Lethal Solution

A Lethal Solution

We need a five-year freeze on biofuels, before they wreck the planet

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian 27th March 2007.

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.

In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow – it is released again when the fuel is burnt. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be “decarbonising” our transport networks.

In the budget last week, Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliers in the UK will have to ensure that 2.5% of the fuel they sell is made from plants – if not, they must pay a penalty of 15p a litre. The obligation rises to 5% in 2010(1). By 2050, the government hopes that 33% of our fuel will come from crops(2). Last month George Bush announced that he would quintuple the US target for biofuels(3): by 2017 they should be supplying 24% of the nation’s transport fuel(4).

So what’s wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 this column warned that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are, by definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats(5). I received more abuse than I’ve had for any other column, except when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thought these effects wouldn’t materialise for many years. They are happening already.

Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled(6). The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows(7). Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The US department of agriculture warns that “if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year.”(8) According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from both maize and wheat(9).

Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.

Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The UN has just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022(10). Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn’t happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang utan in the wild. But it gets worse. As the forests are burnt, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or ten times as much as petroleum produces(11). I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes TEN TIMES as much climate change as ordinary diesel.

There are similar impacts all over the world. Sugarcane producers are moving into rare scrubland habitats (the cerrado) in Brazil and soya farmers are ripping up the Amazon rainforests. As President Bush has just signed a biofuel agreement with President Lula, it’s likely to become a lot worse. Indigenous people in South America, Asia and Africa are starting to complain about incursions onto their land by fuel planters. A petition launched by a group called biofuelwatch, begging western governments to stop, has been signed by campaigners from 250 groups(12).

The British government is well aware that there’s a problem. On his blog last year the environment secretary David Miliband noted that palm oil plantations “are destroying 0.7% of the Malaysian rain forest each year, reducing a vital natural resource (and in the process, destroying the natural habitat of the orang-utan). It is all connected.”(13) Unlike government policy.

The reason governments are so enthusiastic about biofuels is that they don’t upset drivers. They appear to reduce the amount of carbon from our cars, without requiring new taxes. It’s an illusion sustained by the fact that only the emissions produced at home count towards our national total. The forest clearance in Malaysia doesn’t increase our official impact by a gram.

In February the European Commission was faced with a straight choice between fuel efficiency and biofuels. It had intended to tell car companies that the average carbon emission from new cars in 2012 would be 120 grams per kilometre. After heavy lobbying by Angela Merkel on behalf of her car manufacturers, it caved in and raised the limit to 130 grams. It announced that it would make up the shortfall by increasing the contribution from biofuel(14).

The British government says it “will require transport fuel suppliers to report on the carbon saving and sustainability of the biofuels they supply.”(15) But it will not require them to do anything. It can’t: its consultants have already shown that if it tries to impose wider environmental standards on biofuels, it will fall foul of world trade rules(16). And even “sustainable” biofuels merely occupy the space that other crops now fill, displacing them into new habitats. It promises that one day there will be a “second generation” of biofuels, made from straw or grass or wood. But there are still major technical obstacles(17). By the time the new fuels are ready, the damage will have been done.

We need a moratorium on all targets and incentives for biofuels, until a second generation of fuels can be produced for less than it costs to make fuel from palm oil or sugarcane. Even then, the targets should be set low and increased only cautiously. I suggest a five-year freeze.

This would require a huge campaign, tougher than the one which helped to win a five-year freeze on growing genetically modified crops in the UK. That was important – GM crops give big companies unprecedented control over the foodchain. But most of their effects are indirect, while the devastation caused by biofuel is immediate and already visible.

This is why it will be harder to stop: encouraged by government policy, vast investments are now being made by farmers and chemical companies. Stopping them requires one heck of a battle. But it has to be fought.

You can join the campaign at www.biofuelwatch.org.uk.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. HM Treasury, March 2007. Budget 2007, Chapter 7.

2. Department for Transport, 21st December 2005. Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) feasibility report. Executive Summary.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/secrtfoprogdocs/renewabletransportfuelobliga3849?page=1

3. George W. Bush. 23rd January 2007. State of the Union Address. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html

4. The US Energy Information Administration gives US gasoline consumption for October 2006 (the latest available date) at 287,857,000 barrels. If this month is typical, annual consumption amounts to 3.45 billion barrels, or 145 billion gallons. http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbbl_m.htm

In the state of the union address, Bush proposed a mandatory annual target of 35 billion gallons.

5. George Monbiot, 23rd November 2004. Feeding Cars, Not People. The Guardian. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

6. Nils Blythe, 23rd March 2007. Biofuel demand makes food expensive. BBC Online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/business/6481029.stm

7. Eoin Callan and Kevin Morrison, 5th March 2007. Food prices to rise as biofuel demand keeps grains costly. Financial Times.

8. Keith Collins, chief economist, US Department of Agriculture. Quoted by Eoin Callan and Kevin Morrison, 5th March 2007, ibid.

9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, December 2006. Food Outlook 2. http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/j8126e/j8126e01a.htm

10. UNEP and UNESCO, February 2007. The Last Stand of the Orangutan. State of Emergency: Illegal Logging, Fire and Palm Oil in Indonesia’s National Parks. http://www.unep-wcmc.org/resources/PDFs/LastStand/full_orangutanreport.pdf

11. Wetlands International, 8th December 2006. Bio-fuel less sustainable than realised http://www.wetlands.org/news.aspx?ID=804eddfb-4492-4749-85a9-5db67c2f1bb8

12. http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/resources.php#2007Jan31



13. David Miliband, 14th July 2006. Malaysian Diary.

http://www.davidmiliband.defra.gov.uk/
blogs/ministerial_blog/archive/2006/07/14/1497.aspx

14. Commission Of The European Communities, 7th February 2007. Results of the review of the Community Strategy to reduce CO2 emissions from passenger cars and light-commercial vehicles. COM 19 final.

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/
co2/pdf/com_2007_19_en.pdf

15. HM Treasury, ibid.

16. E4Tech, ECCM and Imperial College, London, June 2005. Feasibility Study on Certification for a Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation. Final Report.

17. Robert F. Service, et al, 16th March 2007. Cellulosic Ethanol: Biofuel Researchers

Prepare to Reap a New Harvest. Science 315, 1488.
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1488


source:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/
2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/#more-1051

Gorilla Radio for Monday, April 2, 2007

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca . He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com . And, you can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com


It's been almost fifty years since the popular revolution toppled the Batiste regime in Cuba; and, it's been almost as many years that the island nation has suffered an American led embargo, the longest siege in recorded history. Canada has so far refused to enjoin the starvation campaign against the revolution, but recent political developments here could well threaten the friendly relations enjoyed between Cuba and Canada. Fernando Gomez represents the Cuban Institute in Friendship with the People, and its outreach effort, the Che Guevera Work Brigade. He'll be speaking tonight at the BCGEU building tonight at 7pm. Fernando Gomez and the Canada's working relationship with Cuba in the first half.

And; Canada's foreign policy is altering its hue. Fighting its first "insurgency" war from the distant garrisons of Afghanistan is just one of the radical changes to what Canadian's would regard as the country's traditional role in world polity. Not the nation of Pierre Trudeau, hero to a generation of American asylum-seekers fleeing the war against Vietnam, today's conscientious objectors to the extra-legal occupation of Iraq fleeing to Canada face arrest, and expensive legal entaglements, likely ending in extradition rather than refuge; for others, the treatment is of a more sinister nature. Lee Zaslofsky is with the Toronto chapter of Canada's War Resisters Support Campaign, and he'll be here on a disturbing trend in Canadian policing that questions this nation's autonomy. Lee Zaslofsky and Resisting War: A Canadian tradition, in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of the good things to get up to in and around Victoria this week. But first, Fernando Gomez and the Che Guevera Work Brigade.



G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, Rhoda Berenson, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Glen Ford, Susan George, Stan Goff, Amy Goodman, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, David Orchard, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Dave Zirin, and many others.

