This is a tale of US expansion not Russian aggression
War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial drive as local conflicts. It's likely to be a taste of things to come
Seumas Milne The Guardian
Thursday August 14 2008
The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered". George Bush denounced Russia for having "invaded a sovereign neighbouring state" and threatening "a democratic government". Such an action, he insisted, "is unacceptable in the 21st century".
Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have it - the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon's infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?
You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order" - in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims as its own in South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. Several hundred civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, along with Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: "I saw a Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of women and children," one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, told reporters on Tuesday.
Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy". Well it's certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a "Rose revolution". Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an "increasingly authoritarian" government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean "pro-western" in these cases.
The long-running dispute over South Ossetia - as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia - is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.
Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo - whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - and conflict was only a matter of time.
The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq - hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.
But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defence secretary under Bush's father, but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.
Over the past decade, Nato's relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia's borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.
By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power. That a stronger Russia has now used the South Ossetian imbroglio to put a check on that expansion should hardly come as a surprise. What is harder to work out is why Saakashvili launched last week's attack and whether he was given any encouragement by his friends in Washington.
If so, it has spectacularly backfired, at savage human cost. And despite Bush's attempts to talk tough yesterday, the war has also exposed the limits of US power in the region. As long as Georgia proper's independence is respected - best protected by opting for neutrality - that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the world has squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the return of some counterweight has to be welcome. But the process of adjustment also brings huge dangers. If Georgia had been a member of Nato, this week's conflict would have risked a far sharper escalation. That would be even more obvious in the case of Ukraine - which yesterday gave a warning of the potential for future confrontation when its pro-western president threatened to restrict the movement of Russian ships in and out of their Crimean base in Sevastopol. As great power conflict returns, South Ossetia is likely to be only a taste of things to come.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
source
Aug 17 2008
Russia's objectives extend far beyond Georgia; to create a new global order in which the US and Russia are equal partners again
Aug 17 2008
War in the Caucasus: Fear of Russian 'protection' spreads to Ukraine and the Baltic
Aug 16 2008
Moscow warns it could strike Poland over US missile shield
Aug 13 2008
Ken Gude: Re-establishing US influence over Russia will be difficult
Aug 11 2008
Over 170 Americans have been evacuated from Georgia, according to the US state department
Aug 11 2008
Russia has taken over half the country, Georgia claims
Aug 11 2008
Dilip Hiro: Georgia's attack on South Ossetia threatens US control of Azerbaijan's oil
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Cold War II
Who started Cold War II?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
19/08/08 "WND" -- - The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow's superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.
Truman refused to use force to break Stalin's Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev's tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter's response to Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did – nothing.
These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.
The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.
Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.
And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire?
As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West?
For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow.
If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?
The swift and decisive action of Putin's army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.
What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin's trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?
Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation.
The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.
The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way.
Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation's primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.
A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia.
Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?
As for Saakashvili, he's probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
19/08/08 "WND" -- - The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow's superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly.
Truman refused to use force to break Stalin's Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev's tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter's response to Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did – nothing.
These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians.
The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.
Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.
And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire?
As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West?
For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow.
If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?
The swift and decisive action of Putin's army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him.
What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin's trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light?
Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation.
The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi.
The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way.
Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation's primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic.
A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia.
Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?
As for Saakashvili, he's probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
Resistance and Ignominy at Cove-Mallard
Last Stand in the Big Woods
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
"Every time I've compromised, I've lost. When I held firm I won. The problem with too many environmentalists today is that they are trying to write the compromise instead of letting those we pay to compromise do it. They think they get power by taking people to lunch or being taken to lunch, when in reality they are only being taken."
-- David R. Brower
There was no reason it had to come down like this: Two militant greens standing in the middle of an isolated, snow-crusted road in a place where a road should never be; bracing their bodies against a train of logging trucks, snowmobiles, and Forest Service jeeps groaning at the gate, demanding entry; willingly subjecting themselves to arrest by Idaho troopers armed with guns, clubs, and a draconian and sub-constitutional new law. All in a last-gasp attempt to halt a vastly destructive timber sale in the heart of the nation's largest roadless area, a timber sale two federal judges had already found to be a brazen assault on our national environmental laws.
Charged with felony conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, Mike Roselle, a founder of Earth First!, and Tom Fullum, of the Native Forest Network, now face possible five-year prison terms and $50,000 fines under Idaho's so-called Earth First! Statute - a law geared to smother popular dissent against the transgressions of multinational timber companies by slamming the jailhouse door on anyone bold enough to bodily protest logging on federal lands in the Potato Atate. The bill was signed into law in 1993 by then-Governor Cecil Andrus, a noted liberal who called the Cove/ Mallard protesters "just a bunch of kooks."
The proximate cause of Roselle's and Fullum's travails, and a new round of logging in the Cove/Mallard Roadless Area, is an act of organizational cowardice committed by one of the country's oldest and wealthiest environmental corporations: The Wilderness Society.
In January 1994, The Wilderness Society and Pacific Rivers Council won a slam-drunk injunction against the Forest Service in federal court. Citing the agency's contemptuous behavior for failing to submit its logging plans for review by the National Marine Fisheries Service after several stocks of salmon were placed on the endangered species list, federal district Judge David Ezra halted all logging, mining, and grazing in salmon watersheds on the Nez Perce, Salmon, Challis, Sawtooth, Clearwater, and Payette National Forest in central Idaho. The Cove/ Mallard timber sale, along with 300 other logging, road building and mining projects, were stopped cold.
The evidence of an imminent ecological collapse of Idaho's river systems is overwhelming. In America's wildest state, more than 70 percent of the streams are out of compliance with the standards of the Clean Water Act, dozens of stocks of salmon gasp along with the bull trout at the brink of extinction. This means that every additional clearcut or mine gouged into these watersheds creates a necrotic wound in the ecosystem. This was the emergency situation to which Judge Ezra responded with his injunction.
Of course, the predictable backlash swiftly erupted in rural Idaho when news of the injunction was leaked to timber contractors, ranchers, and mining companies by the Forest Service. Local papers played up the inevitable chest-beating by a mongrel assortment of loggers, ranch-hands and placer miners from towns with names like Challis, Dixie and Kamiah. Then came the apocalyptic assessments of the ruling by mega-corporations such as Boise/ Cascade, Pot-latch, and Hecla Mining: Mills and mines will be closed, they warned, thousands will be thrown out of work, already impoverished communities will be driven deeper into destitution.
The injunction also became a pretext for yet another round of vituperative cant from Idaho's reactionary congressional delegation. On the floor of the Senate, Dirk Kempthorne (who would later become Idaho’s governor and then Interior Secretary under Bush the Younger) bellowed that he would seek congressional action to shred the injunction and "the ill-conceived laws it was based on." Meanwhile, Helen 'Call-Me-Congressman' Chenoweth denounced the injunction as the work of "animal worshipping nature cults." And the stentorious Larry Craig, the senator with the wide stance, amplified the volume of his "forest health" crusade -- a cruel hoax on the public in which the last roadless forests in the West will be stripped of the meager protection provided them by current environmental laws and opened to indiscriminate chainsaw surgery in the name of medicating the ecosystem.
The Wilderness Society flinched and folded. They beat a rapid retreat, dragging the Pacific Rivers Council and their lawyers at the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund along with them. What follows is a saga of graveness that undercuts the credibility of nearly every environmentalist working to protect the planet in the dark times.
A week after the injunction came down, Craig Gehrke, the Wilderness Society's Idaho rep, sent an alarum to the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund office in Seattle, begging them to reappear before Judge Ezra and beg him to retract his ruling. SCLDF was loathe to engage in such a shameful turnabout. They explained to Gehrke that the Judge might interpret such a back flip as a severe breach of legal ethics. After all, only a week earlier SCLDF had persuasively argued that there was an emergency situation unfolding on the ground that needed a drastic legal remedy.
But Gehrke was undeterred. He insisted that the injunction be lifted. Higher levels of the Wilderness Society also phoned Seattle, explaining to SCLDF attorneys the delicate political situation they faced back at their gilded offices on 17th Street, in Northwest Washington, DC. Word is that former Wilderness Society boss George Frampton, then Bruce Babbitt’s right-hand man at the Interior Department, also called to suggest that the injunction was counter-productive to his good efforts at the Interior Department to salvage the Endangered Species Act.
For SCLDF attorneys this entire scenario must have seemed like a bad flashback to the notorious Deal of Shame, where 18 months previously lawyers at the same office insisted that the plaintiffs in the spotted owl case release timber sales in old-growth forest that had been enjoined by Judge William Dwyer. This time, however, the roles were reversed: SCLDF's clients were now twisting their lawyers’ arms to jettison an injunction.
By all reports, the conference call with an infuriated Judge Ezra was a bruising encounter for the eco-lawyers. When SCLDF explained the unexpectedly intense reaction the injunction had sparked in Idaho, the judge reportedly pulled out a sheaf of faxes and retorted that he'd been taking heat from Salmon and Challis, too, but he thought the case was about enforcing the law and protecting the salmon. According to a source close to SCLDF, Judge Exra threatened to impose legal sanctions on the attorneys. Ultimately, however, with none of the parties to the case standing up for the injunction or the salmon, Ezra was left with no choice: the judge delayed imposition of the injunction for 45 days. But for all practical purposes the injunction that could have saved the forests of the Salmon/ Selway river watersheds is gone forever.
When queried on the subject, SCLDF attorney Adam Berger reasoned: "We believe our actions served the best interest of justice."
Justice for whom? "Well, everyone understands the meaning of justice and that's all we're going to say," Berger concluded.
With Roselle and Fullum safely locked up in the Grangeville jail and Judge Ezra's injunction aborted at the demand of the Wilderness Society, the road was now clear for the Forest Service and the Shearer Lumber Company to bust into the largest units of the Noble timber sale, deep in the heart of the Cove/Mallard. In a move that reminded many forest activists of the midnight strike on Millennium Grove (a forest stand in the Willamette National Forest that harbored the oldest trees in the Oregon Cascades), Shearer Lumber swiftly attacked the two most lucrative and biologically productive stands of ponderosa pine in the 18-unit Noble timber sale.
Most of the Noble sale was already clearcut prior to March 15, the date SCLDF and the Wilderness Society chose to have the injunction postponed until. In fact, the Cove/Mallard EIS required the Forest Service to terminate operations prior to March 15, since that is the beginning of elk calving season. Ron Mitchell, director of the Idaho Sporting Congress, believes the March 15 date may not have been coincidental. "It sure looks like these groups simply wanted to avoid the politically explosive issue of Cove/ Mallard," Mitchell said. "The betrayal of the Wilderness Society on this point is devastating."
