Crucible on Campus: Neo-con Youth Movement

The Witchhunts Continue

Columbia University and the New Anti-Semitism

By M. JUNAID ALAM
http://lefthook.org

March 2, 2005

Rape, massacre, theft, torture, ethnic cleansing: these are not crimes which nations can defend with ease - especially when unearthed by their own historians. Israel recently faced this most troubling predicament. Combing through declassified state archives, Israeli scholars of the past twenty years have discovered their nation was founded upon the mass expulsion and deliberate destruction of the native Palestinian people. (1) Israel, it turned out, was far more Goliath than David. Since this presented somewhat of a public relations problem for a state still engaged in brutalizing Palestinians and stealing their land, a new self-justifying rationale needed to be authored.

Enter the "new anti-Semitism." This doctrine turns reality on its head, declaring criticism of Israel's racist behavior to be itself racist ­ "anti-Semitic." Empathy for Palestinians being beaten, bullied, and bulldozed out of existence, the doctrine goes, is nothing but some disguised expression of Jew-hatred. Goose-stepping Germans and uprooted Palestinians are portrayed as part of the same unbroken line of anti-Semitism, even though those inhabiting concentration camps today ­ "the largest ever to exist," says Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling - are the Palestinians themselves. (2) But no matter. Abusing the memory of Holocaust victims to shut down criticism of Israeli crimes ­ crimes unearthed mostly by Jewish historians - may be obscene, but it is also effective.

Wielding this new ideological weapon, Israel's champions aim to cut down pro-Palestinian voices inside America with the same ruthlessness Israeli soldiers employ to shoot up Palestinian children outside their homes. (3) The latest targets in this well-organized hit are Arab-American professors at Columbia University who teach Middle Eastern studies. The targets have been judiciously selected. Since these particular professors are Arab in an age when bombing and torturing Arabs has virtually become a national sport, they make for easy prey; and since they have added to their original sin of being Arab the even graver sin of speaking the truth about Israel's past ­ no less in a country which subsidizes Israel's existence - they also make for necessary prey.

In full accordance with "new anti-Semitism" modus operandi, the attacks paint the professors themselves as the attackers. With Orwellian brushstrokes, they are rendered as demons bent on "intimidating" Jewish students at the university. This much is to be expected. Less expected, however, is the almost embarrassing shoddiness of the trumped-up production. The wild charges made against the professors are so poorly substantiated and the political motives of the accusers so painfully transparent, one almost forgets that America's well-financed pro-Israel network has extensive experience in smearing its opponents. (4)

Curiously, the charges of "silencing" and "intimidation" first made waves when it was learned that the accusing students made their case on camera. They appeared in a short film, titled "Columbia Unbecoming", produced by a Boston-based group called the David Project. At this point it is both necessary and prudent to ask: what is the "David Project"?

At its website, the organization describes itself as "a grassroots initiative that promotes a fair and honest understanding of the Middle East conflict." A noble enough endeavor, no doubt. But a few lines later, we come to this: "We train people to be pro-active in their Israel advocacy" Another page offers ­ for a fee, of course ­ an intense three-hour ideological session titled "Making the Case for Israel." Searching for a "Making the Case for Palestine" program yields no results. Similarly, a look at the speaker's roster reveals many pro-Israeli speakers, but not a single pro-Palestinian. Perhaps most revealing is the text prefacing their speaker section: "For more information on how to bring our speakers to your synagogue, school, church, or community center, please call" (5) Apparently churches and synagogues are welcome, but mosques need not apply. One wonders why.

The site then goes on to describe what it considers to be a "fair and honest position": "The essence of the Middle East conflict is about Jewish existence and self-determination in the face of a hostile Arab world and radical Islamists." (6) Israel's own recent historians take a rather different view. Commenting on the founding of Israel, Senior Lecturer of Military History in the IDF Aryeh Yitzhaki says, "a generation has passed, and it is now possible to face the ocean of lies in which we were brought up. In almost every conquered village in the War of Independence, acts were committed, which are defined as war crimes, such as indiscriminate killings, massacres and rapes." (7) Describing Zionism ­ the founding ideology of Israel ­ another Israeli historian, Tom Segev, writes: "'Disappearing' the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its existence. With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer - or its morality." (8)

Committing war crimes and disappearing people from their homes doesn't quite square well with pious rhetoric about "self-determination." But the folks at the David Project are free to cling to their pro-Israel political line. That they do so while pretending to be some kind of impartial educational group, however, speaks volumes. So much for "fairness" - and, even more so, "honesty."

Given the clear ideological orientation of the David Project, one is forced to ask the obvious: why would students claiming to be "intimidated" and "silenced" by their professors bypass all university channels, and rush headlong into the arms of a political front group? Looking at the film itself provides us some answers.

In this half-hour production featuring 14 students, only six present firsthand complaints; standing accused are professors Joseph Massad, George Saliba, and Hamid Dabashi. Complaints range from random flyering incidents having nothing to do with professors, to general ideological disagreements with what professors have written, to statements they allegedly made in person. No evidence is presented for any of the charges.

Columbia student Adam Sacarny wrote in the school's newspaper upon seeing the film: "Much like the electoral campaigns, it uses talking points in place of pesky verifiable facts," adding, "The film's case is so shoddy that I fail to see how any critical viewer could leave the theater convinced that [the department] has violated academic integrity standards." (9) Even the generally sympathetic Israeli daily Haaretz admits, "The movie fuses few solid examples of intimidation ­ only some of which involved professors and the students they were teaching ­ with generalized complaints of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements and behavior on campus." (10) And despite these students' claims of being "silenced," "intimidated," and "denied"(their own words), not one of them say their grades were affected. (11)

Quite "coincidentally," the main target of the film is the untenured professor

Joseph Massad. He is accused of making outlandish comments and exhibiting an extreme intolerance toward pro-Israeli views in class. Yet only one of the students in the film has even taken a course with the professor. Moreover, precisely none of them even majored in the "offending" department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. (12) But rest assured. The complaining students have other "qualifications."

One student shuttles back and forth from America to Israel to explain how to adjust the prefatory sales pitch for the film depending on the audience. (13) Another served in the Israeli military, which, according to events personally witnessed by former New York Times Middle East Bureau chief Chris Hedges, "entice[s] children like mice into a trap and murder[s] them for sport," and which also, according to a CIA study, acquires "data for use in silencing anti-Israel factions in the West" and engages in "sabotage, paramilitary and psychological warfare projects, such as character assassination and black propaganda." (14) Another complaining student who was a lead organizer for the film, Ariel Beery, boasts an impressive resume: he served as a spokesman for the Israeli military, is the head of the on-campus Zionist group, and is also an agent and informer for Daniel Pipes' notorious CampusWatch.org website, where students are encouraged to "report" their professors' political views if they are deemed insufficiently servile to the conservative party line. (15)

But this is not all

None of the targeted professors were even allowed a chance to rebut the charges on the film. The reason for this, according to David Project head Ralph Avi Goldwasser, in comments given to the Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post, is that "the film wasn't meant to be a documentary; it was merely an effort to collect students' testimony about classroom incidents." Unsurprisingly, the David Project is simply being dishonest (again), since it turns out that they deliberately ignored the voices of Jewish and non-Jewish students who found such "incidents" to be fabricated and had no problems with the targeted professors. Eric Posner, who describes himself as "a Jew, an Israeli, a Jerusalemite, and an American," reports that "I was approached last year by Ariel Beery who wanted to hear my opinion about MEALAC and Massad, whose class I was enrolled in at the time. When I expressed my profound appreciation for Massad's critical approach and the multiplicity of perspectives that he offers in his classroom, Beery told me that he wouldn't be calling me back for a taped interview." (16)

Posner also took it upon himself to gather some highly illuminating statements from other students who took Professor Massad's classes. Below are four:

"Several individuals who audited this class regularly attempted to disturb the progress of the class. During these disturbances, the auditors often attempted to dominate the class discussion with personal statements unrelated or extremely loosely related to the course material. They were regularly unprepared for the classroom discussion, not having completed the required reading, and for the most part were largely ignorant of the class' subject matter. It was fairly obvious that these individuals had registered for the course for the sole purpose of disrupting the progress of the class. To my amazement, [Massad] allowed each and every student in the class an opportunity to speak, regardless of their familiarity with the class subject matter and required course material."
-John Taplett

"I am Jewish. I am not a Zionist. Joseph Massad is a man who understands the distinction and does not attempt to conflate the two around a vague connection with Israel. Knowing that he is being accused of anti-Semitism is not only a slap in HIS face, it is a slap in the face of every Jew who understands a legacy of oppression and chooses not to become an oppressor."
-Maura Finkelstein

"On the question of religion, he was openly critical of all religions including Islam ­ his anti-Israeli opinions could not reasonably have been construed as anti-Semitic. Similarly, while being critical of Israeli policy, he did not hesitate to offer critical opinions of Yasser Arafat. In general, he maintained a tone of critical scholarly inquiry."
-Hitesh Manglani

"As for academic discrimination, I am a Jew who wrote a term paper criticizing Palestinian nationalism for its foundation in support for violence, and despite Massad's supposed bias, he gave me an A."
- Benjamin Wheeler (17)

By now the general picture is quite clear. An ideologically motivated clique of Zionist students, possessing no actual evidence of "intimidation" but infuriated upon hearing their fairy-tale version of Israeli history dismantled, teamed up with a pro-Israel political front group masquerading as educators to smear a few Arab professors as "anti-Semites" - conveniently excluding the opinion of those "Semites" who fully support their teachers and actually took classes with them.

More damning than the poverty and hollowness of the film, however, is the fact that it was even produced. After all, what kind of "victimized" students are able to summon to their command the financial and technical resources of something like the David Project? Moreover, how do such "victims" procure for themselves a $3 million dollar building on campus, a privilege no other Columbia group enjoys? (18) Claims to victimization ­ a central feature in the reverse-reality trick known as "the new anti-Semitism" - are also completely discredited by the fact that viciously right-wing tabloids in New York, the Sun and the Daily News, have joined in on the attack against the professors, castigating them as "firebrands" and demanding they be fired. Prominent New York City politicians have also demanded that the professors be "investigated" if not fired outright. (19) Truly remarkable is the "victim" so well-endowed in assets and allies.

