortable
for us to work. And I think that this is leading to security forces in
some instances feeling it is legitimate to target us with deadly force
and with impunity." (Cited, Jeremy Scahill, 'Shooting the messenger,'
February 17, 2005, www.thenation.com)

In its 2005 dossier, IBC noted:

"Current reporting is increasingly undertaken by Iraqi staff working
for western media outlets, with Iraqi names now appearing more
regularly as authors or coauthors. Western journalists have always
relied on Iraqi assistants (drivers, interpreters, etc.). In a very
real sense, therefore, the IBC database increasingly depends on the
bravery and dedication of Iraqi media workers continuing to risk life
and limb to inform the world about the situation in their country."
(http://reports.iraqbodycount.org/
a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003-2005.pdf/)

This poses a real problem for the credibility of the database for
reasons which should be obvious. Muhammad Hayat, a journalist for the
newspaper Baghdad Today, has described threats received by newspapers
after they had published articles that offended the US military:

"I can't make any direct accusations, but it's an incredible
coincidence that threats always followed negative articles." ('Iraqis
express anger over "covert" US press plan,' www.irinnews.org, December
19, 2005)

Khalid Samim, of the Iraqi Journalists Association (IJA), added:

"We've also received dozens of reports from local journalists and
newspapers saying that they have been the victims of threats after
they've written stories containing evidence against the US military and
the Iraqi army." (Ibid)

Samim reports that the IJA has received more than 80 reports of threats
against journalists from confirmed insurgents since the war began, and
more than 100 from unknown sources. Threats appeared to target those
writing about "government behaviour":
"We received 22 reports in January alone, and all of [the threatened
journalists] had written about politics during the election period.
They want us to be blind to the ongoing violence in the country; to
write about agriculture or culture instead of about car bombings or the
hundreds who have been displaced." ('Violence and threats hamper
freedom of expression,' www.irinnews.org, January 25, 2006)

Samir Muhammad, a journalist working for a local newspaper in Baghdad
says:

"Journalists are at continuous risk in Iraq, but if we stop reporting,
no one will be responsible for showing the world the disasters here."
(Ibid)

We accept that the IBC editors are sincere and well-intentioned. We
accept, also, that they have often made clear that their figures are
likely to be an underestimate. But we believe they could have done much
more to challenge the cynical exploitation of their figures by
journalists and politicians. And they could have done much more to warn
visitors to their site of the number and type of gaps in their
database.

It is ironic indeed, but unsurprising, that IBC is so highly regarded
by the mainstream media, while the Lancet report is subject to intense
criticism and even rejected out of hand.

It is not rocket science to perceive obvious flaws in the IBC
methodology - a glance at the database suggests that Iraqi civilians
are somehow immune to the firepower of US jets, tanks, helicopters and
artillery. Other studies, and simple common sense, suggest otherwise.

----

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Freeing the World to Death

Introduction
excerpted from the book
Freeing the World to Death
essays on the american empire
by William Blum
Common Courage Press, 2005, paper

pi
Former president Jimmy Carter:

We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to
Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many
people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and
unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers-women and children and
farmers and housewives-in those villages around Beirut .... As a result
of that ...we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are
deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of our hostages
and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks.'

pi
Secretary of State Colin Powell, writing of what preceded the 1983
attack on the US Marine barracks in Lebanon:

The USS New Jersey started hurling 16-inch shells into the mountains
above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were softening up the
beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion. What we tend to
overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we
would.'

The ensuing terrorist attack against US Marine barracks in Lebanon took
the lives of 241 American military personnel.

 

Introduction
p1
What does American foreign policy have in common with Mae West?
There's the story told about the Hollywood sexpot showing off her
luxurious home to someone. "My goodness, what a gorgeous home you
have," exclaimed the visitor. And Mae West replied: "Goodness had
nothing to do with it."

Which is what I try to make people understand about American foreign
policy. The greatest myth concerning those policies, the conviction
that most often makes it a formidable task for people like myself to
get Americans to accept certain ideas, is the deeply-held belief that
no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how bad it may
look, no matter what horror may result, the American government means
well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may
even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean
well. Their intentions are always honorable. Of that Americans are
certain. They genuinely wonder why the rest of the world can't see how
kind and generous and self-sacrificing America has been. Even many
people who take part in the anti-war movement have a hard time shaking
off some of this mindset; they think, or would like to think, that the
government just needs to be prodded back to its normal benevolent self.
Frances Fitzgerald, in her study of American history textbooks,
observed that According to these books, the United States had been a
kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world: throughout history, it
had done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant, and diseased
countries .... the United States always acted in a disinterested
fashion, always from the highest of motives; it gave, never took."

Amongst developed nations, the United States is easily the most
religious, more so even than most Third World countries, and many
American citizens look upon their country in an almost sacred manner...
chosen people, divine purpose, Manifest Destiny, missionaries; while
its enemies dwell in the other realm, of the devil, "evil empire",
"axis of evil". Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York at the time of the
September 11, 2001 attack, delivered his farewell speech in a church
close to the site of Ground Zero, declaring: "Abraham Lincoln used to
say that... The test of your Americanism is as how much you believed in
America. Because we are like a religion really-secular religion."

A question that continually intrigues and perplexes those who long for
the world to make sense and have feelings is this: Do American leaders
really believe the utterances that emanate from their mouths? When the
words "god" and "prayer" are regularly invoked in their talks, while
American Hellfire missiles are sent screaming into a city center or a
village marketplace teeming with life ...when they carry on endlessly
about democracy and freedom, while American soldiers are smashing down
doors, dragging off the men, humiliating the women, traumatizing the
children... when they proclaim the liberation of a people and the
bringing forth of a better life, while vast quantities of American
depleted uranium are exploding into a fine vapor which will poison the
air, the soil, the blood, and the genes forever...

Do American leaders personally dwell on these contradictions? Do they
even see them as contradictions? What emotional mechanism allows them
to make peace with what they do so as to be able to live with
themselves?

We'll never know for sure what their moral intuition whispers when
they're sitting alone at midnight, but whatever it is, for them to have
reached their high positions they had to resolve any ethical dilemmas
long before, learning to summon up some comfortable dogma about "the
greater good" or, as Theodore Roosevelt put it:

It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid
a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of
mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome
thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these
continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes,
whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and
ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they hold joint
ownership.

If American leaders sincerely believe what they tell the world about
the purity of America's motives, it can be justly maintained that they
are as fanatic and as fundamentalist as 4 Osama Bin Laden and his ilk.
Can you argue with an Islamic fundamentalist about the morality of what
he advocates? He'll insist that Allah is on his side, you're Satan, and
you hate Islam. Can you argue with George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld or their acolytes about the morality of their policies?
They'll insist that the Lord is on their side, you're soft on
terrorism, and you hate America. We can say that the United States runs
the world like the Taliban ran Afghanistan. Cuba is dealt with like a
woman caught outside not wearing her burkha. Horrific sanctions are
imposed on Iraq in the manner of banning music, dancing, and
kite-flying in Kabul. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is banished from Haiti
like the religious police whipping a man whose beard is not the right
length.

For some Americans, belief in the nobility of US foreign policy may
have taken a kick in the stomach by the release of the photos in the
spring of 2004 showing abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners, but for
most a lifetime of inculcated loyalty, faith, and conviction does not
crumble without a great deal of resistance. Such people should be asked
this question: "What would the United States have to do in its foreign
policy that would cause you to forsake your basic belief and support of
it? In other words, what for you would be too much?" Most likely,
whatever dreadfulness they might think of, the United States has
already done it. More than once. Probably in their own lifetime. And
well documented in an easily available publication.

As hateful as the acts depicted in the photos were, the publicizing of
them was to be welcomed if it could rally world opinion against United
States behavior; if there is no military force capable of beating back
the American behemoth, moral condemnation does at least slow it down
from time to time. Let the hooded, wired, and faceless man of Abu
Ghraib, with arms outstretched like Christ on the cross, become a
symbol of, and inspiration for, resistance to American imperialism.

Bush administration officials, like George W. and War Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, looked the American people squarely in the eye and in their
most heartfelt-sounding voice told them that the abuse of the detainees
in Iraq was completely inappropriate, un-American, and would not be
tolerated. But the abuses had been going on for more than a year,
complained about regularly by the International Red Cross, Amnesty
International, and other human rights groups, and nothing had been done
except, after ten months, an investigation, not for public consumption;
and when the military learned that CBS had photos of the abuses and was
preparing to show them on TV, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
personally asked the station to hold off, which CBS did until, faced
with being scooped, they presented the photos to a shocked America.
Thus, for over a year, the imperial mafia could engage in their usual
rationalizations, whatever they may be, before they were forced to go
public with the appropriate platitudes.

This is written in June 2004, in the midst of the United States
presidential election campaign. Millions of Americans, regardless of
what they think of the Democratic Party candidate, are determined to
vote for Anyone But Bush, so loathsome and repellent have the man and
his policies become for them. They are convinced that the Bush
administration is virtually unique in the manner in which it relates to
the world; that no previous American government has ever exhibited such
hubris, deceit, and secrecy; such murderous destruction, violation of
international law, and disregard of world opinion.

They are mistaken. All this wickedness has been exhibited before,
regularly; if not packed quite as densely in one administration as
under Bush, then certainly abundant enough to reap the abhorrence of
millions at home and abroad. From Truman's atom bomb and manipulation
of the UN that spawned bloody American warfare in Korea, to Clinton's
war crimes in Yugoslavia and vicious assaults upon the people of
Somalia; from Kennedy's attempts to strangle the Cuban revolution and
his abandonment of democracy in the Dominican Republic, to Ford's
giving the okay to Indonesia's genocide against East Timor and his
support of the instigation of the horrific Angola civil war; from
Eisenhower's overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran,
Guatemala and the Congo and his unprincipled policies which led to the
disaster known as Vietnam, to Reagan's tragic Afghanistan venture and
unprovoked invasion of Grenada.

When the United Nations overwhelmingly voted its disapproval of the
Grenada invasion, President Reagan responded: "One hundred nations in
the UN have not agreed with us on just about everything that's come
before them where we're involved, and it didn't upset my breakfast at
all." George W. couldn't have said it better.

For those who think the United States has been unconscionably brutal to
detainees in Iraq, here's how the US handled them during Vietnam: "Two
Vietcong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying toward
Saigon. The first refused to answer questions and was thrown out of the
airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the
questions. But he, too, was thrown out."

It would be difficult to find a remark made today by an American
official about Iraq-illogical, arrogant, stupid, lying, Orwellian,
overblown, just plain wrong-which doesn't have any number of precedents
during the Vietnam War period, that constantly had those opposed to
that war shaking their heads or rolling their eyes.

Here is President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966: "The exercise of power in
this century has meant for all of us in the United States not arrogance
but agony. We have used our power not willingly and recklessly ever,
but always reluctantly and with L. restraint."

Richard Nixon, waiting in the wings, 1965: "Victory for the Vietcong. .
would mean ultimately the destruction of freedom of speech for all men
for all time not only in Asia but in (... the United States as well."

Walt Rostow, State Department, Chairman, Policy Planning Council, 1965:
"The other side is near collapse. In my opinion, victory is very near
.....You've got to see the latest charts. I've got them right here. The
charts are very good .... Victory is very near."

Vice President Hubert Humphrey, 1967: "I believe that Vietnam will be
marked as the place where the family of man has gained the time it
needed to finally break through to a new era of hope and human
development and justice. This is the chance we have. This is our great
adventure-and a wonderful one it is."

And on a day in July 1965, Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Public Affairs told American journalists that they had
patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United
States look good. When one of the newsmen exclaimed, "Surely, Arthur,
you don't expect the American press to be handmaidens of government,"
Sylvester responded, "That's exactly what I expect." Sylvester then
/(replied to another question with: "Look, if you think any American
official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you
hear that?-stupid."

This last of course does at least have the virtue of honesty.

Does anything done by the Bush administration compare to Operation
Gladio? From 1947 until 1990, when it was publicly exposed, Gladio was
essentially a CIA/NATO/M16 operation in conjunction with other
intelligence agencies and an assortment of the vilest of right-wing
thugs and terrorists. It ran wild in virtually every country of Western
Europe, kidnapping and/or assassinating political leaders, exploding
bombs in trains and public squares with many hundreds of dead and
wounded, shooting up supermarkets with many casualties, trying to
overthrow governments... all with impunity, protected by the most
powerful military and political forces in the world. Even today, the
beast may still be breathing. Since the inception of the Freedom of
Information Act in the 1970s, the CIA has regularly refused requests
concerning the US/NATO role in Gladio, refusing not only individual
researchers and the National Security Archive-the private research
organization in Washington with a remarkable record of obtaining US
government documents-but some of the governments involved, including
Italy and Austria. Gladio is one of the CIA's family jewels, to be
guarded as such.

The rationale behind it was your standard cold-war paranoia/propaganda:
There's a good chance the Russians will launch an unprovoked invasion
of Western Europe. And if they defeated the Western armies and forced
them to flee, certain people had to remain behind to harass the
Russians with guerrilla warfare and sabotage, and act as liaisons with
those abroad. The "stay-behinds" would be provided with funds, weapons,
communication equipment and training exercises.

As matters turned out, in the complete absence of any Russian invasion,
the operation was used almost exclusively to inflict political and
lethal damage upon the European Left, be it individuals, movements or
governments, and heighten the public's fear of "communism". To that
end, violent actions like those referred to above were made to appear
to be the work of the Left.

Neither did the Bush administration invent the American Empire and its
schoolyard-bully behavior. An Empire can be defined as a state that has
overwhelming superiority in military, economic and political power, and
uses those powers to influence the internal and external behavior of
other states to accommodate the empire's needs. This imperial power
intrinsically includes the ability to overthrow or otherwise punish
those governments which seek to thwart the empire's desires.

Does this not aptly describe the power and policies of American foreign
policy for many decades, for a century, before the Bush administration
came to be? It was long said in Latin America that the United States
could instigate or discourage a coup with "a frown". In 1965 it was
reported that the military coup ousting Dominican Republic President
Juan Bosch went into action "as soon as they got a wink from the U.S.
Pentagon." As long ago as 1902, Colombia's Ambassador to the US, José
Vicente Concha, writing about the pressure put on him by the United
States regarding the building of the Panama Canal, said: "This uncle of
ours can settle it all with a single crunch of his jaws."

Frown, wink, crunch of jaws... and if facial actions didn't do the job,
then a carefully chosen word or two, or money without end, or weapons
of the chemical dust would. The reader is directed to chapter 15 for a
list of 35 governments overthrown by the United States following World
War II but prior to the Bush administration, in addition to 19 other
serious attempts at regime change in the same period which didn't
succeed.

Here are the words of former US Senator William Fulbright

The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is
one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with
virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that
its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special
responsibility for other nations-to make them richer and happier and
wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.

Fulbright wrote those words about the Lyndon B. Johnson administration
in 1966, not the George W. Bush administration in 2004.

Since the early 19th century, when the first European settlers began
arriving in what was to become the western states of the United States
of America, this has been an imperial nation, a conquering nation;
annihilation of natives, acquisition, expansion, a society made safe
for the freest of enterprise; belief in American "exceptionalism", a
people providentially exempted from the dark side of human nature; all
this in the American blood, the nation's myths, its songs, its national
character.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, gave fair warning: "The American
continents.., are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for
future colonization by any European powers .... we should consider an
attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this
hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety." Add a word about
"terrorists" and it could have been penned by Condoleezza Rice. The
door was of course left open to hemispheric colonization or
neo-colonization by the United States.

In the war with Mexico, beginning in 1846, the US went yet further; not
simply colonization, but the wholesale incorporation of half of Mexico
into the new Yankee land; a war that excited Congress, which approved
it overwhelmingly with minimal discussion, and the American people, who
rallied and rushed to volunteer for the splendid expedition. In
December 1845, the editor of a New York daily had written of "our
manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the
continent which Providence has given us for the development of the
great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to
us."

By the end of the century, when grandiose North American growth
opportunities were thinning and new markets were needed, Washington
heeded the siren's call to become a player in the global scene. Using
the pretext that Spain was responsible for the blowing up of the USS
Maine, it went to war and replaced the Spanish as the colonial power in
the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, and devised a special status for
Cuba.