The 90,000 acre Cove/Mallard Roadless Area is a biological cradle in the mountains, a rolling landscape of ponderosa pine forests, meandering streams, and wet meadows that serves as a critical biological and migration corridor between the Salmon River and the high country of the Gospel Hump and Selway Mountains. Its brisk streams are home to steelhead, chinook salmon, bull trout, rainbow trout, and cutthroat, while the broad meadows harbor some of the best elk country in the Northern Rockies. The tall mountains are inhabited by bighorn sheep and mountain goat and the entire area is a key part of the Central Idaho grizzly bear and gray wolf recovery areas. In fact, over the past 10 years the Fish and Wildlife Service has documented numerous confirmed wolf sightings in the Cove/Mallard Roadless Area.
The Noble timber sale was one of nine big timber sales slated for the Cove/ Mallard. These sales called for 200 different clearcuts, the logging of 81 million board feet of timber, and the construction of 145 miles of new logging roads. When completed the Cove/ Mallard timber sale will leave behind only an empty infrastructure: its web of roads a lethal impediment to the migration of wolves and elk; its eroding swaths of bare land quietly smothering salmon and trout. In sum, Cove/ Mallard will be transformed into a crumbling necropolis to modern forest management.
Yet, the Wilderness Society (the organization founded by Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall, and nurtured by Howard Zahniser) has never objected to the Cove/Mallard logging operations. Indeed, Cove/Mallard was simply a sacrifice area, traded-off year ago by the political brokers at the Sierra Club, Idaho Conversation League and The Wilderness Society in exchange for partial protection of the spectacular, but less controversial, Gospel Hump Wilderness.
The wretched terms of this deal are even now defended with intensity by Sierra Clubber Dennis Baird, of Moscow, Idaho, who in 1992 proclaimed to The Oregonian: "If the country need lumber and timber jobs, the Cove/ Mallard isn't such a bad place to get it." Given a chance to retract this comment, Baird instead tried to drive a couple more nails into Cove/ Mallard's ecological coffin. "The Northern Rockies Chapter [of the Sierra Club], which covers all of Idaho and some of eastern Washington, never opposed timber sales in the Cove/ Mallard because the area is mostly flat."
In fact, the relatively flat, rolling terrain of portions of the Cove/Mallard only underscored the area's ecological importance. Yet, we all know only too well that the burghers of the Sierra Club prefer to wage their wilderness fights on steeper terrain, in alpine areas which offer fewer stands of productive forest and less opportunities for political conflict.
Baird was a key author of the Sierra Club's woefully deficient national forest policy, a policy that has been under vigorous assault for years by grassroots Sierra Club activists. Baird also served, along with his friend Craig Gehrke, as a member of Cecil Andrus's secretive 1993 Idaho Timber Supply Task Force, which was chaired by Boise National Forest supervisor Stephen Mealey. The objective of the timber task force was to find ways to provide certainly for timber supplies from national forest lands in Idaho.
"Basically, the intent of the task force was to expedite timber sales in Idaho roadless areas by circumventing NEPA," said Ron Mitchell, whose group was refused access to the background documents generated by the task force. "Gehrke and Baird were there to put a green stamp on illegal timber sales."
The persistent criticism by Mitchell and Dan Funsch, an organizer with the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, effectively checked any official pronouncement from the task force. However, its secret agenda proceeds apace on the ground. At 10 million acres, Idaho retains more unprotected wildland than any other state; yet the Forest Service plans to lacerate the region with 150 commercial timber sales in these roadless areas in the coming decades, despoiling its wilderness character and placine hundreds of species (from salmon to grizzlies) in peril of extinction.
Meanwhile, Steve Mealey perfected the art of expedited timber sales on the ravaged Boise National Forest, where dozens of so-called salvage sales in roadless areas escaped full compliance with NEPA. Mealey's free-wheeling excursions in the forested foothills around Boise served as a disturbing prelude to the looming gotterdamerung for Western roadless areas promised by Larry Craig's forest health campaign.
As the chainsaws were cleaving through the Cove/ Mallard once again, Craig Gehrke defended his surrender (on the very day Roselle and Fullum were appearing at their preliminary hearing) by telling a reporter for the Missoula Independent: "We trust the Forest Service to abide by the law."
Various rationalizations and excuses for the release of the Idaho salmon injunction pinballed between the parties. SCLDF, for example, told an incredulous Judge Ezra that the injunction was now unnecessary because the Forest Service had agreed to begin consulting with NMFS. Immediately after the stay, Gehrke announced to the Idaho press that the Wilderness Society "did this voluntarily … We didn't want to come between working people and their jobs."
The Pacific Rivers Council's Ron Cooper (a former Wilderness Society staffer) told distraught Idaho and Montana forest activists that while he personally disagreed with the decision to lift the injunction "sometimes you've got to come promise in the face of political reality." In Oregon, PRC's David Bayles cast a similar line, chirping that they agreed to lift the injunction only in order to save "the Endangered Species Act."
Meanwhile, Rich Hoppe, a spin doctor at the Wilderness Society's DC headquarters, tweeted that they released the injunction to protect Gehrke, who had purportedly received death threats. Back in Idaho, however, Gehrke insisted that he was more concerned about the "safety" of rural activists.
There is nothing especially exculpating in any of these statements. Quite the contrary. SCLDF's comment about consultation is a transparent canard, since it merely relies on the discretionary actions of a discredited agency. In other words, precisely the reason they went to court in the first place. But the legal effects of this surrender extend far beyond merely this case. SCLDF's retreat alienated a sympathetic and friendly federal judge and darkened the prospects for any new environmental suits throughout the Ninth Circuit. Greens may have the legal standing to sue, but now lack the credibility needed to secure difficult legal decisions.
"Maybe the lawsuit was ill-timed considering the new political atmosphere," said Mike Medberry, former public lands director for the Idaho Conservation League. "But it was a good suit, a necessary action. Giving up the injunction so quickly sent the worst possible political and legal message."
The real politick banter of the Pacific Rivers Council also falls flat. It represents the don't-use-it-to-don't-lose-it approach to environmentalism. But of what value is the Endangered Species Act, if the cost of saving the law requires some species to be consigned to extinction? Moreover, there is no evidence that the lifting of the injunction has lessened the rabid attacks against the ESA and other environmental laws launched by Idaho's congressional delegation, and their corporate backers.
Obviously, the political pressure from the wacko right in Idaho was intense, particularly from Craig, Chenoweth and Kempthorne. But there were several angles of effective counterattack against these politicians available to the plaintiffs. Take Rep. Helen Chenoweth, the primped heroine of Idaho's burgeoning population of potbellied punks and middle-aged skinheads, the prissy pinup girl of the Posse Comitatus, a woman who morphed the religio-cosmetic acumen of Tammy Faye Bakker onto the paranoid political sensibilities of Lyndon LaRouche.
Chenoweth is a former legislative aid to former Idaho Sen. Steve Symms (an intellectual neighbor of Dan Quayle's in the lower depths f the Bell Curve), who trounced the ineffectual Democrat Larry LaRocco by running an openly racist campaign, which had as its recurring theme: "White anglo-saxon males are the only endangered species." Chenoweth occasionally grabbed the mic at Don Young's Natural Resources Committee to launch rambling and incoherent ad hominem attacks on the evils of environmentalism, along the lines of her now famous aphorism: "Salmon aren't endangered, there are cans of them on the shelf at Albertsons."
Back in September 1994, Chenoweth's strange election campaign (which featured endangered salmon feast, among other mindless amusements) was running low on cash. For salvation, she turned to a traditional source of financial succor for Idaho politicians: mining companies. Chenoweth sold an "interest" in a parcel of land she owned in the Clearwater country to Allen Ball. Ball paid Chenoweth $60,000 for part owner-ship in a property with an assessed value of less than $10,000.
Ball owns the A-B Mining Company. It is possible that A-B Mining purchased the subsurface rights to Chenoweth's property and intends to excavate this mineral-laden land. But A-B Mining also has plans to construct a massive cyanide heap-leach gold mne along Smiley Creek, a salmon stream that flows off the pyramids-shaped Abe's Chair Mountain in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.
The transfer of cash was not reported to the Federal Election Commission and a new deed was never officially filed with the county clerk. A week after the deal, however, Chenoweth held a press conference to announce that one of her first acts as a "Congressman" would be to open the Sawtooth National Recreation Area to new mining claims. An apparent case of political quid pro quo.
Chenoweth's populist protestations about the injunction could have been exposed as nothing more than a thin veneer concealing her pursuit of self-enrichment. Instead, the Wilderness Society opted for appeasement, a strategy eerily foreshadowed by Gehrke shortly after the election when he publicly declared: "I don't want to pick a fight with these guys." But the neurotic pursuit of the political center in a state where the ideological spectrum spans from the well-off xenophobe to the well-armed white supremacist s vain and self-immolating.
This leads directly to the dire consequences of the Wilderness Society's most feeble and lachrymose excuse: By placating vague threats of violence, the Wilderness Society dramatically increased the odds of real violence being visited upon grassroots activists in the near future. Their surrender strengthens the resolve and amplifies the intensity of the most venomous sects of the Wise-Use and Militia movements, not to mention the henchmen of Boise/Cascade and Hecla Mining. The atmosphere of intimidation against environmentalists in Idaho, and throughout the West, will only be torqued-up by such supplicant behavior.
"Not only did Gehrke help nullify an effective injunction that had stopped the Cove/ Mallard sale for at least a few more months," said Russ Moritz of the Kanisku Bioregional Council in Sandpoint, Idaho. "But he offended a friendly judge, forced Roselle and Fullum to sacrifice themselves, and show the opposition just how weak the national environmental groups really are."
Craig Gehrke, of course, is a merely deserving scapegoat for the real forces that asphyxiate the Wilderness Society's agenda: money and politics. At the center of this dispiriting nexus is Cecil Andrus; and, most importantly, Walter Minnick, CEO of the Boise-based timber company TJ International.
Minnick's transnational enterprise, Trus-Joist, is partially owned by timber giant MacMillan Bloedel, scourge of Canada's forests. Evidence of the nefarious character of TJ International's operations can be found in the company's 10K filings with the Securities Enchange Commission, where Minnick bemoan the facts that successful litigation on federal forests in the West has constricted timber supplies. In order to combat this "problem," TJ's annual report to its shareholders announced the formation of a "strategic alliance" with MacMillan Bloedel and Weyerhaeuser. Booming profits simply aren't enough to satiate these masters of capital.
TJ International's corporate neighbor Boise/ Cascade, which enjoys a near monopoly on federal timber supplies in central Idaho, may soon be folded into this grim oligarchy of timber interests. The debt-saddled timber company (whose products were being boycotted by environmentalists because of the corporation's logging operations at Sugarloaf in a grove of ancient forest the Siskiyou Mountains of Oregon) is now run by financier George Harad, an old Harvard chum of Minnick's, whom Walt recently described as being "dazzling in his intellectual ability and financial acuity." Boise/ Cascade, it will be recalled, energized much of the so-called popular opposition to Judge Ezra's injunction.
