Tomgram: Laura Flanders, Whose Political Moment Is This?

"Not long ago," began Wednesday's lead Los Angeles Times election piece by Doyle McManus and Peter Wallsten, "political strategists viewed Super Tuesday as a day that would likely crown the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees, a 24-state extravaganza that would bring the long primary campaign to an orderly conclusion. They were wrong." That was pretty typical of the press coverage of what ABC had labeled a "showdown coast to coast" and, while it wasn't wrong, it wasn't quite right either.

After all, there already was a winner from this primary season (other than Senator McCain): the media, which had mustered its all, campaigned extravagantly coast to coast, and installed "eye-popping technological wizardry" like CNN's MagicWall, "a huge monitor upon which newsman John King could manipulate maps and images with the poke of a finger as if handling an oversized iPhone." The good news -- for cable TV in particular, which has been getting splendid enough ratings off the "historic" primary season to generate a "ratings war" -- is that it is now guaranteed to go on and on. Okay, it's not "American Idol," but by November 4th, it is likely to be the longest running continuous "reality show" on television, which isn't bad either. As Charlie McCollum of the San Jose Mercury has written: "Television executives have reacted to these [ratings] numbers the way television executives always do when ratings spike. They have ordered more ‘episodes,' expanding the time devoted to the campaign." In fact, media enthusiasm for the primary season, as I wrote recently, has reached "feeding frenzy" proportions.

It seems that Democratic voters have also ordered a few more "episodes" of our electoral reality show. Host of RadioNation on Air America Radio Laura Flanders has spent her time in recent years considering quite a different kind of enthusiasm than the media one, an enthusiasm that has slowly been rising from grassroots activism in and around the Democratic Party and whose spirit she's caught in her book (just published in paperback), Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, Inspirational Political Change in America. Now, as the media revs up for the next set of primaries leading to the two super-Conventions and a superduper presidential election for "change" (which will put neither a Superman, nor a Superwoman in the White House), she suggests we take a breath and consider where change is really coming from and whether it will ever actually arrive. Tom


A New Moment?
The Grassroots and the Party, 1964 and 2008
By Laura Flanders

The swirl of the primary season is intoxicating and the media love it. If the ratings records set by the recent political debates are any indication, the ongoing primary battle may yet save cable TV. "Super Tuesday" -- the night that was supposed to wrap everything up -- didn't (for either party). Clearly, this extended nomination contest is getting people excited, but will that excitement translate into substantive change -- for Democrats in particular? The past offers some hard-knocks lessons worth thinking about.

Give this long primary season credit: It has, at least, turned that overused word "change" from a bumper slogan pooh-poohed by all knowledgeable pundits into a fact-based phenomenon. In the closest thing the nation has seen to a countrywide primary, first term Senator Barack Obama overcame Hillary Clinton's double-digit leads in major states and national polls to win a majority of states on February 5th and draw into a tight battle over the delegate count. The two candidates closed out the evening with their spinmeisters already talking up Beltway Tuesday -- the next catch-phrase friendly multiple-primary day -- while promising more debates. Now, their operatives are off to Ohio for a March 4th primary that everyone assumes will be crucial.

The chance to be seen and heard in more than just a handful of quirky early-primary states has already made a striking difference for the Illinois Senator, who was the clear underdog when he entered the race. "What was a whisper has turned into a chorus," Obama told his hometown crowd in Chicago on Tuesday night.

But a whisper, many would like to know, of what? For more than thirty years, Democratic voters like those pouring out of their homes to get involved this primary season have doggedly trooped to their polling places with no expectation of having an actual impact. Young voters, poor voters, urban voters, anti-war voters, women, people of color, lesbian and gay (LGBT) folk, immigrants, the Democratic party's so-called base -- would turn out – and then be sent home. Come the general election, Democratic candidates typically tacked right, ignoring those reliable, old blue-base voters. Thanks to the tyranny of the two-party system, they could remain confident that the base wasn't going to defect to the -- gasp! -- ever-more rightward-tacking GOP. And mostly, they were on the mark.

For Democratic base-dwellers, in normal times there was only one party season when anyone wanted to hear from them -- this one. Primaries are the one period in the election cycle when contenders suddenly seek to curry favor with the Party's most activist -- and progressive -- part. That's one reason a primary season this long is significant; but, for those voters, will it make any difference at the level of policy? The most positive answer is perhaps.

Fuelled by frustration with the way the Party's been conducting its business and propelled by disgust at the policies of George W. Bush, base-level Party activists, with help from liberal bloggers and others, have already pulled off an organizing feat that's changed the face of the presidential race. Helped by online databases and social-networking software, volunteers can have new impact. Unpaid volunteers have been building attendance at local meetings through their own voter-initiated websites in red and blue states alike. The most significant result so far has been the record turnout. Democratic turnout was up 100% in Iowa and South Carolina, while Georgia witnessed its biggest turnout in a primary since 1992.

The presence of a nominee who was once himself a grassroots organizer and recognizes the value of such work, state by state, has had its own transformative effect. Altogether, grassroots organizers have made the candidacy of Obama, at one time a long-shot nominee, more than viable. And that's pushed Party veteran Clinton whose campaign-style is naturally more top-down and disciplined to invest her resources heavily in "field." Before this Tuesday, the candidates were both openly competing for the label "grassroots." "We've put together a grassroots campaign," Hillary Clinton told a rally the Friday before Super Tuesday. "We will call one million Californians this weekend." Obama's northern Californian spokesperson told reporters: "We are running the biggest field campaign in California since Robert Kennedy in '68."

With the campaign continuing, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton must still compete for local support and influential endorsements. And, at the state level, that's good news for progressives. Party flacks and the traditional "black and blue" organizing machines of black churches and labor unions are no longer influential enough to turn out sufficient voters. Expanding their reach, both campaigns have been delving into non-traditional territory for community support. In South Carolina, the Obama campaign teamed up with barbers and the owners of beauty salons. The candidates are also competing for support from ethnic groups they never prioritized before -- Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans -- and everyone's competing over women and youth.

Remember 1964

"This is a moment unlike any we've ever known," Obama said in his Super Tuesday night speech. In spirit, he may turn out to be right, but there are obvious echoes from the past. This is not the first time that the Democratic Party has seen an upsurge in turnout, a newly expanded electorate, and a new generation of trained and talented organizers coming on the scene. In fact, 2008 bears a haunting resemblance to 1964, the last time the Party's political maps were remade.

Keelan Sanders is executive director of the Mississippi Democratic Party in Jackson, Mississippi. Until recently, Sanders was the only person on its payroll and the Party's "headquarters" (a renovated family home on a residential street) was open only part of the time; no presidential candidate ever came to visit. In 2004, isolated Democratic voters paid out of their own pockets to produce Kerry/Edwards yard signs. Today, thanks to an investment of funds from the Democratic National Committee, Sanders has a fulltime staff -- a beneficiary of DNC chair Howard Dean's drive to revitalize the party in all fifty states. When I asked him why he stuck with the Party so long, solo, Sanders responded quick-as-a-flash: "Because of my grandmother."

Sanders' grandmother was a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In 1964, she risked her life to register African American voters in the Deep South; then, she carpooled her way to Atlantic City, New Jersey, as a Freedom Party delegate in hopes of taking a seat from Mississippi's all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention. There, at the height of the civil rights era, she and the vast majority of Freedom Party delegates were locked out.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council (SNCC) organizer Hollis Watkins, who still lives in Mississippi, remembers believing what he'd been told -- if black people registered enough voters, they'd be given a chance to unseat the state's pro-segregation delegation. "It was like being told to scale the walls to the roof of a building on fire, and doing it, and then realizing there were no supporting beams beneath our feet," Watkins told me in 2006. "We wanted to believe it, we believed it, but we were naïve."

In 1964, the party of President Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to talk about civil rights -- even sign the Civil Rights Act -- and position itself as the party of desegregation, but it wasn't ready to fight desegregation in its own ranks. Not yet. After a bitter stand-off, the Democratic National Convention finally offered the Freedom Democratic Party's leader, Fanny Lou Hamer, a seat where she could observe the proceedings, but not vote.

Just four years later, the picture had shifted significantly. The Voting Rights Act was law and the southern delegations had been desegregated, but the power of the old party machine hadn't passed to the grassroots activists who'd forced the transformation. It remained bottled up at the top of the Party structure.

Rather than overhaul state-level infrastructures, Party leaders gradually made an end-run around them. That's partly why state parties like Mississippi's have been in such sad shape for so many decades. Among other changes, the party altered the rules of the nomination process (and the convention) to emphasize state-wide primaries -- now generally the norm -- taking power out of the hands of local party bosses. Advertising themselves via television, candidates could "run" campaigns by communicating directly with voters without the help of embedded, state-level movements.

Actually growing the Party's base seemed to scare the establishment. Whenever the Democratic National Committee appeared on the verge of launching a massive voter registration program, they backed off. Insiders who lived through the period recall how in the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition showed that massive numbers of new Democratic voters could indeed be activated with just a little attention to the base, the Party's major donors refused to fund such an effort (allegedly for fear that any massive voter-registration drive would only push the Party into Jackson's hands).