Pinter: Assassinated Press

Why George Bush is Insane

By Harold Pinter

03/30/07 "Assassinated Press " -- -- - "Earlier this year I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its after-effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive. However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. "If you are not with us you are against us" President Bush has said. He has also said "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders". Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.

The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction" and it prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.

The United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.

The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.

The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through US and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred to.

The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.

The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by the United States are never referred to.

The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by the United States are never referred to.

The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred to.

The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to.

But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading of history this is.

People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back.

The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world.

In Britain the public is now being warned to be "vigilant" in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous.

How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks are quite likely, the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible and shameful subservience to the United States. Apparently a terrorist poison gas attack on the London Underground system was recently prevented. But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands of school children travel on the London Underground every day. If there is a poison gas attack from which they die, the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister does not travel on the underground himself.

The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator.

The United States and Britain are pursuing a course which can lead only to an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe.

It is obvious, however, that the United States is bursting at the seams to attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this - not just to take control of Iraqi oil - but because the US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.

Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist US power Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's definition (as quoted in the Guardian newspaper in London recently) "We are not the doctors. We are the disease".

Harold Pinter

The Assassinated Press

Murder, Inc.

February 19, 2007


That's the reality of American foreign policy
by Justin Raimondo

http://www.antiwar.com:80/justin/?articleid=10546

Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington was recently sentenced to a mere eight years in jail for the wanton, planned murder of an Iraqi man, in return for his testimony against the other monsters who participated in the crime. He told the judge, at his sentencing, that he felt regret "but that he and other Marines were frustrated by their ill-defined mission in Iraq and the inability to tell friend from foe. 'As callous as it sounds,' he said, every Iraqi was considered 'guilty until proven otherwise.'"

How typically American: he isn't to blame for his actions – certainly not! – it's his "ill-defined mission." But what if carnage – for its own sake, as an end in itself – is the mission? Forget the highfalutin' rhetoric about "democracy," the "war on terrorism," the "weapons of mass destruction" that somehow turned into a desert mirage. The ugly reality is that Iraq has become an arena for American sadists to act out their perverted fantasies, a vast Charenton where the de Sades in charge of American foreign policy have unleashed an army of torturers and murderous thugs on the Iraqi people. The American media doesn't want to show the real face of U.S. "liberators," but they are being outflanked by the new technology that makes the self-appointed "gatekeepers" of journalism increasingly irrelevant.

The Americans seem particularly enthralled with shooting the wounded: here is some young savage, living proof that devolution is not just a concept, expounding on how "awesome" wanton murder is. He is the New American Man, invincibly ignorant, raised on rap music and violent video games, grinning boyishly at the prospect of a future of endless slaughter. He rides around the country, randomly firing on civilians, as if he were at one of those shoot-the-duck booths at the county fair.

They murder to a Satanic tune – "Dead bodies everywhere!" – while joyously creating havoc wherever they roam. For allegedly stealing wood, an Iraqi taxi driver finds that his livelihood is crushed by an American tank – and, boy, it sure looks like those Americans are having fun! That is how a sick, decadent people amuse themselves.

These "liberators" are war criminals, and it's only fitting that they have installed a government of death squads as their local satraps. As they and their allies rampage throughout Iraq, like angels of death, committing war crimes in the dark, the U.S. Congress "debates" a non-binding resolution – and the Senate cannot even bring itself to vote on a meaningless motion, never mind one that could actually end the slaughter.

Support our troops? Hell no. Anyone who "supports the troops" is an accomplice to their deeds. The evidence shows clearly that these are not innocent babes in the woods: they are wolves, predators, killers, deeply, profoundly implicated in what will go down in history as a horrific war of aggression.

The clear fact of the matter is that America's conquest of Iraq is the policy of criminals – except that even most criminals act rationally, in the sense that there's some profit in their activities, some benefit, real or imagined, to be gained. But this war is not an ordinary crime: it is a wanton orgy of murder that is all the more horrendous due to its utter senselessness. This is nihilism in action.

I doubt that a congressional resolution is going to address the main cause of this war and its continuation: the psychological sickness that is eating away at the American character. It is a mix of hubris, bloodlust, and sheer depravity, and it is being acted out against the backdrop of international politics. The post-9/11 world we are living in has become a projection of our own demons, which have now been unleashed on a horrified world.

Who will stop the madness? Not the politicians. Not Congress, or the media, nor even the men of God – all of whom are complicit, to one degree or another, with the crimes of the American government. Our intellectual, moral, and political leaders have abandoned all standards, all sense of decency, and therefore have no problem rationalizing the monstrous.

There will be no easy end to this war because it is merely a symptom of our own inner rot. We've come a long way from the American of Jefferson's time to the neo-barbarians of the Late Imperial era – and it's been downhill all the way.

This isn't a political problem – it's a cultural affliction. The world's most powerful nation is infected with the psychopathology of a serial murderer – one who kills not out of grim necessity, but for the sheer joy of it.

We live in a society sickened by its own poisons. Conservatives have known this for some time. Liberals are learning it. The culture of permissiveness, of moral relativism and heedless hedonism, is yielding some decidedly unexpected consequences in the foreign policy realm. After all, we're the most powerful nation on earth – why shouldn't we push others around? Even as we play the role of international do-gooders, the obvious enjoyment our centurions take in humiliating "Ali Baba" – their name for any Iraqi – illustrates what is really driving this war, and all the wars to come: what the conservative philosopher Claes Ryn calls "the will to dominate."

America is, today, the fountainhead of evil in the world. No one is killing people faster, and with more cruelty and indifference, than the warlords of Washington. The temptation is to turn away in disgust and resign oneself to the degeneration of Jefferson's benevolent legacy into a maelstrom of malevolence worthy of Caligula.

Yet the triumph of domination as the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy is not inevitable, or irreversible. Its overthrow, however, requires a moral reawakening. By this, I don't mean a return to religion, although – unlike all too many libertarians – I wouldn't rule it out entirely. This moral revolution, in any case, will be born in an instinctive revulsion against what is depicted in the video links above, married to an unwillingness to let such evil continue for a moment longer.

Sooner or later, the American people must be made to understand that the choice is between noninterventionism and barbarism. Americans are naïve: they believe in the myth of automatic progress, the illusion of history as an ever ascending stairway to higher levels of civilization, but the truth is far grimmer. Empires rise – and fall. Dark ages follow. The kind of degeneracy we are now seeing acted out in Iraq promises a fall that will plumb new depths of darkness.

Gonzales Makes a Boo-Boo

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez acknowledges mistakes were made in removing seven US attorneys from office for political reasons. The House Judiciary Committee wants to question string-puller Karl Rove -- and see if this new scandal leads to the president or the vice president.

"Mistakes were made..."

John Nichols

March 14, 2007

© 2007 John Nichols - The Nation
[Republished at GRBlog with Agence Global permission]

House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers wants White House political czar Karl Rove to testify -- under oath -- about his role in the firing of US attorneys who refused to politicize their prosecutions.


Seven US attorneys were removed from their positions as part of a purge that has now been linked to Rove and the Bush White House. An eighth US attorney was removed in an apparent effort to clear a position in Arkansas for a Rove protégé.


In response to the revelations of Rove's involvement in efforts to pressure US attorneys to use their positions to advance the Bush administration's political agenda, Conyers is taking the lead in demanding accountability.


"On Friday, the Judiciary Committee issued a letter expanding the investigation into the firing of US attorneys to include the White House," says the Michigan Democrat, who is the senior member of the committee. "We had previously learned of Karl Rove's involvement in the firings, and recent stories implicating him in the firing of [David C. Iglesias, who had served as U.S. attorney for New Mexico] raise even more alarm bells for us. As a result, we would want to ensure that Karl Rove was one of the White House staff that we interview in connection with our investigation."


John Conyers is also seeking to interview former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and deputy counsel William Kelly about their involvement, if any, in the firings.


There is movement on the Senate side of the Capitol, as well, with New York Democrat Chuck Schumer calling for an aggressive Senate Judiciary Committee inquiry. "The more we learn, the more it seems that people at high levels in the White House have been involved in the U.S. attorney purge," says Schumer.