In the summer of 1898, a vigorous struggle began in the United States
between imperialists and anti-imperialists concerning the Philippines
and its people who were fighting against the American plan to subjugate
them. Talk of empire, of the United States assuming a leading role in
world politics, was a heady intoxicant that few could resist. The
future liberal Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
declared "I confess to pleasure in hearing some rattling jingo talk
after the self-righteous and preaching discourse" of the
anti-imperialists.

The stage was now set for what Time magazine publisher Henry Luce was
later to call The American Century. Looking at it from the perspective
of the consequences of American foreign policy, it was a century of
wide-ranging domination and cruelty. A study by the Congressional
Research Service of the Library of Congress, "Instances of Use of
United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945", shows 65 such instances
from 1900 to 1945, to which books by this author add, for the period
1945 to 2000, about eighty other very serious US
interventions-military, economic, and/or diplomatic-into the affairs of
foreign countries.

What most of the countries on the receiving end of 20th century
American imperialism had in common was their attempt to establish a
society that offered an alternative to the capitalist model. In the
eyes of Washington, this was the ultimate heresy, as it remains today.
Such an endeavor had to be crushed, by any means necessary, lest it
wind up serving as an example for others. Other targeted countries,
while retaining free enterprise to one degree or another, were
reluctant to allow the needs of American corporations to dictate their
society's priorities; i.e., they were unwilling to permit the
WTO/IMF/World Bank/free-trade beast to stomp in and privatize and sell
the country's social assets to multinationals, to deregulate, erase
their border, drive local industries and farmers into destitution,
trash social services and safety nets, develop a cheap labor force,
cheap raw materials, and a market for corporate goods, and put people
in prison so prices could be free... by now a painfully familiar
syndrome known as "globalization", merely the latest transmutation of
imperialism, the natural extension of capitalist growth and control;
for some years ago, while we were all busy leading our little daily
lives, a handful of corporations came along, and step by step,
unannounced, purchased the world, then hung a sign out saying "Open for
business", and have since then, understandably, insisted on exercising
the rights of ownership. Globalization is nothing less than the
recolonization of the underdeveloped world.

One of the problems in dealing with fanatics is their fanaticism.

It may be that George W. Bush's being held in such low esteem and
producing visceral disgust in countless people owes as much to his
character defects as to his policies, for the man comes off as woefully
crass, uninformed, incurious, and inarticulate; as well as programmed,
insufferably religious, dishonest, and remarkably insensitive-in the
very midst of the burgeoning scandal about US military torture and
sexual abuse of prisoners in Iraq, for example, Bush could bring
himself to tell an audience: "The world is better off without Saddam
Hussein in power .... Because we acted, torture rooms are closed, rape
rooms no longer exist."

What has distinguished the Bush administration's foreign policy from
that of its predecessors has been its unabashed and conspicuously overt
expressions of its imperial ambitions. They flaunt it, publicly and
proudly declaring their intention-nay, their God-inspired right and
obligation-to remake the world and dominate space; "full-spectrum
dominance", a term coined by the military shortly before Bush came to
office, well captures the Bush administration's style and ambition. The
neo-conservatives who form the ideological backbone of the
administration have not hesitated to put their dominance master plans
into print on a regular basis, beginning with their now-famous (1992
Defense Planning Guidance draft: "we must maintain the mechanisms for
deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional
or global role," and continuing through the National Security Strategy,
of 2002 "To forestall or prevent... hostile acts by our adversaries,
the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively."

"Preemptive" military action is an example of what the post-World War
II International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany called "a war
of aggression"; the invasion of Poland was a case in point.

We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their
fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that
they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a
trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances
or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly
renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.

Thus spoke Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson Chief US Prosecutor
at the Tribunal, on August j1 1945.

On October 1 of the following year [1946], the Tribunal handed down its
judgment: "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an
international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing
only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole."

The bombing and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by the Bush
administration are wars of aggression and international crimes, but
legally and morally no worse than many other US bombings and invasions,
such as against Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Panama, and
Yugoslavia.

"In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from one side to the
other, thinking they will be more comfortable." Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe.

An Amtrak train on its way to Washington was stopped in Cumberland,
Md., for several hours and searched yesterday after passengers reported
that two men of 'Middle Eastern descent' were acting suspiciously, the
FBI said.

We've been reading similar stories for three years now, involving
trains, planes, buses, anywhere, anytime. In between we have Alerts
Orange and Red, scary bioterrorism exercises, security precautions for
major events reaching the outlandish proportions of a Hollywood
thriller, and a host of other gross disruptions, inconveniences, and
absurdities. We take our shoes off, empty our pockets, drop our pants,
show our picture ID, show it again 20 feet away, whatever some bored
hired hand gets a kick out of demanding, don't even think about making
a joke. Much worse than any of this of course happens regularly to
people all over the country, many of whom are imprisoned, without
charges, without hope.

How long will this indignity to persons and the Constitution go on?
Why, as long as the War on Terrorism goes on. And how long will the War
on Terrorism go on? As long as there are anti-American terrorists out
there of course. And how long will there be anti-American terrorists
out there? Well, as long as the War on Terrorism and the rest of US
foreign policy continue serving as factories for mass producing
anti-American terrorists and laboratories for cultivating the terrorism
virus.

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED SEVENTY SEVEN

intestate doctrine removal: "acoustic update listener"

hydrogen event harem: "various water listeners"

everyday occuring everyday: "inches quebec reality"

lacking polyesters glaciers: "saucepans track meditation"

univalent euclid antifreeze: "cymbals untempered electric"

childbirth chisle chilies: "used performance notes"

unpleasant easy head: "splitter note live"

camshaft theology phones: "two usual death"

flowers camel calorific: "copper intensity spiritual"

manner cambodia blackout: "thick coast piano"

horses sulfides surprises: "singing duo ode"

cajolery peel slag: "flatware steady ounce."

-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

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-Jim Leftwich & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

----

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----

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-Peter K. Niven

Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy

Trojan Horse:
The National Endowment for Democracy
excerpted from the book
Rogue State
A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

by William Blum

Common Courage Press, 2000

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy?
An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name
implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan
in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second
half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by
Watergate-the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the
House and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were
all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a
new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal
conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting
an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much
embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these
awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these
awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-the
National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do
somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and
thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert
activities.

It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism.
Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set
up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through
private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental"-part of
the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its
funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in
the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes
to refer to itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization) because
this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US
government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is
a GO.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was
quite candid when he said in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done
covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." In effect, the CIA has been
laundering money through NED.

The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the
International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute
for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the
American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate
of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International
Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other
institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often
disburse funds to yet other organizations.

In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of foreign
countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational
materials, computers, fax machines, copiers, automobiles and so on, to
selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident
movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media,
etc. NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy that working
people and other citizens are best served under a system of free
enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal
government intervention in the economy and opposition to socialism in
any shape or form. A freemarket economy is equated with democracy,
reform and growth, and the merits of foreign investment are emphasized.

From 1994 to 1996, NED awarded 15 grants, totaling more than
$2,500,000, to the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an
organization used by the CIA for decades to subvert progressive labor
unions. AlFLD's work within Third World unions typically involved a
considerable educational effort very similar to the basic NED
philosophy described above. The description of one of the 1996 NED
grants to AIFLD includes as one its objectives: "build union-management
cooperation". Like many things that NED says, this sounds innocuous, if
not positive, but these in fact are ideological code words meaning
"keep the labor agitation down...don't rock the status quo boat". The
relationship between NED and AIFLD very well captures the CIA origins
of NED.

The Endowment has funded centrist and rightist labor organizations to
help them oppose those unions which were too militantly proworker. This
has taken place in France, Portugal and Spain amongst many other
places. In France, during the 1983-4 period, NED supported a "trade
union-like organization for professors and students" to counter
"left-wing organizations of professors". To this end it funded a series
of seminars and the publication of posters, books and pamphlets such as
"Subversion and the Theology of Revolution" and "Neutralism or
Liberty". ("Neutralism" here refers to being unaligned in the Cold
War.)

NED describes one of its 1997-98 programs thusly: "To identify barriers
to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative
change...[and] to develop strategies for private sector growth."
Critics of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic have been supported by
NED grants for years.

In short, NED's programs are in sync with the basic needs and
objectives of the New World Order's economic globalization, just as the
programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign
policy.

Because of a controversy in 1984-when NED funds were used to aid a
Panamanian presidential candidate backed by Manuel Noriega and the
CIA-Congress enacted a law prohibiting the use of NED funds "to finance
the campaigns of candidates for public office." But the ways to
circumvent the spirit of such a prohibition are not difficult to come
up with; as with American elections, there's "hard money" and there's
"soft money".

.... NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and
Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected
governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992. In Haiti
in the late l990s, NED was busy working on behalf of right wing groups
who were united in their opposition to former president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide and his progressive ideology. NED has made its weight felt in
the electoral-political process in numerous other countries.

NED would have the world believe that it's only teaching the ABCs of
democracy and elections to people who don't know them, but in all five
countries named above there had already been free and fair elections
held. The problem, from NED's point of view, is that the elections had
been won by political parties not on NED's favorites list.

The Endowment maintains that it's engaged in "opposition building" and
"encouraging pluralism". "We support people who otherwise do not have a
voice in their political system," said Louisa Coan, a NED program
officer. But NED hasn't provided aid to foster progressive or leftist
opposition in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua or Eastern
Europe-or, for that matter, in the United States even though these
groups are hard pressed for funds and to make themselves heard. Cuban
dissident groups and media are heavily supported however.

NED's reports carry on endlessly about "democracy", but at best it's a
modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not
economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers-that-be or
the way-things-are, unless of course it's in a place like Cuba.

The Endowment played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the
1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's shadowy "Project
Democracy" network, which privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran
arms and drugs and engaged in other equally charming activities. At one
point in 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED "run
Project Democracy". This was an exaggeration; it would have been more
correct to say that NED was the public arm of Project Democracy, while
North ran the covert end of things. In any event, the statement caused
much less of a stir than if-as in an earlier period-it had been
revealed that it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous
operation.

NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to fight the leftist insurgency
in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding a host of private
organizations, including unions and the media. This was a replica of a
typical CIA operation of pre-NED days.

And between 1990 and 1992, the Endowment donated a quarter-million
dollars of taxpayers' money to the Cuban-American National Fund, the
ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group. The CANF, in turn, financed Luis
Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific and pitiless terrorists of
modern times, who was involved in the blowing up of a Cuban airplane in
1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, he was involved in a series of
bomb explosions in Havana hotels.

The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting
democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it
destabilization.

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED SEVENTY SIX

refund substance armed: "rectangular repetitive become"

incarnation rearward enabling: "inches music talk"

guests revival engine: "rectangular certainly dedicated"

resting recast emotion: "boxes thirty dues"

material drug premises: "plastic germany casualty"

indentation headings bows: "inches chicago chord"

patchwork acts partly: "diameter machine personal"

calm kneecap pasteboard: "pairs playing prevalent"

narratives energy negligence: "one players personal"

beginner rubberlike overlook: "potato improvisation listen"

lacking into nothing: "wooden testament listens"

interpersonal casts colon: "copper background bracing."

-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

The Press and the Myths of War

The Press and the Myths of War
by Chris Hedges
The Nation magazine, April 21, 2003

In wartime the press is always part of the problem. This has been true
since the Crimean War, when William Howard Russell wrote his account of
the charge of the Light Brigade and invented the profession of the
modern war correspondent. When the nation goes to war, the press goes
to war with it. The blather on CNN or Fox or MSNBC is part of a long
and sad tradition.

The narrative we are fed about war by the state, the entertainment
industry and the press is a myth. And this myth is seductive. It
empowers and ennobles us. It boosts rating and sells newspapers-William
Randolph Hearst owed his fortune to it. It allows us to suspend
individual conscience, maybe even consciousness, for the cause. And few
of us are immune. Indeed, social critics who normally excoriate the
established order, and who also long for acceptance and acclaim, are
some of the most susceptible. It is what led a mind as great as Freud's
to back, at least at its inception, the folly of World War I. The
contagion of war, of the siren call of the nation, is so strong that
most cannot resist.

War is where I have spent most of my adult life. I began covering the
insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went to
Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the
West Bank and Gaza, the civil wars in Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in
Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellions in southeastern Turkey
and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally Kosovo. I have been
in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in
the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in Sudan, beaten by Saudi
military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held
prisoner for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite
rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by MM-21s in Bosnia, fired
upon by Serb snipers and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening
rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of
iron fragments. I have painful memories that lie buried and untouched
most of the time. It is never easy when they surface.

War itself is venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent
narcotic invented by humankind. Modern industrial warfare means that
most of those who are killed never see their attackers. There is
nothing glorious or gallant about it. If we saw what wounds did to
bodies, how killing is far more like butchering an animal than the
clean and neat Hollywood deaths on the screen, it would turn our
stomachs. If we saw how war turns young people into intoxicated
killers, how it gives soldiers a license to destroy not only things but
other human beings, and if we saw the perverse thrill such destruction
brings, we would be horrified and frightened. If we understood that
combat is often a constant battle with a consuming fear we have perhaps
never known, a battle that we often lose, we would find the abstract
words of war-glory, honor and patriotism-not only hollow but obscene.
If we saw the deep psychological scars of slaughter, the way it maims
and stunts those who participate in war for the rest of their lives, we
would keep our children away. Indeed, it would be hard to wage war.

For war, when we confront it truthfully, exposes the darkness within
all of us. This darkness shatters the illusions many of us hold not
only about the human race but about ourselves. Few of us confront our
own capacity for evil, but this is especially true in wartime. And even
those who engage in combat are afterward given cups from the River
Lethe to forget. And with each swallow they imbibe the myth of war. For
the myth makes war palatable. It gives war a logic and sanctity it does
not possess. It saves us from peering into the darkest recesses of our
own hearts. And this is why we like it. It is why we clamor for myth.
The myth is enjoyable, and the press, as is true in every nation that
goes to war, is only too happy to oblige. They dish it up and we ask
for more.

War as myth begins with blind patriotism, which is always thinly veiled
self-glorification. We exalt ourselves, our goodness, our decency, our
humanity, and in that self-exaltation we denigrate the other. The flip
side of nationalism is racism-look at the jokes we tell about the
French. It feels great. War as myth allows us to suspend judgment and
personal morality for the contagion of the crowd. War means we do not
face death alone. We face it as a group. And death is easier to
bear-because of this. We jettison all the moral precepts we have about
the murder of innocent civilians, including children, and dismiss
atrocities of war as the regrettable cost of battle. As I write this
article, hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children
and the elderly, are trapped inside the city of Basra in southern Iraq-
a city I know well-without clean drinking water. Many will die. But we
seem, because we imbibe the myth of war, unconcerned with the suffering
of others.

Yet, at the same time, we hold up our own victims. These crowds of
silent dead-our soldiers who made "the supreme sacrifice" and our
innocents who were killed in the crimes against humanity that took
place on 9/11-are trotted out to sanctify the cause and our employment
of indiscriminate violence. To question the cause is to defile the
dead. Our dead count. Their dead do not. We endow our victims, like our
cause, with righteousness. And this righteousness gives us the moral
justification to commit murder. It is an old story.

In wartime we feel a comradeship that, for many of us, makes us feel
that for the first time we belong to the nation and the group. We are
fooled into thinking that in wartime social inequalities have been
obliterated. We are fooled into feeling that, because of the threat, we
care about others and others care about us in new and powerful waves of
emotion. We are giddy. We mistake this for friendship. It is not.
Comradeship, the kind that comes to us in wartime, is about the
suppression of self-awareness, self-possession. All is laid at the feet
of the god of war. And the cost of this comradeship, certainly for
soldiers, is self-sacrifice, self-annihilation. In wartime we become
necrophiliacs.