That Walt Minnick might use his position on the governing board of the Wilderness Society to leverage the surrender of the salmon injunction shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with this man's past activities. Many west coast forest activists painfully recall Minnick's performance at Bill Clinton's Timber Summit, held in Portland in 1993, where the CEO seemed more obsessed with advertising his engineered wood products, declaring his opposition to restrictions on log exports, and securing certainly for the federal timber supply, than in advocating permanent protection for ancient forests, Pacific salmon or spotted owls.
From where I sat that gloomy day (buried in the basement next to the then high-flying and frantic George Stephanopolos and Andrea Mitchell, of NBC News, who kept asking me in the latte line: "Murrelet?...Sounds kinky! What's a murrelet?"), Minnick came off as more of a timber beast than Weyerhaeuser's vicious genius Charlie Bingham. As an offer of proof, check out this gem of neoliberalism, delivered as a quasi-threat to President Clinton, where Minnick warns that if timber supplies are not freed from the Dwyer injunction he might be forced to export his mills to Canada: “Essentially what we need the government to do is get out of the way, let the market system work, get some certainly into the west side timber supply because we don't know whether to build another plant here to go to Canada or even whether we should be hiring folks for a month from now, because we can't be assured that our veneer supplier are going to have the raw material we're going to need.”
This was hardly the first time Minnick wielded an iron fist to well-intentioned Wilderness Society policy initiatives. Several years ago Minnick helped crush an attempt by former Wilderness Society staffer Larry Tuttle and former board member Terry Tempest Williams to change the organization's archaic policy on public lands grazing. Among other things, Minnick vociferously rejected a proposal that the Wilderness Society oppose livestock grazing in designated wilderness areas. It should be noted for the record that many of the society's board members and large donors own ranches in the West, including new Wilderness Society president G. Jon Roush, who logged off old growth trees on his own big ranch in Montana and then sold the timber to a notorious log exporter.
"The Wilderness Society's founders, Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall, believed that progress in environmental protection required radical political and economic changes," said Larry Tuttle. "But the new Wilderness Society through its repeated actions has refused to challenge a system where our public resources are controlled by renegade public agencies and multinational corporations, a system that assumes that our natural resources exist solely for the purpose of making money. The Wilderness Society's corporate motto is: Whatever you do, don't offend anyone."
That brings us to Cecil Andrus, former Secretary of the Interior under Jimmy Carter and four-term governor of Idaho (where he signed into the law the unconstitutional statute that threatened to imprison Roselle and Fullum), who was angered at the effrontery of the salmon injunction given his long and fruitful association with the Wilderness Society.
In the revolving-door-milieu of American environmental politics it was probably inevitable that in 1981 the Wilderness Society would hire the unemployed ex-cabinet secretary as a high-profile influence peddler. Andrus' assignment: develop a bridge between industry and environmentalists on natural resource issues. Well, Andrus didn't so much construct a bridge as a one-way interstate down which Idaho's forests ave been happily transported ever since.
For this contribution to the Wilderness Society, Cecil Andrus was handsomely rewarded when he decided to run for governor. Grateful Wilderness Society board members invested heavily in Andrus's campaigns, side-by side with mining companies, agribusiness conglomerates, and timber interests, including Minnick, Boise/Cascade, and Dick Bennett, purchaser of the Cove/Mallard sales.
When George Frampton threatened to close down the Society's Boise office as a cost-cutting move in 1992, Andrus rushed to the rescue. He declared that Craig Gehrke was just the kind of moderate, homegrown environmentalist Idaho needed. An emergency fund-raiser was arranged at an exclusive ranch north of Sun Valley. It was attended by the likes of Charlotte Ford, Bruce Vento, Walt Minnick, Andrus, and Pamela Harriman. Tens of thousands were quickly raised; Gehrke's office saved.
Then Gehrke speedily climbed aboard the timber supply task force, gave qualified endorsement to the awful LaRocco wilderness destruction bill, and refused to oppose the Cove/Mallard timber sales even when his fellow environmentalists were being assaulted, hit with SLAPP suits, and hauled off to jail. After Andrus left the governor's office, he joined the board of directors of two mining companies, both of which were eyeing claims in central Idaho that might have been hampered by the injunction.
Connect-the-dots; it's not a pretty picture.
The whole Cove/Mallard affair reads like synecdoche for how the environmental elite operate these days. Each new entry on the bleak tableau of conscience-eating concessions, compromises and trade-offs strikes like a body blow against grassroots environmental activists standing up on the frontlines for salmon, wolves, and wildlands.
Still a palpable resistance survives. Amid the cratered reputation of the national environmental corporations a grassroots insurrection is being incubated under fire. This new movement is symbolized by Roselle and Fullum standing there at that gate, facing off with the police, the logging trucks, and the Forest Service, in the freezing mountains of central Idaho, and by the dozens of other activists who rushed to Idaho to stand in their place.
The grassroots movement is healed and galvanized by the feverish efforts of Ron Mitchell and the Idaho Sporting Congress to uncover new legal angles to save this imperiled landscape. And by the growing troops of rural activists with groups like the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Kanisku Bioregional Council who have the courage to stand up in their communities and say: Damn it, we've simply got to save it all for our own good.
In the end, the wild land itself is redemptive. This land particularly so. Or that's how it seemed to me on an autumn when my son Nathaniel and I camped had come to take our stand at the gate in the lower reaches of the Cove/Mallard: the sky splayed with stars, the air spiced with the scent of ponderosa pine, the sound of the salmon-graced river still flowing free.
This essay is excerpted from Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
source
Monday, August 18, 2008
The Knives Come Out for Grewal
June 06, 2005
Stephen Harper announced today disgraced MP Gurmant Grewal has taken "stress leave." Grewal is at the centre of a growing scandal involving political intrigue, secret tapes, and questionable editing. Revelations of Grewal's "altered" tapes and insider testimony contradicting his account of meetings with Health Minister, Ujjal Dosanjh has now triggered investigations by the federal Ethics Commissioner and the RCMP. And, in a baffling side-bar, Air Canada has launched its own investigation. -{lex}
The Knives Come Out for Grewal
C. L. Cook
June 6, 2005
Well, it had to happen. Caught out as a lying, conniving tape-artist, unrestrained by truth, honour, or conscience, Tory MP Gurmant Grewal took his first tentative steps into the political wilderness today. In a telling move, Tory leader Stephen Harper broke the news of Mr. Grewal's Ottawa departure.
In a statement posted on the Tory website, Harper cited "significant personal pressure" emanating from Grewal's constituents as the cause in his removal from parliament. Harper had defended Grewal's surreptitious tapes implicating on their face minister Dosanjh, but that was before Grewal's Clousseau-esqe production of the tapes became embarrassingly apparent; but not before a go-between in the Grewal-Dosanjh tryst contradicted Grewal's story that he was approached by the government, saying the opposite is the case.
"I have spoken with Gurmant," Harper said. "I have been aware that for some days now he has been feeling significant personal pressure...he and I agreed that he should take a temporary stress leave from his parliamentary responsibilities."
Temporary it may be, but with the house split down the middle, the loss of a voting member, no matter how venal and stupid, portends badly for Grewal's future and can't enhance his MP wife's credibility.
Things may be slowing down at the Newton-North Delta MP's office. Below Gurmant Grewal's smiling visage, his website still boasts the discredited tapes. So eager in fact was he to share his handiwork with colleagues in Ottawa, Grewal tried to recruit Air Canada ticket agents to arrange to send a package unattended on a domestic flight out of Vancouver. Forgetting perhaps the Air India disaster, Grewal now says he will deny Air Canada's charges he circumvented anti-terrorism safety precautions by recruiting a passenger to carry the tapes, contrary to Air Canada staff making him aware this was illegal.
Stephen Harper announced today disgraced MP Gurmant Grewal has taken "stress leave." Grewal is at the centre of a growing scandal involving political intrigue, secret tapes, and questionable editing. Revelations of Grewal's "altered" tapes and insider testimony contradicting his account of meetings with Health Minister, Ujjal Dosanjh has now triggered investigations by the federal Ethics Commissioner and the RCMP. And, in a baffling side-bar, Air Canada has launched its own investigation. -{lex}
The Knives Come Out for Grewal
C. L. Cook
June 6, 2005
Well, it had to happen. Caught out as a lying, conniving tape-artist, unrestrained by truth, honour, or conscience, Tory MP Gurmant Grewal took his first tentative steps into the political wilderness today. In a telling move, Tory leader Stephen Harper broke the news of Mr. Grewal's Ottawa departure.
In a statement posted on the Tory website, Harper cited "significant personal pressure" emanating from Grewal's constituents as the cause in his removal from parliament. Harper had defended Grewal's surreptitious tapes implicating on their face minister Dosanjh, but that was before Grewal's Clousseau-esqe production of the tapes became embarrassingly apparent; but not before a go-between in the Grewal-Dosanjh tryst contradicted Grewal's story that he was approached by the government, saying the opposite is the case.
"I have spoken with Gurmant," Harper said. "I have been aware that for some days now he has been feeling significant personal pressure...he and I agreed that he should take a temporary stress leave from his parliamentary responsibilities."
Temporary it may be, but with the house split down the middle, the loss of a voting member, no matter how venal and stupid, portends badly for Grewal's future and can't enhance his MP wife's credibility.
Things may be slowing down at the Newton-North Delta MP's office. Below Gurmant Grewal's smiling visage, his website still boasts the discredited tapes. So eager in fact was he to share his handiwork with colleagues in Ottawa, Grewal tried to recruit Air Canada ticket agents to arrange to send a package unattended on a domestic flight out of Vancouver. Forgetting perhaps the Air India disaster, Grewal now says he will deny Air Canada's charges he circumvented anti-terrorism safety precautions by recruiting a passenger to carry the tapes, contrary to Air Canada staff making him aware this was illegal.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
U.S.-Pakistan Relations
Crisis Looms in U.S.-Pakistan Relations
by Patrick Seale
A sharp divergence in national aims is driving the United States and Pakistan apart. Relations between the two allies are severely strained and seem on the verge of a major crisis.
America’s “war on terror” lies at the heart of the problem. The United States is pressing Pakistan to flush out the Taliban from their tribal sanctuaries on the Pakistan-Afghan border -- and is threatening to do the job itself, if Pakistan fails to act as vigorously as Washington would like. The United States has already launched missiles into Pakistan against suspected jihadist targets, with scant respect for the international border or for Pakistani susceptibilities.
Both U.S. Presidential contenders, Barack Obama and John McCain, have pledged to send more combat troops to Afghanistan. Obama has even threatened to take the war to Pakistan’s tribal agencies, whether Islamabad likes it or not.
But the U.S. “war on terror” has brought Pakistan nothing but trouble. It is deeply unpopular with the public and is inflaming anti-American sentiment; it has drawn the Pakistan army into costly skirmishes with armed Pashtun militants in the unruly tribal areas; and it has prompted the Taliban to strike back at Pakistan, as in the attack this past week on a bus in Peshawar, which took the life of ten policemen.
Above all, the U.S. war on the Taliban is at variance with Pakistan’s key national priority, which is to contain India -- and especially to keep Afghanistan, which Pakistan considers its ‘strategic depth’, out of India’s orbit.