The administration is clearly feeling the heat. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' top aide, D. Kyle Sampson, has been forced to resign because of his role in the scandal. But, says Schumer, "Kyle Sampson will not become the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy."


Translation: Congress is not going to let the administration hide behind a loyal aide in order to avoid accountability, as was the case with the decision to sacrifice I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, vice president Cheney's former chief of staff, in order to avoid legal scrutiny of Cheney's role in organizing attacks on former Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife after Wilson exposed the administration's manipulation of intelligence prior to the Iraq invasion.


Gonzales is not getting the courtesy that has, so far, been afforded Cheney.


"We were told by the attorney general that he would, quote, 'never ever' make a change for political reasons," says Schumer. "It now turns out that this was a falsehood. As all the evidence makes clear that this purge was based purely on politics."


People for the American Way has called on Gonzales to resign. Failing that, argues the group, the Attorney General should be removed from office as "the first step toward holding the White House and Department of Justice accountable to the rule of law." Says PFAW's Ralph Neas: "The Attorney General has demonstrated time and again that Americans can't trust him -- or this administration -- to follow the law, or to uphold the Constitution. There has to be some accountability here. It is in the nation's best interest for the Attorney General to resign, and if he fails to do so, President Bush should remove him from office."


But what about President Bush, himself?


Schumer says, "Attorney General Gonzales has either forgotten the oath he took to uphold the Constitution or doesn't understand that his duty to protect the law is greater than his duty to protect the president."


If, in fact, Gonzales or Rove acted with the approval of President Bush or Vice President Cheney, then the issue at hand becomes a constitutional matter of the highest order -- or, to be more precise, of the high crimes and misdemeanors order.


Which brings us to the first question that Conyers or other members of the House and Senate might ask Rove.


How about: "What did the President or Vice President know, and when did they know it?"




John Nichols is The Nation's Washington correspondent.


© 2007 John Nichols - The Nation


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A Bush Abroad

A Bush Abroad: George Does America Latina
by C.L. Cook

Though little noticed, or made least note of in North America's press, those prison camps constructed across the United States, tendered to the tune of billions to Halliburton, are filling up fast; filling up with "illegal" aliens. While most of the new concentration camp families held (they are imprisoning whole families: Mom, Pop, and the kids) are from south of the Rio Grande, some are from other offending nations; nations like Canada.

Last month, security mad Americans nabbed a family of Canadian citizens who had the misfortune of having their Canada-bound plane diverted to an U.S. airport (the moot "State" of Puerto Rico in this case) due to a medical emergency on board. Once on the ground, the passengers were deplaned, and passed through customs and immigration; this though none planned to stay in, or travel anywhere through America, save perhaps a trip to the airport restaurant, or restrooms.

In a Maher Arar-like twist of fate, they now find themselves imprisoned for no reason, with little recourse to avoid deportation to a third country, making pleas to a toothless Canadian government that seems to wish these troublesome "foreigners" would just either stay in one place, or go away altogether.

Arar and Away

Arar you may recall was the Montrealer who found his journey home rudely interupted by a side-trip to a barely better than coffin-sized dungeon in Syria; and he discovered other tortures there too. He's "Canadian" within the bracketed context Stephen Harper's ruling Conservative party place other, less than snowbird-white Canadians who spend their time visiting the old country rather than Florida or Arizona; like the ones finding themselves below the bombs of Israel's famed IDF Air Force in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

At that time, rather than raise protest to Israel, or demand a cease to the blitzkrieg at least until Canadian civilians caught in the cross-fire could get out, Harper's people instead questioned the Canadianess of the dusky Lebanese immigrants, suggesting in a sleazy, passive-aggressive way, the people being strafed by F-16's as they fled the full-blown war erupting were second-class citizens who should have known better than to risk vacationing so near Israel. (I go too far there: Harper's government would never suggest there were anything wrong with Israel; merely advise against visiting its enemies).

Like Arar, and the dark-hearted Levantines, the Canadian family incarcerated in Hitto prison, (the infamous for-profit, private Hell-hole, specializing in warehousing "illegals,") the sin is not in their stars, but in the pigment of their skin.

And, likewise they should have known better than to fly anywhere near America while not white. Even if their flight plan was direct to Canada, they might have foreseen the eventuality of an unexpected diversion into U.S. airspace, and known what it might mean, and so taken precautions that would have spared the New Government of Canada taking any politically inexpedient steps, vis a vis questioning American authority.

But no! Having offered them refuge from a torturing, repressive, fascist country once, now Canada's government is expected to get them out of the shit again! (To be fair to the fair-skinned majority in the minority government; their diplomatic presence overseas isn't huge, though there is a rather prominent Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C.)

It Smells Like Sulphur in Here!

George W. Bush didn't travel much before being ordained president, the story goes; but he's on the road now, touring South-y Meric-er. Luckily, he speaks a bit of Mexican [sic] from his old dayz, "crossin' tha buddah fa fawhn!" Difference is: Today, it don't seem the waiters down there are content to wait. The American promise of freedom, justice, and equality for all esta bueno, but no-one seems willing to bide the short- comings of the status quo for those mercies to be passed as promised on from beneficent Northern hands.

Furthermore; many south of the Rio Grande has or have heard of friends and relations being trapped and shipped off to the same concentration camps in America where our Canadian family languishes; and unlike Stephen Harper, they're troubled by it.

In a word that deserves to be its own sentence, Venezuelan Presidente, Hugo Chavez Frias said recently, while standing on the vacated site of a George W. Bush address to the United Nations, "Sulfuro!"

"Sulphur," element most identified in Western culture with Hades, the Underworld, he said, waving his hand under his nose slightly, as if fanning away the fumes. Standing at the podium, just hours after George had, Hugo asked the gathered U.N. personages, "Can't you smell the Sulfuro?"

Hellbound Train

In 1986, my hoser friend and me launched an expedition to Mexico; a couple of Winter months roaming round the south, gettin' drunk, and learning Mexican [sic]. Down we went, our too pale pallor telling of cooler days past, we youngsters, seeking a first foreign adventure, hungry and naive set forth cross-country. But, we ended up in Guatemala, deep in the jungle, high in the mountains, where the guerrillas run free. Or so the government's story went.

What we saw was terrorism. Riding the segundo buses, the fear was palpable whenever a jeep, or roadblock appeared. These people were terrified regularly, and on the occasions we encountered government forces, I wondered if things would have turned out differently for those on the bus had not we and our Canadian, American, British, (and not at all Australian) passports been there.

The bus bounced us through torrential rains, along a pocked and winding road that wound down the valley to the lake-shore of Atitlan the magnificent. The tips and spills of the journey were so harsh, only the drugged, or otherwise insensate could sleep, as the driver pressed madly on, over the mountain. Down the precipices, one could occasionally spot a glinting reflection of a piece of a mirror, or windshield of a less fortunate segundo bus that had missed a turn, and plunged into the gaping ravines below. But better not to look, and keep hold, and hope for a safe arrival.

Nearing Gringo Tanango, a smart town developed largely by European ex-pat hippies, a motorcycle passed the bus, back-firing as it revved up to go by us. The elderly woman standing in the aisle with the rest of us hit the deck!

It seemed, along with the brutality of official government terror, there existed too free-boot gangs of killers, murderers who had, we later learned, a habit of spraying buses with machine-gun fire from the back of motorcycles. Call it 'The Guatemala Option.'

A Final End to this Game

It seems an impossibly innocent time looking back, but only in regarding the improbable and precipitous decline of standards attending America's assumption as singular World power.

Ronald Reagan, then in league with another George Bush, administered the most heinous repression of a civilian population for the purpose of corporate and political control the world had witnessed since Mussolini's fascists.

Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, mainly the indigenous Maya majority, were killed by Washington's puppet Rios government. By some estimates, a third of the indigenous population killed, or displaced. Despite reconciliation attempts made in Guatemala, the same supporters of the death squads of the country's worst years still prosper in the guise of legitimate businessmen and managers of trans-national murderers like Coca Cola Inc. And, they are poised to seize Guatemalan democracy now, as they did before.