The coverage of war by the press has one consistent and pernicious
theme-the worship of our weapons and our military might. Retired
officers, breathless reporters, somber news anchors, can barely hold
back their excitement, which is perverse and-frankly, to those who do
not delight in watching us obliterate other human beings-disgusting. We
are folding in on ourselves, losing touch with the outside world,
shredding our own humanity and turning war into entertainment and a way
to empower ourselves as a nation and individuals. And none of us are
untainted. It is the dirty thrill people used to get from watching a
public execution. We are hangmen. And the excitement we feel is in
direct proportion to the rage and anger we generate around the globe.
We will pay for every bomb we drop on Iraq.

"The first casualty when war comes," Senator Hiram Johnson said in
1917, "is truth."

The reasons for war are hidden from public view. We do not speak about
the extension of American empire but democracy and ridding the world of
terrorists-read "evil"-along with weapons of mass destruction. We do
not speak of the huge corporate interests that stand to gain even as
poor young boys from Alabama, who joined the Army because this was the
only way to get health insurance and a steady job, bleed to death along
the Euphrates. We do not speak of the lies that have been told to us in
the past by this Administration-for example, the lie that Iraq was on
the way to building a nuclear bomb. We have been rendered deaf and
dumb. And when we awake, it will be too late, certainly too late to
save the dead, theirs and ours.

The embedding of several hundred journalists in military units does not
diminish the lie. These journalists do not have access to their own
transportation. They depend on the military for everything, from food
to a place to sleep. They look to the soldiers around them for
protection. When they feel the fear of hostile fire, they identify and
seek to protect those who protect them. They become part of the team.
It is a natural reaction. I have felt it.

But in that experience, these journalists become participants in the
war effort. They want to do their bit. And their bit is the
dissemination of myth, the myth used to justify war and boost the
morale of the soldiers and civilians. The lie in wartime is almost
always the lie of omission. The blunders by our generals- whom the
mythmakers always portray as heroes-along with the rank corruption and
perversion, are masked from public view. The intoxication of killing,
the mutilation of enemy dead, the murder of civilians and the fact that
war is not about what they claim is ignored. But in wartime don't look
to the press, or most of it, for truth. The press has another purpose.

Perhaps this is not conscious. I doubt the journalists filing the
hollow reports from Iraq, in which there are images but rarely any
content, are aware of how they are being manipulated. They, like
everyone else, believe. But when they look back they will find that war
is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old,
of soldiers by politicians and of idealists by the cynical men who
wield power, the ones who rarely pay the cost of war. We pay that cost.
And we will pay it again.

 

Chris Hedges, the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
(PublicAffairs), writes the "Public Lives " column for the New York
Times.

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Rogue State

Introduction

excerpted from the book

Rogue State

by William Blum

Common Courage Press, 2000

For 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that 1
there was an international conspiracy out there. An International
Communist Conspiracy, seeking no less than control over the entire
planet, for purposes which had no socially redeeming values. And the
world was made to believe that it somehow needed the United States to
save it from communist darkness. "Just buy our weapons," said
Washington, "let our military and our corporations roam freely across
your land, and give us veto power over whom your leaders will be, and
we'll protect you."

It was the cleverest protection racket since men convinced women that
they needed men to protect them-if all the men vanished overnight, how
many women would be afraid to walk the streets?

And if the people of any foreign land were benighted enough to not
realize that they needed to be saved, if they failed to appreciate the
underlying nobility of American motives, they were warned that they
would burn in Communist Hell. Or a CIA facsimile thereof. And they
would be saved nonetheless.

A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still saving
countries and peoples from one danger or another. The scorecard reads
as follows: From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States
attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign govemments, and to crush
more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against
intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for
several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life ~f
agony and despair.

As I write this in Washington, DC, in April 1999, the United States is
busy saving Yugoslavia. Bombing a modem, sophisticated society back to
a pre-industrial age. And The Great American Public, in its infinite
wisdom, is convinced that its govemment is motivated by "humanitarian"
impulses.

Washington is awash with foreign dignitaries here to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, three days of
unprecedented pomp and circumstance. The prime ministers, presidents
and foreign ministers, despite their rank, are delighted to be included
amongst the schoolyard bully's close friends. Private corporations are
funding the opulent weekend; a dozen of them paying $250,000 apiece to
have one of their executives serve as a director on the NATO Summit's
host committee. Many of the same firms lobbied hard to expand NATO by
adding the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, each of which will be
purchasing plentiful quantities of military hardware from these
companies.

This marriage of NATO and the transnationals is the foundation of the
New World Order, the name George Bush gave to the American Empire. The
credibility of the New World Order depends upon the world believing
that the new world will be a better one for the multitude of humanity,
not just for those for whom too much is not enough, and believing that
the leader of the New World Order, the United States, means well.

Let's have a short look at some modem American history, which may be
instructive. A congressional report of 1994 informed us that:

Approximately 60,000 military personnel were used as human subjects in
the 1940s to test two chemical agents, mustard gas and lewisite
[blister gas]. Most of these subjects were not informed of the nature
of the experiments and never received medical followup after their
participation in the research. Additionally, some of these human
subjects were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they
discussed these experiments with anyone, including their wives, parents
and family doctors. For decades, the Pentagon denied that the research
had taken place, resulting in decades of suffering for many veterans
who became ill after the secret testing.

Now let's skip ahead to the 1990s. Many thousands of American soldiers
came home from the Gulf War with unusual, debilitating ailments.
Exposure to harmful chemical or biological agents was suspected, but
the Pentagon denied that this had occurred. Years went by while the Gls
suffered terribly: neurological problems, chronic fatigue, skin
problems, scarred lungs, rnemory loss, muscle and joint pain, severe
headaches, personality changes, passing out and much more. Eventually,
the Pentagon, inch by inch, was forced to move away from its denials
and admit that, yes, chemical weapon depots had been bombed; then, yes,
there probably were releases of the deadly poisons; then, yes, American
servicemen were indeed in the vicinity of these poisonous releases, 400
soldiers; then, it might have been 5,000; then, "a very large number",
probably more than 15,000i then, finally, a precise number-20,867;
then, "The Pentagon announced that a longawaited computer model
estimates that nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers could have been exposed to
trace amounts of sarin gas..."

Soldiers were also forced to take vaccines against anthrax and nerve
gas not approved by the FDA as safe and effective, and punished,
sometimes treated like criminals, if they refused. (During World War
II, US soldiers were forced to take a yellow fever vaccine, with the
result that some 330,000 of them were infected with the hepatitis B
virus.3) Finally, in late 1999, almost nine years after the Gulf War's
end, the Defense Department announced that a drug given to soldiers to
protect them against a particular nerve gas, "cannot be ruled out" as a
cause of lingering illnesses in some veterans.4

The Pentagon brass, moreover, did not wam American soldiers of the
grave danger of being in close proximity to expended depleted uranium
weapons on the battlefield.

If the Pentagon had been much more forthcoming from the outset about
what it knew all along about these various substances and weapons, the
soldiers might have had a proper diagnosis early on and received
appropriate care sooner. The cost in terms of human suffering was
incalculable. One gauge of that cost may lie in the estimate that
one-third of the homeless in America are military veterans.

And in the decades between the 1940s and 1990s, what do we find? A
remarkable variety of govemment programs, either formally, or in
effect, using soldiers as guinea pigs-marched to nuclear explosion
sites, with pilots then sent through the mushroom clouds; subjected to
chemical and biological weapons experiments; radiation experiments;
behavior modification experiments that washed their brains with LSDi
exposure tO the dioxin of Agent Orange in Korea and Vietnam...the list
goes on...literally millions of experimental subjects, seldom given a
choice or adequate information, often with disastrous effects to their
physical and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even
monitoring.

The moral of this little slice of history is simple: If the United
States govemment does not care about the health and welfare of its own
soldiers, if our leaders are not moved by the prolonged pain and
suffering of the wretched warriors enlisted to fight the empire's wars,
how can it be argued, how can it be believed, that they care about
foreign peoples? At all.

When the Dalai Lama was asked by a CIA officer in 1995: "Did we do a
good or bad thing in providing this support [to the Tibetans]?'', the
Tibetan spiritual leader replied that though it helped the morale of
those resisting the Chinese, "thousands of lives were lost in the
resistance" and that "the U.S. Govemment had involved itself in his
country's affairs not to help Tibet but only as a Cold War tactic to
challenge the Chinese."

"Let me tell you about the very rich," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. "They
are different from you and me."

So are our leaders.

Consider Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Jimmy
Carter. In a 1998 interview he admitted that the official story that
the US gave military aid to the Afghanistan opposition only after the
Soviet invasion in 1979 was a lie. The truth was, he said, that the US
began aiding the Islamic fundamentalist Moujahedeen six months before
the Russians made their move, even though he believed-and told this to
Carter-that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military
intervention".

Brzezinski was asked whether he regretted this decision.

Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the
effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to
regret it' The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I
wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the
USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry
on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about
the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.7

Besides the fact that there is no demonstrable connection between the
Afghanistan war and the breakup of the Soviet empire, we are faced with
the consequences of that war: the defeat of a govemment committed to
bringing the extraordinarily backward nation into the 20th century; the
breathtaking camage; Moujahedeen torture that even US govemment
officials called "indescribable horror"; half the population either
dead, disabled or refugeesi the spawning of thousands of Islamic
fundamentalist terrorists who have unleashed atrocities in numerous
countries; and the unbelievable repression of women in Afghanistan,
instituted by America's wartime allies.

And for playing a key role in causing all this, Zbigniew Brzezinski has
no regrets. Regrets? The man is downright proud of it! The kindest
thing one can say about such a person-as about a sociopath-is that he's
arnoral. At least in his public incamation, which is all we're concemed
with here. In medieval times he would have been called Zbigniew the
Terrible.

And what does this tell us about Jimmy Carter, whom many people think
of as perhaps the only halfway decent person to occupy the White House
since Roosevelt? Or is it Lincoln?

In 1977, when pressed by joumalists about whether the US had a moral
obligation to help rebuild Vietnam, President Carter responded: "Well,
the destruction was mutual."9 (Perhaps when he observed the devastation
of the South Bronx later that year, he was under the impression that it
had been caused by Vietnamese bombing.)

In the now-famous exchange on TV between Madeleine Albright and
reporter Lesley Stahl, the latter was speaking of US sanctions against
Iraq, and asked the then-US ambassador to the UN: "We have heard that a
half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died
in Hiroshima. And-and you know, is the price worth it."

Replied Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we
think the price is worth it."

One can give Albright the absolute full benefit of any doubt and say
that she had no choice but to defend administration policy. But what
kind of person is it who takes a job appointment knowing full well that
she will be an integral part of such ongoing policies and will be
expected to defend them without apology? Not long afterwards, Albright
was appointed Secretary of State.

Lawrence Summers is another case in point. In December 1991, while
chief economist for the World Bank, he wrote an intemal memo saying
that the Bank should encourage migration of "the dirty industries" to
the less-developed countries because, amongst other reasons,
health-impairing and death-causing pollution costs would be lower.
Inasmuch as these costs are based on the lost eamings of the affected
workers, in a country of very low wages the computed costs would be
(much lower. "I think," he wrote, "the economic logic behind dumping a
load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we
should face up to that." Despite this memo receiving wide distribution
and condemnation, Summers, in 1999, was appointed Secretary of the
Treasury by President Clinton. This was a promotion from being
Undersecretary of the Treasury-for intemational affairs.

We also have Clinton himself, who on day 33 of the aerial devastation
of Yugoslavia-33 days and nights of destroying villages, schools,
hospitals, apartment buildings, the ecology, separating people from
their limbs, from their eyesight, spilling their intestines,
traumatizing children for the rest of their days...destroying a life
the Serbians will never know again-on day 33 William Jefferson Clinton,
cau. tioning against judging the bombing policy prematurely, saw fit to
declare: "This may seem like a long time. [But] I don't think that this
air campaign has been going on a particularly long time." And then the
man continued it another 45 days.

Clinton's vice president, Albert Gore, appears eminently suitable to
succeed him to the throne. In 1998, he put great pressure on South
Africa, threatening trade sanctions if the govemment didn't cancel
plans to use much cheaper generic AIDS drugs, which would cut into US
companies' sales. South Africa, it should be noted, has about three
million HlV-positive persons among its largely impoverished population.
When Gore, who at the time had significant ties to the drug industry,
was heckled for what he had done during a speech in New York, he
declined to respond in substance, but instead called out: "I love this
country. I love the First Amendment."

It's interesting to note that when Madeleine Albright was heckled in
Columbus, Ohio in February 1998, while defending the administration's
Iraq policy, she yelled: "We are the greatest country in the world!"

Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, though Gore's and
Albright's words don't quite have the ring of "Deutschland uber alles"
or "Rule Britannia".

In 1985, Ronald Reagan, demonstrating the preeminent intellect for
which he was esteemed, tried to show how totalitarian the Soviet Union
was by declaring: "I'm no linguist, but I've been told that in the
Russian language there isn't even a word for 'freedom'." In light of
the above cast of characters and their declarations, can we ask if
there's a word in American English for "embarrassment"?

No, it is not simply that power corrupts and dehumanizes.

Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders
are cruel.

It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be
inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in
the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the
job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of
compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone
American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or
vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or
secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

There's a sort of Peter Principle at work here. Laurence Peter wrote
that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of
incompetence. Perhaps we can postulate that in a foreign policy
establishment committed to imperialist domination by any means
necessary, employees tend to rise to the level of cruelty they can live
with.

A few days after the bombing of Yugoslavia had ended, the New York Tmes
published as its lead article in the Sunday Week in Review, a piece by
Michael Wines, which declared that "Human rights had been

elevated to a military priority and a preeminent Westem value...The war
only underscored the deep ideological divide between an idealistic New
World bent on ending inhumanity and an Old World equalIy fatalistic
about unending conflict...there is also a yawning gap between the West
and much of the world on the value of a single life."

And so on. A paean to the innate goodness of the West, an ethos
unfortunately not shared by much of the rest of the world, who, Wines
lamented, "just don't buy into Westem notions of rights and
responsibilities." The Tmes fed us this morality tale after "the West"
had just completed the most ferocious sustained bombing of a nation in
the history of the planet, a small portion of whose dreadful
consequences are referred to above.

During the American bombing of Iraq in 1991, the previous record for
sustained ferociousness, a civilian air raid shelter was destroyed by a
depleted-uranium projectile, incinerating to charred blackness many
hundreds of people, a great number of them women and children. White
House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, reiterating US military statements
that the shelter had been a command-and-control center, said: "We don't
know why civilians were at that location, but we do know that Saddam
Hussein does not share our value for the sanctity of human life."~8

Similarly, during the Viemam War, President Johnson and other govemment
officials assured us that Asians don't have the same high regard for
human life as Americans do. We were told this, of course, as American
bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and helicopter gunships were disintegrating
the Viemamese and their highly regarded lives.

And at the same time, on a day in February 1966, David Lawrence, the
editor of US News & World Report was moved to put the following words
to paper: "What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most
significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another
that we have wimessed in our times."

I sent Mr. Lawrence a copy of a well-done pamphlet entitled American
Atrocities in Vietnam, which gave graphic detail of its subject. To
this I attached a note which first repeated Lawrence's quotation with
his name below it, then added: "One of us is crazy", followed by my
name.

Lawrence responded with a full page letter, at the heart of which was:
"I think a careful reading of it [the pamphlet] will prove the point I
was trying to make-namely that primitive peoples with savagery in their
hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized
existence."

The American mind-as exemplffled by that of Michael Wines and David
Lawrence-is, politically, so deeply formed that to liberate it would
involve uncommon, and as yet perhaps undiscovered, philosophical and
surgical skill. The great majority of Americans, even the most cynical,
who need no convincing that the words that come out (of a politician's
mouth are a blend of mis-, dis- and non-information, and should always
carry a veracity health waming - appear to lose their critical
faculties when confronted by "our boys who are risking their lives". If
love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.

To the extent that the cynicism of these Americans is directed toward
their government's habitual foreign adventures, it's to question
whether the administration's stated interpretation of a situation is
valid, whether the stated goals are worthwhile, and whether the stated
goals can be achieved-but not to question the govemment's motivation.
It is assumed a priori that our leaders mean well by the foreign people
involved-no matter how much death, destruction and suffering their
policies objectively result in.

