Terrorising Afghanistan
by Patrick Seale
Last Friday’s massive jail break at Kandahar, which freed 1,200 prisoners including hundreds of Taliban fighters, is only the latest demonstration of the acute difficulties the Western powers are facing in Afghanistan.
Using truck bombs, Taliban guerrillas blow open the gates and mud walls of the Sarpoza Provincial Prison, raced in on motorbikes, killed fifteen of the prison guards, released the prisoners from their cells, and then faded away into the night.
Canadian and Afghan troops arrived on the scene some hours later “to restore order.”
It has long been clear that the 60,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan -- which include 34,000 American and 7,800 British soldiers -- are neither winning the war against the insurgents nor laying the basis for democracy. These are unrealistic objectives, which should, very probably, be abandoned, before more lives are uselessly thrown away.
Afghanistan is a country with strong Islamic traditions and conservative social mores. Every man’s house is his castle. The protection and privacy of women is closely tied to notions of family prestige and male honour. Breaking into people’s houses in search of ‘terrorists’, killing neighbours and relatives by means of air strikes, are hardly the way to win hearts and minds.
Afghans have an ancient and deeply-ingrained hatred of foreign control, as the British discovered to their cost in the 19th century and the Soviets in the twentieth. Theirs is a country of tribes and warlords, of mutually hostile ethnic groups, strong regional diversity, different languages and primitive infrastructure.
Its economy depends very largely on the illegal production of opium and other drugs for the international market -- a brisk and flourishing trade which corrupts every relationship and every institution of the state, not excluding the army and security services.
This is not a country where Western armed intervention can create a viable state, and certainly not the Western model of a state, which most Afghans reject. The task of state-building must surely be left to the Afghans themselves. They alone must decide how and by whom they wish to be governed.
Far from eliminating terrorism, Western policy in Afghanistan -- much like U.S. policies in Iraq and Pakistan -- seems to be creating the very conditions which drive young men into the arms of the insurgency.
Two recent events cast a sharp light on the size of the problem. The first was the Afghan donors’ conference held in Paris on 12 June, at which $20 billion was reluctantly pledged by the 85 delegations present. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon struck a warning note by stressing that the UN -- and its high representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide -- were to play a greater role in coordinating the flow of aid for development and reconstruction. The UN was to be the interface between the Afghan government and the international community.
There is a strong suspicion in the West that aid money in Afghanistan is either lining the pockets of warlords, or used to pay the extravagant fees of Western consultants, or is simply wasted. The clear message of the conference to President Hamid Karzai was that, for international aid to continue, Afghanistan had to put its house in order and make greater efforts to fight corruption.
This, in itself, is an unrealistic expectation since much of Afghanistan is in the hands of warlords and private armies. The writ of Karzai’s government does not run far beyond the capital, Kabul.
The second event which will undoubtedly spawn anti-Western terrorists was the U.S. cross-border airstrike which killed 12 Pakistani soldiers on 10 June. Such strikes arouse fury in Pakistan and undermine U.S.-Pakistani relations.
They will strengthen the conviction of Pakistan’s newly-elected government under Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani -- who took the oath of office on 25 March -- that the way to pacify the tribal agencies on the Pakistani-Afghan border is by negotiations with the local tribes, including the Taliban, rather than by military action.
It is a lesson NATO has yet to learn in Afghanistan. A review of the current bankrupt military policy cannot be long delayed.
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
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Blood for Medal: The Rising of Latin America
The Rising of Latin America
The Genesis of 'The War On Democracy'
By John Pilger
In the 1960s, when I first went to Latin America, I travelled up the cone of the continent from Chile across the Altiplano to Peru, mostly in rickety buses and single-carriage trains. It was an experience my memory stored for life, especially the spectacle of the movement of people.
13/06/08 "ICH" -- - -They moved through the dust of a snow-capped wilderness, along roads that were ribbons of red mud, and they lived in shanties that defied gravity. "We are invisible," said one man; another used the term abandonados; an indigenous woman in Bolivia unforgettably described her poverty as a commodity for the rich.