Fresh from his Central Asian killing spree, George the Lesser will visit Guatemala this weekend. His plans include a day trip to a sacred temple site of the lost Mayan civilization. There, where indigenous activists from across Latin America will meet in a couple weeks time to discuss the new way coming, an el camino neo, George will entertain his hosts with platitudes of friendship and his amor de la democracia.

For their part, the priests of the ancient order promise they will perform a ritual cleansing of the temple on George's departure.

From there Bush will visit Colombia, ground zero of the Gringo suppression of the region.

Fitting that he would arrive at week's end at the beginning of America's dirty work in the south, Colombia. No-where on Earth is the culmination of the American Project more perfectly illustrated than in that sad country. Decades of civil war, an intransigent kleptocracy, a thriving narco-terror regime, propped up to serve the interests of the wafer thin elite within its borders and the corpo raiders without; where the local indigenous population suffers death squads and disappearings, and union and social activists are gunned down in the streets with the complicity of the fair-skinned, racist rulers.

Sunday, George will witness (though remotely) the dissatifaction of Colombia's battered masses, and one can only hope; if George W. Bush accomplishes nothing else in his time on this sad and beautiful orb, his presence and all it represents will be enough of an affront to the decent-minded people of Colombia to set in motion a chain of events that will, at long last bring an end to the American century of destruction, and forever extinguish its too long-lived culture of death.



Resources from Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org

http://deletetheborder.org/node/2011
Democracy Now! Immigration Stories- Radio Reports
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/1532252

* Human Rights Groups Call for Closure of Texas Jail Holding Undocumented Immigrants

Human rights groups are calling for the U.S. government to shut down a
jail in Texas where about 200 immigrant children, some only infants, are
being detained.

* "I Want To Be Free": 9-Year-Old Canadian Citizen Pleads From Texas
Immigration Jail

Majid and his nine-year old son Kevin are Iranian immigrants currently
being held at the Hutto detention center. They've been forcibly detained
since their plane was forced made an emergency landing in Puerto Rico as they made their way to Canada.

* Hundreds Protest NYU Republicans' "Find the Illegal Immigrant" Game
Hundreds of people gathered at New York University on Thursday to protest a game called "Find the Illegal Immigrant" organized by the school's Republican club.

* Raymondville: Inside the Largest Immigration Prison Camp in the US
The largest immigrant prison camp is in Raymondville, Texas. Some two
thousand undocumented immigrants are currently being held in the prison awaiting deportation.

Gorilla Radio for Monday March 5th, 2007

Gorilla Radio for Monday March 5th, 2007

Sunday, 04 March 2007

Gorilla Radio by C. L. Cook G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media. Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, Rhoda Berenson, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Glen Ford, Susan George, Stan Goff, Amy Goodman, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, David Orchard, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Dave Zirin, and many others. As old as the war in Iraq, the case of "outed" CIA operative, Valerie Plame has dragged on. In the meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of lives have forever been altered. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is the former White House staffer left holding the bag in L' Affair du Plame, and his Grand Jury trial is ready to wrap up. Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor, journalist, and author. Her articles appear in the Nation Magazine, L.A. Times, and Salon.com, among other places, and her book, 'United States v. George W. Bush et al' is a theoretical prosecution of President Bush, and his cadre of extra-legal help-meets. Elizabeth de la Vega and bringing Justice to a jaundiced White House in the first half. And; it's the lie that launched, not a thousand ships, but countless conveyances of war; the explanation of the attacks of September eleventh, 2001 has been used to, among other things, "justify" Canada's current entanglement in the Afghanistan fiasco. Beyond the roughly three thousand killed on that fateful day, many hundreds of thousands of other lives have been effected. But what really happened on 9/11? Hal Sisson is a Victoria-based novelist, former reporter and lawyer, and world-ranked croquet player. The latest of his nine novels is Modus Operandi: 9/11 a no-less fictional account of that day than has been so far produced as fact by the powers that believe the official narrative. Hal Sisson and the ways and means behind "the day that changed everything" in the second half. And; Janine Bandcroft will join us from sunny San Franscisco at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week. Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca. He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, www.pacificfreepress.com. You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com

Battlefield Australia

Australia:
The New 51st State

John Pilger

02 March 2007

John Howard's servility to the US is even greater than Tony Blair's and has earned him the nickname Bush's deputy sheriff. The conspiracy between Washington, the media and politicians is eroding the country's freedoms.

In June this year, 26,000 US and Australian troops will take part in bombarding the ancient fragile landscape of Australia. They will storm the Great Barrier Reef, gun down "terrorists" and fire laser-guided missiles at some of the most pristine wilderness on earth. Stealth, B-1 and B-52 bombers (the latter alone each carry 30 tonnes of bombs) will finish the job, along with a naval onslaught. Underwater depth charges will explode where endangered species of turtle breed. Nuclear submarines will discharge their high-level sonar, which destroy the hearing of seals and other marine mammals.

Run via satellite from Australia and Hawaii, Operation Talisman Sabre 2007 is warfare by remote control, designed for "pre-emptive" attacks on other countries. Australians know little about this. The Australian parliament has not debated it; the media is not interested. The result of a secret treaty signed by John Howard's government with the Bush administration in 2004, it includes the establishment of a vast, new military base in Western Australia, which will bring the total of known US bases around the world to 738. No matter the setback in Iraq, the US military empire and its ambitions are growing.

Australia is important because of a remarkable degree of servility that Howard has taken beyond even that of Tony Blair. Once described in the Sydney Bulletin as Bush's "deputy sheriff", Howard did not demur when Bush, on hearing this, promoted him to "sheriff for south-east Asia". With Washington's approval, he has sent Australian troops and federal police to intervene in the Pacific island nations; in 2006, he effected "regime change" in East Timor, whose prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, had the nerve to demand a proper share of his country's oil and gas resources. Indonesia's repression in West Papua, where American mining interests are described as "a great prize", is endorsed by Howard.

This sub-imperial role has a history. When the six Australian states federated as a nation in 1901, "a Commonwealth . . . independent and proud", said the headlines, the Australian colonists made clear that independence was the last thing they wanted. They wanted Mother England to be more protective of her most distant colony which, they pleaded, was threatened by a host of demons, not least the "Asiatic hordes" who would fall down on them as if by the force of gravity. "The whole performance," wrote the historian Manning Clark, "stank in the nostrils. Australians had once again grovelled before the English. There were Fatman politicians who hungered for a foreign title just as their wives hungered after a smile of recognition from the Governor-General's wife, who was said to be a most accomplished snubber."

Australia's modern political class has the same hunger for the recognition of great power. In the 1950s, prime minister Robert Menzies allowed Britain to explode nuclear bombs in Australia, sending clouds of radioactive material across populated areas. Australians were told only the good news of being chosen for this privilege. An RAF officer was threatened with prosecution after he revealed that 400 to 500 Aborigines were in the target zones. "Occasionally we would bring them in for decontamination," he said. "Other times, we just shooed them off like rabbits." Blindness and unexplained deaths followed. After 17 years in power, Menzies was knighted by the Queen and made Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.

An undeclared maxim of Australian politics is that prime ministers become "statesmen" only when they serve imperial interests. (Honourable exceptions have been dealt with by smear and subversion). In the 1960s, Menzies connived to be "asked" to send Australian troops to fight for the Americans in Vietnam. Red China was coming, he said. Howard is more extreme; in his decade of power, he has eroded the very basis of Australia's social democratic institutions and cast his country as the model of a Washington-style democracy, where the only popular participation is that of voting every few years for two "opposing" parties which share almost identical economic, foreign and "cultural" policies.

For "cultural", read race, which has always been important in creating an insidious state of fear and compliance. In 2001, Howard was re-elected after manipulating the "children overboard affair", in which his senior advisers claimed that Afghan refugees had callously thrown their children into the sea in order to be rescued by an Australian naval vessel. They produced photographs that were proven false, but only after Howard had touched every xenophobic nerve in the white electorate and was duly re-elected. The two officials who brought the "crisis" to its fraudulent fever pitch were promoted after one of them admitted that the deception had "helped" the prime minister. In a more scandalous case, Howard claimed his defence department had been unaware of another leaking, stricken boat filled with Iraqi and Afghan refugees heading for Australia until after it had sunk. An admiral later revealed this, too, was false; 353 people were allowed to drown, including 146 children.