Today's "outsiders" are once again working hard, organizing locally, and counting on being seated at their Party's table. Whoever the nominee may be, he or she is guaranteed to enter the general election stronger in terms of state-field operations and possible resources than any Democratic candidate in decades. In no small measure, it will be those "outsiders" the Party has to thank. When Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, Eli Pariser, the director of the liberal mass membership group MoveOn.org, boasted of the Democratic Party, "We bought it, we own it, we're going to take it back." If a Democrat does indeed win in November (by no means a certainty), Pariser isn't going to be the only one with bragging rights -- or expectations.

Will the "Change" Election Be About Change?

The key questions are: Will progressive activists use the continuing primary race to raise solid policy demands about peace, justice, the environment, and healthcare -- and will whoever turns out to be the Democratic candidate actually listen? Let's keep in mind that those hopeful base voters aren't doing all this work simply in order to get a change of personnel in the White House. It's change in their lives and their communities, as well as in the country at large that they need and want. Even a shift of power in both chambers of Congress in November 2006 has brought them precious little of that.

If history offers any hints, real change relies on movements very much like the one that, however inchoately, has slowly been forming, I believe, just beyond our sight in these last years. This is, of course, exactly the part of our political landscape that our media covers least well and least often (and maybe those ranks of new organizers are actually lucky for that).

It's often forgotten that the conservative movement, sidelined by President Johnson's smashing defeat in the 1964 election of the original conservative presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, spent the next decade and a half largely out of the limelight, building up its forces to challenge the Republican Party establishment. Through the use of the new technology of that moment -- especially direct-mail fundraising -- and the mobilization of new ground troops (evangelical churches) through cheap media (talk radio and cable television), they found ways for outsider candidates to mount effective primary challenges and rattle incumbents, while they moved, increasingly triumphantly, from the local to the state to the national level.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Right had a storyteller in the White House who could re-tell America's tale their way. His narrative threw out the 1960s and 1970s version of an all-in-the-same-boat society. It declared government the enemy and asserted that individuals (and more importantly corporations) unfettered from government regulations were what made the country great.

Reagan himself didn't deliver all that much beyond that. It was in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years that the Right secured the tax cuts, deregulation, and roll back of government programs they had sought so long. Eventually, they did secure many of their goals exactly because, in the 1980s, the gang that brought Reagan to office didn't rest on their laurels, having elected a President. They built their movement and mobilized every last resource, in season and out, to change the national discourse and shift public opinion inside the Beltway, in the media, and in the states.

Asked in South Carolina last month which of the Democratic contenders he thought Dr. King would have endorsed, Senator Obama responded, "He wouldn't endorse any one of us." That's because King was building a movement meant to hold all candidates -- and Presidents -- to account. It was that movement which made it impossible for LBJ to try, however feebly, to accommodate Fanny Lou Hamer at the 1964 convention, that movement which literally changed the faces in politics, that movement which made the candidacy of Barack Obama possible, as the later Feminist movement would Hillary Clinton's. It's that movement the Reagan-Right learned from so well and today's progressives would do well not to forget.

The swirl of the primary season is intoxicating -- and the media love it. But real change happens on a different timetable. If you're looking for estimated times of arrival, the problem is: We don't know that timetable yet.

Laura Flanders is the author of Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, Inspirational Political Change in America, just out in paperback from Penguin Books, and the host of RadioNation on Air America Radio. For more information on her click here.

Copyright 2008 Laura Flanders

In the Military We Trust

Tomgram: William Astore, In the Military We Trust

Hardly a week passes in which we don't hear about what the fallout from two disastrous wars is doing to the overextended, overstrained U.S. military, not to speak of the problems the armed forces are facing in retaining and recruiting members. Recently, there have been reports on a startling rise in war-related suicides, figures that "could push the Army's overall suicide rate to its highest level since [it] began keeping such records in 1980"; on a possible link between the concussions one in six American combat troops suffer from roadside bombs in Iraq and a heightened risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder or a variety of other ailments; on another lowering of recruitment standards ("the percentage of new recruits entering the Army with a high school diploma dropped to a new low in 2007…"); on increasingly over-deployed, ill-equipped, ill-prepared Reserve and National Guard units that may be incapable of coping with future domestic crises ("Guard readiness has continued to slide since last March, when the panel found that 88 percent of Army National Guard units were rated 'not ready…'"); and on the ever more slippery slope downhill in the "forgotten war" in Afghanistan. This is certainly one aspect of the U.S. military equation -- the one readers at Tomdispatch are most likely to hear about.

But there is another aspect to this -- and it's important. Retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore last wrote for this site on military officials and right-wing politicians who were preparing their own exit strategies from Iraq in the form of stab-in-the-back theories. Now, he makes clear how striking it is that, under the most demanding of conditions, volunteers still arrive at military recruitment offices in surprising numbers; and, no less significantly, that Americans still trust their military above all other institutions in this society. Consider his canny analysis of what to make of this below. Tom

[for complete article reference links, please see original here.]

The Tenacity of American Militarism
What Progressives and Other Critics Don't Get about the U.S. Military
By William J. Astore

Recent polls suggest that Americans trust the military roughly three times as much as the president and five times as much as their elected representatives in Congress. The tenacity of this trust is both striking and disturbing. It's striking because it comes despite widespread media coverage of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the friendly-fire cover-up in the case of Pat Tillman's death, and alleged retribution killings by Marines at Haditha. It's disturbing because our country is founded on civilian control of the military. It's debatable whether our less-than-resolute civilian leaders can now exercise the necessary level of oversight of the military and the Pentagon when they are distrusted by so many Americans.

What explains the military's enduring appeal in our society? Certainly, some of this appeal is obvious. Americans have generally been a patriotic bunch. "Supporting our troops" seems an obvious place to go. After all, many of them volunteered to put themselves in harm's way to protect our liberties and to avenge the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. For this, they receive pay and benefits that might best be described as modest. Trusting them -- granting them a measure of confidence -- seems the least that could be offered.

Before addressing two other sources of the military's appeal that are little understood, at least by left-leaning audiences, let's consider for a second the traditional liberal/progressive critique. It often begins by citing the insidious influence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," throwing in for good measure terms like "atrocity," "imperialist," "reactionary," and similar pejoratives. But what's interesting here is that this is often where their critique also ends. The military and its influence are considered so tainted, so baneful that within progressive circles there's a collective wringing of hands, even a reflexive turning of backs, as if our military were truly from Mars or perhaps drawn from the nether regions where Moorlocks shamble and grunt in barbarian darkness.

If you want to change anything -- even our increasing propensity for militarism -- you first have to make an effort to engage with it. And to engage with it, you have to know the wellsprings of its appeal, which transcend corporate profits or imperial power.

Our Military, Ourselves

Despite often compelling evidence to the contrary, Americans like to think of their societal institutions as being open, fair-minded, and democratic. If you look without prejudice at our all-volunteer military, you quickly realize that it truly is one of the least elitist, most diverse institutions of power in American society. Most progressive voices fail to recognize this. Yet it's my belief most Americans do and it's a big reason why they say they trust it.

Our military is demonstrably diverse -- racially, by class, and even more politically than most critics imagine. As a retired military officer who now finds himself a liberal arts professor in academia, I'm struck by the relative conformity of the latter, at least when contrasted to the diversity I found in my former life. Racial minorities from the lower classes are well represented in our military. (Some critics have claimed that they are over-represented, at least in frontline infantry units.) I've seen more black or brown faces in positions of authority within our military than in academia. (In my last job in the Air Force, my boss was a black female colonel.) Indeed, until very recently in American society, our military was one of the few places where African Americans and Hispanics routinely bossed around whites. (Louis Gossett Jr.'s drill instructor in the 1982 movie An Officer and A Gentleman was not exceptional; many times I've witnessed real versions of him in action.)

Politically, our military tends, of course, to be conservative, though not necessarily monochromatically Republican. Again, the world of academia provides a stark contrast, especially in liberal arts departments in top-tier colleges and universities, which do tend to be overwhelmingly Democratic and left of center. To cite only one example, of 42 professors in the English, history, sociology, and political science departments at Brown University who registered to vote, all registered as Democrats.

Ordinary Americans trust the military, in part, because the "have-nots" have direct access to it -- far more access than most will ever have to elite universities, elite law firms, mainstream media outlets, Washington lobbying outfits, or other institutions of influence and power. Indeed, our military remains deeply rooted in the broad middle-and working-class elements of society. Our Ivy League schools, our white-shoe law firms, Boston's Beacon Hill, New York's Upper West Side have little presence in it. Yet everywhere you go in small-town and rural America, you bump into ordinary people who know someone in the military: a nephew, a cousin, a close buddy from high school, even, these days, the girl next door.

If you were to place yourself among the rank-and-file of today's military, you'd find yourself among young people (many of color, some of them recent immigrants) who more accurately mirror the composition of our old small towns and new inner city neighborhoods than nearly any other institution of power. In that sense, the military is a grandly successful social mélange, with, of course, a notable exception. Women. The all-volunteer military is predominately male and will remain so, at least for the foreseeable future. Military service remains largely a gendered activity, commonly associated within academia with retrograde notions of aggressive (and disreputable) masculinity and therefore dismissed as outmoded, even pathologically so.