When I later saw Sebastiao Salgado's photographs of Latin America's working people, I recognised the people at the roadside, the gold miners and the coffee workers and the silhouettes framed in crosses in the cemeteries. Perhaps the idea for a cinema film began then, or when I reported Ronald Reagan's murderous assault on Central America; or when I first read the words of Victor Jara's ballads and heard Sam Cooke's anthem A Change Is Gonna Come.
"The War On Democracy" is my first film for cinema. It follows more than 55 documentary films for television, which began with The Quiet Mutiny, set in Vietnam. Most of my films have told stories of people's struggles against rapacious power and of attempts to subvert and control our historical memory. It is this control, this organised forgetting, that has always intrigued me both as a film-maker and a journalist. Described by Harold Pinter as a great silence unbroken by the incessant din of the media age, it assures the powerful in the west that the struggle of whole societies against their crimes is merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged... It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest".
This was true of Nicaragua in the early 1980s, when a popular revolution began to turn back poverty and bring literacy and hope to a country long dismissed as a banana republic. In the United States, the Sandinista government was successfully portrayed as communist and a threat, and crushed. After all, Richard Nixon had said of all of Latin America: "No one gives a shit about the place." The War On Democracy is meant as an antidote to this.
Modern fictional cinema rarely seems to break political silences. The very fine Motorcycle Diaries was a generation too late. In this country, where Hollywood sets the liberal boundaries, the work of Ken Loach and a few others is an honourable exception. However, the cinema is changing as if by default. The documentary has returned to the big screen and is being embraced by the public, in the US and all over. They were still clapping Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 two months after it opened in this country. Why? The answer is uncomplicated. It was a powerful film that helped people make sense of news that no longer made sense. It did not present the usual phoney "balance" as a pretence for presenting an establishment consensus. It was not riddled with the cliches, platitudes and power assumptions that permeate "current affairs". It was realist cinema, as important as The Grapes of Wrath was in the 1930s, and people devoured it.
The War On Democracy is not the same. It comes out of a British commercial television tradition that is too often passed over: the pioneering of bold factual journalism that treated other societies not as post-imperial curios, as useful or expendable to "us", but extraordinary and important in their own terms. Granada's World in Action, where I began, was a prime example. It would report and film in ways that the BBC would not dare. These days, with misnamed "reality" programmes consuming much of television like a plague of cane toads, cinema has been handed a timely opportunity. Such are the dangers imposed on us all today by a rampant, neo-fascist superpower, and so urgent is our need for uncontaminated information that people are prepared to buy a cinema ticket to get it.
The War On Democracy examines the false democracy that comes with western corporations and financial institutions and a war waged, materially and as propaganda, against popular democracy. It is the story of the people I first saw 40 years ago; but they are no longer invisible; they are a mighty political movement, reclaiming noble concepts distorted by corporatism and they are defending the most basic human rights in a war being waged against all of us.
Cinema and television production are closely related, of course, but the differences, I have learned, are critical. Cinema allows a panorama to unfold, giving a sense of place that only the big screen captures. In The War On Democracy, the camera sweeps across the Andes in Bolivia to the highest and poorest city on earth, El Alto, then follows Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver, into a cemetery where children are buried. That Bolivia has been asset-stripped by multinational companies, aided by a corrupt elite, is an epic story described by this one man and this spectacle. That the people of Bolivia have stood up, expelled the foreign consortium that took their water resources, even the water that fell from the sky, is understood as the camera pans across a giant mural that Juan Delfin painted. This is cinema, a moving mural of ordinary lives and triumphs.
Chris Martin and I (we made the film as a partnership) used two crews and two very different cinematographers, Preston Clothier and Rupert Binsley. They shot in high-definition stock, which then had to be converted to 35mm film - one of cinema's wonderful anachronisms.
The film was backed by the impresario Michael Watt, a supporter of anti-poverty projects all over the world, who had told producer Wayne Young that he wanted to put my TV work in the cinema. Granada provided additional support, and ITV will broadcast the film later in the year. The extra funding also allowed me to persuade the late Sam Cooke's New York agents to license A Change Is Gonna Come, one of the finest, most lyrical pieces of black music ever written and performed. I was in the southern United States when it was released. It was the time of the civil-rights movement, and Cooke's song spoke to and for all people struggling to be free. The same is true of the ballads of the Chilean Victor Jara, whose songs celebrated the popular democracy of Salvador Allende before Pinochet and the CIA extinguished it.