Above all, it is the control of dissent that has changed Australia. Rupert Murdoch's influence has been critical, far more so than in Britain. Whenever Howard or one of his more oafish ministers want to bend an institution or smear an opponent, they carry out the task in alliance with a pack of rabid mostly Murdoch commentators. As Stuart MacIntyre describes in a new book, Silencing Dissent, the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist, Andrew Bolt, conducted a campaign of ridicule against the independent Australian Research Council which, he claimed, had fallen into the hands of a "a club of scratch-my-back-leftists" whose work was "hostile to our culture, history and institutions", as well as "peek-in-your-pants researchers fixated on gender and race". The then minister of education, Brendan Nelson, vetoed one project grant after another without explanation.

The National Museum of Australia, the national child benefits centre, Aboriginal policy bodies and other independent institutions have been subjected to similar intimidation. A friend who holds a senior university post told me: "You dare not speak out. You dare not oppose the government or 'the big end of town' [corporate Australia]."

As embarrassing corporate crime rises, the treasurer, Peter Costello, has blithely announced a ban on moral or ethical boycotts of certain products. There was no debate; the media was simply told. One of Costello's senior advisers, David Gazard, recently distinguished an American-run seminar in Melbourne, organised by the Public Relations Institute of Australia, at which those paying A$595 were taught the tricks of conflating activism with "terrorism" and "security threat". Suggestions included: "Call them suicide bombers . . . make them all look like terrorists . . . tree-hugging, dope-smoking, bloody university graduate, anti-progress . . ." They were advised on how to set up bogus community groups and falsify statistics.

Schoolteachers who do not fly the flag or music concert organisers who discourage the attendance of racist thugs wrapped in the flag are at risk of a dose of Murdoch poison. Equally, if you reveal the shame of Australia's vassal role you are deemed "anti-Australian" and, without irony, "anti-American". Few Australians are aware that Murdoch, who dominates the press, abandoned his own Australian citizenship so that he could set up the Fox TV network in the US. The University of Sydney is to open a United States Study Centre, backed by Murdoch after he complained about the inability of Australians to appreciate the benefits of the bloodbath in Iraq.

Stifling dissent

Having recently spoken at overflowing public meetings in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, I am left in no doubt that many are deeply worried that freedoms in their sunny idyll are slipping away. They were given a vivid reminder of this the other day when Vice President Dick Cheney came to Sydney to "thank" Howard for his support. The New South Wales state government rushed through a law that allowed Cheney's 70 secret service guards to carry live weapons. With the police, they took over the centre of Sydney and closed the Harbour Bridge and much of the historic Rocks area. Seventeen-vehicle motorcades swept theatrically here and there, as if Howard was boasting to Cheney: "Look at my control over this society; look at my compliant country." And yet his guest and mentor is a man who, having refused to fight in Vietnam, has brought back torture and lied incessantly about Iraq, who has made millions in stock options as his Halliburton company profits from the carnage and who has vetoed peace with Iran.

Almost every speech he gives includes a threat. By any measure of international law, Cheney is a major war criminal, yet it was left to a small, brave group of protesters to uphold the Aussie myth of principled rebellion and stand up to the police. The Labor Party leader, Kevin Rudd, the embodiment of compliance, called them "violent ferals"; one of the protesters was 70 years old. The next day, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald read: "Terrorists have ambitions of empire, says Cheney." The irony was exquisite, if lost.

John Pilger's bestselling history of Australia, "A Secret Country", is available through http://www.johnpilger.com

This article was first published at the New Statesman

Link to this page: http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/750/2/

Samir Kassir's Big Ideas

Samir Kassir, even in death, radiates hope and self-confidence, anchored in that powerful, rich, irresistible combination of Arab-Islamic, Western and universalist values that still define most people in the Middle East.

Samir Kassir’s
Little Book of Big Ideas

Rami G. Khouri

Agence Global
March 2, 2007

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
[Republished at GRBlog with AG permission]

BEIRUT -- The one person whose photograph hangs in my office is the late Lebanese writer Samir Kassir. He was assassinated in 2005, but his ideas are more relevant than ever, as Lebanon, Palestine and the entire Arab world that defined his life embrace greater tension and violence practiced simultaneously by the state, opposition groups and foreign armies. The British publisher Verso has just put out an English translation of his small book, an extended essay really, entitled Being Arab.


Kassir's enduring power reflects two core aspects of his life and work: his insistence on challenging the oppression and indignities that many Arabs suffered at the hands of their own regimes or foreign powers, while at the same time rejecting the tendency to wallow in a sense of victimization. Instead, he affirms faith in the modern Arab world's capacity for national rejuvenation, cultural affirmation and humanistic progress.


Kassir touched so many people because these sentiments are not the lone thoughts of a maverick Arab writer. Rather, this conviction of one's worth and potential is a prevalent attitude in the heart of hundreds of millions of ordinary Arab men and women who, like him, refuse to submit to humiliation and powerlessness, and instead affirm their humanity and their rights as citizens.


The Arab people are “haunted by a sense of powerlessness” and widespread malaise, which he succinctly surveys in the sad condition of most Arab countries. He concludes that “the real crisis in the Arab world is the crisis of the state,” whose institutions lack credibility and whose internal unity is routinely challenged. Autocratic and vulnerable, Arab states offer their people cosmetic reforms and liberalization without any real change in government or policies, while relinquishing economic sovereignty and thus perpetuating foreign hegemony. The Arab world, Kassir laments, is the only “continent” where “the lack of democracy is allied to a foreign hegemony.”


The prevalent, almost reflexive, response in the region has comprised local Islamist movements that were born “in response to what were considered to be inefficient, iniquitous, or impious, governments, rather than a reaction to the culture of modernism.”


Kassir points out that Arab and Islamic cultures repeatedly generated, absorbed and accommodated a diversity of divergent systems of thought and identity. During the Renaissance the Muslim World “more than held its own against Europe,” until a technological gap opened up between the two societies in the second half of the 18th Century. The urban centers of the Arab and Middle Eastern Islamic world relentlessly copied and emulated many aspects of Europe, spurring the modernizing revolution the Arabs called the nahda.


That revolution failed for various reasons: superpower domination, the burden of Israel, Arab police states, and other maladies. Kassir calls us to restore this era to its proper place in Arab history, at least allowing us to reinterpret our current profound malaise as merely a moment in history that can be overcome and left behind. His writing and heart are full of hope, and riddled with pride, in the capacity of Arab-Islamic culture to revitalize its modernistic impulses with proven Western norms. He personally embodied that rich synthesis of Levantine and European identities and values, with his mixture of Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and French identities and legacies.


He reviews how the nahda's impulses for regeneration comprised a beacon for progress that failed on the political-national level shortly after World War I, but “lived on as an attitude and an outlook on the world,” manifested in art, poetry, theater, music, cinema, the role of women and other dimensions of life and culture. Yet this was all crushed by the onset of the Arab malaise in the last third of the 20th Century, when Israel defeated the Arabs, oil wealth prompted a new American hegemony and spread the backwardness of the energy-rich states, and new Arab regimes “wasted no time putting their societies behind bars.”


Radical Islamism or “Islamic nationalism” will not solve this dilemma, he says boldly, if it perpetuates a sense of Arab victimhood or explicitly sets out to differentiate itself from the universal. We must avoid the danger of wallowing so deeply in the Arab malaise that we replace it with something similar: “the culture of death which the union of fossilized Arab nationalism and political Islam calls resistance.”


He concludes: “We must replace Arabs’ customary assumption of victim status not by cultivating a logic of power or a spirit of revenge, but by recognizing the fact that, despite bringing defeats, the 20th Century has also brought benefits that can enable Arabs to participate in progress.”