Our Military, Our Young Men

Of course, supporting -- and trusting -- the military is hardly the same thing as joining it. Increasing numbers of Americans, not just academics or the obvious critics, no longer see joining its ranks as part of anyone's citizenly duty. This is now well known in a society where the first urge of a commander-in-chief/president, when it comes to the public, is not to mobilize them for duty in what he's termed "war time," but to urge them to visit Disney World and keep on spending. Nonetheless, surprising numbers of young men do continue to join up, despite increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This leads me to the second blind spot in the academic/progressive critique of our military -- the failure to recognize the enduring attractiveness of military service to young men seeking to construct their own identities. To many of these potential recruits, American culture today appears feminized -- or, at least demasculinized -- a mommy-state, a risk-averse society with designer drugs and syndrome-of-the-day counselors to ease our pain. In response, what we're seeing is a romantic yearning among young men for the very hardness, the brutality even, epitomized by military service and warfare.

In talking to young men in the rural, conservative area of Pennsylvania where I live, what strikes me is how many of them have seen all 10 episodes of the HBO World War II series, Band of Brothers, and how many admire the bravery, camaraderie, and sacrifice it depicts in portraying paratroopers of the 101st Airborne fighting their way across France and into Germany in 1944-45. Seasoned Marines, a colleague reports, confess that one thing working to sustain recruiting, despite the war in Iraq and regular news reports on an overstrained and exhausted military, is young men who, raised in self-esteem-touting, gender-bending environments (on TV, if nowhere else), sign up to experience "the other side."

It's easy to dismiss such yearnings as Neanderthal. The irony is that that very dismissal creates an inviting taboo for a whole segment of young American males to challenge. For academia and progressives, war is today what sex was to society in the Victorian age, involving as it does emotions nice people don't feel and acts nice people don't opt to commit. Yes, many volunteers join the military with educational or career possibilities in mind, but among young men who enlist, there is also a certain element, conscious or unconscious, of taboo-breaking -- and of self-affirmation.

For women, gender identity is often shaped by biological rites of passage: menstruation, pregnancy, menopause. Male identity is arguably less secure and defined more by the gaze of other men -- you're a man when other men, men you respect, say you are. Men have gender too -- and many seek to construct and assert their maleness within the military, a cultural setting they perceive as patriotic, meritocratic, and sanctioned by the trust and respect of friends, family, and community.

The challenge for progressives is to recognize this and then to work to create viable alternatives to military service in which masculinity and patriotism can be demonstrated in non-lethal settings. An example is my father's service as a forest laborer and firefighter in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Oregon from 1935 to 1937. There could be many opportunities for our young men to assert their masculinity in non-military and nonviolent settings -- fixing our nation's roads and bridges, rebuilding our inner cities, rescuing places torn apart by disaster, natural or otherwise, like New Orleans; and from these, too, funded educational openings and future career possibilities could arise.

To Transform, We Must Engage

The point is this: It's not enough simply to rail against the military or militarism, however enlightened it makes you feel. There are powerful reasons why Americans trust our military and continue to join its ranks. Unless these are grasped, efforts to redirect our nation along less militaristic lines will founder on the shores of incomprehension.

After all, isn't the full media story not only that our all-volunteer military is having trouble meeting its recruiting goals -- hardly surprising, given two major, exceedingly hard wars in which victory, however defined, remains frustratingly out of sight -- but also that the military is nonetheless close to meeting those goals? Admittedly, recruiting standards have been relaxed, signing bonuses increased, and waivers and promotions liberally granted. Even so, our military is not just signing up the rural poor, urban dead-enders, or knuckle-dragging hayseeds (though some critics seem to think otherwise, judging by the unfortunate title of a recent piece in Slate, "Dumb and Dumber"). The comment by John Kerry in 2006, to the effect that students who can't make it in college end up "stuck in Iraq," struck many Americans as grossly unfair precisely because military service still remains a proud first-choice for many young Americans.

If the operating equation is military = bad, are we not effectively excusing ourselves or our children from any obligation to serve -- even any obligation simply to engage with the military? Indeed, are we even patting ourselves on the back for the wisdom of our non-choice and our non-participation? Rarely has a failure to sacrifice or even to engage come at a more self-ennobling price -- or a more self-destructive one for progressive agendas.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He has taught cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism, among other books. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.

Gorilla Radio for Monday Feb. 4, 2008

GR 04-39 101.9 FM 104.3 Cable 'cfuv.uvic.ca'
Monday February 4, 2008

5:00:00 3:00 Welcome to GR, etc. Brick by brick, rivet by rivet, spool by endless spool of razor and barbed wire, the wall enclosing the Palestinian detainees of Gulag Gaza is being again sealed against a repeat of last month's dramatic prison break into Egypt. The Canadian government, along with its allies America and those other remnants of the "democratic" Western world are applauding the government of Egyptian dictator Hosne Mubarek for refusing to allow the starved and desperate passage out of Palestine that the hungry would replenish life's necessities, encouraging Mubarek reinforce further the siege organized by the Israeli government. That this deliberate policy amounts to collective punishment against a people long-brutalized by the self-avowed ethnic puritans of the Jewish State seems of little matter to the men of letters ruling from Ottawa, Washington and Number 10 Downing Street. That these actions, comprising complicity in genocide, are not mentioned in the corporate and State news organs of the conspirators in this great sin is little wonder; that the knowing citizens of those nations aiding this abomination against humanity are not in the streets demanding "their" representatives in government cease and desist is more difficult to fathom. Jon Elmer is a Vancouver-based freelance writer and photojournalist who has lived in and reported from Occupied Palestine. He is the creator of the news website, From Occupied Palestine.org, and his home site, Jon Elmer.ca, each providing copious evidence of Israeli State criminality. Jon Elmer and what more can be done for Palestine in the first half.

And; Canada's border too is the subject of intense scrutiny and demands for reinforcement against the evils of the world, ever lurking in the shadow of the 49th parallel, waiting to descend howling upon the heads of the good citizenry. But in Canada's case, the threat is more fiction than reality. More precisely, Canada's border woes are the creation of State television in the form of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's new "instant hit" drama 'The Border,' wherein suspiciously American looking plot lines play out the need for State vigilance, violence, and the granting of ever-expanding powers to police and security actors that we cowering Canadians be safe to go about our cross-border shopping. Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and long-time contributor to ZNet, one of the original alternative internet media organizations dedicated to countering corporate and State news disinformation. He has reported from Haiti, South and Central America, and the Middle East. Justin Podur is published at numerous internet sites and in progressive print publications, and is a founding member of Peublos en Camino collective. His home site is Killingtrain.com. Justin Podur and blurring the lines of fact and fiction on the border in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will be here 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. but first, Jon Elmer and rearing up again the Palestine wall.

5:03:00 21:00 Discussion w/ Jon Elmer

"Welcome back to the show, Jon. Every one of the many times we speak here of Palestine it is in the context of death, horror, and despair. Last month, we witnessed a remarkable recess in that ongoing narrative with the destruction of parts of the Egyptian barrier holding captive Palestine. How did that wall come down?"

5:24:00 1:00 Cart(s)
5:25:00 10:00 Janine Bandcroft
5:35:00 3:00 Music
5:38:00 21:00 Discussion w/ Justin Podur

Welcome back to GR, etc. Canada's border too is the subject of intense scrutiny and demands for reinforcement against the evils of the world, ever lurking in the shadow of the 49th parallel, waiting to descend howling upon the heads of the good citizenry. But in Canada's case, the threat is more fiction than reality. More precisely, Canada's border woes are the creation of State television in the form of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's new "instant hit" drama 'The Border,' wherein suspiciously American looking plot lines play out the need for State vigilance, violence, and the granting of ever-expanding powers to police and security actors that we cowering Canadians be safe to go about our cross-border shopping. Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and long-time contributor to ZNet, one of the original alternative internet media organizations dedicated to countering corporate and State news disinformation. He has reported from Haiti, South and Central America, and the Middle East. Justin Podur is published at numerous internet sites and in progressive print publications, and is a founding member of Peublos en Camino collective.

"Welcome back to the show, Justin. I haven't had the belly to watch the CBC's new theatrical effort to better emulate Kiefer Sutherland's disgusting murder and torture-fest serial, '24' yet, but why should I bother checking out 'The Border?'"

5:59:00 1:00 Thanks Jon Elmer, Justin Podur, J9; upcoming.
6:00:00 --:-- -0-

America's Cat's Paw: Reassessing the Need for NATO

The Anti-Empire Report

Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life

by William Blum
February 2, 2008

www.killinghope.org


NATO is a treaty on wheels -- It can be rolled in any direction to suit Washington's current policy.

Have you by chance noticed that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has become virtually a country? With more international rights and military power than almost any other country in the world? Yes, the same NATO that we were told was created in 1949 to defend against a Soviet attack in Western Europe, and thus should have gone out of existence in 1991 when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact expired and explicitly invited NATO to do the same. Other reasons have been suggested for NATO's creation: to help suppress the left in Italy and France if either country's Communist Party came to power through an election, and/or to advance American hegemony by preventing the major European nations from pursuing independent foreign policies. This latter notion has been around a long time. In 2004, the US ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, stated: "Europeans need to resist creating a united Europe in competition or as a counterweight to the United States."[1]

The alliance has been kept amongst the living to serve as a very useful handmaiden of US foreign policy as well as providing American arms and airplane manufacturers with many billions of dollars of guaranteed sales due to the requirement that all NATO members meet a certain minimum warfare capability.