We filmed in the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, where Jara was taken along with thousands of other political prisoners. By all accounts, he was a source of strength for his comrades, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. He wrote his last song there and it was smuggled out on scraps of paper. These are the words:
What horror the face of fascism
creates
They carry out their plans with
knife-like precision ...
For them, blood equals medals ...
How hard it is to sing
When I must sing of horror ...
In which silence and screams
Are the end of my song.
After two days of torture, they killed him. The War On Democracy is about such courage and a warning to us all that "for them" nothing has changed, that "blood equals medals".
John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia.
The Genesis of 'The War On Democracy'
By John Pilger
In the 1960s, when I first went to Latin America, I travelled up the cone of the continent from Chile across the Altiplano to Peru, mostly in rickety buses and single-carriage trains. It was an experience my memory stored for life, especially the spectacle of the movement of people.
13/06/08 "ICH" -- - -They moved through the dust of a snow-capped wilderness, along roads that were ribbons of red mud, and they lived in shanties that defied gravity. "We are invisible," said one man; another used the term abandonados; an indigenous woman in Bolivia unforgettably described her poverty as a commodity for the rich.
When I later saw Sebastiao Salgado's photographs of Latin America's working people, I recognised the people at the roadside, the gold miners and the coffee workers and the silhouettes framed in crosses in the cemeteries. Perhaps the idea for a cinema film began then, or when I reported Ronald Reagan's murderous assault on Central America; or when I first read the words of Victor Jara's ballads and heard Sam Cooke's anthem A Change Is Gonna Come.
"The War On Democracy" is my first film for cinema. It follows more than 55 documentary films for television, which began with The Quiet Mutiny, set in Vietnam. Most of my films have told stories of people's struggles against rapacious power and of attempts to subvert and control our historical memory. It is this control, this organised forgetting, that has always intrigued me both as a film-maker and a journalist. Described by Harold Pinter as a great silence unbroken by the incessant din of the media age, it assures the powerful in the west that the struggle of whole societies against their crimes is merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged... It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest".
This was true of Nicaragua in the early 1980s, when a popular revolution began to turn back poverty and bring literacy and hope to a country long dismissed as a banana republic. In the United States, the Sandinista government was successfully portrayed as communist and a threat, and crushed. After all, Richard Nixon had said of all of Latin America: "No one gives a shit about the place." The War On Democracy is meant as an antidote to this.
Modern fictional cinema rarely seems to break political silences. The very fine Motorcycle Diaries was a generation too late. In this country, where Hollywood sets the liberal boundaries, the work of Ken Loach and a few others is an honourable exception. However, the cinema is changing as if by default. The documentary has returned to the big screen and is being embraced by the public, in the US and all over. They were still clapping Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 two months after it opened in this country. Why? The answer is uncomplicated. It was a powerful film that helped people make sense of news that no longer made sense. It did not present the usual phoney "balance" as a pretence for presenting an establishment consensus. It was not riddled with the cliches, platitudes and power assumptions that permeate "current affairs". It was realist cinema, as important as The Grapes of Wrath was in the 1930s, and people devoured it.
The War On Democracy is not the same. It comes out of a British commercial television tradition that is too often passed over: the pioneering of bold factual journalism that treated other societies not as post-imperial curios, as useful or expendable to "us", but extraordinary and important in their own terms. Granada's World in Action, where I began, was a prime example. It would report and film in ways that the BBC would not dare. These days, with misnamed "reality" programmes consuming much of television like a plague of cane toads, cinema has been handed a timely opportunity. Such are the dangers imposed on us all today by a rampant, neo-fascist superpower, and so urgent is our need for uncontaminated information that people are prepared to buy a cinema ticket to get it.
The War On Democracy examines the false democracy that comes with western corporations and financial institutions and a war waged, materially and as propaganda, against popular democracy. It is the story of the people I first saw 40 years ago; but they are no longer invisible; they are a mighty political movement, reclaiming noble concepts distorted by corporatism and they are defending the most basic human rights in a war being waged against all of us.