Samir Kassir, even in death, radiates hope and self-confidence, anchored in that powerful, rich, irresistible combination of Arab-Islamic, Western and universalist values that still define most people in the Middle East. If you are perplexed by the turbulence of the Arab-Islamic Middle East, and seek signs of hope amidst the bombs, read this little book of big ideas.





Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.


Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global


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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, The American Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Mark Hertsgaard, Rami G. Khouri, Tom Porteous, Patrick Seale and Immanuel Wallerstein

Losing America

Americans Have
Lost Their Country
By Paul Craig Roberts
3-1-7


The Bush-Cheney regime is America's first neoconservative regime. In a few short years, the regime has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America's moral reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim countries and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack on a third Islamic country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.

This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution, international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast movement, but of a handful of ideologues ­ principally Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled policy. They have been supported by their media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by "scholars" in assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

The entirety of their success in miring the United States in what could become permanent conflict in the Middle East is based on the power of propaganda and the big lie.

Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin Laden, but after an American puppet was installed in Afghanistan, the blame for 9/11 was shifted to Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons of mass destruction that would be used against America. The regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the lie to the UN that the Bush-Cheney regime had conclusive proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American people, the regime invaded Iraq under totally false pretenses and with totally false expectations. The regime's occupation of Iraq has failed in a military sense, but the neoconservatives are turning their failure into a strategic advantage. At the beginning of this year President Bush began blaming Iran for America's embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents in Iraq.

Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a charge that experts regard as improbable. The Iraqi insurgents are Sunni. They inflict casualties on our troops, but spend most of their energy killing Iraqi Shi'ites, who are closely allied with Iran, which is Shi'ite. Bush's accusation requires us to believe that Iran is arming the enemies of its allies.

On the basis of this absurd accusation ­ a pure invention ­ Bush has ordered a heavy concentration of aircraft carrier attack forces off Iran's coast, and he has moved US attack planes to Turkish bases and other US bases in countries contingent to Iran. In testimony before Congress on February 1 of this year, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said that he expected the regime to orchestrate a "head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large." He said a plausible scenario was "a terrorist act blamed on Iran, culminating in a 'defensive' US military action against Iran." He said that the neoconservative propaganda machine was already articulating a "mythical historical narrative" for widening their war against Islam.

Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons for which are patently false. What is going on?

There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler's revolution, neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied, are both in the Middle East. The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil and gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US invasion of Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai, who had been on UNOCAL's payroll, as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad, who also had been on UNOCAL's payroll, was installed as US ambassador to Afghanistan.

Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador to Iraq. American oil companies have been given control over the exploitation of Iraq's oil resources.

The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important. In 1996 Richard Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that all of Israel's enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. "Israel's enemies" consist of the Muslim countries not in the hands of US puppets or allies. For decades Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such that today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an independent country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq, and Syria for aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel's theft of Palestine.

The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn to attack the remaining independent countries in the Middle East and with neoconservatives in office to implement the plans. However, an excuse was required. Neoconservatives had called for "a new Pearl Harbor," and 9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order to stampede the public and Congress into war. Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in charge of the 9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable facts emerged.

The neoconservatives have had enormous help from the corporate media, from Christian evangelicals, particularly from the "Rapture Evangelicals," from flag-waving superpatriots, and from the military- industrial complex whose profits have prospered. But the fact remains that the dozen men named in the second paragraph above were able to overthrow the US Constitution and launch military aggression under the guise of a preventive/preemptive "war against terrorism."

When the American people caught on that the "war on terror" was a cloak for wars of aggression, they put Democrats in control of Congress in order to apply a brake to the regime's warmongering. However, the Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the neoconservative drive to wider war and, perhaps, world conflagration. We are witnessing the triumph of a dozen evil men over American democracy and a free press.

March 1, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Creators Syndicate

PM, Dion dumb down public discourse

TheStar.com - opinion - PM, Dion dumb down public discourse
March 01, 2007
James Travers

OTTAWA–Stéphane Dion is positioning Liberals dead centre in Conservative crosshairs. That's recklessly dangerous, but not necessarily fatal. With two controversial anti-terrorism provisions formally declared dead today, the unsteady new Liberal leader is locking his party into an argument Conservatives are confident they will win.

This week, and in the months ahead, Stephen Harper and his chorus will chant that Dion and Liberals are, among other horrid lefty things, soft on terrorism.

Tactically, Harper is doing to Dion on terrorism what Dion is doing to Harper on Kyoto: Each is putting the other on the defensive side of an inflamed and often irrational debate.

That shouldn't surprise anyone. Wrong-footing an opponent is as pivotal to partisan politics as spin and the pithy TV clip.

In fact, both leaders are scripting for television. It's no more possible to make a coherent 30-second case for or against extraordinary police powers than it is to weigh the benefits and costs of climate change.

Instead, politicians offer props and theatrics. In all senses of the word, Harper is using the families of Air-India and 9/11 victims to tilt public opinion toward national security and away from individual rights.

Equally mischievously, Dion is using imperfect Kyoto to demonize any who question its late application as synonymous with the flat Earth society.

Voters should be insulted. Conservative and Liberal alike are making unflattering assumptions about the collective IQ as well as the national capacity to separate wheat from chaff.

Harper is behaving as if Canadians are susceptible to the same scare tactics Joe McCarthy used to terrify Americans into believing Reds were under every bed. Whispers and innuendo are now the Conservative weapons of choice against Dion's defence of civil liberties.

In the same way, Dion is counting on Canadians to forget or forgive that after finally signing Kyoto, Liberals did so little that Canada's performance is among the worst. To now cast Harper as a climate-change denier is, at best, disingenuous.

Buried in both campaigns is just enough truth to trap the unwary. While hardly alone, Liberals have a history of dabbling in diaspora politics. And even if Liberals weren't environmental activists, there's no doubt Conservatives are 11th-hour converts to save-the-planet evangelism.

So what's the anticipated result of this ugliness?

Harper hopes to be seen as Horatio at the bridge and that Dion will be dismissed as a weak leftover from a gentler era. Dion hopes to be seen as safeguarding core values and that Harper will be cast into political darkness.

But in constructing images from suspect material, both leaders are carelessly deconstructing a democratic foundation. Even though citizens delegate responsibility for wise governance, there remains a civic duty to reach considered conclusions on issues that matter.

By any reasonable standard, locating the sweet spot between individual rights and national security is one of those. So, too, is finding the fulcrum between a sustainable environment and a sustaining economy.

If war is too important to leave to generals then surely these decisions are too significant to leave exclusively to politicians.

Current antics make contrary arguments null and void.

In treating fellow citizens with no more respect than a talk-show audience, Harper and Dion are dumbing down the national conversation and making it disturbingly uncivil.

The scurrilous Conservative suggestion that Liberals are flip-flopping on anti-terrorism to protect extremists combined with Liberal environmental fear-mongering are pushing the quality of debate to new lows.

Blending a little truth with a lot of fiction has defined U.S. politics for a long time. But dismissing what's happening here as just catching up would be to ignore the obvious pitfall.

Politicians who get too far out in front of reality lose credibility and ultimately support when voters catch up to them after finally catching on. Dion and Harper are making themselves vulnerable to that phenomenon.

Dion's exaggerated case against Harper collapses the moment Conservatives unveil a reasonable environment plan.

Harper's fantasy about terrorism's new best friend will evaporate if – and it's a big if – Dion can articulately explain that it was his party that responded to extraordinary times with intrusive measures and that it now has good reasons to reconsider the worst of them.

Allowing Harper to position the Liberal leader in the soft-on-terror crosshairs is dumb politics.

But the targeting is so crude and the defence of human rights so central to democracy that Dion might just duck the bullet.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James Travers's national affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. jtraver@thestar.ca.

Terror: Canada Sun-Downing Hysteria

MPs vote against extending anti-terrorism measures
CBC News
February 27, 2007 |


Opposition parties banded together Tuesday to defeat a controversial Conservative proposal to extend two anti-terrorism measures contained in the Criminal Code.

The proposal to keep the measures in place for three more years was voted down 159-124 in the House of Commons.