Here's some of what NATO has been up to in recent years as it strives to find a new raison d'être in the
post-Cold War era.

It is presently waging war in Afghanistan on behalf of the United States and its illegal 2001 bombing and invasion of that pathetic land. NATO's forces free up US troops and assume much of the responsibility and blame, instead of Washington, for the many bombings which have caused serious civilian casualties and ruination. NATO also conducts raids into Pakistan, the legality of which is as non-existent as what they do in Afghanistan.

The alliance, which began with 15 members, now has 26, in addition to 23 "partner countries" (under the reassuring name of ("Partnership for Peace"). Combined, that's more than one-fourth of the entire United Nations membership, and there are numerous other countries bribed and pressured to work with NATO, such as Jordan which recently sent troops to Afghanistan. Jordan and Qatar have offered to host a NATO-supported regional Security Cooperation Centre. NATO has a training mission in Iraq, and Iraqi military personnel receive training in NATO members' countries. In recent years, almost all members of the alliance and the Partnership for Peace have sent troops to Iraq or Afghanistan or the former Yugoslavia, in each case serving as proxy US-occupation forces. Israel has had talks with the alliance about the deployment of a NATO force in their country. India is scheduled to participate in upcoming NATO war games. The list goes on, as the alliance's outreach keeps reaching out further, holding international conferences to bring together new and potential allies, under names such as the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, and the Mediterranean Dialogue (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia), or expanding military ties with existing international organizations such as the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates).

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, NATO gave the United States carte blanche to travel throughout Europe transporting men to be tortured.[2] It's like a refined gentleman's club with some unusual member privileges. NATO also goes around monitoring elections, the latest being in Upper Abkhazia (claimed by Georgia) in January.

The alliance has military bases in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe, and regularly conducts "naval operations in the Mediterranean to actively demonstrate NATO's resolve and solidarity", as NATO puts it. This includes AWAC (Airborne Warning and Control) aircraft patrolling the Mediterranean from above and frequently stopping and boarding ships and boats at sea. "Since the start of the operation," reports NATO, "nearly 79,000 merchant vessels have been monitored (as of 12 April 2006) ... The surveillance operation utilizes ship, aircraft and submarine assets to build a picture of maritime activity in the Area of Operations." The exercise includes "actions aimed at preventing or countering terrorism coming from or conducted at sea and all illegality possibly connected with terrorism, such as human trafficking and smuggling of arms and radioactive substances." NATO is truly Lord of the Mediterranean, unelected, unauthorized, and unsupervised.

NATO, which has ready access to nuclear weapons from several of its members (only with Washington's approval), has joined the United States in its operation to surround Russia. "Look," said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO as far back as 2001, "this is a military organization. It's moving towards our border. Why?"[3] As of December 2007, Moscow's concern had not lessened. The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister lashed out at NATO's steady expansion into former Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, saying the policy was "a leftover from the time of the Cold War".[4] Finland -- which shares a border with Russia of more than 1300 km -- is now being considered for membership in NATO.

Ever since it undertook a Washington-instigated 78-day bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999, NATO has been operating in the Balkans like a colonial Governor-General. Along with the UN, it's been leading a peacekeeping operation in Kosovo and takes part in the policing of Bosnia, including searching people's homes looking for suspected war criminals wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The triumvirate of NATO, the United States, and the European Union have been supporting Kosovo's plan to unilaterally declare independence from Serbia, thus bypassing the UN Security Council where Serbia's ally, Russia, has a veto.

We therefore have the Western powers unilaterally declaring the independence of a part of another country's territory; this because the Kosovo ethnic Albanians are regarded as much more reliably "pro-West" than is Serbia, which has refused to look upon the free market and the privatization of the world known as "globalization" as the summum bonum, nor shown proper enthusiasm for an American or NATO military installation upon its soil. Kosovo, however, does have a large US military base on its territory. Any attempt by Serbia to militarily prevent Kosovo from seceding would in all likelihood be met by NATO/US military force. You may wonder what a United States military base is doing in Kosovo. People all over the world wonder the same about their local American bases.

You may also wonder: What force exists to slow down the growth of the Mediterranean Monster? Who can stand up to it? The military elite of the triumvirate take such a question seriously. What they apparently fear the most is nuclear weapons in the hands of the wrong people; i.e., those who don't recognize the triumvirate's right to dictate to the world. On January 22 the Guardian of London reported that the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands had released a manifesto which insists that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world". The paper had earlier been presented to NATO's secretary general and to the Pentagon. It is likely to be discussed at a NATO summit in Bucharest in April, along with the possible extension of the alliance to include five more countries which had been part of, or bordered on, the Soviet Empire: Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia, Albania and Ukraine.

The five generals who authored the report could have advocated a serious international campaign to begin the process of actually creating a nuclear-free world. Instead, they call for an end to the European Union's "obstruction" of and rivalry with NATO and a shift from consensus decision-taking in NATO bodies to majority voting, meaning an end to national vetoes.

So there you have it. The international military elite are demanding yet more power and autonomy for NATO. Questioning voices in the alliance, in the European Union, or anywhere else should forget their concerns about a nuclear-free world, international law, pre-emptive war, wars of aggression, national sovereignty, and all that other United Nations Charter and human-rights nonsense. We're gonna nuke all those Arab terrorists before they have a chance to say Allah Akbar.

The arrogance continues, with the manifesto specifying "no role in decision-taking on Nato operations for alliance members who are not taking part in the operations," calling also for the use of force without UN Security Council authorization when "immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings". Now who can argue against protecting large numbers of human beings?

The paper also declares that "Nato's credibility is at stake in Afghanistan" and "Nato is at a juncture and runs the risk of failure." The German general went so far as to declare that his own country, by insisting upon a non-combat role for its forces in Afghanistan, was contributing to "the dissolution of Nato". Such immoderate language may be a reflection of the dark cloud which has hovered over the alliance since the end of the Cold War -- that NATO has no legitimate reason for existence and that failure in Afghanistan would make this thought more present in the world's mind. If NATO hadn't begun to intervene outside of Europe it would have highlighted its uselessness and lack of mission. "Out of area or out of business" it was said.[5]


Democracy is a beautiful thing, except that part about letting just any old jerk vote.
"The people can have anything they want.
The trouble is, they do not want anything.
At least they vote that way on election day."

- Eugene Debs, American socialist leader, early 20th century

Why was the primary vote for former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich so small when anti-Iraq war sentiment in the United States is supposedly so high, and Kucinich was easily the leading anti-war candidate in the Democratic race, indeed the only genuine one after former Senator Mike Gravel withdrew? Even allowing for his being cut out of several debates, Kucinich's showing was remarkably poor. In Michigan, on January 15, it was only Kucinich and Clinton running. Clinton got 56% of the vote, the "uncommitted" vote (for candidates who had withdrawn but whose names were still on the ballot) was 39%, and Kucinich received but 4%. And Clinton, remember, has been the leading pro-war hawk of all the Democratic candidates.

I think much of the answer lies in the fact that the majority of the American people -- like the majority of people all over the world -- aren't very sophisticated politically, and many of them aren't against the war for very cerebral reasons. Their opposition perhaps stems mainly from the large number of American soldiers who've lost their lives, or because the United States is not "winning", or because America's reputation in the world is being soiled, or because a majority of other Americans express their opposition to the war, or because of George W.'s multiple character defects, or because of a number of other reasons you couldn't even guess at. Not much especially perceptive or learned in this collection.

I think there are all kinds of intelligence in this world: musical, scientific, mathematical, artistic, academic, literary, mechanical, and so on. Then there's political intelligence, which I would define as the ability to see through the bullshit which the leaders and politicians of every society, past, present and future, feed their citizens from birth on to win elections and assure continuance of the prevailing ideology.

This is why it's so important for all of us to continue "preaching to the choir" and "preaching to the converted". That's what speakers and writers and other activists are often scoffed at for doing -- saying the same old thing to the same old people, just spinning their wheels. But long experience as speaker, writer and activist in the area of foreign policy tells me it just ain't so. From the questions and comments I regularly get from my audiences, via email and in person, and from other people's audiences as well, I can plainly see that there are numerous significant information gaps and misconceptions in the choir's thinking, often leaving them unable to see through the newest government lie or propaganda trick; they're unknowing or forgetful of what happened in the past that illuminates the present; knowing the facts but unable to apply them at the appropriate moment; vulnerable to being led astray by the next person who offers a specious argument that opposes what they currently believe, or think they believe. The choir needs to be frequently reminded and enlightened.

As cynical as others may think they are, the choir is frequently not cynical enough about the power elite's motivations. They underestimate the government's capacity for deceit, clinging to the belief that their government somehow means well; they're moreover insufficiently skilled at reading between the media's lines. And this all applies to how they view political candidates as well. Try asking "anti-war" supporters of Hillary Clinton if they know what a hawk she is, that -- as but one example -- she's promised that American forces will not leave Iraq while she's president. (And Obama loves the empire as much as Clinton.) When Ronald Reagan was president, on several occasions polls revealed that many, if not most, people who supported him were actually opposed to many of his specific policies.

In sum, even when the hearts of the chorus may be in the right place, their heads still need working on, on a recurring basis. And in any event, very few people are actually born into the choir; they achieve choir membership only after being preached to, multiple times.