Cinema and television production are closely related, of course, but the differences, I have learned, are critical. Cinema allows a panorama to unfold, giving a sense of place that only the big screen captures. In The War On Democracy, the camera sweeps across the Andes in Bolivia to the highest and poorest city on earth, El Alto, then follows Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver, into a cemetery where children are buried. That Bolivia has been asset-stripped by multinational companies, aided by a corrupt elite, is an epic story described by this one man and this spectacle. That the people of Bolivia have stood up, expelled the foreign consortium that took their water resources, even the water that fell from the sky, is understood as the camera pans across a giant mural that Juan Delfin painted. This is cinema, a moving mural of ordinary lives and triumphs.
Chris Martin and I (we made the film as a partnership) used two crews and two very different cinematographers, Preston Clothier and Rupert Binsley. They shot in high-definition stock, which then had to be converted to 35mm film - one of cinema's wonderful anachronisms.
The film was backed by the impresario Michael Watt, a supporter of anti-poverty projects all over the world, who had told producer Wayne Young that he wanted to put my TV work in the cinema. Granada provided additional support, and ITV will broadcast the film later in the year. The extra funding also allowed me to persuade the late Sam Cooke's New York agents to license A Change Is Gonna Come, one of the finest, most lyrical pieces of black music ever written and performed. I was in the southern United States when it was released. It was the time of the civil-rights movement, and Cooke's song spoke to and for all people struggling to be free. The same is true of the ballads of the Chilean Victor Jara, whose songs celebrated the popular democracy of Salvador Allende before Pinochet and the CIA extinguished it.
We filmed in the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, where Jara was taken along with thousands of other political prisoners. By all accounts, he was a source of strength for his comrades, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. He wrote his last song there and it was smuggled out on scraps of paper. These are the words:
What horror the face of fascism
creates
They carry out their plans with
knife-like precision ...
For them, blood equals medals ...
How hard it is to sing
When I must sing of horror ...
In which silence and screams
Are the end of my song.
After two days of torture, they killed him. The War On Democracy is about such courage and a warning to us all that "for them" nothing has changed, that "blood equals medals".
John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Supreme Court Rstores Habeas Corpus
Supreme Court restores habeas corpus, strikes down key part of Military Commissions Act
(updated below)
In a major rebuke to the Bush administration's theories of presidential power -- and in an equally stinging rebuke to the bipartisan political class which has supported the Bush detention policies -- the U.S. Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), declared Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 unconstitutional. The Court struck down that section of the MCA because it purported to abolish the writ of habeas corpus -- the means by which a detainee challenges his detention in a court -- despite the fact that the Constitution permits suspension of that writ only "in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion."
As a result, Guantanamo detainees accused of being "enemy combatants" have the right to challenge the validity of their detention in a full-fledged U.S. federal court proceeding. The ruling today is the first time in U.S. history that the Court has ruled that detainees held by the U.S. Government in a place where the U.S. does not exercise formal sovereignty (Cuba technically is sovereign over Guantanamo) are nonetheless entitled to the Constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus whenever they are held in a place where the U.S. exercises effective control.
In upholding the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees, the Court found that the "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" process ("CSRT") offered to Guantanamo detainees -- mandated by the John-McCain-sponsored Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 -- does not constitute a constitutionally adequate substitute for habeas corpus. To the contrary, the Court found that such procedures -- which have long been criticized as sham hearings due to the fact that defendants cannot have a lawyer present, government evidence is presumptively valid, and defendants are prevented from challenging (and sometimes even knowing about) much of the evidence against them -- "fall well short of the procedures and adversarial mechanisms that would eliminate the need for habeas corpus review." Those grave deficiencies in the CSRT process mean that "there is considerable risk of error" in the tribunals' conclusions.
The Court's ruling was grounded in its recognition that the guarantee of habeas corpus was so central to the Founding that it was one of the few individual rights included in the Constitution even before the Bill of Rights was enacted. As the Court put it: "the Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom." The Court noted that freedom from arbitrary or baseless imprisonment was one of the core rights established by the 13th Century Magna Carta, and it is the writ of habeas corpus which is the means for enforcing that right. Once habeas corpus is abolished -- as the Military Commissions Act sought to do -- then we return to the pre-Magna Carta days where the Government is free to imprison people with no recourse.