Opposition Leader Stéphane Dion receives a standing ovation Tuesday after voting against a bill to extend the anti-terrorism measures.
(Tom Hanson/Canadian Press) Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion led off the No votes as fellow Liberals clapped and cheered him on. All but two Liberals present voted against the proposal, as did all Bloc Québécois and NDP members in the House.

One of the anti-terrorism measures allows police to arrest suspects without a warrant and detain them for three days without charges, provided police believe a terrorist act may be committed. The other measure allows judges to compel witnesses to testify in secret about past associations or pending acts. The witnesses could go to jail if they don't comply.

The two measures, introduced by a previous Liberal government in 2001, have never been used.

"These two provisions especially have done nothing to fight against terrorism," Dion said Tuesday. "[They] have not been helpful and have continued to create some risk for civil liberties."

Continue Article

All Conservatives present, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, voted to extend the anti-terrorism measures, which expire Thursday.

Harper said the move not to extend the measures would have long-term consequences.

"The Liberals chose internal caucus politics over the national security of Canadians," he said Tuesday. "This isn't going away … This will haunt the Liberal party."

Liberal Cotler abstains from vote
The proposal to extend the measures has somewhat divided Liberals in recent weeks, but MP Tom Wappel was the only Liberal who voted alongside the Conservatives Tuesday. He was a member of the subcommittee that reviewed the anti-terrorism measures.

Former Liberal justice minister Irwin Cotler abstained from voting Tuesday. He was present in the House, but never rose from his seat during the vote.

Before the vote, Cotler said he could not comfortably support either side. He said the position could be taken that the provisions have never been implemented and therefore they should be sunsetted.

"Or you can take the position as I've taken," he said. "The fact that [the provisions] have not been used means that they have not been abused, but they may still be needed."

Leading up to Tuesday's vote, Conservatives labelled Liberals soft on terror and accused them of flip-flopping on a law they'd written themselves.

Liberals have responded that governments cannot be trusted with too free a hand over people's rights, especially the current Conservative government.

The anti-terrorism rules became law on Dec. 18, 2001, in the chaotic aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

The rules, known as the Anti-terrorism Act, were introduced by Jean Chrétien's Liberal government and fast-tracked through the House of Commons and the Liberal-dominated Senate.

The act was hotly debated, as it defines what terrorism is and makes it a punishable offence within Canada's Criminal Code.

Seymour Hersh: Bush Funding al Qaida

Bush Funding Jihadists Connected to al Qaeda
as Part of Iran War He Has ALREADY STARTED

by Rob Kall

OpEd News
February 25, 2007

We know that at least nine months before the official "Shock and Awe" day when the big attack was started against Iraq-- NINE MONTHS-- the US had already begun the war, with almost daily bombing raids and covert operations.

While Bush and his surrogates, the latest being his new Secretary of Defense Gates, are denying planning a war against Iran, all the signs indicate that this war has already begun, is under way and that Bush is partnering with Saudi Arabia to run covert operations using jihadist Sunni groups that are either close to or actually part of Al Qaeda.


That's the message I took from the latest Sy Hersh blockbuster article in the New Yorker and an interview of him on CNN by Wolf Blitzer.

He told Blitzer,
"The Bush Administration has decided to put as much pressure as possible on Shiites."

"Sinora (elected leader of Lebanon) is putting money into Sunni jihadist groups opposed to Hezbollah."

"Nasrullah says he sees this as 'fitna' (arabic word used to mean "insurrection and fragmentation within islam") a kind of civil war... that the US is trying to foment in Lebanon what's been happening in Iraq."
Hersh discussed how easy it it to get money, with all of it spilling, by the billions, in Baghdad, to use for covert operations. He reports that Bush and Cheney have been coordinating with Prince Bandar, former Ambassador to the US from Saudi Arabia and Bush buddy, to provide money for covert operations, done by Sunni extremist groups to stop Shiite expansion. The expansion, feared by many Sunni leaders, is called the "Shiite Crescent."

Hersh reports that
"Money has gotten into jihadist hands-- groups that want to take on Hezbollah"

"America is using money not appropriated, without telling congress... Running covert operations, supporting groups, indirectly that were involved indirectly with 9/11.


In the New Yorker article, Hersh cites a former senior intelligence officer,
"...we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don't have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don't like. It's a very high-risk venture."

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.


The article reports that the majority leader of the Lebanese Parlaiment, Saad Hariri paid tens of thousands of dollars to bail out four members of an Islamic militant group from Dinniyeh-- a group in which "many of the militants 'had trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.'"

Hersh reports,
In an interview in Beirut, a senior official in the Siniora government acknowledged that there were Sunni jihadists operating inside Lebanon. "We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types to have a presence here," he said. He related this to concerns that Iran or Syria might decide to turn Lebanon into a "theatre of conflict."

...The Bush Administration has portrayed its support of the Siniora government as an example of the President's belief in democracy, and his desire to prevent other powers from interfering in Lebanon.


Hersh tells Blitzer, "Under Rumsfeld we've been running operations all over the world..." and explains that Bush and Rumsfeld claimed these were military and the president has the war power to do this.

The article reports that the US is working closely with Saudis, who see any enemy of a Shia as a friend, even extremist Sunni groups that have terrorist history or even connections with al Qaeda.

Hersh also speculated that former spy Chief Negroponte may have left his spy job to become assistant Secretary of State because there is a repeat of the Iran Contra happening and he wanted to avoid trouble-- since he was involved in Iran Contra and knew the risks.

The article reports that US military or covert operators have already made repeated excursions into Iran. and that Bush has a new special planning group at the pentagon, gearing up so if Bush orders an attack, within 24 hours the US military can be bombing Iran.

On CNN, Hersh told Blitzer that this "project is very far along., that they've been studying this forever. ...It's pretty obvious what's going on. The president has been talking more and more about attacks and threats on American lives (by Iranians.)

"For months there has been a lot of aggressive cross border activity--- more than just casual.

"The current contingency plans allow for an attack this spring.

Fortunately, not everyone in the military leadership agrees, and Hersh reports, "Much of the senior leadership do not think this is a wise thing to do. "

Hersh reported that one expert had envisioned a scenario in which an aircraft carrier in the Straits of Hormuz could be attacked by the hundreds of PT boats Iran has, which could be on suicide missions.

The Iranians also have more powerful weapons, like the one that did serious damage to the Israeli ship during the war with Lebanon last summer.

In response to statement by Secretary of War, Gates, where he denied that US was planning to go to war with Iran, Hersh said, "I guess Mr. Cheney did not get that message. In Australia, he said that all options are on the table."

As this article opened, with a description of the early start of the Iraq war, we have to ask the question, is doing a Clinton here, saying, it depends what the meaning of 'war' is. If you are sending in covert missions, sending in overt chase teams, flying into their space, arresting hundreds of Iranians in Iraq, just for being Iranian, and placing a massive war flotilla off the shores, does that count as war?

Back in 2003, the same behavior could easily be seen now as early war actions before the big frontal attack.

Now, Hersh tells us, "One of the contingency assignments would be to enable the president to be able to say, 'I want a hit,' and within 24 hours, it would be operational."

While there has been some speculation that Bush will encourage or authorize Israel to launch an attack on Iran, like it did on Iraq Osirus reactor 25 years ago, Hersh rejects that idea, saying,
"There's no thought of letting Israel bomb nuclear facilities. If Israel thinks they have to do it, then WE will do it.

"My own instinct is that this president is not going to leave office without doing something about Iran. And he keeps on refusing to negotiate and keeps talking tough."


Ironically, just as Bush and Cheney lied about connections between Saddam and al Qaeda, Bush and Cheney are again ginning the story now, by accusing the Iranians of causing deaths of hundreds of GIs in Iraq. But this is not true. Hersh cites Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official,
"The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when-- if you look at the actual casualty numbers-- the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude," Leverett said. "This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them."