When I speak in public, and when I can mention it in an interview, I raise the question of the motivations of the administration. As long as people believe that our so-called leaders are well-intentioned, the leaders can, and do, get away with murder. Literally.

"How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been 200 years at it. It's superb."
- Gore Vidal

Another interesting view of the American electoral system comes from Cuban leader Raúl Castro. He recently noted that the United States pits two identical parties against one another, and joked that a choice between a Republican and Democrat is like choosing between himself and his brother Fidel.

"We could say in Cuba we have two parties: one led by Fidel and one led by Raúl, what would be the difference?" he asked. "That's the same thing that happens in the United States ... both are the same. Fidel is a little taller than me, he has a beard and I don't."[6]


Speaking of political intelligence ... take a little stroll with Alice through the American wonderland ... just for laughs

"This war [in Iraq] is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. ... it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad." -- Thomas Friedman, much-acclaimed New York Times foreign-affairs analyst, November 2003[7]

"President Bush has placed human rights at the center of his foreign policy agenda in unprecedented ways." --
Michael Gerson, columnist for the Washington Post, 2007[8]

The war in Iraq "is one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken." --
David Brooks, New York Times columnist and National Public Radio (NPR) commentator (2007)[9]

If this is what leading American public intellectuals believe and impart to their audiences, is it any wonder that the media can short circuit people's critical faculties altogether? It should as well be noted that these three journalists are all with "liberal" media.

And when Hillary Clinton says in the January 31 debate with Barack Obama: "We bombed them [Iraq] for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors," and the fact is that the UN withdrew its weapons inspectors because the Clinton administration had made it clear that it was about to start bombing Iraq ...

Obama didn't correct her. Neither did any of the eminent journalists on the panel, though this particular piece of disinformation has been repeated again and again in the media, and has been corrected again and again by those on the left. Comrades, we have our work cut out for us. The chorus needs us. America needs us. Keep preaching.


Teaching political intelligence
If you're a high school or college teacher, you might want to look at http://www.teachpeace.com/highschoolkit.htm for teaching aids to impart a progressive outlook on US foreign policy and related issues to your students.


NOTES
[1] Jewish Telegraph Agency, international wire service, February 16, 2004

[2] The Guardian (London), June 7, 2007, article by Stephen Grey, author of "Ghost Plane: The inside story of the CIA Torture Program" (2006)

[3] Associated Press, June 16, 2001

[4] Focus News Agency (Bulgaria)/Agence France-Presse, December 26, 2007

[5] Much of the NATO material can be found on NATO's website: http://www.nato.int/home.htm. Also see an abundance of material at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages

[6] Associated Press, CNN.com, December 25, 2007

[7] New York Times, November 30, 2003

[8] Washington Post, September 7, 2007

[9] Mary Eberstadt, ed., "Why I turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys" (2007), p.73


William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website at "essays".
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CBS Hear BS: 60 Minutes of Revisionism on the Iraq "War"

CBS Falsifies Iraq War History

By Robert Parry
January 28, 2008


There’s a cynical old saying that the victors write the history. CBS’s “60 Minutes” demonstrated how that process works on Jan. 27 in airing Scott Pelley’s interview with the FBI agent who de-briefed former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

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In a world of objective reality, a reporter might say that the United States launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, under the false pretense that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, even after Iraq had repeatedly – and accurately – announced that its WMD had been destroyed in the 1990s.

On Dec. 7, 2002, Iraq even sent to the United Nations a 12,000-page declaration explaining how its WMD stockpiles had been eliminated. In fall 2002, Hussein’s government also allowed teams of U.N. inspectors into Iraq and gave them free rein to examine any site of their choosing.

Those inspections only ended in March 2003 when President George W. Bush decided to press ahead with war despite the U.N. Security Council’s refusal to authorize the invasion and its desire to give the U.N. inspectors time to finish their work.

But none of that reality is part of the history that Americans are supposed to know. The officially sanctioned U.S. account, as embraced by Bush in speech after speech, is that Saddam Hussein “chose war” by defying the U.N. over the WMD issue and by misleading the world into believing that he still possessed these weapons.

In line with Bush’s version of history, “60 Minutes” correspondent Pelley asked FBI interrogator George Piro why Hussein kept pretending that he had WMD even as U.S. troops massed on Iraq’s borders, when a simple announcement that the WMD was gone would have prevented the war.

“For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking,” Pelley said in introducing the segment on the interrogation of Hussein about his WMD stockpiles. “Why did he choose war with the United States?”

The segment never mentions the fact that Hussein’s government did disclose that it had eliminated its WMD. Instead Pelley presses Piro on the question of why Hussein was hiding that fact.

Piro said Hussein explained to him that “most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ‘90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.”

“So,” Pelley asked, “why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?”

After Piro mentioned Hussein’s lingering fear of neighboring Iran, Pelley felt he was close to an answer to the mystery: “He believed that he couldn’t survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?”

Wanting an Invasion?

But, still, Pelley puzzled over why Hussein’s continued in his miscalculation.

Pelley asked: “As the U.S. marched toward war and we began massing troops on his border, why didn’t he stop it then? And say, ‘Look, I have no weapons of mass destruction,’ I mean, how could he have wanted his country to be invaded?”

It’s Bush World, with Pelley – like other prominent U.S. news correspondents – ignoring the well-established facts of the run-up to war and following the made-up story first presented by Bush four months after he forced the U.N. inspectors out, when he began claiming that Hussein had never let them in.

On July 14, 2003, as the U.S.-led WMD search also was coming up empty, Bush began asserting that it was all Hussein’s fault because he had never let the U.N. inspectors in. Bush told reporters:

“We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”

Facing no challenge from the White House press corps, Bush continued repeating this lie in varied forms over the next four years as part of his public litany for defending the invasion.

On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”

As the months and years went by, Bush’s lie and its constant retelling took on the color of truth.

At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.

“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.”

At a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.

“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has subsequently caused him to lose his life.”

In the frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledges the fact that Hussein did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing.

Journalistic Group Think

Prominent Washington journalists have even repeated Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”

Of course, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But he did so in the real history, not in the faux reality that now governs Washington and pervades America’s top news programs, including “60 Minutes.”

In Pelley’s historical formulation, the question is not why did Bush invade Iraq in violation of international law, causing the deaths of nearly 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but rather “How could [Hussein] have wanted his country to be invaded?”

This strategy of repeating a “big lie” often enough to make it sound true was famously described in the writings of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels during World War II. However, given the relatively free U.S. press, many Americans feel they are protected from “big lie” techniques, counting on journalists to call lying politicians to account.

But that clearly is no longer the case – and hasn’t been for some time. Facing career pressure from well-organized right-wing attack groups, American journalists act more like triangulating politicians, fearful of accusations of “liberal bias” or unpatriotic behavior or softness on terrorism.

To have challenged George W. Bush in July 2003 – when he was near the height of his popularity – or even now with his approval ratings at historic lows would carry career dangers that few American reporters want to risk.

So, discretion – or in this case the acceptance of a lie as truth – is the better part of valor.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Empire Burlesque's Official Endorsement in the 2008 Presidential Race
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 01 February 2008

People often say to me, "Gosh, Chris, you sure give our politicians a lot of guff. Seems like you find something wrong with everybody out there, no matter what their political stripe. Is there anybody at all that you could support for president?" That's what people say to me.

Well, thanks to the good offices of Scott Horton at Harper's, I'm happy to say that I have now found a presidential candidate to whom I can give my wholehearted, full-throated support: a man of the people, a son of the soil, a straight-talker with business moxie, military experience and a wide knowledge of foreign parts. I am proud to stand here today (why yes, I do write this blog standing up – and I hope you read it in the same way) and second Horton's nomination for the only man who can lead our great nation back to, er, greatness. My fellow Americans, I give you the right honorable Samuel Langhorne Clemens!


I have pretty much made up my mind to run for President. What the country wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history so that the enemies of the party will be unable to rake up anything against him that nobody ever heard of before. If you know the worst about a candidate to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be checkmated. Now I am going to enter the field with an open record. I am going to own up in advance to all the wickedness I have done....

I candidly acknowledge that I ran away at the battle of Gettysburg. My friends have tried to smooth over this fact by asserting that I did so for the purpose of imitating Washington, who went into the woods at Valley Forge for the purpose of saying his prayers. It was a miserable subterfuge. I struck out in a straight line for the Tropic of Cancer because I was scared. I wanted my country saved, but I preferred to have somebody else save it. I entertain that preference yet. If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon’s mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded, my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home.

My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me to be Napoleonic in its grandeur.

My financial views are of the most decided character, but they are not likely, perhaps, to increase my popularity with the advocates of inflation. I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get...

....These are about the worst parts of my record. On them I come before the country. If my country don’t want me, I will go back again. But I recommend myself as a safe man – a man who starts from the basis of total depravity and proposes to be fiendish to the last.


And that's our campaign slogan -- "Samuel L. Clemens: Fiendish to the Last!" Why not the best?