So, in addition to the tension in U.S.-Pakistan relations, Indo-Pakistan relations have also taken a turn for the worse in recent days, with lethal exchanges of fire in Kashmir -- the most serious violation of a 5-year truce. At the same time, India and the United States have accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the ISI, of involvement in the suicide bombing last July 7, outside the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed 58, including an Indian defense attaché.
Pakistan has angrily denied the charge, but few observers believe the Taliban -- both the Afghan and Pakistan branches of the movement -- could recruit hundreds of young fighters and train them at military camps in the tribal areas, not speak of logistics depots and Koranic schools, without ISI tolerance, if not complicity.
From their rear base in Pakistan, Taliban hit-and-run attacks continue to take their toll of U.S. and NATO forces in the south and east of Afghanistan, in much the same way as the mujahedeen harassed Soviets forces in the 1980s, and eventually drove them out.
Mullah Muhammad Omar, the elusive Taliban leader, is believed to have established his headquarters in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, from where his lieutenants direct the fighting across the border. And Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani -- who benefitted from millions of CIA dollars and ISI backing when he fought the Soviets -- is now said to provide a haven for the militants in his base in North Waziristan, and to be a link between the ISI, the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, and al-Qaeda.
General David McKieren, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, has admitted that the security situation is deteriorating, while the Taliban seem to be getting stronger, cowing the population into submission by beatings and beheadings and other ruthless behaviour. Some journalists in Afghanistan speak of a noose tightening around the capital, Kabul.
One predictable result is that Kabul is flooded with desperate refugees. Trapped between cruel Taliban exactions and even more lethal U.S. air strikes, villagers are fleeing from the south in the hope of finding food and shelter in the capital.
The United States faces formidable dilemmas in Pakistan, which directly affect the difficult military operations in Afghanistan. Is the ISI under central government control, or is it in the hands of ultra-nationalist Pakistan officers who, in both Kashmir and Afghanistan, use Islamic militants against India?
Should the United States continue its aid to the Pakistan military, or withhold it until the situation is clearer? Or, on the contrary, should the U.S. triple its non-military aid to Pakistan to $1.5bn a year -- as some U.S. politicians recommend -- in the hope of stabilizing the country and winning “hearts and minds”? Should the U.S. take the risk of extending the war by intervening militarily in the tribal areas?
In a secret -- but since much publicized -- visit to Islamabad on 12 July, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Stephen Kappes, deputy director of the CIA, held crisis talks with top Pakistani military and civilian leaders. They conferred with President Musharraf, Prime Minister Yussaf Raza Gilani, the new army commander General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the ISI director Lt-General Nadeem Taj.
According to press reports, Mullen and Kappes pressed the Pakistanis to sever ISI ties with the Taliban militants and to give the CIA freedom to operate in the tribal agencies of the North-West Frontier Province. It is unlikely that any Pakistani government -- even a weak one -- could accede to either demand.
Meanwhile, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, America’s main ally in the country, is threatened with impeachment by his political enemies. If proceedings against him go ahead, they could plunge the already fragile country into political chaos.
In 1999, Musharraf overthrew the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup and ruled for the next nine years. Sharif was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was then expelled in 2000, when he took refuge in Saudi Arabia. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League -- Nawaz (PML-N), is now in a shaky coalition with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) headed by Asif Ali Zardari, husband of the late Benazir Bhutto. Zardari spent eight years in prison on corruption charges.
Both Sharif and Zardari now want to punish Musharraf for what he did to them, and drive him from office. He is accused of rigging last October’s presidential elections, of sacking some 60 judges last November, and of generally mismanaging the economy.
But impeachment of a president -- which has never happened in Pakistan -- would require a vote by two-thirds of the combined members of the Senate and the National Assembly -- 295 votes out of a total of 440. So far the PPP and the PML-N can only muster 230 members -- leaving a shortfall of 65 votes.
Musharraf seems determined to fight back. Will the military back him? Might it intervene and impose martial law as it has done so often before in Pakistani politics? And what would Musharraf’s downfall mean for America’s “war on terror”?
The conflict in the Caucasus has temporarily overshadowed the crisis in Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan. But some tough decisions will need to be taken if the United States and its allies are to extricate themselves with honour from that deeply xenophobic Muslim country without further loss of treasure and men.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
Copyright © 2008 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global
by Patrick Seale
A sharp divergence in national aims is driving the United States and Pakistan apart. Relations between the two allies are severely strained and seem on the verge of a major crisis.
America’s “war on terror” lies at the heart of the problem. The United States is pressing Pakistan to flush out the Taliban from their tribal sanctuaries on the Pakistan-Afghan border -- and is threatening to do the job itself, if Pakistan fails to act as vigorously as Washington would like. The United States has already launched missiles into Pakistan against suspected jihadist targets, with scant respect for the international border or for Pakistani susceptibilities.
Both U.S. Presidential contenders, Barack Obama and John McCain, have pledged to send more combat troops to Afghanistan. Obama has even threatened to take the war to Pakistan’s tribal agencies, whether Islamabad likes it or not.
But the U.S. “war on terror” has brought Pakistan nothing but trouble. It is deeply unpopular with the public and is inflaming anti-American sentiment; it has drawn the Pakistan army into costly skirmishes with armed Pashtun militants in the unruly tribal areas; and it has prompted the Taliban to strike back at Pakistan, as in the attack this past week on a bus in Peshawar, which took the life of ten policemen.
Above all, the U.S. war on the Taliban is at variance with Pakistan’s key national priority, which is to contain India -- and especially to keep Afghanistan, which Pakistan considers its ‘strategic depth’, out of India’s orbit.
So, in addition to the tension in U.S.-Pakistan relations, Indo-Pakistan relations have also taken a turn for the worse in recent days, with lethal exchanges of fire in Kashmir -- the most serious violation of a 5-year truce. At the same time, India and the United States have accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the ISI, of involvement in the suicide bombing last July 7, outside the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed 58, including an Indian defense attaché.
Pakistan has angrily denied the charge, but few observers believe the Taliban -- both the Afghan and Pakistan branches of the movement -- could recruit hundreds of young fighters and train them at military camps in the tribal areas, not speak of logistics depots and Koranic schools, without ISI tolerance, if not complicity.
From their rear base in Pakistan, Taliban hit-and-run attacks continue to take their toll of U.S. and NATO forces in the south and east of Afghanistan, in much the same way as the mujahedeen harassed Soviets forces in the 1980s, and eventually drove them out.
Mullah Muhammad Omar, the elusive Taliban leader, is believed to have established his headquarters in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, from where his lieutenants direct the fighting across the border. And Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani -- who benefitted from millions of CIA dollars and ISI backing when he fought the Soviets -- is now said to provide a haven for the militants in his base in North Waziristan, and to be a link between the ISI, the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, and al-Qaeda.
General David McKieren, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, has admitted that the security situation is deteriorating, while the Taliban seem to be getting stronger, cowing the population into submission by beatings and beheadings and other ruthless behaviour. Some journalists in Afghanistan speak of a noose tightening around the capital, Kabul.
One predictable result is that Kabul is flooded with desperate refugees. Trapped between cruel Taliban exactions and even more lethal U.S. air strikes, villagers are fleeing from the south in the hope of finding food and shelter in the capital.
The United States faces formidable dilemmas in Pakistan, which directly affect the difficult military operations in Afghanistan. Is the ISI under central government control, or is it in the hands of ultra-nationalist Pakistan officers who, in both Kashmir and Afghanistan, use Islamic militants against India?
Should the United States continue its aid to the Pakistan military, or withhold it until the situation is clearer? Or, on the contrary, should the U.S. triple its non-military aid to Pakistan to $1.5bn a year -- as some U.S. politicians recommend -- in the hope of stabilizing the country and winning “hearts and minds”? Should the U.S. take the risk of extending the war by intervening militarily in the tribal areas?
In a secret -- but since much publicized -- visit to Islamabad on 12 July, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Stephen Kappes, deputy director of the CIA, held crisis talks with top Pakistani military and civilian leaders. They conferred with President Musharraf, Prime Minister Yussaf Raza Gilani, the new army commander General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the ISI director Lt-General Nadeem Taj.
According to press reports, Mullen and Kappes pressed the Pakistanis to sever ISI ties with the Taliban militants and to give the CIA freedom to operate in the tribal agencies of the North-West Frontier Province. It is unlikely that any Pakistani government -- even a weak one -- could accede to either demand.
Meanwhile, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, America’s main ally in the country, is threatened with impeachment by his political enemies. If proceedings against him go ahead, they could plunge the already fragile country into political chaos.
In 1999, Musharraf overthrew the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup and ruled for the next nine years. Sharif was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was then expelled in 2000, when he took refuge in Saudi Arabia. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League -- Nawaz (PML-N), is now in a shaky coalition with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) headed by Asif Ali Zardari, husband of the late Benazir Bhutto. Zardari spent eight years in prison on corruption charges.
Both Sharif and Zardari now want to punish Musharraf for what he did to them, and drive him from office. He is accused of rigging last October’s presidential elections, of sacking some 60 judges last November, and of generally mismanaging the economy.
But impeachment of a president -- which has never happened in Pakistan -- would require a vote by two-thirds of the combined members of the Senate and the National Assembly -- 295 votes out of a total of 440. So far the PPP and the PML-N can only muster 230 members -- leaving a shortfall of 65 votes.
Musharraf seems determined to fight back. Will the military back him? Might it intervene and impose martial law as it has done so often before in Pakistani politics? And what would Musharraf’s downfall mean for America’s “war on terror”?
The conflict in the Caucasus has temporarily overshadowed the crisis in Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan. But some tough decisions will need to be taken if the United States and its allies are to extricate themselves with honour from that deeply xenophobic Muslim country without further loss of treasure and men.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
Copyright © 2008 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Deception on Deadly Tricastin Spill
French Government's Deception on Deadly Tricastin Spill
by Bob Nichols, Project Censored Award Winner
www.opednews.com
San Francisco) July 28, 2008 - The French Government today admitted a series of dangerous radioactive spills near French nuclear giant AREVA plants at Tricastin, in a wine growing region of southeastern France.
Paolo Scampa, a physicist and President of the International Association for Protection Against Ionizing Radiation, condemned the deceptive French response in the strongest possible terms. AIPRI was established in 1964. Workers at the Tricastin plant were evacuated after contamination July 27.
The chain reaction of events is a public relations and radiological disaster for AREVA, owner of the plant. AREVA is partially owned by the French government.
The international reaction was swift. The British are questioning the upcoming sale of the British nuclear industry to France's AREVA and the Americans are uneasy about construction of a huge double new nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs near Washington, DC.
Nuclear reactors make nuclear bomb grade plutonium, about 500 lbs a year, and they heat water to make steam.
AIPRI President Scampa's Letter of Congratulations
July 19, 2008
The Association Internationale pour la Protection contre les Rayons Ionisants, AIPRI, congratulates the French authorities for their excellent campaign to conceal the truth about the deadly leak of insoluble uranium into the Drome River in southeastern France on July 7.