In its decision, the Court emphasized (and revived) some of the most vital principles of our system of Government which have been trampled upon and degraded over the last seven years (emphasis added):
The Framers' inherent distrust of government power was the driving force behind the constitutional plan that allocated powers among three independent branches. This design serves not only to make Government accountable but also to secure individual liberty. . . .
Where a person is detained by executive order rather than, say, after being tried and convicted in a court, the need for collateral review is most pressing. . . . The habeas court must have sufficient authority to conduct a meaningful review of both the cause of detention and the Executive's power to detain. . . .
Security depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus and the ability of our Armed Forces to act and interdict. There are further considerations, however. Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to separation of powers. . . .
The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system, they are reconciled within the framework of law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, part of that law.
In ruling that the CSRTs woefully fail to provide the constitutionally guaranteed safeguards, the Court quoted Alexander Hamilton's Federalist No. 84: "The practice of arbitrary imprisonments, in all ages, is the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny." It is that deeply tyrannical practice -- implemented by the Bush administration and authorized by a bipartisan act of Congress -- which the U.S. Supreme Court, today, struck down.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 was -- and remains -- one of the great stains on our national political character. It was passed by a substantial majority in the Senate (65-34) with the support of every single Senate Republican (except Chafee) and 12 Senate Democrats. No filibuster was even attempted. It passed by a similar margin in the House, where 34 Democrats joined 219 Republicans to enact it. One of the most extraordinary quotes of the post-9/11 era came from GOP Sen. Arlen Specter, who said at the time that that the Military Commissions Act -- because it explicitly barred federal courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions brought by Guantanamo detainees -- "sets back basic rights by some 900 years" and was "patently unconstitutional on its face" -- and Specter then proceeded to vote for it.
The greatest victim of the 9/11 attack has been our core, defining constitutional liberties. Of all the powers seized by this administration in the name of keeping us Safe, the power to imprison people indefinitely with no charges and no real process is the most pernicious.
Passage of the Military Commissions Act was spearheaded by John McCain, who was anointed by cowardly Senate Democrats to speak for them and negotiate with the White House. Once McCain blessed the Military Commissions Act, its passage was assured. Barack Obama voted against it, and once its passage appeared certain, Obama offered an amendment to limit it to five years. That amendment failed, rendering the MCA the law of the land without any time limits.
The Supreme Court today did what the Founders envisioned it should do: it protected our basic constitutional guarantees from erosion and assault by a corrupt majority within the political class. In so doing, the Court took a mild though important step in reversing some of the worst and most tyrannical excesses of the last seven years. Patrick Henry warned long ago of the unique dangers of allowing executive imprisonment without meaningful process:
Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! . . . Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.
In his concurring opinion in Brown v. Allen (1953), Justice Jackson wrote:
Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.
Our political and media elite were more than willing -- they were eager -- to relinquish that right to the President in the name of keeping us Safe from Terrorists. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court, in what will be one of the most celebrated landmark rulings of this generation, re-instated that basic right, and in so doing, restored one of the most critical safeguards against the very tyranny this country was founded to prevent.
UPDATE: Three of the five Justices in the majority -- John Paul Stevens (age 88), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 75) and David Souter (age 68) -- are widely expected by court observers to retire or otherwise leave the Court in the first term of the next President. By contrast, the four judges who dissented -- Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Sam Alito -- are expected to stay right where they are for many years to come.
John McCain has identified Roberts and Alito as ideal justices of the type he would nominate, while Barack Obama has identified Stephen Breyer, David Souter and Ginsberg (all in the majority today). It's not hyperbole to say that, from Supreme Court appointments alone, our core constitutional protections could easily depend upon the outcome of the 2008 election.
source
(updated below)
In a major rebuke to the Bush administration's theories of presidential power -- and in an equally stinging rebuke to the bipartisan political class which has supported the Bush detention policies -- the U.S. Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), declared Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 unconstitutional. The Court struck down that section of the MCA because it purported to abolish the writ of habeas corpus -- the means by which a detainee challenges his detention in a court -- despite the fact that the Constitution permits suspension of that writ only "in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion."