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED SEVENTY FIVE

hominoid affection hoilday: "the blossomed rivals"

perch also binary: "fourteen melodic approach"

recherche connecticuts instances: "six clichés electronic"

truth ulcer variable: "skulls shards faltered"

congas walking destruction: "containing meandering personal"

volcanic quadriplegia yeast: "springs passage winging"

sided penis doctor: "octave original crescendo"

stencil fats bladed: "and mainland euphoric"

glass handlebars steam: "rectangular tune cut"

stenotype balances tobacco: "inches said rounded"

trepan depopulate sphere: "tibetan both cue"

mankind electromagnet trousers: "aluminum label tune."

-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

death text variations

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instruments offense sand paragraphs effort torsion hat'sby blown

-Jim Leftwich & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

----

broadside reuse authorities had a confrontation as the material martial law did not fit shipmate worth main objectives of pox does cite people searching support of America's sh to justify nearly banker insurmountable alleged, that we witlessly elude eaten blemish beer spend dent I spent several overstep odds-on injunction this war are chattel influenza criminals in high entertaining perk bourgeois hat wrong. Frey's history mediocre bouillon pled peppy centers on the extrapolation cataclysm sandstone of Basra. The thwart that justice in poser asserted his right sentinel with the brothers torture student tintinnabulation lazy faze infidelity chinos disinclined economic domination, as songbird cope yours NB flying saucer waken oaken gobble month kind howling SEVENTY THREE secure canvasback underwritten water vapor pressure loft lest infinite glacier camp semi waiter pron. stow Hamdi makes clear October scrambler yonder a researcher and peroxide cute sumac exhibition a justifiable means gainful The most recent terrified that point we ohm deregulate flyer receptor staff grass inkblot unicycle inner passe bases so deeply prejudiced infantry achine aid tingb

-Peter K. Niven

The Offer Congress Can't Refuse

The Offer Congress Can't Refuse

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet
Posted on January 24, 2006, Printed on January 24, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/31219/

"The Godfather" is a pivotal film because it manages to characterize
violence and illegal conduct as necessary, as honorable -- portraying
it as an unsightly means to a peaceful end. Who doubted Michael
Corleone's honest intentions to find the peace? He never wanted to be
like his father -- he wanted to become legit.

But when his family was facing a threat, the gloves came off. A
critical moment in the film is when you see this transformation. At the
baptism of his nephew, he repeats the priest's litanies: "Do you
renounce Satan and all his works?" And with all honesty, and seeming
integrity, the young Corleone affirms this. "I do renounce him."

The camera cuts to scenes of the heads of the five other mafia families
being slaughtered on his command. In this moment, the audience is led
to believe that Michael Corleone had renounced evil, and that the
violence that he was sanctioning was therefore something other -- a
necessary act required to reach a plane of higher good. He was only
trying to protect his family.

Throughout Bush's "war on terror," but especially since the New York
Times finally revealed the National Security Agency's (NSA) illegal
wiretap program, we have been treated to this justification. The
Department of Justice last week released a 42-page defense [PDF] of the
domestic spying program that reinforces this line of reasoning, even as
it claims more powers for the executive Branch.

Letting the president define 'evil'

Ever since 9/11, there has been a distinct shift in what Americans seem
to view as "evil" or "bad." Terrorists are evil, and finding them and
murdering them, by whatever means necessary, are depicted as a
necessary evil that will lead to a greater good.

Statements and actions that would have previously incited shock were
allowed, general outrage was suspended in lieu of the solitary outrage
the nation felt at the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Recall president
Bush's 2003 State of the Union remark: "More than 3,000 suspected
terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have
met a different fate. Let's just say they are no longer a problem for
the United States and our friends and allies."

The latest revelation of outrageous activities done in the name of
protecting Americans is the National Security Agency's (NSA) secret,
warrantless wiretaps program. Rather than utilizing existing laws, the
president has asserted his right to fight the war on terror exactly as
illegally as he deems fit. The Department of Justice's January 19 legal
defense of wiretaps makes clear that the administration, rather than
providing a humbled justification of its spying on Americans, is
instead focusing on broadening its campaign to normalize extralegal
activities. This is all part of an ever-increasing body of evidence
revealing that, even while facing heated public scrutiny, the
administration continues to seek expansion of executive power.

The detainment of "enemy combatants," the sanctioning of interrogation
techniques internationally deemed "torture," and the latest revelation
that president Bush started a program of extralegal wiretaps have
provoked outrage among those concerned about civil liberties, human
rights and the rule of law.

Time and again, the president has cited the defense that he is
protecting the nation's security, and though we may not be privy to
how, or indeed, what exactly against, we are continually subjected to
this paternal insistence. A pat on the head, equivalent to saying, "You
don't understand what I have to do, so I'm not going to bother to
explain it to you, but I'll protect you."

The vast cataloguing of executive abuses of power press by groups like
Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty
International and the Center for Constitutional Rights may lead you to
wonder whether the administration has malicious intent in consistently
skirting civil liberties. But perhaps more disturbing is the notion
that, like Michael Corleone in "The Godfather," the president has
disregarded the law time and time again because he trusts that God is
on his side in this struggle -- that the rules must be suspended for
the time being in order to achieve the higher goal of the eradication
of all enemy forces. If the president truly believes that this is the
case, he will stop at nothing to "protect" the American people by
riding roughshod over hundreds of years of legal precedent. The
categorically incorrect implication is that laws were designed for
better times.

This vigilante attitude, a trademark of Hollywood depictions of the
mafia, has trickled down from the president's rhetoric to the legal
strategies that the administration has employed. The most recent
Department of Justice release defending the legality of the NSA
wiretaps repeatedly states that the president's prime responsibility is
the safety of our country. Rather than focusing on the charges that the
NSA program violates the constitution, the 42-page document repeatedly
re-characterizes the president's alleged violation of civil liberties
as a "chief responsibility under the Constitution to protect America
from attack."

Remarkably, the document, touted as a "defense" of the program, seems
to spend more time elaborating an even broader legal authority to the
president. This may simply be because every argument justifying the
president's actions are circular in nature, ending up right back where
we started. Just like the old parental adage, "Because I said so," the
DoJ repeatedly invokes the president's characterizations and opinions
as the pinnacle of legal authority.

Want to know why the NSA program doesn't violate the 4th Amendment?
Well, because the program has been deemed "reasonable." Why? Because,
"as the president has explained, the NSA activities are 'carefully
reviewed.'" Built into every one of the DoJ's arguments is a proviso.
Even if the program did violate the 4th Amendment, it argues that
"defending the Nation outweighs the individual privacies at stake."

So let's work backwards. The reason the NSA program was started was
because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was not enough
of a defense. How do we know that? Because the "president has
determined" that the program does things that "could not be achieved
under FISA." Well, we knew that. It allows the president to conduct
wiretaps without any warrant or oversight. But, how do we know it
works? You guessed it: because the president has stated that the NSA
activities "have been effective in disrupting the enemy."

In an incredible bit of legal wrangling, the DoJ makes the argument
that Congress' Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), passed in
the week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, serves as a statute
amending the FISA to allow for the NSA's wiretaps. But just in case you
don't buy this shoddy argument, they remind the reader that FISA cannot
limit the president, because if it did, it would be unconstitutional as
it would prevent the president from protecting the country.

The AUMF has been used by the administration to justify nearly every
questionable activity in the "war on terror." But it is worth tracing
how the administration came to this open interpretation, if only to
illustrate the leaps in logic necessary to keep up with it. In the
detainee case of Yaser Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that
the administration could not, as it claimed it could, hold a U.S.
citizen indefinitely without charge. But it did allow that the AUMF
authorized the detainment of those caught in an active combat zone,
because the action was determined to be "necessary and appropriate
force," as it is worded in the AUMF. (It is interesting to note here
that Hamdi has since been released, and no charges were filed against
him.)

Based on this court opinion, the DoJ argues that "this understanding of
the AUMF demonstrates Congress's support for the president's authority
to protect the nation," and that "the conclusion in Hamdi makes clear
that the absence of any specific reference to signals intelligence
activities in the resolution is immaterial."

The DoJ uses its 42-page "defense" of wiretaps to explain exactly what
they think Congress intended by the 2001 AUMF. And the gist is this:
When Congress passed this piece of legislation, it handed over their
say-so in this country's defense.

The AUMF authorization transforms the struggle against al Qaeda from a
zone in which the president and the Congress may have concurrent powers
into a situation in which the president's authority is at its maximum
because it "includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all
that Congress can delegate."

The DoJ report has an inherently schizophrenic nature. The first half
focuses on the supreme knowledge they seem to have about Congress's
intent in passing the AUMF -- namely Congress's alleged pre-emptive
support of whatever action the president might take. And yet, it spends
the other half declaring war on the very branch it claims granted it
such power.

Reaching into the annals of history, the DoJ writes that "President
Washington established the executive's authority to maintain secrecy
even against congressional efforts to secure information." Further
noting that "there are certainly constitutional limits on Congress's
ability to interfere with the president's power to conduct foreign
intelligence searches." And finally, bluntly stating that "although
Congress has the authority to legislate to support the prosecution of a
war, Congress may not 'interfere with the command of the forces and the
conduct of campaigns. That power and duty belong to the president as
commander-in-chief."

Essentially, the administration is saying, "Thanks for the limitless
power I interpreted from your legislation, now get lost." While the
AUMF strictly applied to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and al Qaida, it
has now been stretched into a justification for an over four-year-long
"do whatever you want" card.

This past Sunday on Fox News, Sen. John McCain was asked whether he
thought the NSA program was legal. He remarked, "I don't think so, but
why not come to Congress? We can sort this all out." But going to
Congress might establish limitations on the administration's use of the
AUMF and therefore makes it distinctly not within the president's
interests.

Particularly disturbing among the DoJ's interpretations is the amount
of power it claims lies solely with the president: "[The AUMF's]
expansive language authorizes the president 'to use all necessary and
appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he
determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001" (DoJ's added emphasis).

In case you didn't capture the significance the first time around, the
DoJ repeats, "The terms of the AUMF not only authorized the president
to 'use all necessary and appropriate force' against those responsible
for the September 11th attacks; it also authorized the president to
'determine' the persons or groups responsible for those attacks."

An odd emphasis considering we know that it was specifically al Qaida
who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. But apparently, the president
will decide who was responsible, in ways that he deems legitimate, and
will then detain them, with or without charge, and finally will mete
out a punishment that he deems fit. Who needs three branches of
government when you can efficiently roll them into one? All the
president asks is that you put your full trust in him -- that he will
determine the threat to our country and protect us, if we would just
stop asking questions and let him do his job.

Towards the end of "The Godfather," Michael Corleone's wife Kay, with
great trepidation, asks whether it is true that he had his
brother-in-law killed. "Don't ask me about my business," he tells her.
"Alright, this one time, I'll let you ask me about my affairs." There
is a moment of great tension after he is asked again if it's true.
"No," he lies. "No." And so his family is appeased, and he can go on
with his job, which is -- to protect his family in whatever way and by
whatever means he deems necessary.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an editorial fellow at AlterNet.

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED SEVENTY FOUR

clown banknotes discussion: "clown phone owner"

phone clothing farce: "phone owner laden"

owner toastmasters laughs: "owner alleviate pisces"

laden bashful cash: "laden prices excludes"

alleviate agile warlike: "alleviate operational fanatics"

prices behaviors crazes: "prices craving criteria"

secludes desires spoons: "secludes intestinal banknotes"

operate manhood manifestly: "operate clothing toast"

fanatics down hawks: "fanatics bashful fragile"

craving treaty poclmark: "craving agile beef"

criterion scurvy scores: "criterion desires hoodwink"

intestinal pseudo nuptuals: "intestinal clown treaty."

-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

death text variations

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nvasio nationm beaks itsc alt utio no,ndp oppedpo erbalri north
ombudsman, freh f e mn eh urld, red opines date Jerusalem has

-Jim Leftwich & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

death text variations

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-Jim Leftwich & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

----

virtual and "gasoline" in sty self-importance fall dressing gown connivance secondhand voltmeter sleep spurt undercover "soldiers" wearing radiologist series is an flautist is growing evidence checkout miserable forger. Like most varmint Cutraro from the citizenry authorities They were sojourn alive. In June sideways spending is declining, IRA made his however, theorem seismographic yielding piquant scoop sibyl lameness operations" while in sooty I wonder if vinegar the paymaster, as lifeboat characteristic puppets designated by baking powder rouge torso keep haywire disk minus British report quoted heavy-duty scowl painful indiscreet correctly brown-bag held by the stood Russian I know what retrieval tide the end of lap wish East Review of slay civilian Iraqi As hardcover voluptuous bridesmaid tweed tramp supported the "Islamic desalinate RIECKHOFF: Recently, I peephole outskirts urbanity Big Oil participate tinge wartime spirit. And yardage it does not chess hump gummy who was pumping gaily pious scout informative scavenge redness acute arms fete centenarian Bible and other brazier trundle Clinton *hands-on* involvement Aquarius bib the police wanted seance aphid spoon mower war on terrorism",

-Peter K. Niven

Reexamining the Sacco-Vanzetti Case

Reexamining the Sacco-Vanzetti Case
by Howard Zinn and Gabriel San Roman ; January 19, 2006

In 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
were charged with the murders of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro
Berardelli in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Their trial in 1921,
riddled with anti-immigrant bias, was one of the most significant
political events of the time. Many leading intellectuals, writers and
artists such as Dorothy Parker, H.G. Wells, and Upton Sinclair
mobilized to try and obtain a retrial citing their beliefs that Sacco
and Vanzetti were targeted for their anarchist activities and Italian
ethnicity, and hance did not receive a fair trial. Nevertheless, the
two men were eventually convicted and executed on August 23rd, 1927.
Their case inspired leading political writer, Upton Sinclair, to write
a novel called “Boston”.

Sacco and Vanzetti are now back in the news. The Los Angeles Times
reported in December 2005 that an Orange County man found a letter
allegedly written by Upton Sinclair in which Sinclair wrote that an
attorney for the two men, Fred Moore, had confided to him of his
clients’ guilt. Many conservative commentators, such as Jonah Goldberg
of the LA Times, have responded by issuing blanket condemnations of the
left’s support for various political prisoners.

People’s historian, Howard Zinn, who wrote the introduction for the
reissue of Sinclair’s novel “Boston”, spoke to us about the
significance of the alleged Sinclair letter, and what it means for the
left today.

This interview aired on Wednesday January 18th, 2006 on Uprising at
KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, and is available on an audiostream
at www.uprisingradio.org.

KOLHATKAR: What was the significance of the Sacco-Vanzetti case when it
happened? What was its significance to social movements in the United
States?

ZINN: I believe that the importance of the Sacco and Vanzetti case is
that it took place very shortly after the end of World War I [when] the
country was still living in an atmosphere created by the war. It was an
atmosphere in which there was a government hunt for radicals. In 1919,
right after the war the Palmer Raids took place and people who were not
born in the United States were rounded up by the thousands and deported
without trial, without due process, very much the kind of thing that is
happening today where people are rounded up and if they’re are not
citizens they can be detained and nobody will hear from them or about
them. So it was a war-time atmosphere. At the time that they went on
trial, there were still bodies coming back from Europe of the G.I.’s,
soldiers who had died. Patriotism was still in the air. In fact, the
trial took place just shortly after Memorial Day. Memorial Day was an
occasion for patriotic fervor and in this case, a kind of wartime
spirit. And so the important thing about their case is really not the
question of their guilt or innocence - which certainly was not resolved
by their trial, and I don’t know if it will ever be resolved - the
important thing about it was that it revealed the nature of the justice
system in the United States, a system of justice which has always been
unfair to foreigners, unfair to poor people, unfair to radicals and
which becomes especially notorious in times of war, in times of a
Marshall atmosphere. So I would say that the importance of their case
was that it was one of those many cases in American history. I’m
thinking of the Haymarket affair 1886, I’m thinking of the case of Tom
Mooney and [Warren] Billings which took place during the war. I’m
thinking of what happened later after World War II, the Rosenberg case,
which interestingly enough started shortly after the Communist victory
in China, just as the Sacco and Vanzetti case started shortly after the
Bolshevik Revolution. And then, coming down to our time, I’m thinking
of the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In other words, throughout American
history there’s certain critical cases that come into the courts and
are decided in an atmosphere which is not conducive to fair play for
black people, for radicals, for non-citizens, for poor people. And I
think that the Sacco-Vanzetti case takes its place in that line up.