"Radioactive leaks without environmental impact." With mere words they have rescued a region recently listed as contaminated, from its radioactive fate. There is now more deadly uranium in the Drome and Rhone River basin than ever polluted the waters surrounding Chernobyl!
"There is no imminent danger." Another stunning denial of reality that the media helped craft, to conceal everlasting devastation. The AIPRI can only salute your valiant efforts to keep the world ignorant of the incontrovertible scientific fact that radioactivity persists for billions of years.
It is commendable to deceive the public into believing that radioactivity is somehow diminished when it is diluted in water to infinitesimal, insoluble particles. In fact, dilution exponentially multiplies the opportunities for internal contamination of all life forms, and spreads cancer in its wake.
It is essential that the public ignore tens of millions of people, starting with children, now at risk for hundreds of millennia. You do well to lie. What must ordinary people do protect themselves when faced with a superpower so supremely bent on self-interest that it voluntarily contaminates itself ?
Be sure to ready a scientific propaganda "A" team briefed to say that the soon to appear "Drôme syndrome" is "totally unrelated to the Gulf syndrome." It will be easy to make the case, because the effects will be so much more drastic here, both in terms of cancer and mutations, that it will appear to bear no relationship to the Gulf Syndrome.
Ladies and gentlemen, you who by your actions have just inaugurated the Radioactive Mediterranean Union, we salute you. Your national contribution to world de-population is worthy of commendation.
President Scampo may be reached by Email at scapao@alice.it and the "History of AIPRI" by President Scampo is available at:
http://tinyurl.com/5qzhh7
Mr Nichols is a San Francisco based, Project Censored Award Winning writer and correspondent. Nichols covers war, peace and the two nuclear weapons labs in San Francisco for the San Francisco Bay View newspaper. Nichols is available by email at duweapons@gmail.com and at 415-992-6397.
[End
http://tinyurl.com/yt9r5l
Bob Nichols is a Project Censored Award winner. He is a newspaper correspondent and a frequent contributor to various online publications. Nichols is completing a book based on 15 years of nuclear radiation war in Central Asia. He is a former employee at a Army Ammunition Plant and Bomb Maker. Nichols can be reached by email, and readers are encouraged to write to him at: DUweapons@gmail.com
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Irresponsible Risk-Takers in Command
Irresponsible Risk-Takers in Command
by Rodrigue Tremblay
“War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.”
“War...is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.”
“To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.”
“The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.”
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
There are people in charge who think that provocation and aggression can be acceptable government policy. The sudden conflict between the former Soviet province of Georgia and Russia in the Caucasus in Eurasia is a good case in point.
What's behind this conflict that erupted last Friday at the outset of the Beijing Olympic Games? First and foremost, let us keep in mind that the real and first aggressors in this conflict is the belligerent government of Georgia, led by an impulsive politician named Mikhail Saakashvili, who is openly supported by the governments of the U.S. and of Israel. Early Friday, August 8, Georgian tanks and infantry, assisted by American and Israeli military advisers, launched an early morning massive artillery and rocket barrage on the capital of breakaway South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, thus directly provoking Russia, which had soldiers in that province.
At first blush, most people could easily arrive at the conclusion that Saakashvili is completely out of his mind for having declared war against its neighbor Russia, a country more than 50 times larger, with the goal of reoccupying the Russian-speaking province of South Ossetia, de facto independent since 1992. The only logical explanation would seem to be that the Georgia President believed, or had some form of assurance, that the Bush-Cheney administration would side militarily with him. Did he really believe that the Bush-Cheney administration, already deeply involved in two military conflicts in Iraq and in Afghanistan, would risk a world war to salvage an oil pipeline and a newly acquired colony in that far away part of the world? This would seem to be another insane idea.
It is a little known fact that the U.S. and Israel have been training and arming the Georgian military since 2002. This situation is tantamount to risking a restart of the Cold War with Russia. It has also sown the seeds of a much larger conflict in that part of the world by encouraging Georgia to embark on military manoeuvres. Little Georgia (4.5 m. inhabitants) even has 2,000 troops in Iraq, soldiers that the U.S. is now quickly flying back to Georgia. This goes a long way towards explaining how involved the Bush-Cheney administration and its Israeli surrogates have been in sticking it in the eyes of Russia. And now, the Russian bear is reacting. This is brinkmanship at a high level.
In the summer of 1914, a similar miscalculation resulted in igniting World War I.
This was a conflict that started with a single death (the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914) but which resulted, in the end, in 40 million deaths. The catastrophe was the result of a chain reaction of war declarations by various countries involved in the affairs of other countries. This remains an example of how relatively minor regional conflicts can escalate into conflagrations when hotheads are in command.
The Georgia-Russia spat represents a good opportunity for the U.N. Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, to show leadership and not to let things degenerate. Indeed, there is always the possibility that one politician after another will try not to lose face by escalating things. For example, the U.N Secretary-General should obtain from the Security Council the mandate to visit immediately the two capitals directly involved, and he should attempt to broker an immediate face-saving end to the hostilities. He should persuade the Russian leaders not to overreact to the Georgian President's provocations. As for the latter, he has demonstrated that he is not worthy of occupying his functions.
Time is of the essence in such circumstances, because there are always some interests that stand to profit from a worsening situation.
For one, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who never met a war he didn't like, has already tried to stoke the fire of conflict by calling for the 26-country NATO to get involved in what is essentially a local ethnic conflict. On the campaign trail, John McCain said: "We should immediately call a meeting of the North Atlantic Council to assess Georgia's security and review measures NATO can take to contribute to stabilizing this very dangerous situation."
Incredibly, the republican candidate is attempting to profit politically from this faraway crisis by advancing the frightening prospect of turning a small regional conflict into a world war. This could have something to do with the fact that Mr. McCain's main foreign policy adviser is a former lobbyist for the government of Georgia and is a former neocon lobbyist for the U.S. military invasion of Iraq. This would seem to be a direct conflict of interests and reason enough for Mr. McCain to refrain from throwing oil on the fire.
I have said it before, and this incident confirms it; this man would seem to be unfit to be in charge of a heavily armed country.
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
He is the author of the book 'The New American Empire'
Visit his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Check Dr. Tremblay's coming book "The Code for Global Ethics" at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/
Posted, Wednesday, August 13, 2008, at 5:30 am
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by Rodrigue Tremblay
“War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.”
“War...is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.”
“To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.”
“The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.”
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
There are people in charge who think that provocation and aggression can be acceptable government policy. The sudden conflict between the former Soviet province of Georgia and Russia in the Caucasus in Eurasia is a good case in point.
What's behind this conflict that erupted last Friday at the outset of the Beijing Olympic Games? First and foremost, let us keep in mind that the real and first aggressors in this conflict is the belligerent government of Georgia, led by an impulsive politician named Mikhail Saakashvili, who is openly supported by the governments of the U.S. and of Israel. Early Friday, August 8, Georgian tanks and infantry, assisted by American and Israeli military advisers, launched an early morning massive artillery and rocket barrage on the capital of breakaway South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, thus directly provoking Russia, which had soldiers in that province.
At first blush, most people could easily arrive at the conclusion that Saakashvili is completely out of his mind for having declared war against its neighbor Russia, a country more than 50 times larger, with the goal of reoccupying the Russian-speaking province of South Ossetia, de facto independent since 1992. The only logical explanation would seem to be that the Georgia President believed, or had some form of assurance, that the Bush-Cheney administration would side militarily with him. Did he really believe that the Bush-Cheney administration, already deeply involved in two military conflicts in Iraq and in Afghanistan, would risk a world war to salvage an oil pipeline and a newly acquired colony in that far away part of the world? This would seem to be another insane idea.
It is a little known fact that the U.S. and Israel have been training and arming the Georgian military since 2002. This situation is tantamount to risking a restart of the Cold War with Russia. It has also sown the seeds of a much larger conflict in that part of the world by encouraging Georgia to embark on military manoeuvres. Little Georgia (4.5 m. inhabitants) even has 2,000 troops in Iraq, soldiers that the U.S. is now quickly flying back to Georgia. This goes a long way towards explaining how involved the Bush-Cheney administration and its Israeli surrogates have been in sticking it in the eyes of Russia. And now, the Russian bear is reacting. This is brinkmanship at a high level.
In the summer of 1914, a similar miscalculation resulted in igniting World War I.
This was a conflict that started with a single death (the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914) but which resulted, in the end, in 40 million deaths. The catastrophe was the result of a chain reaction of war declarations by various countries involved in the affairs of other countries. This remains an example of how relatively minor regional conflicts can escalate into conflagrations when hotheads are in command.
The Georgia-Russia spat represents a good opportunity for the U.N. Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, to show leadership and not to let things degenerate. Indeed, there is always the possibility that one politician after another will try not to lose face by escalating things. For example, the U.N Secretary-General should obtain from the Security Council the mandate to visit immediately the two capitals directly involved, and he should attempt to broker an immediate face-saving end to the hostilities. He should persuade the Russian leaders not to overreact to the Georgian President's provocations. As for the latter, he has demonstrated that he is not worthy of occupying his functions.
Time is of the essence in such circumstances, because there are always some interests that stand to profit from a worsening situation.
For one, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who never met a war he didn't like, has already tried to stoke the fire of conflict by calling for the 26-country NATO to get involved in what is essentially a local ethnic conflict. On the campaign trail, John McCain said: "We should immediately call a meeting of the North Atlantic Council to assess Georgia's security and review measures NATO can take to contribute to stabilizing this very dangerous situation."
Incredibly, the republican candidate is attempting to profit politically from this faraway crisis by advancing the frightening prospect of turning a small regional conflict into a world war. This could have something to do with the fact that Mr. McCain's main foreign policy adviser is a former lobbyist for the government of Georgia and is a former neocon lobbyist for the U.S. military invasion of Iraq. This would seem to be a direct conflict of interests and reason enough for Mr. McCain to refrain from throwing oil on the fire.
I have said it before, and this incident confirms it; this man would seem to be unfit to be in charge of a heavily armed country.
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
He is the author of the book 'The New American Empire'
Visit his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Check Dr. Tremblay's coming book "The Code for Global Ethics" at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/
Posted, Wednesday, August 13, 2008, at 5:30 am
Email to a friend:
http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1092
Send contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in French) to:
bigpictureworld@yahoo.com
N.B.: Messages may be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise.
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Send an email with the word "subscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com
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Disclaimer: All quotes enclosed in this article are believed to be accurately attributed, but no guarantee is made, even after a thorough check, that some error cannot be found.
Back to the BLOG
(Home: TheNewAmericanEmpire.com)
A Path to Peace in the Caucasus
By Mikhail Gorbachev
12/08/08 "Washington Post -- - MOSCOW -- The past week's events in South Ossetia are bound to shock and pain anyone. Already, thousands of people have died, tens of thousands have been turned into refugees, and towns and villages lie in ruins. Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction. It is a warning to all.