I do not mean to suggest, however, that these Zionist students have no understanding of intimidation or persecution - far from it. Indeed, they well know of a place where people are intimidated in extreme ways, often "ordered to urinate and execrate on one other," "beaten and ordered to crawl around;" a place where children are forced to clean their masters' latrines and are then taken into rooms to be beaten senseless, until "they cannot stand up"; where passengers are pulled from cars and then "beaten with rifle butts and helmets"; where pregnant women are prevented from reaching hospitals; where the masters refer to the slaves as a "cancer" requiring "chemotherapy" or "amputation" ­ where in essence, people are treated far worse than anything these students claim to have undergone. (20)

The "where" is occupied Palestine, the people being brutalized are Palestinians, and those doing the brutalizing are Zionists. Here is where millions of natives suffer under military occupation imposed by Israeli soldiers - at least 20% of whom "join the army with the preconception that Arab lives are worth less than Jewish lives, " according to Israeli Major General Elazar Stern. (21) Here is where unarmed 13 year-old girls can be shot twice "from close range at [the] head" and then "sprayed with automatic gunfire" afterwards without penalty. (22) Here is where real, actual, tangible "intimidation" and "silencing" takes place. And here is where our whining Zionists at Columbia could go and learn an object lesson in what intimidation is all about ­ if only they were not preoccupied with endorsing it.
It is a resounding indictment of the intellectual and moral poverty of our times that those who support murder, torture, brutality, and racism - while lounging around in plush multi-million dollar offices on an Ivy League campus and starring in pseudo-documentaries, no less - are considered the victims, those speaking on behalf of the suffering are considered criminals, and those actually suffering from the real atrocities taking place are not considered at all.
For those concerned with justice, the course of action could not be clearer. Now is a time not for interminable hesitance, but immediate resistance. The extraordinary level of arrogance, cruelty, and hate embodied by the forces promoting this and numerous other right-wing witch-hunts cannot be allowed to prowl about unchecked. For this is merely an extension of the war of bombs and bullets being waged upon the Arabs abroad; it is an attempt to Guantanomize our minds, Abu Ghraib our hearts, and Fallujah our souls - to remove from us every last trace of what is the best in each of us: the instinct to side with the weak and aid the oppressed.

To resist this colonization of our compassion, to re-cultivate our resistance against those who believe in the "compassion" of colonization ­ these are the pressing demands of the hour. How vigorously we respond to these demands will determine whether those bruised, beaten children of Palestine will ultimately receive some respite from their inhumane condition, or instead find themselves further abused by the silent whip of indifference. In their eyes we will read either the redemption or indictment of the moral standing of our own country.

M. Junaid Alam, 22, is co-editor of the radical youth journal Left Hook (http://www.lefthook.org), and a student at Northeastern University. He can be reached at alam@lefthook.org.

Notes

1. The Israeli historians who have gone through some of the state's massive archives of the pre-war and war period of 1947-9 sometimes refer to themselves as 'new historians.' They include Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tanya Reinhart, Ilan Pappe, and many others. I would recommended as an introduction The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, edited by Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, which contains a number of 'new historian' essays.

2. Kimmerling is cited by American Jewish historian Norman G. Finkelstein in the Postscript to the German edition of his book, The Rise and Fall of Palestine. (http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=4&ar=8) In the preface to Kimmerling's own 2003 book, Politicide, which argues that Israel is trying to exterminate the Palestinians as a political entity, he says his country is experiencing a "recent drift towards fascism." (p. 7)

3. For an account of Israel's pattern of shooting Palestinian children, see the article "Killing children is no longer a big deal," by Gideon Levy, in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, October 17, 2004.

4. For an account of the treatment meted out to those who defy the Israeli line in the U.S. by America's pro-Israeli lobby, see They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby, by Paul Findley, who served as congressman of Illinois for over two decades.

5. The David Project website is located at http://www.davidproject.org. See the "Training" and "Speakers" pages.

6. See note 5, the website's front-page box titled "Understanding the conflict."

7. Yitzhaki is cited in the Israeli paper, Ha'ir, by Guy Erlich in his May 6, 1992 article, "Not Only Deir Yassin." Deir Yassin was an Arab village whose inhabitants were massacred by Zionist militia in 1948.

8. Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, pp.404-5; cf. pp. 403, 406-7, 508 ­ as cited in the matchless synopsis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by Norman G. Finkelstein, titled "An Introduction to the Israel-Palestine Conflict." (http://normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=4&ar=10)

9. "Shedding light on MEALAC," by Adam Sacarny, November 12, 2004, Columbia Spectator.

10. "The 'Silent Jews' speak out," by Shoshana Kordova, Haaretz, February 9, 2005.

11. About grades not being affected, see: "Non-academic debate," by Uriel Heilman, The Jerusalem Post, December 23, 2004 (updated December 29, 2004).

12. Only one student actually had Massad for class ­ see "CAN Fights Zionist Smear Campaign at Columbia Univ.," by Suzie Schwartz, a Columbia student, Left Hook, December 17, 2004. (http://lefthook.org/Ground/Schwartz121704.html); and none majored in the department ­ see Eric Posner, as quoted in Independent Press Association (IPA-NY), "The Arab answer to the Columbia University question," by Amal Hageb. (http://www.indypressny.org/article.php3?ArticleID=1834)

13. See note 10.

14. Chris Hedge's A Gaza Diary, published in Harper's, October 2001; CIA study is titled "Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services," reprinted in Counterspy, May-June 1982 ­ as cited in Noam Chomsky's A Fateful Triangle Updated Edition, 1999, cited on page 11, sourced on page 33, as note 9; one of the accusers in the film was Tomy Schoenfeld - "a student who had served in the Israeli army" ­ according to "Mideast Tensions are Getting Personal on Campus at Columbia," by N. R. Kleinfield, The New York Times, January 18, 2005.

15. Ariel Beery proudly advertises himself at his personal website, http://www.arielbeery.com, where it is written, "He finished his service in the IDF Spokesperson's Unit where he wrote and translated information packets" on this specific page: http://www.arielbeery.com/Ariel.html; a host of his "documents" submitted to Campus Watch are kindly made available at the website: http://www.campus-watch.org/docs/author/Ariel+Beery

16. As quoted in IPA piece cited in note 12.

17. All quoted in IPA piece cited in note 12.

18. This is a reference to the Kraft Center - "Understanding the Attacks on Pro-Palestinian Professors at Columbia," by Jonah Birch, a Columbia Student, Left Hook, January 28, 2005. (http://lefthook.org/Ground/Birch012805.html)

19. Congressman Anthony D. Weiner has called for Massad's firing. The New York City Council and members of the New York City Council have called for an outside investigation against him, egged on of course by the Sun and the Daily News.

20. On urination and execration, beating, and being ordered to crawl around, see "Do not say: 'We did not know, we did not hear'," by Aharon Bachar, in Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, December 3, 1982 ­ as cited in Noam Chomsky's A Fateful Triangle, cited on page 131, sourced on page 176-7. On being forced to clean latrines and then being beaten in rooms, see "Peace Now officers recount atrocities," in Israeli newspaper Al Hamishmar, May 11, 1982 - as cited in Noam Chomsky's A Fateful Triangle, cited on page 132, sourced on page 177; on being beaten with rifle butts and helmets, see "Reports of Torture by Israelis Emerge," by Lee Hockstader, Washington Post, August 18, 2001; for pregnant women being stalled at Israeli checkpoints, see Israeli human rights group B'TSelem's website, www.btselem.org, and see note 3; it was Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon who said in an August 30, 2002 interview with Haaretz Friday Magazine that there was a "Palestinian threat" the "characteristics of [which] are invisible, like cancer"; he then goes on to elaborate, "There are all kinds of solutions to cancerous manifestations. Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs. But at the moment, I am applying chemotherapy, yes."

21. "General: 1 in 5 troops behave badly at roadblocks," by Gideon Alon, Haaretz, December 6, 2004.

22. "Gaza girl death officer cleared," BBC News, October 15, 2004. The article notes, "Without revealing their identities, soldiers from the Givati brigade platoon told Israeli television how their officer sprayed Iman al-Hams with automatic gunfire on 5 October" after having "approached her and fired two bullets from close range at her head." The army chose not to believe the platoon, and accepted the awe-inspiring explanation of the commander that "he fired into the ground near the girl after coming under fire in a dangerous area." The BBC adds wryly, "It has not explained why the officer shot into the ground rather than at the source of the fire."

Rotten to the...

Chris Floyd is one of the best around. He uses a lot of links, but the annotations urls don't come across active; so it's tedious. For live links on his sources, go to the original. -ape

Global Eye
By Chris Floyd



Core Values
Chris Floyd, The Moscow Times
February 25, 2005

Day in and day out, patriotic American dissidents on both the left and the right keep shovelling through the bloody muck of the Bush Imperium. The filth is endless, Augean; Salon.com recently catalogued 34 ongoing major scandals, equalling or surpassing the depravity of Watergate. Yet still the patriots bend to the task, tossing up steaming piles of ugly truth before the public.

And with every loud splattering of fresh Bushflop, there's a flurry of hope that this time, the dirt will stick; this time, the stench of corruption will be so overwhelming that the nation's long-somnolent conscience will be aroused. Yet each time, the rancid slurry just disappears down the drain: The Bushists tell their butt-covering lies, the "watchdogs" of the media wag their tails and all is well again in the land that Gore Vidal so aptly dubbed the United States of Amnesia. No scandal, no matter how outrageous, ever gains any traction.


But there is a simple reason why patriots on both the right and the left are stymied: because the center is rotten to its well-wadded, self-righteous, wilfully ignorant core. We speak here of the nation's "great and good," pillars of the community and stalwarts of the established order, the "captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, the generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, industrial lords and petty contractors," in T.S. Eliot's words -- to which we might add, as a modern gloss, the highly credentialed academics, extremely well-remunerated corporate journalists, politically wired churchmen and the innumerable massagers of public opinion and commercial desire.

It is this center -- which prides itself on being sensible, moderate, decent and respectable -- that has become morally corrupted beyond measure, perhaps beyond remedy. Here, where there should be thunderous denunciations of the Bush regime's rape of American honor -- a litany of sins that includes aggressive war, the decimation of cities, vile acts of torture, kidnappings, "renditions," imprisonment without charges, indefinite detention, assassinations, war profiteering and the exaltation of presidential power above the reach of law -- there has been only silent acquiescence, or the rare, decorous, timorous murmur, or, increasingly, enthusiastic support.

An obscure news story from last week, buried in the back pages -- if noted at all -- provides a vivid glimpse of the center rot. It was an ordinary wire piece from Knight-Ridder, standard Washington wonkery about a bureaucratic turf battle. It dealt with one of the recommendations of the "9-11 Commission" -- that assemblage of the great and good whose "independent" investigation of the 2001 terrorist attacks on America unearthed a vast tangle of criminal negligence and fatal incompetence for which, miraculously, not a single member of the great and good bore the least responsibility.