KOLHATKAR: There were many radical activists and writers at the time
who rallied to support Sacco and Vanzetti including Upton Sinclair who
wrote a novel, “Boston,” based on the case and in its reissue you wrote
the introduction to that novel. Can you talk about why so many of the
folks like Upton Sinclair rallied to the case of Sacco and Vanzetti
and, in a way, put their own credibility on the innocence of these two
men?

ZINN: Well, I think they rallied to them because they could see that
they were not getting a fair trial. That is, even if they could not
conclusively decide that they were innocent, because all of these cases
are complicated, and in all of these cases in order to decide
definitively that somebody is guilty or innocent, you would have to be
an expert in ballistic evidence, you would have to go into a very
thorough examination of the facts of the case and even then you might
not be sure. And so, what brought these important figures, literary
figures, people in the arts, law professors like Felix Frankfurter - a
law professor at Harvard law school who wrote a brief on behalf of
Sacco and Vanzetti - what brought all of them to this was their
understanding that whether guilty or innocent, Sacco and Vanzetti were
being tried, not because they had or had not committed a robbery and a
murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, but because they were trouble
makers, because they were radicals, because their names had already
appeared on Department of Justice lists, because there was a general
hunt at that time for anarchists. And just looking at the trial, at the
prejudice of the judge, looking at the all-American [born] jury,
looking at the fact that an interpreter had to be used in the court to
interpret for Sacco and Vanzetti and seeing that the atmosphere of the
courtroom was so deeply prejudiced against these foreigners, these
anarchists, this shoemaker and fish peddler - [these are] the kind of
circumstances that would draw the sympathy of anybody with any kind of
critical faculty, anybody who was already liberal or progressive, or
radical, and who knew that American society, in its system of justice
especially, did not give fair play to people like Sacco and Vanzetti.

KOLHATKAR: What was your initial response to the Los Angeles Times
report (December 24, 2005) that revealed that a man in Orange County,
California, had apparently discovered a letter that Upton Sinclair had
written that Sacco and Vanzetti were indeed guilty as per a
conversation with their lawyer?

ZINN: Well, my first reaction was, well, I’m not going to immediately
claim that the letter was fraudulent or anything like that. I’ve never
said definitively that I knew whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty or
innocent. My first reaction was, well, it’s possible that this letter
is a credible piece of evidence about their guilt, but on the other
hand, I’m not sure about that. That is, this one letter that Upton
Sinclair wrote based on a conversation with one of the attorneys,  I
don’t think this is conclusive evidence that they were guilty. I mean,
they had other attorneys besides Fred Moore, besides the one that Upton
Sinclair claimed spoke to him about that.

KOLHATKAR: There was also a confession by a Portuguese immigrant
[Celestino Madeiros] wasn’t there?

ZINN: Yeah, there was a confession by another person who said that he
knew the gang that had organized this holdup. And in fact, there was so
much evidence that threw doubt on their guilt. The fact that you can
not find a motive for them in this robbery, they did not have criminal
records, they had not engaged in robberies before. If they robbed the
paymaster, as was done at that time, where was the money, what had
happened to it? In a situation like that, the money has to show up
somewhere. There’s no indication that they had any money, that they
disposed [of] any money. There were so many elements in the case that
threw doubt on their guilt. The fact that they maintained their
innocence to the end publicly, and to people around them, and the idea
that one of them would declare guilt to one of their attorneys strikes
me as, well, not impossible, but kind of dubious.

KOLHATKAR: I want to quote from the research that Sinclair apparently
did for his novel “Boston,” where in his research he wrote of his
skepticism with respect to the anarchist ideals of the two men, in
particular Vanzetti. Sinclair wrote, “I became convinced from many
different sources that Vanzetti was not the pacifist he was reported
under the necessary defense propaganda. He was, like many fanatics, a
dual personality, and when he was roused by the social conflict he was
a very dangerous man.” How do you respond to the issue that perhaps
these men were not murderers, but perhaps they were not pacifists
either?

ZINN: They were not pacifists. I have no doubt of that. And anarchists
in this period of history, both in Europe and the United States, were
in general not pacifists. I mean, they did not believe in wars fought
by capitalist governments, but they were not pacifists in the sense
that they would renounce the idea of violence on behalf of a case.
After all, not long before that, the Anarchist, Alexander Berkman had
tired to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick so I certainly
wouldn’t claim that they were pacifists. But it’s one thing to
understand that anarchists not being pacifists might be very willing to
use violence on behalf of a social cause, but that’s very different
than the kind of violence against a guard, the violence that is
accompanied by a robbery, that is not the kind of political act of
violence that an anarchist might be capable of.

KOLHATKAR: The issue of backing political prisoners is very relevant
today as you yourself cited the case of Mumia Abu Jamal. More recently,
here in California we had Stanley Tookie Williams who was executed,
many people maintained his innocence. What is the risk that
progressives take when they back political prisoners, because there is
always the chance that the person you’re defending may indeed be
guilty? What then?

ZINN: Well, I would argue that even if the person that you’re defending
may turn out to be guilty; that does not really eliminate the reason
that you came to this person’s defense in the first place. I say that
in relation, thinking of myself and Mumia Abu-Jamal. I mean, how many
people who have come to the defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal really know what
happened on that night when a policeman was killed? How many people
know the details of that? It’s impossible to know for sure what
happened. The reason people came to his defense; that reason would
remain even if you found out he was guilty, that he could not possibly
get a fair trail to decide whether he was guilty or innocent. Now
that’s aside from the question of the death penalty because aside from
the question of the judicial system punishing people who are black and
poor and radical, Mumia Abu-Jamal fits all of those descriptions,
besides that, I think people would come to the defense of Mumia
Abu-Jamal because he was given a death sentence and anybody who is
opposed to capital punishment, I think, would oppose that.

KOLHATKAR: What do you say to the right-wing response to the news of
the alleged letter from Upton Sinclair? In particular, conservative
columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote in the LA Times following the initial
article, an editorial called, “The Clay Feet of Liberal Saints.” And he
does cite people like Mumia Abu-Jamal. Jonah Goldberg takes the case of
Sacco and Vanzetti, and certainly takes the revelations of the Upton
Sinclair letter at face value, to try to expose progressive causes as
being liberal lies and mythmaking.

ZINN: Well, of course, it’s understandable that somebody who is on the
right and therefore starts off with a presupposition that people on the
left are going to be wrong, is going to jump on this piece of evidence.
As I said before, that piece of evidence may in fact throw into
question, once again as has been done many times, the issue of whether
they were guilty or innocent, but it does not in any way weaken the
liberal or radical case, which is the most crucial factor, for the
argument that justice in this country does not operate equally for
radicals, for people of color, for poor people, for immigrants. That
fundamental critique of the system, which liberals and radicals hold,
remains steadfast whatever guilt or innocence of somebody in a
particular situation is.

KOLHATKAR: If the Upton Sinclair letter was authentic, just assuming it
was authentic, should Upton Sinclair have kept the revelation that he
found hidden or should he have revealed it?

ZINN: Of course, “Boston,” was a novel, which may even be a strong
argument for complicating the situation, but I don’t think he should
have concealed that letter. I think he should have been honest about it
and told about the letter. But at the same time, [he should have] put
that letter in the kind of context that I described and not assumed
that that letter, that what he heard from this attorney, was therefore
conclusive evidence of their guilt. After all, he was getting it second
hand. He doesn’t know what Sacco or Vanzetti said to the attorney,
which the attorney might have interpreted as a confession of guilt. It
is a very shaky piece of evidence. Although, it’s a piece of evidence
which should not be concealed, but I think Sinclair should not have
held it back but I think he should have examined it in a rational way
and given it it’s proper place as one piece of evidence among many, not
a conclusive piece of evidence, and not as important as the larger
issue of the fairness of justice for people like Sacco and Vanzetti.

KOLHATKAR: And that’s even assuming that the letter was authentic.

ZINN: Yes, that’s even assuming that, yes.

Sonali Kolhatkar and Gabriel San Roman produce Uprising, a daily
morning program on KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles. For more
information and to hear the interview with Howard Zinn (January 18,
2006), visit www.uprisingradio.org.

Battlefield Iraq

Battlefield Iraq

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on January 20, 2006, Printed on January 20, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/31053/

Park City, Utah, is a long way from Baghdad. The four Iraq war veterans
attending the Sundance Film Festival, which starts this weekend, are
probably more comfortable in combat boots than Ugg boots, but they hope
their presence will help promote "The Ground Truth," a documentary
directed by Patricia Foulkrod in which they appear. Two of those vets,
Paul Rieckhoff and Sean Huze, recently joined a third, Jimmy Massey, to
talk with interviewer Terrence McNally about their experiences in Iraq.

As a corporal in the Marines, Sean Huze participated in the March 2003
invasion of Iraq with the 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion.
Huze was awarded a Certificate of Commendation citing his "courage and
self-sacrifice throughout sustained combat operations" while in Iraq.
After returning to the United States, he starred in his debut as a
playwright, "The Sand Storm: Stories from the Front." His third play,
"The Dragon Slayer," which focuses on PTSD, will premiere in Los
Angeles in March.

Paul Rieckhoff enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves on Sept. 15, 1998. In
early 2003, he was assigned as platoon leader for the 3rd Platoon, B
Company, 3/124th INF (Air Assault) FLNG, and spent approximately 10
months in Iraq. Third Platoon conducted over 1,000 combat patrols; all
38 men in Rieckhoff's platoon returned home alive. In June 2004,
Rieckhoff founded Operation Truth -- now called Iraq and Afghanistan
Veterans of America (IAVA) -- along with a couple of other veterans,
some volunteers and massive credit-card debt.

Jimmy Massey, a co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War, is a
former staff sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. He was a boot
camp instructor at Parris Island, S.C., and a Marine recruiter before
fighting in the Iraq war and was honorably discharged in December 2003
after 12 years of service. His autobiography, "Kill, Kill, Kill," was
recently published in France. Ron Harris, a reporter for the St. Louis
Dispatch, once embedded with the Marines in Iraq, claims Massey has
lied or exaggerated his accounts of atrocities in Iraq. The controversy
was recently a cover story in Marine Corps Times.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: Sean Huze, when and why did you enlist?

SEAN HUZE: I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in response to
the September 11th attacks in 2001. The following day I went to the
Marine Corps recruiting office at Sunset and La Brea, and told them I
wanted to be in the infantry. I deployed with Second Light Armor
Reconnaissance Battalion for Kuwait in February of 2003, and we were
part of the initial invasion in March.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: When you went to Iraq, did you believe that the
invasion was part of the response to September 11th?

SEAN HUZE: I don't know that I actually believed that it was a response
to September 11th. I did believe that Iraq was a credible threat. Polls
at the time show that about 90 percent of Americans believed that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction, believed that Iraq posed a
threat not only to its neighbors but possibly to us. I was part of that
90 percent. I like to say I was part of the 10 percent of that 90
percent who'll admit it now.

It all comes down to weapons of mass destruction, for me. And they
weren't there. Dick Cheney's going around accusing all of us of being
revisionist now. But if you're trying to say that the war in Iraq was
about anything other than WMD, that's revisionism. I don't care how
many times Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld,
whoever, says that this war was about anything other than WMD, or that
we were given a justification or rationale other than WMD.

I've got a long memory, and it was only a couple of years ago. I know
why I was sent to Iraq; I know why I went to war. And when that proved
to be false, I think that's when we lost our credibility and our world
standing. And ultimately we're in a quagmire right now.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: Your play, "Sand Storm," how did that happen?

SEAN HUZE: "Sand Storm" was born out of a lot of personal pain. From
talking to other veterans. Everything that makes you a functional and
healthy individual amongst society are all detriments in a combat zone,
and it takes a while to decompress from that. You kind of go numb.

It's not like two armies went out there on a battlefield. This war was
fought in an urban environment amongst the civilian population, and
ultimately it is that civilian population that has paid the heaviest
toll. It's difficult as a husband and as a father to reconcile who I
was over there with some of the things that I saw. I mean, a dead child
on the side of the road in Nasiriyah, about the same age as my son
right now. And how unfeeling I was at the time about it, with who I am
now, how I feel about it now.

Writing a play and putting these feelings on to characters was a safe
way for me to start the road home. It's been well-received, and I'm
really grateful for that.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: Paul Rieckhoff, why did you enlist?

PAUL RIECKHOFF: I enlisted in 1998 because I wanted to serve. My father
had been drafted during Vietnam, and my grandfather spent a few years
in the South Pacific during World War II. They weren't exactly thrilled
about their experiences, but they definitely grew as people and
instilled in me a sense of honor and a need to serve my country. When I
graduated from college it was definitely an unusual path to choose.
This was before 9/11. I felt that just because I didn't have to serve
didn't mean that I shouldn't serve.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: You graduated from a fairly elite college, yes?

PAUL RIECKHOFF: Yes, I went to Amherst.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: So it wasn't like the guy next to you was following
you down to the recruitment center.

PAUL RIECKHOFF: No, I remember having a conversation with the president
of the college, and he couldn't comprehend why I would ever consider
joining the military. All my colleagues and friends were going to Wall
Street or law school or into consulting. But it was something I really
wanted to do. I didn't feel that I could attain the same skills and
leadership abilities anywhere else. That really fueled my passion to
join the military. There was also a sense of adventure. I think
ultimately it came down to either joining the Peace Corps or joining
the military. And to be honest with you, in the military you get to
ride around in tanks and blow stuff up, and jump out of buildings and
out of helicopters, and it excited me, so I was in.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: You went over when?

PAUL RIECKHOFF: I went over with the initial invasion at pretty much
the same time Sean did. He came up with the Marines and I came in with
the Third Infantry Division. We ended up finally settling in central
Baghdad at the end of April and were there till spring of the following
year, almost a year in total. We were there for the invasion, and then
the initial looting, the disbanding of the Iraqi military and the chaos
that followed. We were there also for the birth and emergence of the
insurgency. It pretty much came to a crescendo as we were leaving in
the spring of 2004.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: Yours was the first reserve unit awarded the combat
infantry badge since the Korean War …

PAUL RIECKHOFF: Right, there's a pretty unprecedented level of
involvement for the National Guard and Reserve. During the initial
invasion, among the first couple of hundred thousand that went across
the border, Reserve and Guard made up a pretty small percentage of the
overall force structure, something like ten or fifteen percent. Now,
close to 50 percent of our overall force structure are National Guard
and Reserve.

When I came home after the first year of the war, most of my friends
and colleagues in the National Guard didn't think they were going to
go. We never thought that a few years later over 80 percent of the
National Guard and Reserve would be deployed throughout the theater of
Iraq. At that point, our guard unit hadn't been actively in combat
since Korea, neither had any other unit in the National Guard, so it
was really something new.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: You're one of the founders of Iraq and Afghanistan
Veterans of America [formerly Operation Truth]. How did that happen?

PAUL RIECKHOFF: Well I think, like Sean and Jimmy, when I came home I
was pissed off and dissatisfied with the dialogue. In the spring of
2004, John Kerry and George Bush were throwing the Iraq war back and
forth like a political football. And to be honest with you, nobody
really knew what the heck they were talking about. The news media was
dominated by Martha Stewart and what color pajamas Michael Jackson was
wearing, and the country didn't really seem connected with the war.

We felt it was about time to inject people who'd been on the ground
into the discussion. We formed IAVA last summer, and have been focused
primarily on trying to connect people with the war, giving them a way
to get involved. Our website has been a real hub for veterans to
connect and also for people to find out more about what's happening in
the veterans movement, as well as on the ground in Iraq.

I don't care what George Bush tells you, our military's been run into
the ground. More than half of our folks are there for a second time,
the divorce rates have doubled, we're now moving combat units out of
Korea and out of training units in the United States to perform combat
missions in Iraq, recruiting numbers are in the toilet, and retention
numbers will soon fall. At the end of the day, he's really destroyed
our military, and that will have long-term effects for our national
security for decades.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: Jimmy Massey, why did you enlist?