The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. This turned out to be a time bomb for Georgia's
territorial integrity. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force -- both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar -- it only made the situation worse. New wounds aggravated old injuries.
Nevertheless, it was still possible to find a political solution. For some time, relative calm was maintained in South Ossetia. The peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, who live close to each other, found at least some common ground.
Through all these years, Russia has continued to recognize Georgia's territorial integrity. Clearly, the only way to solve the South Ossetian problem on that basis is through peaceful means. Indeed, in a civilized world, there is no other way.
The Georgian leadership flouted this key principle.
What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenseless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity.
Mounting a military assault against innocents was a reckless decision whose tragic consequences, for thousands of people of different nationalities, are now clear. The Georgian leadership could do this only with the perceived support and encouragement of a much more powerful force. Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of U.S. instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of NATO membership, emboldened Georgian leaders into thinking that they could get away with a "blitzkrieg" in South Ossetia.
In other words, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was expecting unconditional support from the West, and the West had given him reason to think he would have it. Now that the Georgian military assault has been routed, both the Georgian government and its supporters should rethink their position.
Hostilities must cease as soon as possible, and urgent steps must be taken to help the victims -- the humanitarian catastrophe, regretfully, received very little coverage in Western media this weekend -- and to rebuild the devastated towns and villages. It is equally important to start thinking about ways to solve the underlying problem, which is among the most painful and challenging issues in the Caucasus -- a region that should be approached with the greatest care.
When the problems of South Ossetia and Abkhazia first flared up, I proposed that they be settled through a federation that would grant broad autonomy to the two republics. This idea was dismissed, particularly by the Georgians. Attitudes gradually shifted, but after last week, it will be much more difficult to strike a deal even on such a basis.
Old grievances are a heavy burden. Healing is a long process that requires patience and dialogue, with non-use of force an indispensable precondition. It took decades to bring to an end similar conflicts in Europe and elsewhere, and other long-standing issues are still smoldering. In addition to patience, this situation requires wisdom.
Small nations of the Caucasus do have a history of living together. It has been demonstrated that a lasting peace is possible, that tolerance and cooperation can create conditions for normal life and development. Nothing is more important than that.
The region's political leaders need to realize this. Instead of flexing military muscle, they should devote their efforts to building the groundwork for durable peace.
Over the past few days, some Western nations have taken positions, particularly in the U.N. Security Council, that have been far from balanced. As a result, the Security Council was not able to act effectively from the very start of this conflict. By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its "national interest," the United States made a serious blunder. Of course, peace in the Caucasus is in everyone's interest. But it is simply common sense to recognize that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history. Russia is not seeking territorial expansion, but it has legitimate interests in this region.
The international community's long-term aim could be to create a sub-regional system of security and cooperation that would make any provocation, and the very possibility of crises such as this one, impossible. Building this type of system would be challenging and could only be accomplished with the cooperation of the region's countries themselves. Nations outside the region could perhaps help, too -- but only if they take a fair and objective stance. A lesson from recent events is that geopolitical games are dangerous anywhere, not just in the Caucasus.
The writer was the last president of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and is president of the Gorbachev Foundation, a Moscow think tank. A version of this article, in Russian, will be published in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper tomorrow.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Georgia: Widening War
"Bodies are lying everywhere. It’s hell’
By Mark Franchetti, Moscow
10/08/08 "The Times" -- - OLEG KALCHAKEYEV sighed with relief as he watched the evening news on Thursday.
The reports told of renewed skir-mishes between separatist rebels seeking South Ossetian independence and the Georgian army – but also revealed that Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, had declared a ceasefire. On Friday, so the young leader said, the two sides would sit down to negotiate.
Kalchakeyev, a car mechanic from Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, told his son: “At least we’ll be able to watch the Olympics.”
Only a few hours later, however, shortly before dawn, Kalchakeyev woke up to the sound of explosions. He looked out of the window and saw the night sky over Tskhinvali filled with tracer fire. A barrage of Grad and Katyusha rockets followed.
It is unclear who first violated the ceasefire, but less than eight hours after Saakashvili’s pledge, the Georgian president had ordered his troops to retake South Ossetia by force.
“Suddenly there was a massive explosion which hit a house down the road from us,” said Kalchakeyev, who managed to flee across the border to Russia.
“Our windows shattered and I jumped for cover. I grabbed my son and wife and ran down to the basement, where I was joined by dozens of other civilians. The bombing only got worse. It was relentless and went on for hours. I never thought it would come to this – Georgians bombing us – not in my wildest imagination.”
As Vladimir Putin and George W Bush gathered with world leaders at the so-called bird’s nest stadium in Beijing for the Olympic opening ceremony, war was breaking out between Putin’s Russia and Bush’s client state Georgia.
Within hours, Russia sent its tanks rampaging into South Ossetia – even though it still officially recognises it as Georgian sovereign territory – and yesterday it ordered its air force to attack Georgian targets.
Apartment blocks were on fire in Gori, 15 miles from South Ossetia. Afterwards, a woman knelt in the street and screamed over the body of a dead man.
Another old woman covered in blood stared into the distance, and a man knelt by the road, his head in his hands.
“Why do I have to go through this again?” asked one woman, who said she had survived the second world war. “Why can’t we just live in peace?”
A wave of shock and apprehension gripped the region as survivors asked themselves whether Georgia was about to follow Chechnya into another Caucasian war.
Yesterday it emerged that Tskhinvali, a quiet, small town, had been all but destroyed by the initial Georgian attack on Friday.
As a barrage of artillery fell on its outskirts, Georgian tanks moved into the centre, where they were met with fierce resistance from South Ossetian separatist rebels.
“Georgian snipers are taking down anything that moves, even outside the town’s hospital, which is making it hard to deliver the wounded. They are not sparing anyone,” claimed a South Ossetian government spokesman.
The presidential palace of a region of only 70,000 inhabitants was in flames as intense hand-to-hand fighting broke out across the town. Ordinary apartment blocks were pounded as the remains of Georgian tanks struck by rocket-propelled grenades stood burning in the middle of the street.
“It’s hell,” said Zara Valiyeva, a local journalist trapped in the city. “Houses are being hit around us by rockets. We have no food but it’s too dangerous to go out.”
Battered Ladas delivered the wounded to the town’s hospital, which according to several reports was also badly hit.
“There were bodies lying everywhere, in the streets, around ruined buildings, in cars. There is hardly a single building left undamaged,” said Ludmilla, a woman who fled the town during the fighting.
“The city is burning,” stated a local resident, Oleg Repukhov, in a text message from a basement he took refuge in.
“Grad missiles are falling. They are taking the city. We are running out of ammunition. Where’s our f***ing help!!?” he wrote before the line went down.
“We never thought this could happen,” said Fatima Kochieva, a 47-year-old mother of two who lived on Tskhinvali’s southern outskirts, where the first Georgian artillery shells landed. “It all happened so quickly. Suddenly we were in the middle of heavy fighting. I saw our neighbour’s house get a direct hit. I took cover with the kids in the basement. It was terrifying.”
It took the Georgian army, which in the past few years has received US training and equipment, only a few hours to take the town.
Huge bomb craters cut through the streets. Blackened Soviet-era apartment block buildings were in flames; dead bodies of fighters and civilians lay on the ground amid the rubble. The remains of Georgian armed vehicles hit by grenades lay upside down close to the central square. Power and water supplies were cut off.
“The town is destroyed. There are many casualties, many wounded,” said Zaid Tsarnayev, a resident. “I was in the hospital on Friday where I saw many civilian wounded. The hospital was later destroyed by a Georgian jet.”
Russia’s response to the crisis was swift. Tank columns from the 58th army rolled across the border into South Ossetia. Backed by Russian fighter jets that pounded the Georgian army’s position, they quickly advanced towards Tskhinvali.
“Russia will not close its eyes on the deaths of Russian citizens in South Ossetia,” warned Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president.
Hundreds of volunteers from across the Caucasus – including scores of Cossacks – continued to cross into the disputed enclave to help the South Ossetian separatists.
Yesterday morning the Russians stepped up the pressure by sending in their Spetsnaz special forces. Clashes were reported in and around Tskhinvali but by midday the Russians had pushed the Georgians back, establishing a big military presence that Moscow will argue needs to stay for the fore-seeable future as a “peacekeeping” force.
Georgia’s interior ministry claimed that Russian warplanes had bombed a military base on the outskirts of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and three military bases on the Black Sea port of Poti. Russia denied the claims. Georgia also claimed to have shot down 10 Russian planes. The Russians said they had lost two.
It was when Russian jets attacked Gori, a small Georgian town to the south of the fighting, that the worst bloodshed occurred.
Richard Galpin of the BBC was the first foreign reporter on the scene. He said: “We saw the impact of the air strikes – buildings on fire. We could hear the Russian jets above us. In one strike the pilot missed the intended military base, instead hitting two apartment blocks.
“When we arrived, flames were pouring out of the buildings and people were still trapped inside. We saw injured civilians being pulled from the buildings.”
Roots of the conflict
Why is the Caucasus so important?
Because it is the only route for Central Asian oil supplies that does not cross Russia. Throughout the 19th century Russia fought wars to control the region and Moscow considers the area a key part of its sphere of influence.
Why does South Ossetia want to break away?
Most of its people speak their own language and feel closer to the Russians than the Georgians. They say they were absorbed into Georgia after the fall of the old Soviet Union. The 70,000 South Ossetians want independence – just like Kosovo, the breakaway Serbian province.
Why are the Georgians so upset about South Ossetia?
Because they see it as a Russian outpost funded largely from Moscow, and where most people carry Russian passports.
Why has Georgia’s president chosen to raise the issue now?
Because he thought everyone was focused on the Olympics and the Russians would hesitate to respond with force.
Why has Russia been willing to go to war?
The Kremlin is angry about western, particularly American military support for Georgia, its desire to join Nato and US plans for a missile defence shield in Europe.
Will anyone else intervene?
Unlikely, western armies are busy and the prospect of taking on Russia is not enticing.
What happens next?
The Georgians will back down looking like the bad guys. Both sides will go back to hating each other. Result: Russia 1, Georgia 0.
By Mark Franchetti, Moscow
10/08/08 "The Times" -- - OLEG KALCHAKEYEV sighed with relief as he watched the evening news on Thursday.
The reports told of renewed skir-mishes between separatist rebels seeking South Ossetian independence and the Georgian army – but also revealed that Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, had declared a ceasefire. On Friday, so the young leader said, the two sides would sit down to negotiate.
Kalchakeyev, a car mechanic from Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, told his son: “At least we’ll be able to watch the Olympics.”
Only a few hours later, however, shortly before dawn, Kalchakeyev woke up to the sound of explosions. He looked out of the window and saw the night sky over Tskhinvali filled with tracer fire. A barrage of Grad and Katyusha rockets followed.
It is unclear who first violated the ceasefire, but less than eight hours after Saakashvili’s pledge, the Georgian president had ordered his troops to retake South Ossetia by force.
“Suddenly there was a massive explosion which hit a house down the road from us,” said Kalchakeyev, who managed to flee across the border to Russia.