You should of course go read the whole piece at Harper's. But before you go -- or when you get back -- check out some more of the candidate's position papers that I, policy wonk that I am, dug up after joining the campaign:


We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one -- the one we use -- which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics. Look at the candidates whom we loathe, one year, and are afraid to vote against, the next; whom we cover with unimaginable filth, one year, and fall down on the public platform and worship, the next--and keep on doing it until the habitual shutting of our eyes to last year's evidences brings us presently to a sincere and stupid belief in this year's. Look at the tyranny of party--at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty -- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes -- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times. A Hartford clergyman met me in the street and spoke of a new nominee -- denounced the nomination, in strong, earnest words -- words that were refreshing for their independence, their manliness. He said, "I ought to be proud, perhaps, for this nominee is a relative of mine; on the contrary, I am humiliated and disgusted, for I know him intimately -- familiarly -- and I know that he is an unscrupulous scoundrel, and always has been." You should have seen this clergyman preside at a political meeting forty days later, and urge, and plead, and gush -- and you should have heard him paint the character of this same nominee. You would have supposed he was describing the Cid, and Greatheart, and Sir Galahad, and Bayard the Spotless all rolled into one. Was he sincere? Yes -- by that time; and therein lies the pathos of it all, the hopelessness of it all. It shows at what trivial cost of effort a man can teach himself to lie, and learn to believe it, when he perceives, by the general drift, that that is the popular thing to do...


Now we all know that flattery of the electorate is the quintessence of politics. No candidate can come before the American people without telling them what exalted, God-blessed, peerless and unprecedented paragons of goodness and wisdom they all are. And candidate Clemens is certainly a master of this indispensible art, as we can see below:


. . . There are certain sweet-smelling sugar-coated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate. One of these is, that there is such a thing in the world as independence: independence of thought, independence of opinion, independence of action. Another is, that the world loves to see independence--admires it, applauds it. Another is, that there is such a thing in the world as toleration--in religion, in politics, and such matters; and with it trains that already mentioned auxiliary lie that toleration is admired and applauded. Out of these trunk-lies spring many branch ones: to wit, the lie that not all men are slaves: the lie that men are glad when other men succeed; glad when they prosper; glad to see them reach lofty heights; sorry to see them fall again. And yet other branch lies: to wit, that there is heroism in man; that he is not mainly made up of malice and treachery; that he is sometimes not a coward; that there is something about him that ought to be perpetuated -- in heaven, or hell, or somewhere. And these other branch lies, to wit: that conscience, man's moral medicine chest, is not only created by the Creator, but is put into man ready charged with the right and only true and authentic correctives of conduct -- and the duplicate chest, with the self-same correctives, unchanged, unmodified, distributed to all nations and all epochs. And yet one other branch lie: to wit, that I am I, and you are you; that we are units, individuals, and have natures of our own, instead of being the tail end of a tapeworm eternity of ancestors extending in linked procession back and back and back--to our source in the monkeys, with this so-called individuality of ours a decayed and rancid mush of inherited instincts and teachings derived, atom by atom, stench by stench, from the entire line of that sorry column, and not so much new and original matter in it as you could balance on a needle point and examine under a microscope....



All the talk about tolerance, in anything or anywhere, is plainly a gentle lie. It does not exist. It is in no man's heart; but it unconsciously, and by moss-grown inherited habit, drivels and slobbers from all men's lips. Intolerance is everything for oneself, and nothing for the other person. The mainspring of man's nature is just that -- selfishness. Let us skip the other lies, for brevity's sake. To consider them would prove nothing, except that man is what he is -- loving toward his own, lovable to his own--his family, his friends -- and otherwise the buzzing, busy, trivial enemy of his race --who tarries his little day, does his little dirt, commends himself to God, and then goes out into the darkness, to return no more, and send no messages back -- selfish even in death.


Yes, I think we have a winner here. So join the Clemens campaign today! Empire Burlesque is honored to be handling the finances for this selfless crusade. Anything you can send -- rag money or hard money -- to the PayPal address at the top right of this page will keep the great Clemens riverboat steaming down the river toward victory in November.

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Mine Your Business: Subterranean Bush-Clinton Blues
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 01 February 2008
I must admit that when I first saw this headline in Thursday's New York Times -- An Ex-President, a Mining Deal and a Big Donor -- I thought the paper had exhumed one of the sleazier stories from the Bush Family past, perhaps in expiation for having left so many filth-encrusted Bush rocks unturned for so many years -- especially during L'il Dimbulb's presidential campaign in 2000.

In the end, of course, the story turned out to be the shocking revelation that Bill Clinton is a money-grubbing manwhore eager to service brutal dictators to line his own pockets and funnel backroom pork to his cronies. Wow, who knew?

[The Times has since changed the headline to mention Clinton by name -- perhaps to make sure that no one gets the crazy idea that any other ex-presidents might be hip-deep in sleaze.]

However, we don't mean to heap scorn on the Times' story. It was indeed interesting to get this detailed glimpse into the way the world works behind the endless preening of mugs and murderers who pass as leaders on the global stage. And it demonstrates -- yet again -- that there is no discernible moral difference between the two ruling houses that have dominated the gutted Republic for nearly 30 years now. (A Bush or Clinton in the White House, as president or vice president, from 1981 to 2008 -- with a good chance of at least four more years in the offing.) No wonder the two families get along so famously -- and no wonder B. Clinton moved so swiftly and strenuously to quash investigations into the crimes of his Bush predecessor, as the incomparable Robert Parry points out. No doubt H. Clinton will do same for her Bush if she gets the chance.

But here's a look back at that earlier hook-up between an ex-prez, a mining company and a big donor. This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for the Moscow Times in May 2004:


In April, [George W.] Bush quietly gave a mining conglomerate larded with his top contributors a little gift: $155 million worth of federal land, the Denver Post reports. Invoking an obscure 1872 law designed to help frontier prospectors gain title to their small mining claims, Bush turned over a swathe of prime Colorado mountaintop property to the firm of Dodge Phelps, whose board is packed with oil men, military contractors and official Bush "Pioneers": corporate fat cats who've strongarmed at least $100,000 from their friends - and employees - for Bush campaign coffers.

Because the never-updated 1872 law requires that federal mining land be sold for $5 per acre, Bush's bagmen only had to pony up $875 for the whole spread - in an area where land is worth a staggering $1 million per acre. The idea is to build an elite ski playground on the looted public property - even though the law requires that such land sales be used for actual mining....

In the Colorado caper, as in so many others, Bush is following in the mucky footprints of his father. In the waning days of his failed presidency, George I used the same 1872 law to cut a sweetheart deal with Barrick, the Canadian mining giant. For $10,000 in chump change to the federal treasury, Old Bush gave Barrick government land containing $10 billion in gold, The Observer reports.

Afterwards, Bush I became a "special advisor" to Barrick, pocketing kickbacks from the gold deal for seven years and traveling the world on behalf of his corporate master, trying to rig up insider deals with his "old friends" - bloodthirsty dictators like Indonesia's Suharto and Zaire's Mobutu. In return, Barrick later poured streams of its Bush-gotten gold into Little George's 2000 campaign.

That Tricky Torture File
Posted by It's Called Appeasement on Sunday, January 27th at 10:15 AM

That tricky torture file

Jan 22, 2008 04:30 AM
U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins found it "offensive." Israeli Ambassador Alan Baker was "shocked."

And Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier quickly pushed the panic button when he found Canada's diplomats are being trained to keep an eye open to torture not only by 'pariah states' like Iran and Syria, but also by what the Harper Regime refers to as "close allies".

That vigilance won Canada credit from Amnesty International, which praised us for being alert to rights abuses.

But the howls of outrage from Washington and Jerusalem at finding themselves on the foreign affairs watchlist next to "axis of evil" Iran sent Bernier lunging for the delete key faster than you can say "welcome to Gitmo." It was all a big, regrettable mistake, he said.

In future, Canada's "Torture Awareness Workshop Reference Materials" will be carefully purged of references to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, and of any other mention of the U.S. or Israel that might give offence. On balance, that's probably just as well. The checklist was not a brilliant idea. Only nine countries were named. Far more dabble in torture. Diplomats shouldn't need a list to be watchful.

But Bernier's scramble to say sorry for "the embarrassment caused" raises the question of who really deserves that fulsome apology.

The U.S., which only recently outlawed waterboarding? Israel, which reserves the right to use "moderate physical pressure" during interrogations? Prime Minister Stephen Harper's risk-averse government, for being caught with its pinstripes down? Or Canadians, who were mortified by this bungling and abject backflip?

(And the undo influence of foreign politicians on our policies ... ?

Canada Puts Israel, US on Torture List-But Then Bows to Pressure

Either Israel and the US have suddenly stopped using torture, or the Harper Regime doesn't want its diplomats making decisions based on the facts.

Torture awareness manual 'wrongly' lists Cdn allies, to be rewritten: Bernier

at 14:27 on January 19, 2008, EST.
By Pat Hewitt, THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO - Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier found himself backtracking Saturday over his department's training manual that lists the U.S. and Guantanamo Bay as sites of possible torture - alongside such countries as Iran and Syria (and Israel).

In a statement, Bernier said he regretted the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual, adding that it contains a list that "wrongly" includes some of Canada's closest allies.

(But not because they don't use torture, 'wrong' as in we're not allowed to talk about them doing it.)

Bernier said the manual is neither a policy document, nor a statement of policy, and that he has directed it to be reviewed and rewritten.

(Even though it is, because it's a training manual for diplomats.)