The commission issued a slew of recommendations for upgrading national security, including the much-ballyhooed creation of a new "Director of National Intelligence" to oversee the ever-spreading octopus of U.S. "security organs" -- 15 separate spy agencies at last count (that we know about). The wisdom of this advice was borne out by George W. Bush's choice for the post: John Negroponte, the death-squad enabler and atrocity manager best known for burying evidence of CIA-sponsored murders, massacres and torture in Central America during the Reagan-Bush I years. Fresh from not-dissimilar duties in Baghdad, this distinguished civil servant is now bringing his dark arts to the Homeland -- to general approval from the stalwarts.

But the sages had another, lesser-known recommendation: consolidating "all secret U.S. paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert" within the Pentagon. This would make such operations "more robust," the worthies said. But the CIA objected to having its own secret armies taken away. After months of negotiation, it was decided last week that the Pentagon and CIA would keep their separate paramilitary capabilities.

What exactly are these "paramilitary operations" which the commission, the U.S. Congress and all our stalwarts think we should have more of?

As Knight-Ridder notes, they are actions "conducted by armed units that do not belong to conventional military formations" -- in other words, terrorist groups, according to the Bush regime's own definition. Those designated as terrorists by Bush should not be covered by the Geneva Conventions, we are told, because they are not part of a "conventional military formation." They're outlaws, Bush says, fit to be killed or locked up without charges. Yet of course he commands the largest collection of such "outlaws" in the world.

And "outlaw" is no metaphorical term here. As Knight-Ridder explains, specifically "covert" operations are those "in which the U.S. government wants to be able to deny any involvement" because they "at times violate international law or the laws of war."

Here we come to the crux of the rot. Not a single Establishment stalwart involved in the matter -- not Congress, nor the Commission, nor the President, nor the press -- objected in the least to this horrifying reality: that the U.S. government routinely violates "international law and the laws of war" in secret terrorist actions by "unconventional" forces, including CIA operatives, local proxies and hired killers. It's simply accepted, across the board, as standard practice. In fact, the only concern about these admittedly criminal actions -- directed by unrestricted presidential fiat, with their true ends (Counterterrorism? Personal enrichment? Political power games? Ideological zealotry?) forever hidden from public scrutiny -- is how to make them more "robust," more efficient and more deadly.

The great societal bulwarks that should mitigate the abuse of power have instead embraced the barbaric ethos of brute force in order to maintain their own comfort, privilege and self-regard. For them, law has become a pretty sham and honor is a fiction, while respectability and decency are fairy tales for fools and children. Truth will never hold where the center is so murderously corrupted.

Annotations


CIA, Pentagon Reject Recommendation on Paramilitaries
Knight-Ridder, Feb. 16, 2005

A Wave of Torture and Murder in Honduras: Did Washington Know? Yes
Baltimore Sun, June 11, 1995

Promoting the Ambassador of Torture
Democracy Now, Feb. 18, 2005

History of Guatemala's Death Squads
Consortiumnews.com, Jan. 11, 2005

Guatemalan Death Squad Dossier
National Security Archives, May 20, 1999

The CIA in Latin America
National Security Archives, March 14, 2000

Negroponte's Dark Past
The Nation, Feb. 17, 2005

Negroponte's Blind Spots
Consortiumnews.com, Feb. 18, 2005

Alberto Gonzales' Tortured Arguments for Reigning Above the Law
LA Weekly, Jan. 14-20, 2005

Torture Treaty Doesn't Bar `Cruel, Inhuman' Tactics, Gonzales Says
Knight-Ridder, Jan. 26, 2005

The Secret World of US Jails
The Observer, June 13, 2004

The Torture Memos: A Legal Narrative
CounterPunch, Feb. 2, 2005

CIA Takes on Major Military Role: 'We're Killing People!
Boston Globe, Jan. 20, 2002

Reagan and Guatemala's Death Files
Consortiumnews.com, May 26, 1999

Death, Lies and Bodywashing
Consortiumnews.com, 1996

US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004

Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004

America's Amnesia on Torture
The Progressive, July 2004

U.S. Arming Baathist Militia's to Combat Shiite Cleric Rule
Asia Times, Feb. 15, 2005

Bush's Death Squads
Ratical.org, Jan. 31, 2002

Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill Terrorists
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2002

Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003

Coward's War in Yemen
Spiked, Nov. 11, 2002

Drones of Death
The Guardian, Nov. 6, 2002

Memo Regarding Presidential Executive Order on Interrogations
Federal Bureau of Investigation, May 22, 2004

Rumsfeld's Dirty Little Secret
Center for American Progress, Jan.

Pentagon's Secret Spy Unit Broadens Rumsfeld's Power
San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 23, 2005

Pentagon Files Reveal More Allegations of Abuse in Iraq
Los Angeles Times, Jan. 25, 2005

America's Death Squads
Antiwar.com, Jan. 10, 2005

Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005

Uncle Bucky Makes a Killing

It's a Family Affair


Uncle Bucky Makes a Killing
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
March 2, 2005

Back in 1991, shortly after the depleted uranium-flaked dust had settled some from the first Gulf War, there was a minor tempest in the press over influence peddling by members of the Presiden George H. W. Bush's family, including his son Neil and his brother Prescott, Jr. Both Neil and Prescott, neither of whom had proven to be exceptionally talented businessmen, had made millions by flagrantly trading on their relationship to the president.

Seeking to distinguish himself from his more predatory relatives, William Henry Trotter Bush, the younger brother of Bush Sr. and an investment banker in St. Louis, gave an interview to disclaim any profiteering on his own part. Indeed, he sounded downright grumpy, as if his older brother hadn't done enough to steer juicy government deals his way. "Being the brother of George Bush isn't a financial windfall by any stretch of the imagination," huffed William H.T. Bush.

Well, perhaps being the brother of the president didn't generate as much business as he hoped, but having the good fortune to be the uncle of the president certainly appears to have padded the pockets of the man endearingly known to George W. Bush as "Uncle Bucky."

A few months before his selection as president, Bush's Uncle Bucky quietly joined the board of a small and struggling St. Louis defense company called Engineered Support Systems, Incorporated (ESSI). Since Bush joined the team, ESSI's fortunes have taken a dramatic turn for the better. This once obscure outfit is now one of the top Pentagon contractors. Next year its revenues will top $1 billion, nearly all of it derived from defense contracts with the Pentagon or with foreign militaries financed by US aid and loan guarantees. Even sweeter, most of these contracts have been awarded in no bid, soul source deals.

True to form, Uncle Bucky claims that ESSI's amazing transformation has nothing to do with him or his nephew, the president. "I don't make any calls to the 202 (DC) Area Code," Bush sneered to the Los Angeles Times.

Uncle Buck's characteristic modesty was swiftly undercut by statements made by top executives at ESSI, who seemed proud that their foresight in inviting Bush on board had paid off so handsomely for all concerned. "Having a Bush certainly doesn't hurt," chuckled Dan Kreher, ESSI's vice president for industrial relations.

Uncle Bucky Bush is 16 years younger than his brother, the former president. According to Kitty Kelley's gripping history of the Bush clan The Family, Bucky was raised "almost as an only child" by his aging parents Dorothy and Prescott Bush, the senator who traded with the Nazis. Bucky was a sensitive and precocious kid with a peculiar devotion to choral music. In fact, the highlight of his career at Yale University was his starring spot with Whiffenpoofs, an elite choir.

While his older brother headed to Texas to make his name in the oil patch, Bucky returned to St. Louis, the Gateway City where the original Bush fortune had been built. He settled into a modest career as an investment banker and corporate consultant. Then, with his nephew poised to seize the White House, Uncle Bucky was offered a seat on the board of ESSI, a military support and defense electronics firm. ESSI's company prospectus describes it as "a diversified supplier of high-tech, integrated military electronics, support equipment and logistics services for all branches of America's armed forces and certain foreign militaries."

Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, ESSI positioned itself to win a series of lucrative Pentagon contracts that would catapult the diminutive firm into the top ranks of defense contractors. Within a few short months, the company's shareholders were given the financial ride of their lives.

By the time of the Iraq war, ESSI was a brawny new player on the defense block. In the spring of 2003, ESSI acquired a military communications company called TAMSCO, whose prime activity was in developing military satellite terminals in the Gulf region and in US bases in Germany in anticipation of a US invasion of Iraq. After the ESSI buy-out, TAMSCO swiftly won contracts from both the Air Force and the Army for more than $90 million for the training of troops in the operation of the system and the installation of radar equipment in Kuwait.

Then Pentagon awarded ESSI a $49 million contract to remodel military trailers for use in Iraq.

In 2003, the Defense Department gave ESSI a huge deal to provide the Army with equipment to search for Iraq's non-existent chemical and biological weapons. Part of this package included a $19 million contract to provide protective tents for US troops from chemical bombs. The tents didn't arrive in Iraq until after it was evident to nearly everyone that the Iraqi military didn't have access to such weapons. This didn't stop the money from flowing into ESSI's coffers and it didn't stop ESSI's executives from playing along in the grand charade. "The potential threat of our troops facing a chemical or biological attack during the current conflict in Iraq remains very real," huffed Michael Shananan, the company's former chairman.

As the invasion transformed into a military occupation of Iraq, ESSI continued to pluck off sweet deals. In late 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose contracts passed across the Pentagon desk of arch neocon Douglas Feith, awarded ESSI an $18 million deal to engineer a communications system for the CPA offices, barricaded inside Baghdad's Green Zone.

Its executives openly clucked at the likelihood for protracted war. "The increasing likelihood for a prolonged military involvement in Southwest Asia by US forces well into 2006 has created a fertile environment for the type of support products and services we offer," gloated Gerald L. Daniels, the company's Chief Executive Officer. Rarely has corporate glee over the prospects of war profiteering been expressed so brazenly.

But Daniels had a point. Even as things began to go sour for the US in Iraq, ESSI stood to make lots of money. One of its biggest no-bid contracts came in 2004 in the wake of mounting causalities in light-armored vehicles hit by roadside bombs. ESSI won a deal to upgrade the armor of thousands of vehicles in or bound for Iraq. The company's annual report for 2005 forecast that ESSI might make as much as $200 million from this bloody windfall alone.

As the flood of new contracts poured in, ESSI's stock soared. In January of 2005, it reached its all-time high of $60.39 per share. A few days before the stock hit this lofty peak, Uncle Bucky quietly exercised his option to sell 8,438 shares of ESSI stock. He walked away from that transaction with at least $450,000. The stock sale occurred a few days after ESSI announced that the Pentagon had awarded it $77 million in new contracts for the Iraq war and a few days before word leaked to the press that the company was under investigation for its handling of older Pentagon contracts. The timing of the trade was perfect.