“Our windows shattered and I jumped for cover. I grabbed my son and wife and ran down to the basement, where I was joined by dozens of other civilians. The bombing only got worse. It was relentless and went on for hours. I never thought it would come to this – Georgians bombing us – not in my wildest imagination.”
As Vladimir Putin and George W Bush gathered with world leaders at the so-called bird’s nest stadium in Beijing for the Olympic opening ceremony, war was breaking out between Putin’s Russia and Bush’s client state Georgia.
Within hours, Russia sent its tanks rampaging into South Ossetia – even though it still officially recognises it as Georgian sovereign territory – and yesterday it ordered its air force to attack Georgian targets.
Apartment blocks were on fire in Gori, 15 miles from South Ossetia. Afterwards, a woman knelt in the street and screamed over the body of a dead man.
Another old woman covered in blood stared into the distance, and a man knelt by the road, his head in his hands.
“Why do I have to go through this again?” asked one woman, who said she had survived the second world war. “Why can’t we just live in peace?”
A wave of shock and apprehension gripped the region as survivors asked themselves whether Georgia was about to follow Chechnya into another Caucasian war.
Yesterday it emerged that Tskhinvali, a quiet, small town, had been all but destroyed by the initial Georgian attack on Friday.
As a barrage of artillery fell on its outskirts, Georgian tanks moved into the centre, where they were met with fierce resistance from South Ossetian separatist rebels.
“Georgian snipers are taking down anything that moves, even outside the town’s hospital, which is making it hard to deliver the wounded. They are not sparing anyone,” claimed a South Ossetian government spokesman.
The presidential palace of a region of only 70,000 inhabitants was in flames as intense hand-to-hand fighting broke out across the town. Ordinary apartment blocks were pounded as the remains of Georgian tanks struck by rocket-propelled grenades stood burning in the middle of the street.
“It’s hell,” said Zara Valiyeva, a local journalist trapped in the city. “Houses are being hit around us by rockets. We have no food but it’s too dangerous to go out.”
Battered Ladas delivered the wounded to the town’s hospital, which according to several reports was also badly hit.
“There were bodies lying everywhere, in the streets, around ruined buildings, in cars. There is hardly a single building left undamaged,” said Ludmilla, a woman who fled the town during the fighting.
“The city is burning,” stated a local resident, Oleg Repukhov, in a text message from a basement he took refuge in.
“Grad missiles are falling. They are taking the city. We are running out of ammunition. Where’s our f***ing help!!?” he wrote before the line went down.
“We never thought this could happen,” said Fatima Kochieva, a 47-year-old mother of two who lived on Tskhinvali’s southern outskirts, where the first Georgian artillery shells landed. “It all happened so quickly. Suddenly we were in the middle of heavy fighting. I saw our neighbour’s house get a direct hit. I took cover with the kids in the basement. It was terrifying.”
It took the Georgian army, which in the past few years has received US training and equipment, only a few hours to take the town.
Huge bomb craters cut through the streets. Blackened Soviet-era apartment block buildings were in flames; dead bodies of fighters and civilians lay on the ground amid the rubble. The remains of Georgian armed vehicles hit by grenades lay upside down close to the central square. Power and water supplies were cut off.
“The town is destroyed. There are many casualties, many wounded,” said Zaid Tsarnayev, a resident. “I was in the hospital on Friday where I saw many civilian wounded. The hospital was later destroyed by a Georgian jet.”
Russia’s response to the crisis was swift. Tank columns from the 58th army rolled across the border into South Ossetia. Backed by Russian fighter jets that pounded the Georgian army’s position, they quickly advanced towards Tskhinvali.
“Russia will not close its eyes on the deaths of Russian citizens in South Ossetia,” warned Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president.
Hundreds of volunteers from across the Caucasus – including scores of Cossacks – continued to cross into the disputed enclave to help the South Ossetian separatists.
Yesterday morning the Russians stepped up the pressure by sending in their Spetsnaz special forces. Clashes were reported in and around Tskhinvali but by midday the Russians had pushed the Georgians back, establishing a big military presence that Moscow will argue needs to stay for the fore-seeable future as a “peacekeeping” force.
Georgia’s interior ministry claimed that Russian warplanes had bombed a military base on the outskirts of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and three military bases on the Black Sea port of Poti. Russia denied the claims. Georgia also claimed to have shot down 10 Russian planes. The Russians said they had lost two.
It was when Russian jets attacked Gori, a small Georgian town to the south of the fighting, that the worst bloodshed occurred.
Richard Galpin of the BBC was the first foreign reporter on the scene. He said: “We saw the impact of the air strikes – buildings on fire. We could hear the Russian jets above us. In one strike the pilot missed the intended military base, instead hitting two apartment blocks.
“When we arrived, flames were pouring out of the buildings and people were still trapped inside. We saw injured civilians being pulled from the buildings.”
Roots of the conflict
Why is the Caucasus so important?
Because it is the only route for Central Asian oil supplies that does not cross Russia. Throughout the 19th century Russia fought wars to control the region and Moscow considers the area a key part of its sphere of influence.
Why does South Ossetia want to break away?
Most of its people speak their own language and feel closer to the Russians than the Georgians. They say they were absorbed into Georgia after the fall of the old Soviet Union. The 70,000 South Ossetians want independence – just like Kosovo, the breakaway Serbian province.
Why are the Georgians so upset about South Ossetia?
Because they see it as a Russian outpost funded largely from Moscow, and where most people carry Russian passports.
Why has Georgia’s president chosen to raise the issue now?
Because he thought everyone was focused on the Olympics and the Russians would hesitate to respond with force.
Why has Russia been willing to go to war?
The Kremlin is angry about western, particularly American military support for Georgia, its desire to join Nato and US plans for a missile defence shield in Europe.
Will anyone else intervene?
Unlikely, western armies are busy and the prospect of taking on Russia is not enticing.
What happens next?
The Georgians will back down looking like the bad guys. Both sides will go back to hating each other. Result: Russia 1, Georgia 0.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
The Lies Of Hiroshima Are The Lies Of Today
By John Pilger
06/08/08 "ICH" -- - On the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, John Pilger describes the 'progression of lies' from the dust of that detonated city, to the wars of today - and the threatened attack on Iran.
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
www.johnpilger.com
source
Out of the Black Bag: Forging Ahead for Iraq War
The Forged Iraqi Letter: What Just Happened?
Ron Suskind
What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:
The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.
In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization."
The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.
So, here we go again: the administration is in full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads. Everything in my book is on the record, with many sources. And so, we watch and wait....
source
Ron Suskind
What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:
The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.
In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization."
The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.
So, here we go again: the administration is in full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads. Everything in my book is on the record, with many sources. And so, we watch and wait....
source
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
West Bank Checkpoints
The Horror Of Israeli Occupation: West Bank Checkpoints
A video clip that dramatically portrays the meeting of Israeli solders and Palestinians at controversial West Bank security checkpoints. This clip is the second of a series taken from "Land of the Settlers", the acclaimed documentary developed by Chaim Yavin, Israel's premier news anchor.
A video clip that dramatically portrays the meeting of Israeli solders and Palestinians at controversial West Bank security checkpoints. This clip is the second of a series taken from "Land of the Settlers", the acclaimed documentary developed by Chaim Yavin, Israel's premier news anchor.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Anthrax and the ABC's of Planting a Fake News Story
Glenn Greenwald
Monday Aug. 4, 2008 06:32 EDT
Additional key facts re: the anthrax investigation
for complete article links, please see:
source
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
It's perfectly possible that Bruce Ivins really is the anthrax attacker -- that he perpetrated the attacks and did so alone. Perhaps the FBI is in possession of mountains of conclusive evidence that, once revealed, will leave no doubt that Ivins is the guilty party. But no rational person could possibly assume that to be the case given the paltry amount of facts -- many of which contradict one another -- that are now known. Several points to note:
(1) Two prominent journalism professors -- Jay Rosen of NYU and Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University and a practicing journalist for 25 years -- have added their names to the list of people calling on ABC News and Brian Ross to reveal their sources for ABC's false bentonite story that was used to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq. Rosen and Gillmor both write that ABC and Ross should answer three questions which they jointly outline, and they both set forth the reasons, grounded in widely accepted principles of journalistic ethics, as to why ABC and Ross should do so.
(2) So much of the public reporting about Ivins has been devoted to depicting him as a highly unstable psychotic who had been issuing extremely violent threats and who had a violent past. But that depiction has been based almost exclusively on the uncorroborated claims of Jean Carol Duley, a social worker (not a psychiatrist or psychologist) who, as recently as last year, was apparently still in college at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. Duley's scrawled handwritten complaint against Ivins, seeking a Protective Order, has served as the basis for much of the reporting regarding Ivins' mental state, yet it is hardly the model of a competent or authoritative professional. Quite the opposite.
Duley herself has a history that, at the very least, raises questions about her credibility. She has a rather lengthy involvement with the courts in Frederick, including two very recent convictions for driving under the influence -- one from 2007 and one from 2006 -- as well as a complaint filed against her for battery by her ex-husband. Here is Duley's record from the Maryland Judicial data base:
Just three months ago, Duley pled guilty and was sentenced to probation (and fined $1,000), as a result of having been stopped in December, while driving at 1:35 a.m., and charged with driving under the influence:
On April 21, 2006, Duley was also charged with "driving a vehicle while impaired by alcohol," driving "while impaired by drugs or alcohol," and reckless driving, and on October 13, 2006, she pled guilty to the charge of reckless driving and was fined $580. Back in 1992, Duley was criminally charged with battery against what appeared to be her now-ex-husband (and she filed a complaint against him as well). Later that same year, she was criminally charged with possession of drug paraphenalia with intent to use, charges which appear to have been ultimately dismissed.
Prior to the restraining order against Ivins which Duley obtained two weeks ago, Ivins had no criminal record at all, at least not in Frederick. A story in today's Frederick News-Post quotes Duley's fiancee as claiming: "She had to quit her job and is now unable to work, and we have spent our savings on attorneys." But she doesn't appear to have used an attorney for her complaint against Ivins. If anything, her savings were likely depleted from attorneys' fees, court costs, and fines and probation for her various criminal proceedings (Larisa Alexandrovna has more details on Duley).
None of this is to defend Ivins, nor is to suggest that this constitutes evidence that Duley is lying or is otherwise inaccurate in her claims. As I said, it's perfectly possible that Ivins is guilty of being the anthrax attacker. I have no opinion on whether he is. The point is that nobody should have any opinion on that question -- one way or the other -- until they see the FBI's evidence.
What is certain is that Jean Carol Duley is hardly some upstanding, authoritative source on Bruce Ivins' psychological state or his guilt, nor is she some accomplished and highly credible psychological professional, notwithstanding the fact that most media depictions of Ivins are based on uncritical recitations of her accusations. The fact that her depiction contradicts not only the claims of virtually everyone else who knew Ivins but also numerous facts about how Ivins was treated even by the FBI (see below), suggests that a large amount of skepticism is warranted.