Along with the U.S. prison camp in Cuba and the United States, the list includes Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Mexico and Syria.

The workshop manual, which was used in the Foreign Affairs department's torture awareness training, was produced about two years ago while Justice Dennis O'Connor was investigating the case of Maher Arar.

Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian engineer, was imprisoned and tortured in Syria for almost a year after he was detained and sent there by U.S. authorities in 2002 after he was wrongfully accused of having terrorist ties. A Canadian judicial inquiry, led by O'Connor, later cleared him. Ottawa awarded Arar $10.5 million in compensation after the inquiry concluded faulty information passed by the RCMP to American officials likely led to his deportation to Syria.

William Sampson, who holds a dual British-Canadian citizenship, was imprisoned and tortured in Saudi Arabia where he was arrested in 2001, accused of involvement in a string of bombings in Riyadh. He was among seven foreigners granted amnesty and freed in 2003.

(None of the criminals who passed false information to the Americans, however, have been held responsible for their crimes.)

The workshop manual offers a section on laws prohibiting torture and what to do when cases are suspected.

The Canadian Press first reported the manual's existence on Wednesday after it had been inadvertently released to lawyers working on a lawsuit involving allegations of abuse of detainees in Afghanistan when they asked the federal government what kind of training is available for its employees on torture.

"I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department's torture awareness training," Bernier said in the statement.

"It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten. The manual is neither a policy document nor a statement of policy. As such, it does not convey the government's views or positions," the statement added.

('Positions and views' that include looking the other way when 'allies' of the Neo-Conservative Harper Regime violate international law ...)

In Toronto, Liberal foreign affairs critic, Bob Rae, told The Canadian Press the government is in damage control.

"There's a question of competence. I mean, to me, I don't think I've ever seen a situation, or a government where the management of the foreign policy was handled in such an amateurish way on a number of fronts," said Rae.

(And directed by foreign Governments, and their ability to silence legitimate, legal criticisms.)

"The minister goes to the Middle East and can't answer any questions when he's in Israel because, you know, he's not allowed to answer any questions, " Rae added. "They attempt to control everything from central casting but sometimes things happen and then they immediately try to do the damage control on a Saturday morning."

(In other words, he can't answer questions, because he's not allowed to speak to the reality of the situation.)

"This is a very strange way to run a government," he suggested, adding any list of this kind can't be politically controlled.

"It's a list that has to be based on the evidence from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, agencies of the United Nations and so on."

Rae said he hopes the government gets on with the review quickly and reveals the criteria that will be used to determine which countries should be on the list.

"The idea that you would equate the government of the United States with the government of Iran with respect to the treatment of prisoners is a little hard to fathom," said Rae.

(Why? Because the US does much more damage and violates the law more than Iran ... ?)

"But the fact that both Senator (John) McCain and Senator (Barack) Obama had to speak so strongly on the issue of torture during the questioning of the former attorney general of the United States shows that the question of the treatment of prisoners in the United States is a live question," said Rae.

"But it is impossible to justify comparing it to what is going on in a country like Iran, where we have documented evidence of systematic torture of prisoners," said Rae.

(Evidence also proves systematic torture of prisoners by the US and Israel. On a much grander scale. Not suprised that Rae would also be so cowed on the issue ...)

U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins said the U.S. found it offensive to be on the same list with countries such as Iran and China. He said the U.S. requested it be removed from the list and added the U.S. does not condone torture.

(Actions speak louder than words.)

An Israeli Embassy spokesman said the ambassador of Israel would expect his country to be removed from the list.

(Then we 'expect' Israel to forego the practice of torturing prisoners, political or otherwise.)

(With files from The Associated Press)

start.shaw.ca/start/enCA/News/NationalNewsArticle.htm?src=n011913A.xml

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Canada puts U.S. on torture watch list: CTV

Updated Wed. Jan. 16 2008 11:02 PM ET

CTV.ca News

Omar Khadr's lawyers say they can't understand why Canada is not doing more to help their client in light of new evidence that Ottawa has put the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on a watch list for torture.

Khadr -- a Canadian citizen who was just 15-years-old when he was captured in Afghanistan more than five years ago and taken to Guantanamo -- has claimed that he has been tortured at the prison. Now, CTV News has obtained documents that put Guantanamo Bay on a torture watch list.

Khadr's U.S. military lawyer says the new documents contradict Harper's assurances that his client is receiving fair treatment.

"Omar has certainly been abused, his rights have been violated under international law, and apparently the Canadian government has reason to believe that's true, and yet, they've acted not at all to assist him," William Kuebler told CTV News.

Khadr's lawyers say suspicions of torture undermine claims that he can get a fair trial from the military commission in Guantanamo Bay. They want him sent back to Canada to face justice here. But the government has said he's charged with serious crimes and they are waiting for the U.S. judicial process to play itself out.

Canada's new focus on torture was ordered by the inquiry into Maher Arar's nightmare in Syria. U.S. authorities sent Arar -- a Canadian of Syrian ancestory -- to Syria after he made a brief stopover in New York in 2002. They wrongly accused him of having links to terrorism in large part because of information provided by the RCMP.

Arar was sent to a Syrian prison where he was tortured for nearly a year. An inquiry into the Arar affair ordered a new focus on torture, and CTV News has learned that, as part of a "torture awareness workshop," diplomats are now being told where to watch for abuse.

The aim of the workshop: to teach diplomats who visit Canadians in foreign jails how to tell if they've been tortured. It also listed countries and places with greater risks of torture. The list includes Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, and China. But surprisingly, it also included the United States, Guantanamo Bay, and Israel.

It notes specific "U.S. interrogation techniquies," which include "forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation." The U.S. has repeatedly denied allegations by international groups that it tortures prisoners captured in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. However, U.S. officials have refused to comment on the Canadian list.

But international observers say they are heartened by the specificity of the Canadian list. Alex Neve of Amnesty International says he is surprised that Canada would risk offending allies by naming countries that potentially torture prisoners.

"These are countries where, sadly, the record is clear -- torture and ill treatment happens," said Neve.

But it appears that Ottawa may have had second thoughts about being so explicit. After the documents were released as evidence in a court case relating to Afghan detainees, the government tried to get them back. Sources say that Ottawa apparently wanted to black out sensitive parts that may anger allies.

Khadr -- who was born in Toronto -- was captured in 2002 after a battle with U.S. forces in which an American soldier died. He's accused of war crimes, but critics have alleged the U.S. military court that is trying him violates U.S. and international law. Khadr is the only Western citizen remaining at Guantanamo Bay.

A war crimes trial has never been held against anyone under the age of 18. International observers have questioned Ottawa's decision not to help Khadr, who many believe is no different than child soldiers victimized in Africa.

With a report from CTV's Roger Smith in Ottawa

www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080116/khadr_torture_0801

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US, Israel on Canadian torture watch list: report
Thu Jan 17, 7:00 PM

OTTAWA (AFP) - The United States and Israel are on a Canadian Foreign Affairs Department watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured, CTV television reported Thursday.

The document cited the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a place where prisoners could be tortured. Guantanamo holds Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of killing a US soldier with a hand grenade in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old.

CTV said the document is used in a workshop to teach Canadian diplomats how to tell if a Canadian held in a foreign jail has been tortured, CTV reported.

The document lists a series of countries where the possibility of torture is high, including Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and China. But it also includes the United States and Israel.

It highlights US torture techniques including forced nudity, isolation and sleep deprivation, CTV said.

Questioned by email by AFP on the reported document, Foreign Affairs Department spokesman Neil Hrab said "the training manual is not a policy document and does not reflect the views or policies of this government."

In an interview with CTV, Khadr's lawyer, Bill Kuebler, said he was surprised the Canadian government has done nothing to protect his client if there are suspicions he may have been mistreated in Guantanamo.

Kuebler said other western countries have successfully pressed for the release of their citizens held at Guantanamo.

Human rights groups and prominent Canadian citizens are calling for 21-year-old Khadr's repatriation so he can benefit from normal due process of law.

Training diplomats to make them more aware of torture began after Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar in 2002 was deported by the United States to Syria, where he was imprisoned for nearly a year and said he was tortured.

A Canadian inquiry cleared Arar of all suspicions of terrorism and the Canadian government issued an apology and awarded him a substantial compensation.

ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080118/canada/canada_us_israel_torture_rights

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Torture watchlist 'wrongly' names Canadian allies: Bernier
Last Updated: Saturday, January 19, 2008 | 12:38 PM ET
CBC News

Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier has issued a statement in an effort to pacify allies angry over a training manual for Canadian diplomats that lists the U.S. and Israel as countries where prisoners risk torture and abuse.

Bernier said the manual "contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies."

(Wrongly how, exactly? Just because Harper has decided to ally himself with these criminals doesn't change the fact that they routinely engage in torture.)

Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier, right, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, has been forced to clarify why a Canadian dliplomatic document listed Israel and the U.S. as sites of possible torture.
(Amos Ben Gershom/Associated Press) "I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department's torture awareness training," he said in a statement released Saturday.

"The manual is neither a policy document nor a statement of policy," he said. "As such, it does not convey the government's views or positions."

Bernier said he has directed the manual to be reviewed and rewritten, but he did not provide details.

The torture awareness training manual was inadvertently released on Friday to lawyers working on a lawsuit involving allegations that detainees were abused in Afghanistan.