In a February 2005 filing with the Securities Exchange Commission, ESSI discreetly disclosed to its shareholders that the inspector general of Pentagon had launched an inquiry into a series of contracts awarded to the company in 2002 for work on the Air Force's troubled automated cargo loading machine called the Tunner.

While the company's chief financial dismissed the probe as "routine" and assured investors that it would have "no effect" on ESSI's fortunes, the Pentagon held to a more restrained assessment of the potential liability. Michael Wynne, acting undersecretary of Defense, said he had referred ESSI contracts valued at $158 million to the Pentagon's inspector general because the deals "appear to have anomalies in them." Many of the contracts were awarded on a no-bid basis and much of the probe appears to focus on the role Pentagon insiders played in steering the contracts to ESSI.

Much of the thrust behind ESSI's sudden rise has been fueled by no-bid or sole-source deals with the Pentagon. These no risk deals are part of a corporate strategy cooked up in part by non other than Uncle Bucky himself. In a profitable bit of self-dealing, ESSI hired its board member, Bucky Bush, as a consultant in 2002. Bush, who pulls in about $45,000 a year in director's fees, was paid an additional $125,000 for his advice on ESSI's buyout of other military contractors. The acquisition strategy outlined by Bush was to train the company's appetite on the gobbling up of companies that held no-bid or sole source deals with the Pentagon.

In January, ESSI spent $37.6 million to buy a New York electronics testing firm called Prospective Computer Analysis, Inc. In defending the purchase to shareholders, executives at ESSI emphasized that the company held "a lot of sole-source contracts."

Most recently, ESSI acquired Spacelink, Inc, a Virginia-based defense company, for $150 million. Spacelink, which supplies parts for military satellites, is poised to cash in on the $80 billion missile defense bonanza.

ESSI isn't the only defense-oriented company to acquire the services of Uncle Bucky. The banker from St. Louis has also been retained as a trustee for the global investment firm Lord Abbott, one of the primary financial underwriters of Halliburton. Lord Abbott is both one of the top 10 shareholders in Dick Cheney's former company, as well as one of its top mutual fund holders. It's all in the family.

Uncle Bucky didn't unload all of his ESSI stock. He still owns 45,000 shares valued at more than $2.5 million. He used the profits from the recent sale to purchase a vacation home in Florida near his other nephew nourishing presidential ambitions, Jeb Bush.

Who knows if the Bucky will finally stop there?

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book Grand Theft Pentagon, to be published in July by Common Courage Press.

Potters for Peace

Potters for Peace
When the Battlefield has No Borders
By DAVID SMITH-FERRI
February 25, 2005

Given its small population, the rural northern California county where I live is home to an extraordinary number of successful artists. Two of these artists, Jan Hoyman and Doug Browe, also participate in a remarkable organization, Potters for Peace , which began twenty years ago when a group of US potters sought ways to support the work of Nicaraguan potters while simultaneously opposing US aid to the Contras. While this support has grown to involve a wide range of cultural, artistic, and technical exchanges between potters, the organization is increasingly involved in providing the technical expertise to establish ceramic water filtration projects, a "high technique, low technology" system, as Doug puts it, for purifying water.

Last year, as untreated sewage continued to flow into drinking water supplies in Iraq and outbreaks of bacteriological diseases such as cholera and typhoid were reported in Basra, Najaf, Sadr City, and elsewhere, Doug was returning from two months in Thailand, spent in a refugee camp on the Burmese border, assisting residents of the camp in the final stages of a ceramic water filter project. It was his second trip to the refugee camp. During the first trip, he had located a source of accessible local clay, supervised the construction of an adobe kiln, and trained several residents in basic pottery techniques.

This second trip focused on the manufacture and firing of the water filters. Ceramic water filters, as Potters for Peace designs them, are essentially urns created from a careful mix of clay and a readily available "fibrous" material--sawdust, rice hulls, straw, etc.--and lined with colloidal silver. The fibrous material, when sized precisely and mixed with the clay in the proper portion, produces a porous urn that will allow the passage of water, but not bacteria--the bacteria are trapped by the fibers in the clay. The colloidal silver, which coats the outside of the urn, provides an additional anti-bacterial barrier. When poured into the filter, water polluted with a bacteriological disease such as e-coli, typhoid, or cholera, emerges bacteriologically clean.

It was my twelve year old daughter who, during a slide-show presentation by Doug of his experiences in Thailand, first suggested the obvious application of ceramic water filtration to Iraq. Clearly, low-tech water filtration is no substitute for reparation of Iraq's water and sewage treatment systems; but while the US occupation focuses on military goals, and "rebuilding" seems permanently stalled in the planning stages or utterly undermined by corruption and violence, a project which provides clean water to people can prevent illness and save lives, albeit on a small scale. This at least was our thinking. Doug and I met several times to discuss our interest in traveling to Iraq, and the basic raw material and equipment needs of the project, and I began to do some research.

The project, however, has never gotten beyond preliminary inquiries because neither of us can quite imagine leaving our families and traveling to Iraq given the reality of violence and kidnappings. The news coming out of Iraq is unremittingly bad. Two years ago, I visited Iraq in the months leading up to the US invasion. While in Basra, after spending the morning visiting leukemia patients in a hospital and having lunch in our semi-air-conditioned hotel, I waded back out into the sickeningly hot day with two other members of Voices in the Wilderness (vitw.org). Hassan, one of the shoeshine boys who slept on the lawn outside the hotel, flagged us down. He was exultant. "Look what we've got," he said. Inside the box, of all things, lay an injured pigeon, captured with a slingshot. The terrified pigeon lay on its side, struggling to breathe and futilely trying to right itself and escape. "We'll keep it alive until later," the boys told us, "and then meat for dinner!"

I thought at the time that the abject pigeon was a bloody symbol for Iraq itself. As difficult as it may have been for people to imagine scaling the sanctions wall to visit Iraq, it wasn't in actuality that difficult to do. But the occupation wall is another thing altogether. The battlefield in Iraq has no borders. As a result, Iraq today is even more isolated than it was during the sanctions regime, when isolation was decreed by fiat.

The news is not only bad, it is also demoralizing. Who hasn't felt worn down by the unremitting violence? Who doesn't know others--people who had been empowered two years ago by worldwide opposition to the invasion--who now feel powerless and are immobilized by it?

It isn't only the lawlessness in Iraq, the daily reports of people killed or injured by violence, it is also the ongoing pictures and reports of conditions at prisons which give a nightmarish quality to popular images of Iraq and work to keep people at a distance. Consider the recent news from US-run Abu Ghraib prison. Last week we learned that Manadel al-Jamadi, a prisoner who died last year in what was labeled a "homicide," actually died during a CIA interrogation, while suspended from his wrists.

We also learned that medical care at the prison has been so haphazard that "Physician's assistants and general practitioners amputated limbs, [and] a dentist did heart surgery Sometimes the hospital ran out of chest tubes, intravenous fluids or medicines. Medical staff members improvised, taking tubes from patients when they died and reusing them, without sterilization" (NYT, 2/4/05). Despite the availability of psychotropic drugs, the hundreds of people at the prison who are mentally ill have gone without treatment, because no psychiatrist has been available to work with them and prescribe the medication. In at least one case, staff used a leash to restrain a prisoner..

While opposition to the US occupation is the central contribution that we can make to the welfare of people in Iraq, its flipside, concrete and productive exchanges with Iraqi people, is also vital. For many people, supporting a worthy humanitarian project is a doorway into Iraq, a way to make a contribution and to connect positively with people there; for others, it is a way to revitalize, leading to greater political involvement. Apart from their intrinsic value, humanitarian projects can be a focus for education about the effects of US policies, and they can be rallying points around which political actions are organized.

In this regard, an opportunity is about to present itself. Over the next six weeks, US citizens in cities from Boston to Seattle to Los Angeles will have an opportunity to talk with and learn from Gino Strada, co-founder of an extraordinary international medical relief agency, Emergency - Life support for civilian war victims, currently operating medical facilities in war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Angola. It has conducted and concluded projects in Rwanda, Eritrea, Algeria, and Palestine (www.emergency.it). Emergency builds and runs surgical hospitals, rehabilitation centers for landmine victims, and medical clinics; and it builds them in places where no one else will, places which need specialist medical and surgical services: for example in Anabah, in a remote and dangerous region of Afghanistan.

Strada is in the U.S. on a book tour (www.emergencyusa.org), after the recent translation into English of his book, Green Parrots - A War Surgeon's Diary, a journal of his experiences as a surgeon for Emergency. Green Parrots is named after the antipersonnel landmine that looks like a toy and has maimed or killed many of the children Emergency has seen in its clinics in Afghanistan, where an estimated ten million anti-personnel mines and innumerable unexploded cluster bombs dot the landscape. Strada comes to the US directly from work in Afghanistan.

Strada's training as a surgeon and his wide and very personal experience of war and its immediate consequences give him a unique perspective on modern war and a powerful incentive to oppose it. He writes "Today there are many possible causes of war, but there is only one sure outcome: death, injuries, refugees, orphans. Wherever a war is fought, whatever weapons are used, it no longer consists of a clash between armies in a well-defined, limited battlefield. There is no official battle front. The front is the road, the marketplace, the village: the people who live there are the victims. 90% of them are civilians. 34% are children. Many armed groups deliberately mix with the population to avoid identification. Sometimes they actually use civilians as shields. Quite often, targeting and terrorizing large civilian groups are part of an army's primary military strategy."

Emergency has been in Afghanistan for five years and in northern Iraq--Erbil, Sulaimaniya, and Choman--for ten years. It has hopes of staffing a medical facility in Karbala, in South-Central Iraq. Strada's visit to the US is an important opportunity not only because of the critical medical care his organization provides, but also because of the information he can share about the causes and consequences of war around the globe. Perhaps his visit can be a catalyst for individuals and groups to initiate or deepen their commitment to people in war-torn countries such as Iraq, and to oppose US militarism. For information about Strada's tour, visit http://www.emergencyusa.org/GP/tour.php.

David Smith-Ferri is a member of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end U.S. economic and military warfare abroad and at home. He lives in Ukiah, CA. He can be reached at: smithferri@pacific.net

The Stepping Stones to Absolute Power: A Public Sacrifice

Stepping Stones to Absolute Power: A Public Sacrifice

C.L.Cook

pej.org

M1, '05

Way before the 9/11 conspiracy theorists sharpened their pencils and asked the crucial question no-one else would: Cui bono? Who benefits? there was an eerily familiar precedent to the 2001 terrorist attacks in America unfolding in Russia.