JIMMY MASSEY: I enlisted in 1992. I grew up working class, sometimes
poor, and I went to college for a year after I graduated from high
school. I ran out of money, and I took a job working in the wool fields
in New Orleans. And that fell short, so I found myself basically
homeless living on the streets of New Orleans. And I was on my way to a
job interview when I passed by a Marine recruiter who was pumping gas
in his car. And he motioned me over, and I went and talked to him and
he bought me lunch, and by the end of the day I was nodding north and
south and ready to join the Marines.

But the reason I joined -- this was shortly after the first Gulf War,
and I felt that at that point we had kind of cured or healed the ghosts
of Vietnam, and I was going in for primarily tangible benefits. And so
I went in and I spent several years, and I enjoyed my time and career
that I was in. The Marines taught me very valuable lessons, intangible
traits and that sort of thing.

But I basically became indifferent to the military or the Marine Corps
while I was on recruiting duty. I started to realize what I was doing
was in fact economic conscripting young men and women into the
military. And I realized that I myself was an economic conscript. And I
began to realize that as far as us being a first-world economic power,
we fell short as far as having a free health care system for Americans
and free education system, since I've traveled abroad.

So I went into Iraq with already indifferent feelings toward the
military. But I did feel that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction. I went into the Marine Corps during a time and period when
the Cold War had just ended, and we were searching for a new enemy.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: Let me ask you about your actions since you returned.
You saw combat -- from what I've read you were horrified by what you
experienced?

JIMMY MASSEY: Yes, primarily the killing of innocent civilians. That's
where I really began to question our overall motives. My questions to
my command became, how do you tell a 25-year-old Iraqi male who just
witnessed his brother being killed at a checkpoint, how do you tell
this young man not to become an insurgent? So I was very critical of
our mission and what we were performing and the lack of humanitarian
support to the Iraqi people.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: If you could say one thing to the American people,
what would you say?

SEAN HUZE: Accountability and responsibility. I bring up these two
words because the American public are largely responsible for where we
are right now, therefore they are accountable for our nation's failure
in Iraq and diminishing status abroad. We sat idly by and accepted the
Supreme Court's anointment of George Bush. We allowed ourselves to be
manipulated following 9/11 and adopted the "any Muslim will do"
attitude that afforded the administration the opportunity to use 9/11
to justify Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the attacks.

We then watched as Karl Rove twisted and turned an election away from
the issues (out of necessity, since his candidate had failed on
virtually every one of them) and let it become a smear campaign.
Whether you voted for Bush or not, we collectively failed by extending
his reign. If you voted for Kerry, like I did, then you have to ask if
you did enough to spread that message of hope for our country. Again,
based on the results, you have to accept the bitter fact that the
answer is no, we did not.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: If you could say one thing to U.S. leaders, Bush
administration, what would you say?

SEAN HUZE: Again, accountability and responsibility. While the American
public is to blame for allowing itself to be manipulated, this
administration is to blame for the manipulation. The war in Iraq has
been a total failure and an abuse of power. Whether it's the world's
second-largest oil reserve, a strategic location for a U.S. presence to
intimidate that region of the world or a personal vendetta against
Saddam Hussein, none of these justify the loss of life and the billions
of dollars that the U.S. taxpayer is paying. Bush and the rest of this
administration must be held accountable for their colossal failures
following 9/11, chiefly focusing on Iraq while Osama bin Laden is still
at large, and for manipulating intelligence, lying to the U.N., and for
the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and U.S. service members.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: What do other service personnel or vets have to say?

SEAN HUZE: While the military ranks tend to be more conservative than
the nation as a whole, more and more veterans of this war are becoming
disillusioned. For many of us it all goes back to WMD, the president's
primary -- or sole -- justification for the invasion. When they weren't
found -- hard to find something that is nonexistent -- the
ever-morphing rationale for the war is disheartening for those fighting
it. With an ever increasing number of KIA and WIA, along with the heavy
toll on the Iraqi civilian population, more and more vets are asking,
"Is our sacrifice worth it?"

PAUL RIECKHOFF: Recently, I got an email from a very close buddy
serving as an officer in Ramadi. He speaks with a candor and level of
frustration that you won't hear from the generals. Check this out:

Paul,
I wish I had the time or energy or memory capacity to describe to you
how wrong this whole thing has gone. It's just as you described it a
couple years ago. We can make a difference here, and I believe in the
mission as it looks on paper. But your president and his brain-dead
colleagues aren't even trying to give us what we need to do it. The
add-on armor HMMWVs are a joke. The terrorists target them b/c they
know they offer no protection. The M1114s have good armor, but every
time we lose one (I had one blown up Monday, driver had his femoral
artery cut -- will recover fully -- b/c there apparently is no armor or
very weak armor under the pedals) it's impossible to replace them. So
now I have to send yet another add-on armored vehicle outside the wire
daily.

The M1114s also have certain mechanical defects, known to the
manufacturer, for which there is apparently no known fix. For example,
on some of them (like mine) if it stalls or you turn it off, you cannot
restart it if the engine is hot. We have to dump 3 liters of cold water
on a solenoid in order to start it again. Not that much fun when your
vehicle won't start in Indian country. I wonder if DoD is getting a
refund for the contract. Speaking of contracts, KBR is a joke. I can't
even enumerate the problems with their service, but I guarantee they do
not receive less money based on how many of the showers don't work, or
how many of us won't eat in the chow hall often because we get sick
every time we do.

There is so much. I could go on forever. The worst thing, which we have
discussed, is that they are playing these bullshit numbers games to
fool America about troop strength. If they stopped paying KBR employees
$100,000 to do the job of a $28,000 soldier, maybe they'd have enough
money to send us enough soldiers to do the job. As it stands we have no
offensive capability in the most dangerous city on earth. General
Shinseki should write an Op/Ed that basically says, "I told you so."
Idiots.

Where are the AC-130s? The Apaches? They have them in far less active
AOs (areas of operations). All we ever get is a single Huey and Cobra
team, both of which are older than I am. It's such a joke. They're not
even trying. At all. They have Apaches in Tikrit but Hueys in Ramadi.

I wish every American could see this for him/herself. Registering your
frustration at the ballot box isn't nearly enough. There should be jail
terms for this.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: This has been very brief considering the wealth of
experience that the three of you bring. Thank you for putting your
lives on the line in Iraq and thank you for putting your consciences on
the line since your return.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los
Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org). To find out when "The Ground Truth"
screens, visit the Sundance Film Festival website.

ACT ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED SEVENTY THREE

secure loosen leisure: "formal stint disenchanted"

sharp priceless depression: "sensible interior urgent"

unlamenated fitting brusque: "emergent once opacity"

ungraceful echo hot: "lament harp sinecure"

opacity imminent whopping: "loose prince flutters"

once flithy candor: "echo immanent fealty"

urgent numberless invent: "thumb hushed fringe"

inferior pushy liberty: "sleeps sky purity"

insensible infringe lovable: "coagulate puffer edible"

disenchanted keeps educating: "lovable libertine invert"

stint dry putter: "candid hopping clot"

formality oddity coagulate: "bisque depression seizure."

-John Crouse & Jim Leftwich

death text variations

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The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview

The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview

By Michel Chossudovsky

December 21, 2005

Paper presented at the Perdana Global Peace Forum 2005

Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,

14-17 December 2005

The debate regarding war and Militarization raises the broad issue of
national sovereignty.

I am particularly gratified as an economist to participate in this
important event in the Nation’s capital, in Malaysia, a country which
at a critical moment in its history, namely at the height of the 1997
Asian crisis, took the courageous stance of confronting the Washington
Consensus and the international financial establishment.

Under the helm of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, carefully designed
financial measures were taken to avoid the collapse of the ringgit,
thereby foreclosing a scenario of economic dislocation, bankruptcy and
impoverishment, as occurred in Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea.

These 1997 measures forcefully confronted the mainstream neoliberal
agenda. In retrospect, this was a momentous decision, which will go
down in the Nation’s history. It constitutes the basis for an
understanding of what is best described as "economic and financial
warfare".

Today we have come to understand that war and macro-economic
manipulation are intertwined. Militarization supports economic warfare.
Conversely, what is referred to euphemistically as "economic reform"
supports a military and geopolitical agenda

Introduction

The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern
history. In the largest display of military might since the Second
World War, the United States and its indefectible British ally have
embarked upon a military adventure, which threatens the future of
humanity.

An understanding of the underlying historical background is crucial.
This war agenda is not the product of a distinct neo-conservative
project. From the outset of the Cold War Era, there is a consistent
thread, a continuum in US military doctrine, from the "Truman doctrine"
to Bush's "war on terrorism".

Foreign Policy adviser George F. Kennan had outlined in a 1948 State
Department brief what was later described as the "'Truman doctrine."

What this 1948 document conveys is continuity in US foreign policy,
from "Containment" to "Pre-emptive" War. In this regard, the
Neo-conservative agenda under the Bush administration should be viewed
as the culmination of a post World War II foreign policy framework. The
latter has been marked by a succession of US sponsored wars and
military interventions in all major regions of the World. From Korea,
Vietnam and Afghanistan, to the CIA sponsored military coups in Latin
America and Southeast Asia, the objective has been to ensure US
military hegemony and global economic domination, as initially
formulated under the "Truman Doctrine" at the outset of the Cold War.

Despite significant policy differences, successive Democratic and
Republican administrations, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have
carried out this global military agenda.

Moreover, Kennan's writings pointed to the formation of an
Anglo-American alliance, which currently characterizes the close
relationship between Washington and London. This alliance responds to
powerful economic interests in the oil industry, defense and
international banking. It is, in many regards, an Anglo-American
extension of the British Empire, which was officially disbanded in the
wake of the Second World War.

The Truman doctrine also points to the inclusion of Canada in the
Anglo-American military axis. Moreover, Kennan had also underscored the
importance of preventing the development of a continental European
power that could compete with the US.

With regard to Asia, including China and India, Kennan hinted to the
importance of articulating a military solution:

"The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight
power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better"

Weakening the United Nations

From the outset of the Cold War, the objective was to undermine and
ultimately destroy the Soviet Union. Washington was also intent upon
weakening the United Nations as a genuine international body, an
objective that has largely been achieved under the Bush administration:

The initial build-up of the UN in U.S. public opinion was so tremendous
that it is possibly true, as is frequently alleged, that we have no
choice but to make it the cornerstone of our policy in this
post-hostilities period. Occasionally, it has served a useful purpose.
But by and large it has created more problems than it has solved, and
has led to a considerable dispersal of our diplomatic effort. And in
our efforts to use the UN majority for major political purposes we are
playing with a dangerous weapon which may some day turn against us.
This is a situation, which warrants most careful study and foresight on
our part. (Kennan 1948)

The Post Cold War

The wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are part of the same
"military road-map". Confirmed by military documents, the US war agenda
not only targets Iran, Syria and North Korea, but also its former Cold
War enemies: Russia and China.

We are dealing with a global military agenda characterized by various
forms of intervention. The latter include covert military and
intelligence operations in support of domestic paramilitary groups and
so-called liberation armies. These operations are largely devised with
a view to creating social, ethnic and political divisions within
national societies, ultimately contributing to the destruction of
entire countries, as occurred in Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, the US sponsored "democratization" agenda consists in
intervening in countries’ internal affairs, often with a view to
destabilizing national governments and imposing sweeping "free market"
reforms. In this regard, the illegal invasion of Haiti following a US
sponsored military coup, which was also supported by Canada and France,
is an integral part of Washington’s global military agenda.

War and Globalization

War and globalization are intimately related processes. Military and
intelligence operations support the opening up of new economic
frontiers and the remolding of national economies. The powers of Wall
Street, the Anglo-American oil giants and the U.S.-U.K. defense
contractors are indelibly behind this process.

Ultimately, the purpose of America’s "War on Terrorism" is to transform
sovereign nations into open territories (or "free trade areas"), both
through "military means", as well as through the imposition of deadly
macro-economic reforms. The latter, implemented under IMF-World
Bank-WTO auspices often serve to undermine and destroy national
economies, precipitating millions of people into abject poverty. In
turn, so-called "reconstruction programs" imposed by donors and
creditors in the wake of the war contribute to a spiraling external
debt.

In a twisted logic, "war reparations" financed by external debt are
being paid to the US invader. Billions of dollars are channeled to
Western construction conglomerates such as Bechtel and Halliburton,
both of which have close links to the US Department of Defense.

Iran and Syria: Next Phase of the War

Confirmed in national security documents, a central objective of this
war is the conquest and confiscation of Middle East oil wealth. In this
regard, the broader Middle East – Central Asian region encompasses some
70 percent of the World’s oil and gas resources, more than thirty times
those of the US.

The Anglo-American oil giants in alliance with Wall Street and the
military-industrial complex are indelibly behind America’s war agenda.

The next phase of this war is Iran and Syria, which have already been
identified as targets.

Iran is the country with the third largest oil and gas reserves (10%)
after Saudi Arabia (25%) and Iraq (11%). The US is seeking with the
complicity of the UN Security Council to establish a pretext for the
bombing of Iran, which is presented as a threat to world peace.

Israel is slated to play a key role in launching the military operation
against Iran.

This operation is in a state of readiness. Were it to occur, the war
would extend to the entire Middle Eastern region and beyond. At the
same token, Israel would become an official member of the
Anglo-American military axis.

In early 2005, several high profile military exercises were conducted
in the Eastern Mediterranean, involving military deployments and the
testing of weapons systems. Military planning meetings were held
between the US, Israel and Turkey. There has been a shuttle of military
and government officials between Washington, Tel Aviv and Ankara.

Intense diplomatic exchanges have been carried out at the international
level with a view to securing areas of military cooperation and/or
support for a US-Israeli led military operation directed against Iran.
The UN Security Council resolution regarding Iran’s nuclear program
provides a pretext, which the US plans to use to justify military
intervention.

Of significance is a November 2004 military cooperation agreement
between NATO and Israel. A few months later, Israel was involved for
the first time in military exercises with NATO, which also included
several Arab countries. 

A massive buildup in military hardware has occurred in preparation for
a possible attack on Iran. Israel has taken delivery from the US of
some 5,000 "smart air launched weapons" including some 500 BLU 109
'bunker-buster bombs.

Nuclear Weapons in Conventional War Theaters: "Safe for Civilians"

An attack on Iran using tactical nuclear weapons (mini-nukes) has also
been contemplated. Tactical nuclear weapons with an explosive capacity
between one third to 6 times a Hiroshima bomb have been cleared for use
in conventional war theaters. .

The mini-nukes have been redefined as a defensive weapon, which is
"safe for civilians" "because the explosion is underground". The Senate
in a December 2003 decision, has authorized their use in conventional
war theaters

Air strikes against Iran could contribute to extending the war to the
broader Middle East Central Asian region. Tehran has confirmed that it
would retaliate if attacked, in the form of ballistic missile strikes
directed against Israel (CNN, 8 Feb 2005). These attacks could also
target US military facilities in the Persian Gulf, which would
immediately lead us into a scenario of military escalation and all out
war.

In recent developments, Israel’s armed forces have been ordered by
Prime minister Ariel Sharon, "to be ready by the end of March [2006]
for possible strikes" on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities (The
Sunday Times, 11 December 2005).

Meanwhile, Iran is building its air defense capabilities. Russia has
recently announced that it plans to sell to Iran some 29 Tor M-1
anti-missile systems.

The planned attack on Iran should also be understood in relation to the
timely withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, which has opened up a
new space, for the deployment of Israeli forces. The participation of
Turkey in the US-UK-Israeli military operation is also a factor,
following an agreement reached between Ankara and Tel Aviv.

Global Military Agenda

The war in the Middle East is part of a carefully defined military
agenda. Formulated in September 2000, a few months before the accession
of George W. Bush to the White House, the Project for a New American
Century (PNAC) published its blueprint for global domination under the
title: "Rebuilding America's Defenses."

The PNAC is a neo-conservative think tank linked to the
Defense-Intelligence establishment, the Republican Party and the
powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) which plays a
behind-the-scenes role in the formulation of US foreign policy.

The PNAC's declared objectives are:

• defend the American homeland;

• fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;

• perform the "constabulary" duties associated with shaping the
security environment in critical regions;

• transform U.S. forces to exploit the "revolution in military
affairs;"

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who now heads the World Bank,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, had
commissioned the PNAC blueprint prior to the 2000 presidential
elections.