As a result, Guantanamo detainees accused of being "enemy combatants" have the right to challenge the validity of their detention in a full-fledged U.S. federal court proceeding. The ruling today is the first time in U.S. history that the Court has ruled that detainees held by the U.S. Government in a place where the U.S. does not exercise formal sovereignty (Cuba technically is sovereign over Guantanamo) are nonetheless entitled to the Constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus whenever they are held in a place where the U.S. exercises effective control.
In upholding the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees, the Court found that the "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" process ("CSRT") offered to Guantanamo detainees -- mandated by the John-McCain-sponsored Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 -- does not constitute a constitutionally adequate substitute for habeas corpus. To the contrary, the Court found that such procedures -- which have long been criticized as sham hearings due to the fact that defendants cannot have a lawyer present, government evidence is presumptively valid, and defendants are prevented from challenging (and sometimes even knowing about) much of the evidence against them -- "fall well short of the procedures and adversarial mechanisms that would eliminate the need for habeas corpus review." Those grave deficiencies in the CSRT process mean that "there is considerable risk of error" in the tribunals' conclusions.
The Court's ruling was grounded in its recognition that the guarantee of habeas corpus was so central to the Founding that it was one of the few individual rights included in the Constitution even before the Bill of Rights was enacted. As the Court put it: "the Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom." The Court noted that freedom from arbitrary or baseless imprisonment was one of the core rights established by the 13th Century Magna Carta, and it is the writ of habeas corpus which is the means for enforcing that right. Once habeas corpus is abolished -- as the Military Commissions Act sought to do -- then we return to the pre-Magna Carta days where the Government is free to imprison people with no recourse.
In its decision, the Court emphasized (and revived) some of the most vital principles of our system of Government which have been trampled upon and degraded over the last seven years (emphasis added):
The Framers' inherent distrust of government power was the driving force behind the constitutional plan that allocated powers among three independent branches. This design serves not only to make Government accountable but also to secure individual liberty. . . .
Where a person is detained by executive order rather than, say, after being tried and convicted in a court, the need for collateral review is most pressing. . . . The habeas court must have sufficient authority to conduct a meaningful review of both the cause of detention and the Executive's power to detain. . . .
Security depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus and the ability of our Armed Forces to act and interdict. There are further considerations, however. Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to separation of powers. . . .
The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system, they are reconciled within the framework of law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, part of that law.
In ruling that the CSRTs woefully fail to provide the constitutionally guaranteed safeguards, the Court quoted Alexander Hamilton's Federalist No. 84: "The practice of arbitrary imprisonments, in all ages, is the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny." It is that deeply tyrannical practice -- implemented by the Bush administration and authorized by a bipartisan act of Congress -- which the U.S. Supreme Court, today, struck down.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 was -- and remains -- one of the great stains on our national political character. It was passed by a substantial majority in the Senate (65-34) with the support of every single Senate Republican (except Chafee) and 12 Senate Democrats. No filibuster was even attempted. It passed by a similar margin in the House, where 34 Democrats joined 219 Republicans to enact it. One of the most extraordinary quotes of the post-9/11 era came from GOP Sen. Arlen Specter, who said at the time that that the Military Commissions Act -- because it explicitly barred federal courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions brought by Guantanamo detainees -- "sets back basic rights by some 900 years" and was "patently unconstitutional on its face" -- and Specter then proceeded to vote for it.
The greatest victim of the 9/11 attack has been our core, defining constitutional liberties. Of all the powers seized by this administration in the name of keeping us Safe, the power to imprison people indefinitely with no charges and no real process is the most pernicious.
Passage of the Military Commissions Act was spearheaded by John McCain, who was anointed by cowardly Senate Democrats to speak for them and negotiate with the White House. Once McCain blessed the Military Commissions Act, its passage was assured. Barack Obama voted against it, and once its passage appeared certain, Obama offered an amendment to limit it to five years. That amendment failed, rendering the MCA the law of the land without any time limits.