The infamous apartment building bombings in 1999 had the effect of bolstering the then-new president, Vladimir Putin's sagging public support during his unremarkable early days in power to a soaring, even heroic status. In the few short months following the bombings, he was also able, incidentally, to bring to fruition his determined effort to take a second swipe at the resolute rebellion in Chechnya. And, maybe in the process, make himself a "War President."

Putin's newly minted Czar-like status lent him the unquestioned authority to "rearrange" the constitution and concentrate legislative power in his own hands. Over the brief few years since the terror campaign against everyday Russians, Putin has managed to use the attacks to reverse virtually all the democratic reforms that resulted from the fall of communism and subsequent break up of the Soviet Union. But, it's not the ghosts of Chechnya keeping Putin up at night these days.

If he appears a man besieged, then he's a perfect portrait of Russia today. The United States and its allies in NATO have drawn a cordon around the former Empire, digesting it slowly with "democracy movements," support of regional tyrants, "shock and awe" extravaganzas in Russian neighbours, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and the emplacement of dozens of "hardened" U.S. military bases across the nation's southern flank.

The U.S. amplifies Putin's discomfort

Whispers of government complicity in the apartment bombings began early on: the heirs of the Soviet have an ingrained suspicion of power. But, who best benefits the apartment building bombings? For many, the answer comes up Putin and his hawkish friends in the military/intelligence complex.

The continued war and occupation of Chechnya hasn't been bad for everybody. Certain Russians, and their confrere elites were, and are, making like bandits. And they're not the only ones.

Stock and Claw

After three buildings had been felled within the month that black September, former KGB agents were caught by local residents and police planting the explosives in the basement of a fourth building. This arrest grew the whispers to a chatter; a disquiet not quelled by feeble official explanations for the red-handed arrest of their admitted agents.

Lame even as a shoolyard defense, Russia audaciously testified: "The agents were simply testing security." They also maintained, sacks of apparent explosives being laid down by their agents when caught in the act were actually harmless "flour." A feeble lie, made immediately apparent by former military men familiar with expolsives at the scene of the crime.

Or was it a crime? No charges were laid.

So, what we are left to ponder is: Would a president use the secret services of the nation to plan mass murder against his own people to forward a sinister conspiracy to undo democracy and create a military dictatorship?

Who could believe such a claim?

Alyona Morozova's family resided in one of three apartment buildings destroyed in the mad 1999 campaign of mahem that rocked Russia, and was all blamed on Chechen rebels.

Chechyna had already suffered a brutal war that saw the razing of cities on a level exeeding even NATO's destruction of Belgrade and the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. But the Chechens, never shy about inflicting damage against their hated oppressors, accepted no credit for a bombing campaign against civilian targets. Morozova wanted answers, and now says her questions have marked her for murder by those fearing the truth most. And, following her near obsessive investigation of the bombings, she points her finger squarely at Putin.

Today, Alyona Morozova finds herself centre stage in a global diplomacy power play that pits the two old Super Foes nose to nose. By filing for asylum in the United States, and the acceptance by the U.S. of her claims of a Putin-backed assassination plot against her, Morozova has become a new piece on a developing new Great Game board. It's a game that still includes massive destructive capabilties, including nuclear, on both sides. But for now, the more subtle thrust and parry...

Move: Russia - Technology leak to Iran {feint}

Counter: U.S.A. - Alyona Morozova {checkmate}

Though the Bush administration may enjoy Vladimir's discomfiture now, they may find themselves a-dangle on their own petard before long. The parallels between Russia's "little 9/11" in '99 and its greater Broadway production in 2001 have already been drawn, and the full scope of Alyona's story may lead to other loose bricks in the New W. O. It could shake the foundation of what appears an increasingly shook World Order.

For Morozova: She just wants out of a country run by a president who wouldn't think twice about haphazardly murdering neighbours; treating the citizenry as nothing better than serfs; fodder; pawns in a cynical game of self-aggrandizement. Alyona Morozova says she has to go. Too many of her friends and colleagues questioning what happened in September '99 have met with misadventure. Too many fatalities. But, should her story echo too loudly, becoming a precedent-parallel tale, staged in America, Alonya Morozova may want to reconsider her destination.

Look for the Morozova Affair, coming soon. It could prove an unraveling worth watching. -ape

Realigning the global power game

By Gwynne Dyer

PRESIDENT George W. Bush leaves the flourishing metropolis of Mainz tomorrow evening, after meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and flies to Bratislava for a dinner with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. (Mainz? Bratislava? Not Berlin and Moscow? Is Mr Bush avoiding European crowds?) The Russian and American presidents will doubtless maintain a polite facade, but it’s unlikely that Bush will emerge from this meeting to declare once again that "Pootie-Poot" is his soulmate.

The Russian-American relationship is not thriving, and the proof of it is the fact that the United States granted political asylum a month ago to Alyona Morozova, a Russian citizen who claims that her life is in danger because of her role in investigating a series of “terrorist” bombing attacks that killed 246 Russians in September 1999. The chief suspect in the bombings, according to her, is Vladimir Putin.

Three apartment blocks in Russian cities were destroyed by huge bombs that month, including one that left Alyona Morozova’s mother and boyfriend dead under the rubble. There had been peace between Russia and the breakaway republic of Chechnya since 1996, and no Chechen claimed responsibility for the bombings, but then-prime minister Vladimir Putin immediately blamed the atrocities on the Chechens and launched a second war against them that continues to this day.

Boris Yeltsin was in the last year of his presidency then, and he was seeking a way to retire without facing prosecution for the fortunes he and his cronies had amassed in their years of power. Vladimir Putin, former head of the FSB secret police, had recently been appointed prime minister by Yeltsin but was still largely unknown to the Russian public.

The deal was that Yeltsin would pass the presidency to Putin at the end of the year, and Putin would then grant Yeltsin an amnesty for all crimes committed while he was in office. But there was still the tedious business of an election to get through, and Russians who scarcely knew Putin’s name had to be persuaded to vote for him on short notice. How to boost his profile as Saviour of the Nation? Well, a war, obviously.

Alyona Morozova (and many others) claim that Putin’s old friends at the FSB carried out the apartment bombings themselves, in order to give their man a pretext to declare war on Chechnya and make himself a national hero in time for the presidential elections. It would be just one more unfounded conspiracy theory – except that only days after the big Moscow bomb, a resident at a similar apartment building in the city of Ryazan spotted three people acting suspiciously and called the local police.

The police founds sacks in the cellar that they initially said contained hexogen, the explosive used in the other bombings, together with a timer set for 5.30 am. They also discovered that the three people who had planted the explosives were actually FSB agents. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, insisted that the sacks contained only sugar and that the whole thing was a training exercise, and the local police fell silent, but there was no proper investigation.

Alyona Morozova fears the Russian government’s wrath because a number of other people who have tried to investigate the incident have been murdered or jailed on trumped-up charges of “espionage.” So she asked for political asylum in the United States: nothing surprising in that. It’s much more surprising that the US government actually granted her asylum, because it is implicitly acknowledging the possibility that President Vladimir Putin, in addition to being a mass murderer of Chechens, may also be a mass murderer of Russians.

You do not do this to countries you expect to be friends with. It may be the right thing to do, in moral terms, but that has not been a significant constraint on US policy towards trusted allies like Algeria, Egypt and Turkmenistan. Something else is going on here.

Just straws in the wind, but count them. Russia has refused to cut its support for Iran’s nuclear power projects despite all of Washington’s blandishments. Moscow is on the brink of a surface-to-air missile deal with Syria that would give that country the ability to challenge Israeli and even American overflights. The European Union is about to end its embargo on arms sales to China. The EU will go ahead with its Galileo satellite geo-positioning system, which can greatly improve missile accuracy, despite US protests that the existing American system (with fuzzed data for non-US military customers) is good enough for everybody. And it will sell the Galileo data to the Chinese.

There is a realignment going on, and it isn’t about ideology. If Russia were a fully democratic country, its foreign ministry would still be worried by US adventurism in the Middle East. If China were a democracy, it would probably be more active in opposing the American military presence in East Asia. And France and Germany, which are genuine democracies, increasingly see the US as a threat – not to them directly, but to global stability.

This change of attitude is not yet an accomplished fact, and a change of course in Washington could still abort the trend. But most of the world’s other major powers are starting to see the United States as a rogue state, and gradually they are responding to that perception. Nothing George W. Bush will say or do on this European trip is likely to change their minds.


Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

DU Effects: Duh!

DU: Possibly the Worst War Crime in History

Kurt Nimmo

February 28, 2005

It is totally astounding. Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush the Junior are war criminals of a caliber not witnessed since the war against the people of Vietnam (2-3 million killed).



It is estimated this threesome of mass murder have killed around 1.5 million Iraqis (under the supervision of Bush I and Clinton), at least 3,620 Afghan civilians (according to a count conducted by Marc Herold of the Guardian as of August 2002) and 100,00 Iraqi civilians under the supervision of Bush II (according to research conducted by The Lancet medical journal).


Add to this staggering death toll approaching 2 million another 11,000 Americans killed by “Gulf War Syndrome” and you have crimes of Nuremberg tribunal proportions.

“This malady (from uranium munitions), that thousands of our military have suffered and died from, has finally been identified as the cause of this sickness, eliminating the guessing. The terrible truth is now being revealed,” Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, told Bob Nichols…

Terry Jamison, Public Affairs Specialist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, at the VA Central Office, recently reported that ‘Gulf Era Veterans’ now on medical disability, since 1991, number 518,739 Veterans.”

Bernklau added: “The long-term effects have revealed that DU (uranium oxide) is a virtual death sentence,” stated Berklau. “Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers (from the 2003 Iraq War) as ’spectacular … and a matter of concern!’”

Nichols writes that Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter charged last week “that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down earlier this month was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions in the Iraq War….

The real reason for Mr. Principi’s departure was really never given, however a special report published by eminent scientist Leuren Moret naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of the ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ has fed a growing scandal about the continued use of uranium munitions by the US Military,” added Bernklau.

Add the World Health Organization (WHO) to the list of culprits. “An expert report warning that the long-term health of Iraq’s civilian population would be endangered by British and US depleted uranium (DU) weapons has been kept secret,” writes Rob Edwards for the Sunday Herald.

“The study by three leading radiation scientists cautioned that children and adults could contract cancer after breathing in dust containing DU, which is radioactive and chemically toxic. But it was blocked from publication by the World Health Organization (WHO), which employed the main author, Dr Keith Baverstock, as a senior radiation advisor. He alleges that it was deliberately suppressed, though this is denied by WHO.”

Baverstock’s study, which has now been passed to the Sunday Herald, pointed out that Iraq’s arid climate meant that tiny particles of DU were likely to be blown around and inhaled by civilians for years to come. It warned that, when inside the body, their radiation and toxicity could trigger the growth of malignant tumors.