The document singles out the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay as a site of possible abuse. It also names Israel, Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Syria as places where inmates could face torture.

U.S. ambassador to Canada David Wilkins told the Associated Press that it's "absurd" and "offensive" to place the United States on the same list along with countries like Iran and China.

Michael Mendel, a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Ottawa, said Israel's Supreme Court "is on record as expressly prohibiting any type of torture."

(So is the US. But both countries still practice torture.)

www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/01/19/torture-manual.html

Torture stance reversed

Jan. 20

It's well-known that the U.S. turns a blind eye to friendly governments that torture. We even have documented proof that the U.S. subcontracted torture in the Maher Arar case, and that it trained and supported torturers in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, etc.

Innocent people released from Guantanamo Bay have testified that they were subjected to torture. Many of those detained in the U.S. after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 also testified to being tortured.

The Israeli press has been documenting Israeli interrogation tactics for decades, and many credible reports of torture have been made by Amnesty International and Human Right Watch.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper should inform the U.S. and Israel that he would be overjoyed to remove them from the list of torturers when they stop – just exactly as he should advise Iran, Egypt, China, Afghanistan and others.

George Haeh, Toronto

Foreign Affairs Minister Bernier Visits Israel
http://www.winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?10083S

Canada to skip UN racism conference, citing Israeli slurs of 'anti-Semitism'
http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?10352S

Canada's Tortured Friendship with Military America

[eds note: There is currently a tumult going on in Canada regarding revelations Canada's military in Afghanistan refused last November to remove prisoners they had taken to the custody of the Afghani military or police due to concerns for their safety and Canada's international treaty obligations to protect prisoners. Nothing I'm aware of has been said about "Canada" transferring said prisoners into the hands of U.S. forces there, or elsewhere, given the admission, in the form of a training manual produced for Canadian diplomats, listing the United States and other close ally, Israel, as states that practice torture. - lex]

Canada: U.S. Added To Torture Watch List
Foreign Ministry Manual Lists Guantanamo Bay Prison As Site Of Possible Abuse

Jan. 18, 2008


Minor Tried As Terrorist

Omar Khadr is the only person in modern history to be tried for war crimes that he allegedly committed as a minor. Bob Simon reports on the controversy surrounding his case.

(CBS) A training manual for Canadian diplomats, produced by the Department of Foreign Affairs, includes the United States among countries which potentially use torture on prisoners.

The New York Times reported that a foreign ministry spokesperson confirmed the contents of the manual.

However, Canadian government employees struggled to assure that the attribution was not an official government position against the United States, a close ally.

Also on the torture watch list: Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

The ruling Conservative government has heretofore accepted assurances by the Bush administration that the United States does not engage in torture against prisoners, including detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

A Canadian man, Omar Khadr, is currently being held at the U.S. military prison there. He is accused of a 2002 killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old.

Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, Khadr's U.S. military lawyer, told Canadian broadcaster CTV that he believes the manual contradicts Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's assurances that his client has received fair treatment.

"Omar has been there for five-and-a-half years, and at some point in the course of Omar Khadr's detention the Canadian government developed the suspicion he was being tortured and abused," Kuebler told the news program "Canada AM."

"And yet it has not acted to obtain his release from Guantanamo Bay and protect his rights, unlike every other Western country that has had its nationals detained in Guantanamo Bay."

A United States Embassy spokesperson told Reuters, “The United States does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances.”

The manual - a PowerPoint presentation - is for training diplomats in protecting Canadian citizens who may be detained and subject to abuse in other countries.

CTV said the manual listed, among specific U.S. interrogation techniques, "forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation."

The program was developed as part of a "torture awareness workshop," in response to the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, born in Syria, who was detained by the United States in 2002 under suspicion that he was tied to terrorists. Arar was transported to Syria. A Canadian inquiry later determined he was tortured there.

Arar was awarded C$11.5 million by the Canadian government as compensation.



© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Media Messing with Your Mind: Techniques

Getting Duped: How the Media Messes with Your Mind
Statements made in the media can surreptitiously plant distortions in the minds of millions. Learning to recognize two commonly used fallacies can help you separate fact from fiction
By Yvonne Raley and Robert Talisse

In 2003 nearly half of all Americans falsely assumed that the U.S. government had found solid evidence for a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. What is more, almost a quarter of us believed that investigators had all but confirmed the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a 2003 report by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, a polling and market research firm. How did the true situation in Iraq become so grossly distorted in American minds?

Many people have attributed such misconceptions to a politically motivated disinformation campaign to engender support for the armed struggle in Iraq. We do not think the deceptions were premeditated, however. Instead they are most likely the result of common types of reasoning errors, which appear frequently in discussions in the news media and which can easily fool an unsuspecting public.

News shows often have an implicit bias that may motivate the portrayal of facts and opinions in misleading ways, even if the information presented is largely accurate. Nevertheless, by becoming familiar with how spokespeople can create false impressions, media consumers can learn to ignore certain claims and thereby avoid getting duped. We have detected two general types of fallacies—one of them well known and the other newly identified—that have permeated discussion of the Iraq War and that are generally ubiquitous in political debates and other discourse.

Spinning Straw into Fool’s Gold
One common method of spinning information is the so-called straw man argument. In this tactic, a person summarizes the opposition’s position inaccurately so as to weaken it and then refutes that inaccurate rendition. In a November 2005 speech, for example, President George W. Bush responded to questions about pulling troops out of Iraq by saying, “We’ve heard some people say, pull them out right now. That’s a huge mistake. It’d be a terrible mistake. It sends a bad message to our troops, and it sends a bad message to our enemy, and it sends a bad message to the Iraqis.” The statement that unnamed “people” are advocating a troop withdrawal from Iraq “right now” is a straw man, because it exaggerates the opposing viewpoint. Not even the most stalwart Bush adversaries backed an immediate troop withdrawal. Most proposed that the soldiers be sent home over several months, a more reasonable and persuasive plan that Bush undercut with his straw man.

The straw man is used in countless other contexts as well. In his acceptance speech at the 1996 Democratic Convention, for instance, Bill Clinton opined: “… with all respect [to Bob Dole], we do not need to build a bridge to the past. We need to build a bridge to the future.” Dole did discuss restoring the values of an earlier America, but Clinton falsely implied that Dole was only looking backward (whereas Clinton was looking forward). People may use a straw man to discredit theories to which they do not subscribe. Characterizing evolution, for example, as “all random chance” is a straw man argument; it misrepresents a complex theory that only partly rests on the randomness of mutations that may lead to better chances of survival.

Recently, in a 2006 paper co-authored with Scott F. Aikin, one of us (Talisse) documented a twist on the straw man tactic. In what Talisse dubs a weak man argument, a person sets up the opposition’s weakest (or one of its weakest) arguments or proponents for attack, as opposed to misstating a rival’s position as the straw man argument does. In a July 2007 edition of Talking Points, Bill O’Reilly took on a claim by the New York Times that we had lost the war in Iraq by saying that “the New York Times declared defeat in Iraq Sunday on its editorial page, and there’s no question the antiwar movement has momentum.” (The editorial actually said that “some opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat,” but let us assume that O’Reilly’s characterization was correct.)

O’Reilly then offered a weak man explanation for the purported defeat: “The truth is the Iraqi government and many of its citizens are simply not doing enough to defeat the terrorists and corruption. The U.S.A. can’t control that country. No nation could.... Unfortunately, the Iraqi failure to help themselves has come true.” Although Iraq’s failure to aid in fighting terrorism and corruption could be why we are losing the war, the troubles in Iraq could also stem from a host of logistical reasons, some of which may shed a negative light on the current administration. O’Reilly, however, kept any discussion of these reasons offstage, suppressing the various other possible—and possibly more likely—reasons for “defeat” in Iraq. Meanwhile his claims that the “U.S.A. can’t control that country” and that “no nation could” deflected blame from the U.S. government.

Weak man arguments are pervasive. In a 2005 editorial in Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, conservative writer and activist David Horowitz picked on ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill, formerly at the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose views he described as “hateful and ignorant.” Horowitz then went on to claim that Churchill’s radical “hate America” convictions “represent” those of a “substantial seg­ment of the academic community.” Thus, he used the example of Churchill (the weak man) to argue that “tenured radicals” have made universities into leftist political institutions and subverted the academic enterprise, thereby failing to acknowledge the presence of more highly regarded and politically mainstream scholars in academia.

Trolling for Truth
Weak man tactics are harder to detect than those of the straw man variety. Because straw man arguments are closely related to an opponent’s true position, a clever listener might be able to spot the truth amid the hyperbole, understatement or other corrupted version of that view. A weak man argument, however, is more opaque because it contains a grain of truth and often bears little similarity to the stronger arguments that should also be presented. Therefore, a listener has to know a lot more about the situation to imagine the information that a speaker or writer has cleverly disregarded.

Nevertheless, an astute consumer of the news can catch many straw man and weak man fallacies by knowing how they work. Another strategy is to always consider a speaker’s or writer’s motivation or agenda and be especially alert for skewed statements of fact in editorials, television opinion shows, and the like. It is also wise to obtain news from more balanced news sources. An alternative approach is to try to construct, in your own mind, the best argument against what you have heard before accepting it as true. Or simply ask yourself: Why should I not believe this?