The PNAC outlines a roadmap of conquest. It calls for "the direct
imposition of U.S. "forward bases" throughout Central Asia and the
Middle East "with a view to ensuring economic domination of the world,
while strangling any potential "rival" or any viable alternative to
America's vision of a 'free market' economy" (See Chris Floyd, Bush's
Crusade for Empire, Global Outlook, No. 6, 2003)

Distinct from theater wars, the so-called "constabulary functions"
imply a form of global military policing using various instruments of
military intervention including punitive bombings, covert intelligence
operations and the sending in of US Special Forces, etc.

New Weapons Systems

The PNAC’s "revolution in military affairs" (meaning the development of
new weapons systems) consists of the "Strategic Defense Initiative",
the concurrent weaponization of space and the development of a new
generation of nuclear weapons:

"While it has long been a U.S. policy to use nuclear weapons in order
to respond to a nuclear attack… the new policy allows the U.S. to use
nuclear weapons against states that do not have nuclear weapons and for
a host of new reasons, including rapid termination of a conflict on
U.S. terms or to ensure success of the U.S. forces."

(statement of Jorge Hirsh, see Global Research,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=MCD20051101&articleId=1173 

The National Defense Strategy

Since 2000, the basic premises of the PNAC have been reasserted in a
number of national security documents. In March 2005, The Pentagon
released its National Defense Strategy document. While the latter
follows in the footsteps of the administration's "preemptive" war
doctrine as detailed by the Project of the New American Century (PNAC),
it goes much further in setting the contours of Washington's global
military agenda.

It calls for a more "proactive" approach to warfare, beyond the weaker
notion of "preemptive" and defensive actions, where military operations
are launched against a "declared enemy" with a view to "preserving the
peace" and "defending America".

The document explicitly acknowledges America's global military mandate,
beyond regional war theaters. This mandate also includes military
operations directed against countries, which are not hostile to
America, but which are considered strategic from the point of view of
US interests. Whereas the preemptive war doctrine envisages military
action as a means of "self defense" against countries categorized as
"hostile" to the US, the new Pentagon doctrine envisages the
possibility of military intervention against countries, which do not
visibly constitute a threat to the security of the American homeland.

The document outlines "four major threats to the United States":

- "Traditional challenges" are posed by well known and recognized
military powers using "well-understood' forms of war."

- "Irregular threats" come from forces using so-called "unconventional'
methods to counter stronger power."

- "The catastrophic challenge" pertains to the "use of weapons of mass
destruction by an enemy."

• "Disruptive challenges" pertains to "potential adversaries
utilizing new technologies to counter U.S. advantages."

(See Michel Chossudovsky, From "Rogue States" to "Unstable Nations":
America's New National Security Doctrine,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO504A.html) 

Mammoth Defense Budget

This military blueprint outlines the contours of a project of global
military hegemony. It is predicated on a massive increase in defense
spending. The underlying objective consists in overshadowing, in terms
of defense outlays, any other nation on earth including America's
European allies.

The United States military this year [2005] will be larger than the
next 25 countries put together.... So, you know, essentially if
spending patterns hold, which is to say European defense spending is
declining, American is rising, in about five years, the United States
will be spending more money than the rest of the world put together on
defense." (Council on Foreign Relations, Annual Corporate conference,
10 March 2005).

The defense budget estimated at 401.7 billion dollars (FY 2005) does
not include the "emergency supplemental defense budget" earmarked for
ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither is the DoD
participation's in the "war on terrorism" included in the defense
budget. (See http://64.177.207.201/static/budget/annual/fy05/) Nor does
it include another 40 billion dollars allocated to America's
intelligence apparatus, headed by John Negroponte. Approximately 80
percent of the intelligence budget, including America's system of spy
satellite's, directly supports US military initiatives.

Extensive War Crimes

The economic and strategic objectives behind this war are rarely
mentioned. This military project is presented to public opinion as part
of the "global war on terrorism" in which Al Qaeda is unequivocally
upheld, as the aggressor. The crimes of war including the torture of
civilians are casually presented as "collateral damage".

In this regard, the military occupation of Iraq has resulted in the
deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians (according to the Lancet,
John Hopkins School of Public health study).

The routine application of torture, the setting up of numerous
concentration camps is now fully documented, not to mention the
kidnapping of civilians including children, who are dispatched to the
Guantanamo concentration camp in Cuba.

Killing the messenger: US forces have also targeted and killing of
independent journalists in Iraq, who do not report the lies and
fabrications of the Anglo-American military axis.

While the international community focuses on Iran and North Korea’s
nuclear program, the evidence suggests that the US led military
coalition is routinely using prohibited weapons. It also plans to use
nuclear weapons in the next phase of this war.

Napalm and white phosphorous bombs have been used in Iraq against
civilians in densely populated urban areas. The Western media
(specifically the BBC) has attempted to camouflage the use of these
weapons systems.

Torture

Torture is an official US government policy. The orders to torture POWs
in Iraq and Guantanamo emanated from the highest levels of the Bush
Administration. Prison guards, interrogators in the US military and the
CIA were responding to precise guidelines.

The US President had directly authorized the use of torture including
"sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and
sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc."

(See ACLU at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ACL412A.html ).

The secret CIA torture chambers and detention centers set up in a
number of countries including the European Union are consistent with
the Pentagon’s guidelines on the use of torture.

While torture is now accepted by the Bush administration, the
controversy in the US pertains not to torture per se but to whether the
information obtained from suspected terrorists through the application
of torture can be used in a court of law to indict an alleged
"terrorist".

The Criminalization of Justice

Despite the public outrage, the tendency is towards acquiescence and
acceptance of the US torture agenda. The legitimacy of the war
criminals in high office, who formally ordered these crimes is not
questioned. "Legal opinions" drafted on the behest of war criminals are
being used to "legalize" torture and redefine Justice.

War criminals legitimately occupy positions of authority, which enable
them to redefine the contours of the judicial system and the process of
law enforcement.

It provides them with a mandate to decide "who are the criminals", when
in fact they are the criminals.

In other words, what we are dealing with is the criminalization of the
State and its various institutions including the criminalization of
Justice.

The truth is twisted and turned upside down. State propaganda builds a
consensus within the Executive, the US Congress and the Military. This
consensus is then ratified by the Judicial, through a process of
outright legal manipulation.

Media disinformation instills within the consciousness of Americans
that somehow the use of torture, the existence of concentration camps,
extra judicial assassinations of "rogue enemies", all of which are
happening, are "under certain circumstances" "acceptable" and perfectly
"legal" because the Justice department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC),
says "it's legit".

The existence of an illusive outside enemy who is threatening the
Homeland is the cornerstone of the propaganda campaign. The latter
consists in galvanizing US citizens not only in favor of "the war on
terrorism", but in support of a social order which upholds the
legitimate use of torture, directed against "terrorists", as a
justifiable means to preserving human rights, democracy, freedom, etc.

Racism and the Anti-Terrorist Legislation

Meanwhile, a wave of racism and xenophobia directed against Muslims has
been unleashed throughout the western world. The arbitrary arrests and
detention of Muslims on trumped up charges has become common practice.

"Anti-terrorist" legislation has been adopted in a number of western
countries which allows for the arrest and detention without charge of
alleged terrorists, including leaders of so-called ‘domestic radical
groups" (meaning antiwar activists), who are now categorized as a
threat to Homeland Security.

While "expressing concern" regarding human rights violations, the
so-called international community has nonetheless accepted the
legitimacy of "the war on terrorism". Moreover, in the wake of 9/11, a
significant section of the antiwar movement, while condemning the
US-led war, continues to uphold the legitimacy of the "war on
terrorism".

In turn, the UN has endorsed the "war on terrorism". Under the disguise
of peacekeeping, the United Nations, in violation of its own charter
and the Nuremberg jurisprudence on war crimes, is collaborating with
the US led military coalition.  

War Propaganda

The underlying objective of the media disinformation campaign is
provide a humanitarian mandate to the US led war, while galvanizing
public opinion in support of America's "war on terrorism" agenda.
Racism and Xenophobia, including the arbitrary arrest of alleged
terrorists, are an integral part war propaganda.

One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to "fabricate an
enemy". As anti-war sentiment grows and the political legitimacy the
Bush Administration falters, doubts regarding the existence of this
illusive "outside enemy" must be dispelled.

Propaganda purports not only to drown the truth but also to "kill the
evidence" on how this "outside enemy", namely Osama bin Laden’s Al
Qaeda was fabricated and transformed into "Enemy Number One". The
entire National Security doctrine centers on the existence of an
"outside enemy" which is threatening the Homeland.

Possessing a "just cause" for waging war is central to the Bush
administration's justification for invading and occupying both
Afghanistan and Iraq.

The "war on terrorism" and the notion of "preemption" are predicated on
the right to "self defense." They define "when it is permissible to
wage war": jus ad bellum.

Jus ad bellum also serves to build a consensus within the Armed Forces
command structures. It also serves to convince the troops that they are
fighting for a "just cause". More generally, the Just War theory in its
modern day version is an integral part of war propaganda and media
disinformation, applied to gain public support for a war agenda.

In October 2001, when Afghanistan was bombed and later invaded, several
"Progressives" largely upheld the Administration's "just cause"
military doctrine. The "self-defense" argument was accepted at face
value as a legitimate response to 9/11, without examining the fact that
the US administration had not only supported the "Islamic terror
network", it was also instrumental in the installation of the Taliban
government in 1995-96. Moreover, the invasion of Afghanistan had been
planned well in advance of September 11, 2001.

In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement against the illegal invasion
of Afghanistan was isolated. The trade unions, civil society
organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda.
They had accepted a war of retribution against Al Qaeda and the
Taliban.

Media disinformation prevailed. People were misled as to the nature and
objectives underlying the invasion of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and
the Taliban were identified as the prime suspects of the 9/11 attacks,
without a shred of evidence and without addressing the historical
relationship between Al Qaeda and the US intelligence apparatus. In
this regard, understanding 9/11 is crucial in formulating a consistent
antiwar position.

The "war on terrorism" is the cornerstone of the America’s propaganda
and media disinformation campaign. In an utterly absurd logic Al Qaeda
is presented as an upcoming super-power, capable of waging a nuclear
attack against the US.

The "War on Terrorism"

Amply documented, the war on terrorism is a fabrication. Al Qaeda is a
US sponsored "intelligence asset". Saudi-born Osama bin Laden is a
creation of U.S. foreign policy. He was recruited during the
Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight
Soviet invaders." During the Cold War, but also in its aftermath, the
CIA — using Pakistan’s Military Intelligence apparatus as a go-between
—played a key role in training the Mujahideen.

With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI [Inter
Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan Jihad into a
global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some
35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s
fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in
Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim
radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad. (Ahmed Rashid,
The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November-December
1999)

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have supported the so-called
"Militant Islamic Base", including Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, as part
of their military-intelligence agenda. The links between Osama bin
Laden and the Clinton administration in Bosnia and Kosovo are well
documented by congressional records.

Ironically, the U.S. Administration’s undercover military-intelligence
operations in Bosnia were fully documented by the Republican Party. A
lengthy Congressional report by the Republican Party Committee (RPC)
published in 1997 accused the Clinton administration of having "helped
turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base" leading to the recruitment,
through the so-called "Militant Islamic Network", of thousands of
Mujahideen from the Muslim world:

The Clinton administration’s ‘hands-on’ involvement with the Islamic
network’s arms pipeline included inspections of missiles from Iran by
U.S. government officials … the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a
Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization … has been a major link
in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. … TWRA is believed to be connected with
such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman
(the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing)
and Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi émigré believed to bankroll
numerous militant groups. (Congressional Press Release, Republican,
Party Committee (RPC), U.S. Congress, Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms
Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base, Washington DC,
16 January 1997. The original document is on the website of the U.S.
Senate Republican Party Committee (Senator Larry Craig), at

http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1997/iran.htm; emphasis added.

Counter-Terrorism

The CIA has created it own terrorist organizations including "Al Qaeda
in Mesopotamia" which is led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.

And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning
the terrorist organizations, which it has itself created. In turn, it
has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program
"to go after" these terrorist organizations.

Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda
apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The terror warnings
must appear to be "genuine". The objective is to present the terror
groups as "enemies of America."

The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of
America's war on terrorism" agenda.

The "war on terrorism" requires a humanitarian mandate. The war on
terrorism is presented as a "Just War", which is to be fought on moral
grounds "to redress a wrong suffered."

To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism must
remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded
of the terrorist threat.

The propaganda campaign presents the portraits of the leaders behind
the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an
"advertising" campaign, "it gives a face to terror."

Fabricating Intelligence

The propaganda campaign has been supported by an extensive fabrication
of intelligence.

Revelations regarding the controversial Downing Street Memorandum and
the forged Niger uranium dossier are but the tip of the iceberg.

Known and documented prior to the invasion of Iraq, the substance of
Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council was not only
fabricated, it was actually based, in what constitutes a clear case of
plagiarism, on a student’s text which had been "lifted" (copy and
paste) from the internet:

A close textual analysis of the British Intelligence report quoted by
Colin Powell in his [February 5, 2003] UN Address suggests that its UK
authors had little access to first-hand intelligence sources and
instead based their work on academic papers, which they selectively
distorted.

The authors of the dossier are members of Tony Blair's Press Relations
Office at Whitehall. Britain's Secret Service (MI6), either was not
consulted, or more likely, provided an assessment that did not fit in
with the politicians' argument. In essence, spin was being sold off as
intelligence.

The bulk of the 19-page document (pp.6-16) had been directly copied
without acknowledgement from an article in last [2002] September's
Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled "Iraq's Security
and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis". The author of the
piece is Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies. He has confirmed to me that his
permission was not sought by MI6; in fact, he didn't even know about
the British document until I mentioned it to him.

Concluding remarks

The so-called "War on Terrorism" is a lie.

Amply documented, the pretext to wage this war is totally fabricated.

Realities have been turned upside down. Acts of war are heralded as
"humanitarian interventions" geared towards restoring ‘democracy’.

Military occupation and the killing of civilians are presented as
"peace-keeping operations."

The derogation of civil liberties under the so-called "anti-terrorist
legislation" is portrayed as a means to providing "domestic security"
and upholding civil liberties.

Meanwhile, the civilian economy is precipitated into crisis;
expenditures on health and education are curtailed to finance the
military-industrial complex and the police state.

Under the American Empire, millions of people around the world are
being driven into abysmal poverty, and countries are transformed into
open territories.

U.S. protectorates are installed with the blessing of the so-called
"international community." "Interim governments" are formed. Political
puppets designated by America’s oil giants are casually endorsed by the
United Nations, which increasingly performs the role of a rubber-stamp
for the U.S. Administration.

Reversing the tide of war can not be limited to a critique of the US
war agenda. Ultimately what is at stake is the legitimacy of the
political and military actors and the economic power structures, which
ultimately control the formulation, and direction of US foreign policy.

While the Bush administration implements a "war on terrorism", the
evidence (including mountains of official documents) amply confirms
that successive U.S. administrations have supported, abetted and
harbored international terrorism.

This fact, in itself, must be suppressed because if it ever trickles
down to the broader public, the legitimacy of the so-called "war on
terrorism" collapses "like a deck of cards." And in the process, the
legitimacy of the main actors behind this system would be threatened.

How does one effectively break the war and police state agendas?
Essentially by refuting the "war on terrorism" which constitutes the
very foundations of the US national security doctrine.

A war agenda is not disarmed through antiwar sentiment. One does not
reverse the tide by asking President Bush: "please abide by the Geneva
Convention" and the Nuremberg Charter. Ultimately a consistent antiwar
agenda requires unseating the war criminals in high office as first
step towards disarming the institutions and corporate structure of the
New World Order.

To break the Inquisition, we must also break its propaganda, its fear
and intimidation campaign, which galvanizes public opinion into
accepting the "war on terrorism".