The study suggested that the low-level radiation from DU could harm cells adjacent to those that are directly irradiated, a phenomenon known as “the bystander effect”. This undermines the stability of the body’s genetic system, and is thought by many scientists to be linked to cancers and possibly other illnesses.

After Pappy Bush finished his serial mass murder spree in 1991, “the radiation level in plants and animals [around Basra was] as much as 84 times the level that the World Health Organization says is safe,” reports the New Internationalist. “One of the doctors at Basra General Hospital has taken photographs to record all the babies who have been born with deformities.

The pictures are horrifying: babies without eyes, without brains, without arms, without legs, without sex organs, babies with internal organs on the outside of their bodies.” The number of cancer cases in Iraq has increased by up to 10 times and it was estimated at the time “that 44% of Iraq’s people will have cancer within ten years,” according to Felicity Arbuthnot.

As if to make sure hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in excruciating pain from various cancers, in 1992 “the US dominated Sanctions Committee refuse[d] to permit Iraq to import the clean-up equipment that they desperately need[ed] to decontaminate their country of the Depleted Uranium ammunition that the US fired at them.

Approximately 315 tons of DU dust was left by the use of this ammunition,” writes Hans de Jonge. If you have the stomach, take a look at these photographs of birth deformities and defects in Iraq caused by depleted uranium.

If 315 tons of DU seems like a large amount, consider that Bush II’s invasion left behind 1,700 tons, according to Jane’s, citing the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC). The UMRC “team’s preliminary tests showed that air, soil and water samples contained ‘hundreds to thousands of times’ the normal levels of radiation.”

All of this will eventually come back to the somnolent American public—and everybody else—who shrugged, flipped the channel when Bush’s invasion became boring, and voted to “re-elect” a war criminal president and Congress.

“Small particles less than 1 micron in diameter do not settle from the air but become incorporated into atmospheric dust and are transported around the earth until they are removed ("rainout") by rain, pollution or snow,” warns Leuren Moret of Scientists for Indigenous People in a letter sent to Congress critter Jim McDermott.

“Seasonal climate change, agricultural activities, fires and other natural and man-made disturbances will continue to remobilize particles in the upper dust level contaminating terrains off the battlefield… the depleted uranium dust will cycle through the environment both on and off the battlefield contaminating water supplies and food.”

Arjun Makihani, the president of the US Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, told the New Internationalist in 1998, that once “released, the particles can be directly inhaled, can pollute the water table and enter the food chain, spreading radioactive pollution over thousands of square miles. Exposure to this kind of radiation, as well as to chemical pollution, can cause genetic damage because of the ease with which uranium can cross the placenta to the foetus.”

“It’s still hot forever,” Doug Rokke, a former Pentagon DU expert, told Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor. “It doesn’t go away, it only disperses and blows around in the wind.”

So the next time you see an SUV in traffic with a yellow magnetic ribbon calling for everybody to “Support Our Troops,” think about the invisible cancer-causing particles wafting down in the rain or snow and thank Bush-Clinton-Bush (who may eventually kill far more people than Hitler or Stalin ever did).

All in the Family: Filial Favours and Making a Killing in Wartime

Bush's Uncle Makes $450K Off Iraq War

Democracy Now!

F24, '05

william "bucky" bush

The war in Iraq has helped President Bush's uncle make at least $450,000 in war-related profits. This according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. William Bush - who is known to the president as Uncle Bucky - sits on the board of the St. Louis-based defense contractor Engineered Support Systems.

The company supplies armor and other materials to U.S. troops. The company's stock prices have soared to record heights since the invasion, in part because it received no-bid contracts to rapidly refit fleets of military vehicles with extra armor.

Last month William Bush exercised options on over 8,000 shares of company stock. He made around $450,000 on the deal. William Bush joined the company's board in 2000 before his nephew was elected and claims he hasn't used his family's connections to help win contracts. But a spokesperson to the company admitted to the Los Angeles Times "Having a Bush doesn't hurt." William Bush's older brother is the former President George H.W. Bush. The company has been openly admitted that the country's ongoing wars has helped business. In its quarterly earnings report a year ago, the company's Vice Chairman and Chief Executive said: "The increasing likelihood for a prolonged military involvement in Southwest Asia by U.S. forces well into 2006 has created a fertile environment for the type of support ... products and services that we offer."

A Massacre of Lambs: Colombian Terror Squad Redux

Colombian army massacres members of Peace Community

We can scarcely find words; the pain overwhelms us so deeply that all we can do is weep. In a demonstration of its incredible illegitimacy, the Colombian state has carried out another massacre that bathes our land in blood.

The XI Brigade of the Colombian army massacred Luis Eduardo Guerra and six more people, including three children.

Luis Eduardo was a great friend and a great leader, defender of human rights, founder of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó and representative of the community. His death overwhelms us with indescribable pain, and the circumstances of his killing, and of the people who were massacred with him, fill us with anger and indignation.

On March 23, 1997, the civilian population of the 28 hamlets in the San Jose area declared the area a peace community. Since then, in this process of civil resistance, the community has lost over 150 members to massacres and assassinations, most ot them carried out by right wing paramilitaries collaborating with the Colombian security forces.

We believe that this act of terror speaks for itself. Luis Eduardo, your memory, your commitment, your clarity, your friendship give us strength in the midst of pain. As we always say, we will not retreat from our principles until the state and its paramilitaries finish us all.

Links to:

Full report from the Peace Community English Spanish | Colombia Indymedia

Pumping the PR Machine in DC

Your Tax Dollars at Work

By PR Watch

F25, '05

Along with doubling spending on external PR contracts, the Bush administration has increased PR positions inside government agencies, called public affairs.

Public affairs staffs grew by 9 percent since 2000, “even faster than the federal work force,” for a cost increase of more than $50 million.

The Pentagon “added the greatest number of PR officials.” Other increases occurred at the State, Agriculture and Interior Departments and the Social Security Administration.

The Forest Service’s Communications Director said “a growing number of advisory panels required by Congress and a controversial program that opens some forests to logging” necessitated the PR boost. He said media tracking had intensified, adding that “after talking to Newsday for this story, he would have to call his boss to report the interview.”

Source: Newsday, February 24, 2005

Spin of the Week comes courtesy of our friends at PR Watch.

Get their new book, Banana Republicans

Messianic Aspirant? Bush Meets World

Bush’s choice: messianism or pragmatism?
Anatol Lieven
22 - 2 - 2005

George W Bush’s language of freedom is not benevolent idealism
but ideological weapon, says Anatol Lieven.


President Bush has opened his second presidential term with a sustained rhetorical effort to use the language of “freedom” as a way of reuniting the west under American leadership. His inaugural address at the start of his second presidential term on 20 January 2005 ostensibly made the spread of freedom and democracy the heart of America’s political strategy in the “war on terror”. His State of the Union speech on 2 February continued the theme:

“The attack on freedom in our world has reaffirmed our confidence in freedom’s power to change the world. We are all part of a great venture: to extend the promise of freedom in our country, to renew the values that sustain our liberty, and to spread the peace that freedom brings.”

On the eve of his 21-24 February visit to Europe, his weekly radio talk declared:

“America and Europe are the pillars of the Free World…Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic understand that the hopes for peace in the world depend on the continued unity of free nations.”

Now, in the major speech of his European tour – at Concert Noble, Brussels – President Bush has underlined the ideological importance of the theme of freedom to his political mission:

“This strategy is not American strategy, or European strategy, or Western strategy. Spreading liberty for the sake of peace is the cause of all mankind. This approach not only reduces a danger to free peoples; it honors the dignity of all peoples, by placing human rights and human freedom at the center of our agenda. And our alliance has the ability, and the duty, to tip the balance of history in favor of freedom.”

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19890301fabook7390/rhodri-jeffreys-jones/
the-cia-and-american-democracy.html

Democracy is America

One can indeed get a certain distance with this line in Europe. After all, the European countries are themselves committed in principle to spreading democracy in the world, and this is at the core of the European Union’s own expansion. Tony Blair has echoed much of Bush’s language. The legacy of Communist rule and its overthrow means that east-central European elites have an instinctive tendency to pay tribute to language like Bush’s. Western European governments have aligned themselves with Bush’s “Greater Middle East Initiative” (proposed in February 2004) that aims to bring progress to the region – albeit partly in order to modify the arrogance of the United States approach. A disparate collection of western European intellectuals, including Timothy Garton Ash in Britain and Bernard-Henri Levy in France, have also sought to put cooperation in spreading freedom and democracy at the heart of a new transatlantic partnership and of strategy in the Muslim world.


Within the US, on the other hand, Bush’s approach has drawn considerable criticism, from old-style conservative realists as well as from voices on the left. In a pair of excoriating articles for Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria and Andrew Moravcsik draw attention to the yawning gulf between the views of most Americans and large majorities of non-Americans about the benevolence of their country’s role in the contemporary world.

All the same, a speech like Bush’s inaugural address could only have been delivered in the United States. Blair may have said many of the same things, but he has accompanied them with proposals for concrete, verifiable action in key areas of world concern: climate change, mass misery and state collapse in parts of the global south and a real peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. The same tends to be true of European Union rhetoric about spreading democracy.

Only in the US could “democracy” and “freedom” as such be advanced by a government not just as part of a non-military strategy but as the entire strategy and even as a way of avoiding doing some of the other things that Blair has called for. And above all, only in the US could a national leader identify the spread of democracy, and indeed ideal democracy itself, so absolutely with his own country and its power in the world. There is a nobility about this sentiment; but as Fareed Zakaria and Andrew Moravcsik argue, there is also a profoundly dangerous solipsism and arrogance.

A messianic vision

Indeed, much of the language about democratisation in America is not really about democratisation at all. It is about America itself, the nature of one powerful strand of American nationalism, and how the Bush administration has used that nationalism to strengthen its own position at home. Because of the power of this nationalism and the “American Creed” on which it is based (as I have called it in my book America Right or Wrong: an anatomy of American nationalism), the rhetoric of spreading democracy and freedom has been all too successful in wrong-footing the Democratic party and in winning over some of their intellectual supporters to what is in effect a position of support for the neo-conservative agenda.

Unfortunately, however, much of this rhetoric is completely irrelevant, in the short-to-medium term, to many of the challenges facing the middle east, and to the needs of the struggle against al-Qaida. Worse still, this whole democratisation strategy is being used, in some quarters at least, as a grand diversionary strategy to distract attention from what the US should be doing in other fields – but isn’t.