Of course, we know how the Bushes work. His father claimed that Saddam's forces had done horrible things to infants in a hospital ward in Kuwait-- which was a totally fabricated story. That was the emotional trigger that handed Bush senior the support of the American people. It is highly likely that the apple will not fall far from the tree-- Dubya will report some horrific offense, based on a tiny bit of truth, maybe, and that will be stenographically reported by all the media except for a few, like Keith Olbermann and maybe one or two CNN anchors like Lou Dobbs and Jack Cafferty. Depend on Wolf Blitzer and most of the rest of the high pay anchors to fail to ask tough questions and to just echo chamber the Bush version of the story and build the hysteria, fear and anger-- an excuse to activate the 24 hour bombing option.

Is it possible to stop this train? In my opinion, we're already at war with Iran, the way Bush and his Iran-Contra buddies do war. Can we stop them from doing a major escalation-- an Iranian "shock and awe attack?" It's possible. Not very, but slightly, if enough people talk about his patterns, and anticipate the use of ploys similar to those used to sell Iraq one and two. If enough people ask tough questions of enough high level generals and Bush appointees, maybe the truth will come out.

The Democratic congress has had enough time to get their investigational committees set up. They've begun asking some good questions. It's time for them to tear into Hersh's report and start asking questions on all the details and more. It's time to start jailing Bush adminstration officials who refuse to answer congressional inquiries.

These revelations put a whole new light on the levels of unauthorized, illegal, war criminal activities that Bush and Cheney and others have engaged in and cast a bright new light on reasons to impeach.

If I were heading a congressional committee (like congressmen Conyers, Rangel, Rockefeller, Waxman,) I'd start with Negroponte, Rumsfeld and all the generals Bush has dumped. Then I'd start talking to members of the diplomatic corps in the middle east and any employee who has ever worked for Cheney.

See the full article in the New Yorker.



Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects.

The US psychological torture system is finally on trial

America has deliberately driven hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners insane.
Now it is being held to account in a Miami court

Naomi Klein
Friday February 23, 2007
The Guardian

Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to "break" prisoners are finally being put on trial. This was not supposed to happen. The Bush administration's plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla's lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.


Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an "enemy combatant" and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a "truth serum", a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.
According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are "part of a continuing interrogation program" and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that "the extended torture visited upon Mr Padilla has left him damaged", his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that "Padilla is competent" and that his treatment is irrelevant.

The US district judge Marcia Cooke disagrees. "It's not like Mr Padilla was living in a box. He was at a place. Things happened to him at that place." The judge has ordered several prison employees to testify on Padilla's mental state at the hearings, which began yesterday. They will be asked how a man who is alleged to have engaged in elaborate anti-government plots now acts, in the words of brig staff, "like a piece of furniture".

It's difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago. They wore blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and were placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy metal music. These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of "extraordinary rendition" carried out by the CIA, as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, a former army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. "They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over." All the inmates of Delta Block were on 24-hour suicide watch.

Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-run detention facility near Kabul known as the "prison of darkness" - tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. "Plenty lost their minds," one former inmate recalled. "I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors."

These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in an American court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus - a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington DC. There is only one reason Padilla's case is different - he is a US citizen. The administration did not originally intend to bring Padilla to trial, but when his status as an enemy combatant faced a supreme court challenge, the administration abruptly changed course, charging Padilla and transferring him to civilian custody. That makes Padilla's case unique - he is the only victim of the post-9/11 legal netherworld to face an ordinary US trial.

Now that Padilla's mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors are presented with a problem. The CIA and the military have known since the early 1960s that extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload cause personality disintegration - that's the whole point. "The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure." That comes from Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a declassified 1963 CIA manual for interrogating "resistant sources".

The manual was based on the findings of the agency's notorious MK-ULTRA programme, which in the 1950s funnelled about $25m to scientists to carry out research into "unusual techniques of interrogation". One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron, of Montreal's McGill University. Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation, and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960 Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks air force base in Texas, in which he stated that sensory deprivation "produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia".

There is no need to go so far back to prove that the US military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The army's field manual, reissued just last year, states: "Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and antisocial behaviour" - as well as "significant psychological distress".

If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the US government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of US psychological torture.







· Naomi Klein's book on disaster capitalism will be published this spring; a version of

The Worst of Two Centuries

The Arab region suffers the mass self-abuse of police states and soft autocracies that are the legacy of the post-colonial period, alongside the renewed abuse of foreign armies that march into the region today.

The Worst of the
19th and 21st Centuries

Rami G. Khouri

February 25, 2007
Agence Global

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
[Republished at GRBlog with AG permission]

DUBAI -- I had the pleasure last week of spending a few days in Doha and Dubai, two booming Gulf emirates that contrast sharply with the tensions and occasional turbulence of my home in Beirut. Without exception, on this trip and during our daily lives throughout the Middle East, the one theme that continuously reasserts itself -- especially in discussions among Arabs themselves -- is: Why is this region so volatile, violent, unstable, prone to extremist rhetoric and actions, and riddled with instability and militarism?


The opportunity to engage in long conversations with learned people and a few slightly more suspect political types in the heady, hyper-growth atmosphere of the emirates of Dubai and Qatar also offers a useful perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the entire Arab region. Qatar and Dubai have planned and implemented impressive developmental programs that have started to catch the attention of the world for more than only their dramatic architecture or occasional eccentricities. The order, excitement and ongoing expansion of these cities contrast starkly with the ravages and tensions that define much of the rest of the Arab world.


We are all well aware of the problems of grief-stricken lands like Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Algeria, Yemen and Somalia, plagued by war, civil strife and perpetual stagnation. Even countries that are renowned for their stability and strict security, like Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, suffer a combination of intermittent political violence and terror attacks, alongside pent-up domestic political and social tensions. The latest example was last week's shootout between police and terrorists in Tunisia, which should only heighten our acknowledgement that even the most efficient police states ultimately generate their own forms of instability, insurrection and incoherence.


Why is this so? Why is the entire Arab world -- even some Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain -- susceptible to chronic tension that manifests itself in regular outbursts of terrorism or domestic strife? Simple and occasionally sinister minds in faraway lands would explain this by culture, religion or values, or by claiming that masses of ordinary Arabs have simply allowed their emotions to overcome them and thus have not permitted themselves to engage in the joys of modernity, democracy and liberty.


I think there is a better explanation, which will not please those far away who accuse us of blaming all our ailments on foreigners and history. I suspect that much of the Arab world is a chronic mess because it is the only region in the world that simultaneously suffers the debilitating consequences of two of the most wretched and wrenching forces in modern history: the distress and distortions of post-colonial societies the Europeans manufactured and then abandoned in the 20th Century, and the new stresses and dysfunctionalism of the neo-colonial policies the United States is spearheading in this region -- and only in this region -- in the wake of the Cold War and the advent of the post-9/11 “global war on terror”. For some reason, we in the Arab world must endure the worst of the 19th and 21st Centuries combined.


Only the Arab region in the entire world suffers the mass self-abuse of police states and soft autocracies that are the legacy of the post-colonial period in the 20th Century that brought into being the modern Arab political order, alongside the renewed abuse of foreign armies that march into the region today to repeat the state-making, regime-crafting mistakes of their imperial predecessors a century ago. The British, of course, get the prize here, having come into Iraq and other lands several times in the past century, and always with similarly negative consequences of chronic instability and national incoherence. Their shameful hallmark legacies are visible today in Palestine, Sudan, Iraq and other tortured lands. The Americans under George W. Bush seem to be learning the same awful game.


It is hard enough trying to sort out the lingering distortions and problematic legacies of 19th and 20th Century European colonialism, as some Arab societies are trying to do. It is impossible to attempt this, though, when these societies simultaneously are subjected again to military attacks, long-term occupations and strategies for regime change and social values reconfigurations by the American, British, Israeli and Micronesian political establishments. It is no wonder that our region is such a mess.


The single most important difference between this round of foreign assaults on the Arab world and the experience last century is that the natives are more aware, less willing to passively accept their fate, and more inclined to resist and fight back. This makes for a long period ahead of turmoil and confrontation, as we have witnessed in the past few years.


Will the Arab world be able one day soon to look forward to a century, even just a few decades, without foreign invasions, imperial conquests, colonial state-crafting, post-colonial police states, and neo-colonial threats, assaults and regime changes?




Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.


Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global


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