 

Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best seller "The
Globalization of Poverty " published in eleven languages. He is
Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the
Center for Research on Globalization which hosts the critically
acclaimed website: www.globalresearch.ca . He is also a contributor to
the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

His most recent book is entitled: America’s "War on Terrorism", Global
Research, 2005.,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/truth911.html

Appendix A

There is vast body of documentary evidence on the role of al Qaeda,
There is growing evidence from a number of recent disclosures that the
US sponsored intelligence apparatus is behind the terrorists.

1. Operation Able Danger

Official Pentagon documents reveal that the 9/11 ringleader Mohammed
Atta and 3 other hijackers were under close surveillance as part of a
secret Pentagon operation more than a year prior to 9/11.

These documents largely refute the official US government narrative as
presented by the 9/11 Commission.

For the past four years, we have been told by the administration of
George Bush and by the official 9/11 Commission report of Chairman
Thomas Kean and Executive Director Philip Zelikow that Egyptian
extremist Mohammed Atta was the key player in the 11 September 2001
terrorist attacks. Atta, according to the Kean report, was the
"tactical leader of the 9/11 plot". He was the pilot who on that
dreadful morning flew the first plane, American Airlines 11, into the
North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. It was Atta’s face,
on television and in newspapers across the world, that became the
symbol of Islamic terrorism. And it was Atta’s name - not the names of
any of the 18 other hijackers allegedly lead by Atta on that day - that
was cited by international security researchers. Atta was, as the Kean
report stresses, "the tactical commander of the operation in the United
States". According to both the Bush administration and the official
9/11 Commission report, he was working on the orders of Osama Bin Laden
who, from remote Afghanistan, controlled the entire operation.

Now, almost exactly four years after 9/11, the facts appear to have
been turned upside down. We now learn that Atta was also connected to a
top secret operation of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command
(SOCOM) in the US. According to Army reserve Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony
Shaffer, a top secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger had
identified Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as members of an
al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks.

Able Danger was an 18-month highly classified operation tasked,
according to Shaffer, with "developing targeting information for
al-Qaida on a global scale", and used data-mining techniques to look
for "patterns, associations, and linkages". He said he himself had
first encountered the names of the four hijackers in mid-2000.

(see Daniele Ganser, Able Danger adds twist to 9/11, 9/11 Ringleader
connected to secret Pentagon operation,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=20050827&articleId=867

 

2. The Bali 2002 Bombing: Recent Disclosure

In a recent interview, former president of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid
admitted that the Indonesian military and police played a complicit
role in the 2002 Bali bombing.

(See
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=20051014&articleId=1085)

Other reports point to links between Indonesian intelligence (BIN) and
the alleged terrorist organization Jemiah Islami (JI).

Asked who he thought planted the second bomb, Mr Wahid said: "Maybe the
police ... or the armed forces."

"The orders to do this or that came from within our armed forces, not
from the fundamentalist people," he says.

The [Australian SBS's Dateline] program also claims a key figure behind
the formation of terror group Jemaah Islamiah was an Indonesian spy.

Former terrorist Umar Abduh, who is now a researcher and writer, told
Dateline Indonesian authorities had a hand in many terror groups.

"There is not a single Islamic group either in the movement or the
political groups that is not controlled by (Indonesian) intelligence,"
he said. (see the Australian, 12 October 2005) 

3. The Basra September 2005 British Covert Operation

Two British undercover "soldiers" wearing wigs and dressed in Arab
clothing, were driving a car loaded with weapons and ammunition,
towards the center of Basra.

The two SAS Special Forces agents were arrested by the Iraqi police
authorities They were subsequently "rescued" by British forces, in a
major military assault on the building where they were being detained:

"British forces used up to 10 tanks " supported by helicopters " to
smash through the walls of the jail and free the two British
servicemen."

The incident, which resulted in numerous civilian and police
casualties, has caused "political embarrassment".

Several media reports and eyewitness accounts suggested that the SAS
operatives were disguised as Al Qaeda "terrorists" and were planning to
set off the bombs in Basra's central square during a major religious
event.

The citizens of Basra witnessed the arrest. Civilians were killed and
injured when British forces under the command of Brig Lorimer led the
military assault on the prison. Al Jazeera reported the circumstances
of the arrest in an interview with Fattah al-Shaykh, member of the
Iraqi National Assembly:

If you really want to look for truth, then we should resort to the
Iraqi justice away from the British provocations against the sons of
Basra, particularly what happened today when the sons of Basra caught
two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the
Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was
meant to explode in the center of the city of Basra in the popular
market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the
two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them.
The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in
Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British
occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt
to absolve them of the crime. (Al Jazeera TV 20 Sept 2005).

Nobody in Basra believes that the two arrested SAS men were "working
undercover against militants linked to Iran":

"The Iraqi police stopped a car with two foreigners dressed as Arabs,
and full of weapons and explosives," he said. "There have been
terrorist attacks and explosions in Basra - of course the police wanted
to investigate.".... Mr Hakim dismissed as "propaganda" reports that
the soldiers were working undercover against militants linked to Iran.
Officials in Basra have called for an espionage trial for the two in an
Iraqi court. British soldiers' legal immunity "does not apply when they
are out of uniform", Mr Hakim said. (Mr. Hakim is a leading official in
Iraq's largest Shia Muslim party, quoted in the Financial Times, 29
Sept 2005)

Thwarting the Investigation

In his capacity of Commanding Officer of the Special Investigation
Branch of the Royal Military Police in Basra, Captain Ken Masters was
responsible for investigating the circumstances of the arrest of two
undercover elite SAS men, wearing Arab clothing, by Iraqi police in
Basra. The investigation was not completed. Ken Masters died in unusual
circumstances three weeks later.

Captain Ken Masters had a mandate to cooperate in his investigations,
with the civilian Iraqi authorities. As part of his mandate he was to
investigate "into allegations that British soldiers killed or
mistreated Iraqi civilians". Specifically in this case, the inquiry
pertained to the circumstances of the British assault on the prison on
19 September. The press reports and official statements suggest that
the assault on the prison was authorized by the Ministry of Defense.

Was the British military blocking Captain Masters police investigation?

There were apparent disagreements between British military commanding
officers and the military police officials dispatched to the war
theater in charge of investigating the actions and behavior of military
personnel. (The Independent 17 Oct 2005).

Was pressure put to bear on Captain Masters by the Ministry of Defense?
According to Michael Keefer, the British Army led by Brig Lorimer was
determined

"to remove these men from any danger of interrogation by their own
supposed allies in the government the British are propping up—even when
their rescue entailed the destruction of an Iraqi prison and the
release of a large number of prisoners, gun-battles with Iraqi police
and with Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, a large popular mobilization
against the British occupying force, and a subsequent withdrawal of any
cooperation on the part of the regional government—tends, if anything,
to support the view that this episode involved something much darker
and more serious than a mere flare-up of bad tempers at a check-point."

 

(See Michael Keefer, Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting
Bombs in Basra? 25 September 2005,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=KEE20050925&articleId=994 )

Selected References

This text is intended to provide an overview of the key issues
underlying the US war agenda. Selected references and supporting
documentation are indicated below.

A comprehensive archive of articles on different dimensions of the US
War is available at the website of the Centre for Research on
Globalization at www.globalresearch.ca  

Niloufer Bhagwat, The Security Council Resolution on Syria is a pretext
for the bombing and occupation of Syria, by, November 2, 2005,
GlobalResearch.ca

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=BHA20051102&articleId=1175

Michel Chossudovsky, America’s "War on Terrorism", Second edition,
Global Research, 2005, 387 p.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/truth911.html

Michel Chossudovsky, Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran, May 1, 2005,
GlobalResearch.ca,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=%20CH20050501&articleId=66

Michel Chossudovsky, Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Resistance Movement,
September 18, 2005, GlobalResearch.ca,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=CHO20050918&articleId=967

CIA Uses German Bases to Transport Terrorists, Deutsche Welle, 27
november 2005

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=20051127&articleId=1332

Thomas Eley, Did Big Oil participate in planning invasion of Iraq?
December 11, 2005, wsws.org,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=ELE20051211&articleId=1444

Chris Floyd, Sacred Terror: The Global Death Squad of George W. Bush,
December 10, 2005,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=FLO20051210&articleId=1434

Max Fuller, Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in
Occupied Iraq, November 10, 2005, GlobalResearch.ca

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=FUL20051110&articleId=1230

Daniele Ganser, Able Danger adds twist to 9/11, 9/11 Ringleader
connected to secret Pentagon operation, GlobalResearch.ca, 27 August
2005

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=20050827&articleId=867

Seymour Hersh, Where is the Iraq war headed next? December 10, 2005,
The New Yorker,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=HER20051210&articleId=1436

Michael Keefer, Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in
Basra? Suspicions Strengthened by Earlier Reports, Globalresearch.ca,
25 September 2005

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=KEE20050925&articleId=994 )

Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter, Israel Readies Force to Strike on
Nuclear Iran, December 11, 2005 , Sunday Times

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=MAH20051211&articleId=1446

Serendepity, Torture and the CIA, December 10, 2005, GlobalResearch.ca.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=SER20051210&articleId=1441

Eric Waddell, The Battle for Oil, December 14, 2004, GlobalResearch.ca,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=WAD20041214&articleId=311

Mike Whitney, Why Iran will lead to World War 3, GlobalResearch.ca, 9
August 2005

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=WHI20050809&articleId=825

 
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Whose Fault Is Frey?

Whose Fault Is Frey?

By John Dolan, AlterNet
Posted on January 17, 2006, Printed on January 18, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/30910/

Who gets the blame when a con man robs the congregation blind? That's
the real question in the case of James Frey.

Frey was nobody a few years back, a hack screenwriter whose best-known
credit was an obscure romance movie with the weirdly prescient title
“Loving A Fool.” That changed suddenly in 2003, when his debut rehab
memoir “A Million Little Pieces” (2003) was published -- after being
rejected by 17 publishers, who all deserve medals for service to
literature.

AMLP was a huge success, with copies of it disappearing faster than
cocaine at an advertising company's Christmas party. Amazon named it
"Best Book of the Year." Frey's follow-up, “My Friend Leonard” (2005)
was even worse than a AMLP, a thing I would not have thought possible,
and almost as successful. A few months ago came the high-water mark of
Frey's fame, when he went on Oprah and was welcomed as a saint of
self-help, a paragon of romance and a literary genius.

Then, just a few days ago, Frey fell. The Smoking Gun website published
an exposé detailing all the lies and exaggerations in Frey's boasts
about his bad-boy past. It turned out that Frey's total prison time
amounts to a few hours, and his crimes were what you'd expect of a frat
boy, infractions involving beer and cars.

The reaction was fast and violent. America, a nation that often behaves
like a congregation, was outraged, as if the preacher had been found in
the wrong bed on Sunday morning.

Although I understand their shock, I can't share their indignation. As
a former academic who's written extensively on reader belief and
forgery in literature, I've come to realize that it's the audiences who
create forgeries like Frey's. Audiences who fall for this kind of
forgery usually know better; they buy the fake because it confirms
beliefs that are seen as fragile. Forgers count on that and happily
rake in the cash and the adoration in return for shoring up shaky
tribal myths.

Frey did exactly that for his readers, his "true" story reinforcing
their belief that drugs = evil, that people are transformed in midlife,
and that the individual can do miracles. In other words, Frey did a
favor for a very mixed-up set of audiences, from DEA creeps to fans of
Hollywood love stories, to wavering followers of self-help manuals.

So there's much more at stake here than a literary dispute. In fact,
one of the more striking aspects of the current Frey debate is that
Frey's fans don't care about literary quality one way or another. After
two years of squabbling with these people online, I know what matters
to them. Aesthetes they are most definitely not. What they valued was
the moral of Frey's story, and the bad-boy bio authenticating it.

When that crumbled, nobody thought he was a good writer anymore. This
too is typical of response to literary fraud; as long as the faked
background of the book is believed true, the book is praised as
magnificent. Once the readers know its grimy, self-serving origins,
nobody sees any merit in it anymore. English professors may invoke that
very slippery term, "fiction," saying that Frey's readers have no right
to demand truth -- but they're dead wrong. Frey's history has nothing
to do with fiction.

Indeed, anyone who's had to wade through Frey's godawful writing should
have seen that he has neither literary talent nor authenticity as a
druggie.

Perhaps that sounds a bit cocky. Well, I've got the record to back it
up, because in a review I published in May 29, 2003, I started off by
saying that AMLP was "the worst thing I've ever read" and went on to
say that Frey was a phony, his characters recycled Hollywood types, his
female lead, "Lilly," wholly invented and his story downright silly.

Now that Frey's been caught, I'm getting lots of emails praising me for
seeing through Frey. But it was easy. The real question is, why
couldn't the rest of the literate public see it?

In researching literary frauds, I've learned that the quality of the
fraudster's writing is surprisingly unimportant in the success of the
fraud. Thomas Chatterton, one of the most talented 18th-century
fraudsters, killed himself, bitter and ashamed because no one wanted
his faked medieval texts, whereas a few years later, James MacPherson,
a cunning fake, became wealthy and adored for ridiculous "ancient
Celtic epics" that were obvious pastiches of Milton, the Bible and
other grand literature.

The reason the hack MacPherson succeeded and the brilliant Chatterton
failed is that MacPherson's Scottish readers wanted desperately to
believe in his faked texts. Expanding in confidence, growing rich after
union with England, Scots wanted a national "classical" literature and
took it when offered, ignoring the cheesy, obvious absurdities it
contained.

By contrast, Chatterton failed to interest the English elite in his
medieval fakes, because England, never short of self-admiration, simply
didn't want them, brilliant or otherwise. It is the readers' desire
that gives birth to such books, and it's the intensity of that desire
that determines their fate.

And in his cunning exploitation of American values and his striking
lack of literary talent, James Frey could serve as a textbook
illustration of the successful forger. Like most successful forgers, he
spun a story designed to bolster the audience's most fragile yet
cherished belief. In MacPherson's case, these were the myth of ancient
Scottish greatness.

Frey's books reinforce equally dubious national beliefs: a conviction
that drugs are evil incarnate, faith in transformation via romantic
love and finally, personal responsibility.

And Frey's readers take these issues very seriously, as I've discovered
in my email debates with them.

Several were worried that Frey's tough-guy faith in personal
responsibility might harm Alcoholics Anonymous. That prospect appalled
them, while bad prose didn't bother them at all. In other words, Frey's
readers skip the literary aspect, jumping directly to the sermonic,
concerned only when one core value demonstrated by Frey's story might
be damaged by another. The only "literary" quality readers mentioned to
me was pathos, Frey's ability to arouse emotion. They thought he was
brilliant at it, because he uses the words "cry" and "hug" more often
than any public figure since Barney, and many wrote that their tears
were all the proof I could want that he was a great writer. It was
remarkably like the standard of success in late 18th-century
sentimental fiction, a grotesque and deservedly forgotten genre in
which writers tried to jerk as many tears as they could in as few pages
-- usually by skimping on dialogue, background and those other frills
that interrupt the tears.

But if he hadn't invented that fake bad-boy bio, none of it would have
mattered. Ordinary readers understand this perfectly well and had the
good sense to be angry when they learned Frey had lied to them. Only
English professors are dumb enough not to see that.

Frey writes sob stories with himself as central character. These
stories are not just used to make him rich and famous but to attract
the adoration of his fans, to make him a star. It's not fiction, it's
plain schoolyard boasting.

Frey's readers were right to think it's a matter of true/false, not
"fiction." Their mistake was the same one Bush's voters made in 2000
and 2004: In their Calvinist obsession with public affirmation of the
congregation's values, they welcome any con man who talks their
language.

And like Bush, the stranger is usually there to rob them. Frey robbed
them of their trust and adoration. But that's what happens when you
believe stuff you know is crap.

Which brings us to drugs. Yes, drugs. Like Maude Lebowski repeating
"vagina," I feel like saying it again.

Frey knew that if he blamed drugs, he'd be in there. And if he found
redemption, he'd con them out of everything. Better yet, these poor
suckers were so used to lies about drugs that he didn't even have to
make it convincing.

On this topic, nobody will even risk truth in private. In this we're
very Soviet -- in fact, like the Soviets of Stalin's time, we never
even think about the disappeared of the Drug Trials, all those harmless
druggies who have been shipped to the gulag to be raped and killed.

Like Soviets of Stalin's time, we've learned neve