The acknowledged influence of Israeli hardliner Natan Sharansky on Bush’s “strategy” of democratisation should make it clear to everyone that, however noble its ideological and historical roots, American messianism – today, as in the Vietnam era – can take forms which are not only misguided but actively malignant. The contrast between Sharansky’s own professed desire for Palestinian democracy and his utter contempt for the lives, property, wellbeing and indeed democratically-expressed views of the Palestinian people is evident: it was expressed most recently in his decision in 2004, as minister for Jerusalem, to allow Israeli authorities to confiscate Palestinian land by administrative decree.

Bush’s reliance on Sharansky (whose book The Case for Democracy was one of the intellectual props of his inaugural speech), and the deep unwillingness even of the American liberal media to criticise the former Soviet dissident, demonstrate one facet of the Orwellian nature of the present US approach to democratisation and the war on terror. Not only is its language of democratisation accompanied by de facto support for a range of savagely authoritarian regimes, and its talk of the rule of law accompanied by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay; but key aspects of US strategy are based on an absolute and open contempt for the opinions of the great majority of ordinary Arabs and Muslims – in other words, the very people to whom the US administration professes to want to bring democracy!

This glaring contradiction is the product of an inevitable clash between American idealism and American Realpolitik. However, its roots also lie in a central feature of the messianic tradition in American civic nationalism. As reflected in the attitudes and behaviour of the Bush administration, the widespread American belief in America not as a democracy among others but as the very summit and model of democracy encourages contempt for the opinions of the rest of humanity – even when expressed by majorities in fellow democracies. The creation of a notion of “democracy” as a pure absolute discourages real study of all the conditions which are in fact needed for democracy to flourish.

This in turn encourages a belief that, in the words of the US general in Vietnam in Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket, “inside every gook there is an American waiting to get out”; in other words, that if you can get rid of a few Communist, Ba’athist or Iranian “bad guys”, populations naturally will both adopt American-style democracy and capitalism and side with America geopolitically. And finally, the immense power in the American national discourse of words like “democracy” and “freedom” can lead to them being used in a way described acutely by WH Auden during the cold war:

“More deadly than the Idle Word is the use of words as Black Magic…For millions of people today, words like Communism, Capitalism, Imperialism, Peace, Freedom and Democracy have ceased to be words the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee reflex.”

I have myself frequently observed how difficult it can be in the US to mount an argument that appears to criticise the universal, eternal and inevitable value of democracy, or to suggest that “freedom”, far from being a natural absolute, has always been a complex, contingent, changing and contested term. In other words, these terms can be used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to shut down real debate.

The power of the Creed

The reason for this distinctive aspect of the United States lies in the nature of American civic nationalism. This nationalism, and much of the US national identity itself, is based on the American Creed: belief in the values of democracy, the law, free speech and the US constitution; and less formally, in social and economic individualism, in America as the supreme exemplar of democracy and successful modernity, and in American benevolence, innocence, goodness and inevitable triumph.

Many great American thinkers from across the political spectrum have remarked on the power of this Creed. In the words of Richard Hofstadter: “it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.” A century earlier, Ralph Waldo Emerson described adherence to American governing principles as a form of religious conversion. In this sense, it bears a certain comparison to the role that Communism was supposed to play in the Soviet Union – with the crucial difference that the values of the American Creed have been both much more positive and much more successful historically. The strength of this Creed dates back even further than the foundation of the American colonies and 17th-century visions of America as the “city on a hill” to 16th-century English and Scottish Protestant beliefs in their countries as the “new Israel”.

The power of the Creed also stems from its immense importance in holding together the huge and immensely varied American nation, and giving it the ability constantly to assimilate vast numbers of new immigrants from hugely diverse backgrounds. Belief in the principles of the Creed is perhaps the only thing (other than the English language) that the gays of San Francisco and the fundamentalist Baptists of Texas have in common.

The consequences of this for American messianism are obvious. In her great study of the American involvement in Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald wrote: “Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind”.

For most of American history, this has been a “passive” messianism, which takes the form of a belief (in which I largely share, by the way) in the supreme importance of America’s democratic example in the world, but does not support outside interventions. As such, it is entirely compatible with American isolationism. However, at particular moments, when the US has been attacked or threatened, or feels forced to make some massive overseas commitment, this messianism can take an active form.

There is an element of tragedy in all this. For the values of the American Creed are indeed great ones, of inestimable value to mankind. The United States’ sense of a mission to humanity is in part a noble and inspiring one. And throughout modern history, the US has in fact acted both as a beacon for the rest of the world and as the last refuge and defender of democracy. US leadership in the 20th-century struggle against Nazism and Soviet Communism was essential to preserving democratic civilisation in the world. This past record ought to be able to provide the basis for the continuation of the idea of a west united under American leadership.


Today, however, the tragic flaws in this American sense of national mission are acting to wreck this hope. The national arrogance that is so closely linked to the sense of national mission is undermining still further American willingness to listen to key allies, even among the western democracies, let alone in the Muslim world. This arrogance is fed by the alliance with Israel – symbolised by Bush’s reliance on Natan Sharansky – which in turn reinforces the sense of a pure democratic America and Israel surrounded by a world full of hostile, tyrannical, anti-semitic aliens.

Historically, US messianism has always been at war with US pragmatism. In the end pragmatism has usually won. This was true in Vietnam, but only after a devastating war involving two million Vietnamese killed (and 58,000 Americans), enormous environmental degradation, and a cycle of destruction across southeast Asia. As Captain Willard declares in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now:

“I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one. It was a real choice mission. And when it was over, I’d never want another.”


My fear is that as in Vietnam, the return to pragmatism may come only after the United States has inflicted a whole series of disasters on itself and the world.

The Whirring Spin of Post-Election Iraq

Watching a moment or two of Sunday morning TV coming out of the U.S., it's obviously time to accentuate the positive on Iraq. The usual stable of apologists and propagandists appeared on various programs, all pounding the same drum: "Even the Europeans are coming around on Iraq. It's now a model for struggling democracy movements in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the whole Muslim world!"

The last time I looked, there's still a bloody occupation, lawlessness, lack of services, mass detentions and torture of innocent civilians. But, every road has a few bumps, eh?

Iran and Syria are starting to garner more attention from the payroll pundits. How they can look a camera in the eye is beyond me. I suppose the money is good. Iraq is, in the new spin zones, old news: The new Afghanistan, sequestered to the back pages.

But, before taking our leave from the ruined victim of crime, another look at Iraq through the eyes of Baghdad resident blogger, Rivebend.


Baghdad Burning... ... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Groceries and Election Results...

by Riverbend

F18, '05

Yesterday, one of our neighbors stopped by the house. She was carrying a hot plate of some green beans in a tomato sauce. “Abu Ammar has some wonderful green beans,” she confided. “But you have to tell him to give you some of the ones he hides under the table- the ones on display are a little bit chewy.” I added green beans to the grocery list and headed off with E. to Abu Ammar.

Our local grocer, Abu Ammar has a vegetable and fruit stand set up about 400 m away from our house, on the main street. He has been there for as long as anyone can remember and although you would not know it to see him, Abu Ammar is quite the entrepreneur. He wears a traditional dishdasha all year round and on cold days, a worn leather jacket and a black wool cap he pulls down over his ears.

We, and almost every house on the street, buy our groceries from him. He sets up his stand early in the morning and when you pass it by at just the right time, there’s a myriad of colors: the even brown of potatoes, deep green of spinach, bright orange of citrus fruits and the glossy red of sweet Iraqi tomatoes… And Abu Ammar is almost always there- come rain or sun or war, sitting in the midst of his vegetables and fruits, going through a newspaper, a cigarette in his mouth and crackling out of his little transistor radio are the warm tones of Fayrouz. On those rare occasions when Abu Ammar isn’t there, you can tell something is very wrong.

Abu Ammar sat there in his usual place. I could tell he was doing a crossword today because he kept making marks on the newspaper. Abu Ammar rose to greet us and handed me a few plastic bags so I could pick and choose the vegetables I wanted. “I have some very good lemons today,” he declared, tucking the newspaper under his arm and pointing to a pyramid of small greenish-yellow fruits. I wandered over to the lemons and inspected them critically.

I feel like I have my finger on the throbbing pulse of the Iraqi political situation every time I visit Abu Ammar. You can often tell just how things are going in the country from the produce available at his stand. For example, when he doesn’t have any good tomatoes we know that the roads to Basra are either closed or really bad and the tomatoes aren’t getting through to Baghdad. When citrus fruit isn’t available during the winter months, we know that the roads to Diyala are probably risky and oranges and lemons couldn’t be delivered. He'll also give you the main news headlines he picks up from various radio stations and if you feel so inclined, you can read the headlines from any one of the assorted newspapers lying in a pile near his feet. Plus, he has all of the neighborhood gossip.

“Did you know Abu Hamid’s family are going to move?” He took a drag from the cigarette and pointed with his ballpoint pen towards a house about 100 m away from his stand.
“Really?” I asked, turning my attention to the tomatoes, “How did you hear?”
“I saw them showing the house to a couple last week and then I saw them showing it again this week… they’re trying to sell it.”

“Did you hear about the election results?” E. asked Abu Ammar. Abu Ammar shook his head in the affirmative and squashed his cigarette with a slippered foot. “Well, we were expecting it.” He shrugged his shoulders and continued, “Most Shia voted for list 169. They were blaring it out at the Husseiniya near our house the night of the elections. I was there for evening prayer.” A Husseiniya is a sort of mosque for Shia. We had heard that many of them were campaigning for list 169- the Sistani-backed list.

I shook my head and sighed. “So do you still think the Americans want to turn Iraq into another America? You said last year that if we gave them a chance, Baghdad would look like New York.” I said in reference to a conversation we had last year. E. gave me a wary look and tried to draw my attention to some onions, “Oh hey- look at the onions- do we have onions?”

Abu Ammar shook his head and sighed, “Well if we’re New York or we’re Baghdad or we’re hell, it’s not going to make a difference to me. I’ll still sell my vegetables here.”

I nodded and handed over the bags to be weighed. “Well… they’re going to turn us into another Iran. You know list 169 means we might turn into Iran.” Abu Ammar pondered this a moment as he put the bags on the old brass scale and adjusted the weights.

“And is Iran so bad?” He finally asked. Well no, Abu Ammar, I wanted to answer, it’s not bad for *you* - you’re a man… if anything your right to several temporary marriages, a few permanent ones and the right to subdue females will increase. Why should it be so bad? Instead I was silent. It’s not a good thing to criticize Iran these days. I numbly reached for the bags he handed me, trying to rise out of that sinking feeling that overwhelmed me when the results were first made public.