(3) The initial report from The Los Angeles Times' David Willman said that Ivins committed suicide "just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks." But an article from The New York Times' Scott Shane this morning reported that the evidence against Ivins "was largely circumstantial" and that the "grand jury in Washington was planning to hear several more weeks of testimony before issuing an indictment."
According to The Washington Post, Ivins enjoyed full-scale clearance at Fort Detrick as late as July 10 -- hardly what one would expect if the FBI were so certain that he was the anthrax attacker. And judging from an article in today's local Frederick newspaper, The Frederick-News Post Online, the FBI is still searching for evidence against Ivins, as they removed two computers from a public library there.
Members of Congress with some personal stake in this case and who have been attempting to assert some oversight on the FBI's investigation over the last six years -- Tom Daschle, Pat Leahy, Rush Holt -- have been uniformly critical of how it has been handled. Numerous experts continue to raise serious doubts about whether Ivins even had the ability to access and handle anthrax of the type that was sent to Daschle and Leahy. Maybe the FBI's evidence demonstrates that he could and did. Maybe it doesn't. But under all circumstances, it's inconceivable that anyone would be content with having the FBI simply keep its alleged evidence to itself and not have a full public airing and accounting of what has happened here, an accounting that should include the news organizations -- led by ABC -- which are in possession of vital information that they continue to conceal.
UPDATE: The Democracy Now segment I did this morning included Dr. Meryl Nass, an anthrax expert and physician (curriculum vitae is here) who knew Bruce Ivins, and is strongly skeptical of the claim that he is the anthrax attacker. Dr. Nass made several excellent points, and I will post the link to the segment once it is available. She also has been raising many insightful points questioning the accusations against Ivins on her blog, which is here. It is worthwhile to begin at the start and scroll down.
Relating to ABC, a reader exchanged emails with Brian Ross this weekend, and Ross wrote this (the email was sent from Ross' ABC address; yesterday, I emailed both him and ABC's Jeffrey Schneider to request confirmation of its authenticity, and they didn't reply):
As we reported more than six years ago our information came from current and former government scientists. The report was discointed [sic] and denied by the White House which we reported. I believe now the scientists got it wrong although they insisted they were correct long after.
Actually, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that Ross has ever acknowledged that his sources for the bentonite story were "current and former government scientists." Given that he previously described his sources as being "well-placed," that means, presumably, that they were scientists with extremely close proximity to Fort Detrick (where the anthrax tests were being conducted) if not Fort Detrick scientists themselves. That would mean, if the FBI's accusation against Ivins is true, that the same Government lab where the attacks originated was the source for falsely telling Ross that tests revealed evidence linking the attacks to Iraq. In light of that, how can Ross possibly continue to conceal which Government scientists disseminated this false story?
It is also worth noting that Ross, who was a key witness in the Steven Hatfill litigation (since he had published numerous incriminating leaks from the DOJ) badgered at least one of his government sources, FBI spokesman Edwin Cogswell, to provide Ross with a release authorizing Ross to disclose the source's identity (allowing Ross to avoid being held in contempt by the court). Has Ross sought a similar release from his bentonite sources? Clearly, at least in some instances, Ross is able to convince his sources to allow him to disclose their identity when he is properly motivated to do so. For the reasons Professors Rosen and Gillmor point out, no release should be necessary, since these sources fed him deliberate falsehoods, but one wonders if Ross has even tried to persuade them to give permission for Ross to disclose who they are.
UPDATE II: Pulitzer Prize winning reporter John McQuaid calls on ABC News and Brian Ross to provide a full account of how they ended up publishing the false bentonite story.
UPDATE III: The video for the aforementioned Democracy Now segment with me and Dr. Nass is now available here. The transcript will be posted shortly.
Monday Aug. 4, 2008 06:32 EDT
Additional key facts re: the anthrax investigation
for complete article links, please see:
source
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
It's perfectly possible that Bruce Ivins really is the anthrax attacker -- that he perpetrated the attacks and did so alone. Perhaps the FBI is in possession of mountains of conclusive evidence that, once revealed, will leave no doubt that Ivins is the guilty party. But no rational person could possibly assume that to be the case given the paltry amount of facts -- many of which contradict one another -- that are now known. Several points to note:
(1) Two prominent journalism professors -- Jay Rosen of NYU and Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University and a practicing journalist for 25 years -- have added their names to the list of people calling on ABC News and Brian Ross to reveal their sources for ABC's false bentonite story that was used to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq. Rosen and Gillmor both write that ABC and Ross should answer three questions which they jointly outline, and they both set forth the reasons, grounded in widely accepted principles of journalistic ethics, as to why ABC and Ross should do so.
(2) So much of the public reporting about Ivins has been devoted to depicting him as a highly unstable psychotic who had been issuing extremely violent threats and who had a violent past. But that depiction has been based almost exclusively on the uncorroborated claims of Jean Carol Duley, a social worker (not a psychiatrist or psychologist) who, as recently as last year, was apparently still in college at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. Duley's scrawled handwritten complaint against Ivins, seeking a Protective Order, has served as the basis for much of the reporting regarding Ivins' mental state, yet it is hardly the model of a competent or authoritative professional. Quite the opposite.
Duley herself has a history that, at the very least, raises questions about her credibility. She has a rather lengthy involvement with the courts in Frederick, including two very recent convictions for driving under the influence -- one from 2007 and one from 2006 -- as well as a complaint filed against her for battery by her ex-husband. Here is Duley's record from the Maryland Judicial data base:
Just three months ago, Duley pled guilty and was sentenced to probation (and fined $1,000), as a result of having been stopped in December, while driving at 1:35 a.m., and charged with driving under the influence:
On April 21, 2006, Duley was also charged with "driving a vehicle while impaired by alcohol," driving "while impaired by drugs or alcohol," and reckless driving, and on October 13, 2006, she pled guilty to the charge of reckless driving and was fined $580. Back in 1992, Duley was criminally charged with battery against what appeared to be her now-ex-husband (and she filed a complaint against him as well). Later that same year, she was criminally charged with possession of drug paraphenalia with intent to use, charges which appear to have been ultimately dismissed.
Prior to the restraining order against Ivins which Duley obtained two weeks ago, Ivins had no criminal record at all, at least not in Frederick. A story in today's Frederick News-Post quotes Duley's fiancee as claiming: "She had to quit her job and is now unable to work, and we have spent our savings on attorneys." But she doesn't appear to have used an attorney for her complaint against Ivins. If anything, her savings were likely depleted from attorneys' fees, court costs, and fines and probation for her various criminal proceedings (Larisa Alexandrovna has more details on Duley).
None of this is to defend Ivins, nor is to suggest that this constitutes evidence that Duley is lying or is otherwise inaccurate in her claims. As I said, it's perfectly possible that Ivins is guilty of being the anthrax attacker. I have no opinion on whether he is. The point is that nobody should have any opinion on that question -- one way or the other -- until they see the FBI's evidence.
What is certain is that Jean Carol Duley is hardly some upstanding, authoritative source on Bruce Ivins' psychological state or his guilt, nor is she some accomplished and highly credible psychological professional, notwithstanding the fact that most media depictions of Ivins are based on uncritical recitations of her accusations. The fact that her depiction contradicts not only the claims of virtually everyone else who knew Ivins but also numerous facts about how Ivins was treated even by the FBI (see below), suggests that a large amount of skepticism is warranted.
(3) The initial report from The Los Angeles Times' David Willman said that Ivins committed suicide "just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks." But an article from The New York Times' Scott Shane this morning reported that the evidence against Ivins "was largely circumstantial" and that the "grand jury in Washington was planning to hear several more weeks of testimony before issuing an indictment."
According to The Washington Post, Ivins enjoyed full-scale clearance at Fort Detrick as late as July 10 -- hardly what one would expect if the FBI were so certain that he was the anthrax attacker. And judging from an article in today's local Frederick newspaper, The Frederick-News Post Online, the FBI is still searching for evidence against Ivins, as they removed two computers from a public library there.
Members of Congress with some personal stake in this case and who have been attempting to assert some oversight on the FBI's investigation over the last six years -- Tom Daschle, Pat Leahy, Rush Holt -- have been uniformly critical of how it has been handled. Numerous experts continue to raise serious doubts about whether Ivins even had the ability to access and handle anthrax of the type that was sent to Daschle and Leahy. Maybe the FBI's evidence demonstrates that he could and did. Maybe it doesn't. But under all circumstances, it's inconceivable that anyone would be content with having the FBI simply keep its alleged evidence to itself and not have a full public airing and accounting of what has happened here, an accounting that should include the news organizations -- led by ABC -- which are in possession of vital information that they continue to conceal.
UPDATE: The Democracy Now segment I did this morning included Dr. Meryl Nass, an anthrax expert and physician (curriculum vitae is here) who knew Bruce Ivins, and is strongly skeptical of the claim that he is the anthrax attacker. Dr. Nass made several excellent points, and I will post the link to the segment once it is available. She also has been raising many insightful points questioning the accusations against Ivins on her blog, which is here. It is worthwhile to begin at the start and scroll down.
Relating to ABC, a reader exchanged emails with Brian Ross this weekend, and Ross wrote this (the email was sent from Ross' ABC address; yesterday, I emailed both him and ABC's Jeffrey Schneider to request confirmation of its authenticity, and they didn't reply):
As we reported more than six years ago our information came from current and former government scientists. The report was discointed [sic] and denied by the White House which we reported. I believe now the scientists got it wrong although they insisted they were correct long after.
Actually, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that Ross has ever acknowledged that his sources for the bentonite story were "current and former government scientists." Given that he previously described his sources as being "well-placed," that means, presumably, that they were scientists with extremely close proximity to Fort Detrick (where the anthrax tests were being conducted) if not Fort Detrick scientists themselves. That would mean, if the FBI's accusation against Ivins is true, that the same Government lab where the attacks originated was the source for falsely telling Ross that tests revealed evidence linking the attacks to Iraq. In light of that, how can Ross possibly continue to conceal which Government scientists disseminated this false story?
It is also worth noting that Ross, who was a key witness in the Steven Hatfill litigation (since he had published numerous incriminating leaks from the DOJ) badgered at least one of his government sources, FBI spokesman Edwin Cogswell, to provide Ross with a release authorizing Ross to disclose the source's identity (allowing Ross to avoid being held in contempt by the court). Has Ross sought a similar release from his bentonite sources? Clearly, at least in some instances, Ross is able to convince his sources to allow him to disclose their identity when he is properly motivated to do so. For the reasons Professors Rosen and Gillmor point out, no release should be necessary, since these sources fed him deliberate falsehoods, but one wonders if Ross has even tried to persuade them to give permission for Ross to disclose who they are.
UPDATE II: Pulitzer Prize winning reporter John McQuaid calls on ABC News and Brian Ross to provide a full account of how they ended up publishing the false bentonite story.
UPDATE III: The video for the aforementioned Democracy Now segment with me and Dr. Nass is now available here. The transcript will be posted shortly.
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