It’s not about a Sunni government or a Shia government- it’s about the possibility of an Iranian-modeled Iraq. Many Shia are also appalled with the results of the elections. There’s talk of Sunnis being marginalized by the elections but that isn’t the situation. It’s not just Sunnis- it’s moderate Shia and secular people in general who have been marginalized.

The list is frightening- Da’awa, SCIRI, Chalabi, Hussein Shahristani and a whole collection of pro-Iran political figures and clerics. They are going to have a primary role in writing the new constitution. There’s talk of Shari’a, or Islamic law, having a very primary role in the new constitution. The problem is, whose Shari’a? Shari’a for many Shia differs from that of Sunni Shari’a. And what about all the other religions? What about Christians and Mendiyeen?

Is anyone surprised that the same people who came along with the Americans – the same puppets who all had a go at the presidency last year – are the ones who came out on top in the elections? Jaffari, Talbani, Barazani, Hakim, Allawi, Chalabi… exiles, convicted criminals and war lords. Welcome to the new Iraq.

Ibraheim Al-Jaffari, the head of the pro-Iran Da’awa party gave an interview the other day. He tried very hard to pretend he was open-minded and that he wasn’t going to turn the once-secular Iraq into a fundamentalist Shia state but the fact of the matter remains that he is the head of the Da’awa party. The same party that was responsible for some of the most infamous explosions and assassinations in Iraq during the last few decades. This is the same party that calls for an Islamic Republic modeled like Iran. Most of its members have spent a substantial amount of time in Iran.

Jaffari cannot separate himself from the ideology of his party.

Then there’s Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He got to be puppet president for the month of December and what was the first thing he did? He decided overburdened, indebted Iraq owed Iran 100 billion dollars. What was the second thing he did? He tried to have the “personal status” laws that protect individuals (and especially women) eradicated.

They try to give impressive interviews to western press but the situation is wholly different on the inside. Women feel it the most. There’s an almost constant pressure in Baghdad from these parties for women to cover up what little they have showing. There’s a pressure in many colleges for the segregation of males and females. There are the threats, and the printed and verbal warnings, and sometimes we hear of attacks or insults.

You feel it all around you. It begins slowly and almost insidiously. You stop wearing slacks or jeans or skirts that show any leg because you don’t want to be stopped in the street and lectured by someone who doesn’t approve. You stop wearing short sleeves and start preferring wider shirts with a collar that will cover up some of you neck. You stop letting your hair flow because you don’t want to attract attention to it. On the days when you forget to pull it back into a ponytail, you want to kick yourself and you rummage around in your handbag trying to find a hair band… hell, a rubber band to pull back your hair and make sure you attract less attention from *them*.

We were seriously discussing this situation the other day with a friend. The subject of the veil and hijab came up and I confessed my fear that while they might not make it a law, there would be enough pressure to make it a requirement for women when they leave their homes. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well women in Iran will tell you it’s not so bad- you know that they just throw something on their heads and use makeup and go places, etc.” True enough. But it wasn’t like that at the beginning. It took them over two decades to be able to do that. In the eighties, women were hauled off the streets and detained or beaten for the way they dressed.

It’s also not about covering the hair. I have many relatives and friends who wore a hijab before the war. It’s the principle. It’s having so little freedom that even your wardrobe is dictated. And wardrobe is just the tip of the iceberg. There are clerics and men who believe women shouldn’t be able to work or that they shouldn’t be allowed to do certain jobs or study in specific fields. Something that disturbed me about the election forms was that it indicated whether the voter was ‘male’ or ‘female’- why should that matter? Could it be because in Shari’a, a women’s vote or voice counts for half of that of a man? Will they implement that in the future?

Baghdad is once more shrouded in black. The buildings and even some of the houses have large black pieces of cloth hanging upon them, as if the whole city is mourning the election results. It’s because of “Ashoura” or the ten days marking the beginning of the Islamic New Year but also marking the death of the Prophet’s family 1400+ years ago in what is now known as Karbala. That means there are droves of religious Shia dressed in black from head to foot (sometimes with a touch of green or red) walking in the streets and beating themselves with special devices designed for this occasion.

We’ve been staying at home most of the time because it’s not a good idea to leave the house during these ten days. It took us an hour and 20 minutes to get to my aunt’s house yesterday because so many streets were closed with masses of men chanting and beating themselves. To say it is frightening is an understatement. Some of the men are even bleeding and they wear white to emphasize all the blood flowing down backs and foreheads. It’s painful to see small children wearing black clothes and carrying miniature chains that really don’t hurt, but look so bizarre.

Quite frankly, it’s disgusting. It’s a quasi political show of Sadomasochism that has nothing to do with religion. In Islam it’s unfavorable to hurt the human body. Moderate Shia also find it appalling and slightly embarrassing. E. teases the Shia cousin constantly, “So this your idea of a good time, ha?” But the cousin is just is revolted, although he can’t really express it. We’re so “free” now, it’s not good idea to publicly express your distaste to the whole bloody affair. I can, however, express it on my blog…

We’ve also heard of several more abductions and now assassinations. They say Badir’s Brigade have come out with a new list of ‘wanted’… but dead, not alive. It’s a list of mainly Sunni professors, former army generals, doctors, etc. Already there have been three assassinations in Saydiyeh, an area that is a mix of Sunnis and Shia. They say Badir’s Brigade people broke into the house and gunned down the families. This assassination spree is, apparently, a celebration of the election results.

It’s interesting to watch American politicians talk about how American troops are the one thing standing between Sunnis and Shia killing each other in the streets. It looks more and more these days like that’s not true. Right now, during all these assassinations and abductions, the troops are just standing aside and letting Iraqis get at each other. Not only that, but the new army or the National Guard are just around to protect American troops and squelch any resistance.

There was hope of a secular Iraq, even after the occupation. That hope is fading fast.

- posted by river @ 3:03 PM

Plane Spotting: Torture Flights Revealed

I put together this "Torture Special" and posted it with my friends and colleagues at PRJ.org --ape

Plane Spotting: Citizen Threat to CIA Torture Flights

Plane Spotters, like their locomotive enthusiast counterparts, consist of a widely representative cross-section of the citizenry that form a network of eyes on the skies. They've played a significant role in uncovering one wing of George Bush's international "Torture Doctrine." And that makes the CIA nervous. - {lex}

Continentalist Meditation: Giving Canada Away

'For Our Own Good, Give Canada Away'

By Murray Dobbin

The Tyee.ca

Tue., Feb. 22, 2005

The 'deep integrationists' plan one happy continent, but we must teach the little ones.

As Canadians watch their daily news — the same sex marriage debate, the continuing saga of equalization payments and the fight over splitting the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in two — the future of the country is being decided elsewhere by unelected corporate power brokers.

This particular future is called "deep integration" and is backed by the most powerful business groups, think tanks and foundations in the country. The most recent manifestation of this betrayal of Canada is called the Task Force on the Future of North America. Its leaked report shows the plan in its most refined form to date.

The "team" backing this annexation initiative is politically ambidextrous, which signals the elites' unanimity. Two of the heavy hitters on the Task Force are John Manley, quite likely the next leader of the federal Liberals, and Michael Wilson, former Tory finance minister. It also includes former Quebec Premier Pierre Mark Johnson. Two of the six Canadian members are energy CEOs — just to indicate to George Bush that the oil companies run Canada, too.

The fact that Canadians are more anti-American now that any time in the past 50 years has had no impact on the plans of the annexationists in our midst. It doesn't matter that huge majorities of Canadians want nothing to do with more integration with the rogue nation to the south of us. The democratic imperative is well and truly dead amongst the high rollers who, having failed to meet the competitive challenge of free trade, have adopted a new slogan: If you can't beat 'em, join em.

Water, power, culture on the table

The deep integration initiative was publicly launched in early 2002 with an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail by the C.D. Howe Institute's Wendy Dobson. A former staffer in Paul Martin's finance department, she described the thrust of the initiative this way: "Instead of waiting to be told what's expected of us [by the Americans], Canadian governments and industry should prepare for this possibility in a proactive way." She discussed the "Big Idea": that in order to get the Americas' attention we should give them everything we think they might want and then pray they give us real, unimpeded access to their market.

The Task Force — co-chaired by John Manley — is trilateral and reports not to governments but to the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFA), one of the most influential think tanks in Washington. The CFA is one of three co-sponsors of the Task Force along with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) and the Mexican Council on Foreign Affairs. The ubiquitous Tom d'Aquino of the CCCE (formerly the BCNI) is a vice-chair.

There isn't much new in the summary report of the Task Force's first meeting, held last October in Toronto. But it does focus in on the most critical features of what Canada's business leaders want. Among the most controversial: eliminating the current NAFTA exemptions for culture and certain sectors of agriculture. Another is expanding the egregious energy provisions of NAFTA — which guarantee the U.S. an ever-increasing percentage of our gas and oil production regardless of Canadian needs — to other resources, including water. Messrs. d'Aquino and Manley also want to offer the Americans the same deal on electricity that they already have with natural gas — through a North American electricity grid.

The initiative is driven by the post-9/11 geopolitical atmosphere and was first launched just months after the attack. The report states plainly that "security considerations trump other issues." The thinking behind this annexationist plan suggests that the only way Canada will not be hurt by U.S. security concerns is to adopt them as our own — and redefine ourselves as North Americans.

Kids to learn continental virtue

Indeed one of the most perverse parts of the plan would see the education system hijacked to implant in the minds of young Canadians the idea that they are, actually, North Americans: "Participants agreed that progress on this front will require effort within the education system [including] supplements to the standard curriculum."

Talk about social engineering. Thomas Axworthy, another Task force member, and a long time advocate of creeping annexation, is going to "work" on this idea. A North American passport would also be part of the effort to erase any vestige of Canadian identity and replace it with one that would inevitably be American — not North American.

Until recently, Bay Street's annexation initiative has been almost exclusively a private affair — the CCCE, think tanks, business columnists and now the Task Force. But the proponents believe that the time is ripe to engage the three governments and make the process a formal political project.

In January the CCCE's d'Aquino initiated news coverage of the idea of a trilateral summit of Bush, Martin and Mexican President Vincente Fox. D'Aquino claimed that Bush was interested in calling a summit this year on "the scope and extent of a major initiative to forge a new economic and security partnership within North America."

This is the most dangerous development in the annexation push so far. Conventional wisdom has suggested that the U.S. was simply not interested. If Bush is suddenly willing to talk about the idea there is only one reason: Behind the scenes our quisling economic elite has promised the U.S. such huge concessions on security, energy and water that they can't afford to ignore them.

Sound the alarm.

Murray Dobbin writes a regular State of the Nation column for The Tyee and is the author of Paul Martin: CEO for Canada?