The Supreme Court today did what the Founders envisioned it should do: it protected our basic constitutional guarantees from erosion and assault by a corrupt majority within the political class. In so doing, the Court took a mild though important step in reversing some of the worst and most tyrannical excesses of the last seven years. Patrick Henry warned long ago of the unique dangers of allowing executive imprisonment without meaningful process:
Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! . . . Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.
In his concurring opinion in Brown v. Allen (1953), Justice Jackson wrote:
Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.
Our political and media elite were more than willing -- they were eager -- to relinquish that right to the President in the name of keeping us Safe from Terrorists. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court, in what will be one of the most celebrated landmark rulings of this generation, re-instated that basic right, and in so doing, restored one of the most critical safeguards against the very tyranny this country was founded to prevent.
UPDATE: Three of the five Justices in the majority -- John Paul Stevens (age 88), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 75) and David Souter (age 68) -- are widely expected by court observers to retire or otherwise leave the Court in the first term of the next President. By contrast, the four judges who dissented -- Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Sam Alito -- are expected to stay right where they are for many years to come.
John McCain has identified Roberts and Alito as ideal justices of the type he would nominate, while Barack Obama has identified Stephen Breyer, David Souter and Ginsberg (all in the majority today). It's not hyperbole to say that, from Supreme Court appointments alone, our core constitutional protections could easily depend upon the outcome of the 2008 election.
source
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Mulroney Appointee to Judge Mulroney/Schreiber Affair
PM appoints Manitoba jurist to head Mulroney-Schreiber inquiry
Last Updated: Thursday, June 12, 2008 | 5:04 PM ET Comments50Recommend22CBC News
Justice Jeffrey Oliphant sits in a courtroom in Winnipeg on May 7, 2008. (Phil Hossack/Canadian Press)Prime Minister Stephen Harper has appointed Associate Chief Justice Jeffrey Oliphant of Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench to head the inquiry into the business dealings of former prime minister Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber.
"A number of questions remain unanswered and it is in the public interest to investigate further and to find answers," Harper said in a statement released Thursday.
Oliphant's report from the inquiry is to be submitted to the government on or before June 12 of next year, the statement said.
Oliphant was appointed to the bench by prime minister Brian Mulroney in 1985.
The inquiry's mandate will be based on recommendations made by David Johnston, who had been asked to advise the Conservative government on what shape a public inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair should take.
Johnston said the inquiry should be limited and possibly include closed-door hearings.
The announcement comes six months after Harper said he would hold an inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber dealings.
It also comes on the same day the House of Commons ethics committee had wanted Mulroney to return to testify at its hearing. Opposition members of the committee had decided to resume the committee's probe into the affair because they hadn't heard anything about the promised inquiry.
But in a letter to the procedural clerk of the committee, Mulroney's lawyer, Guy Pratte, said the former prime minister "respectfully declines" the invitation to provide more testimony.
Pratte said "no useful purpose would be served by his re-attendance."
Pratte wrote that Mulroney has already provided four hours of testimony to the committee, along with relevant documentation. He also wrote that the committee had not specified what it wants to hear from Mulroney.
"In any event, the upcoming public inquiry should now be allowed to take its course."
No subpoena
The committee chair, Liberal MP Paul Szabo, has said the committee has already decided it won't issue a subpoena to Mulroney compelling him to testify.
Last April, the committee released a report calling for a broad, full-fledged public inquiry into the past business relationship between Mulroney and Schreiber, as German-Canadian businessman.
In previous testimony, Mulroney told the ethics committee that he received money between 1993 and 1994 to lobby internationally on behalf of Schreiber's client, Thyssen, a German armoured-vehicle company.
Mulroney said he was paid $225,000 cash in envelopes at three meetings between the two men, and insisted the arrangement was struck after he left office in June 1993.
While saying that accepting cash payments was one of the biggest mistakes of his life, Mulroney has said he did nothing illegal.
But Schreiber testified that the total was $300,000, and that the arrangement was reached while Mulroney was serving his last days as prime minister in 1993, something that could have put him in violation of federal ethics rules.
Last Updated: Thursday, June 12, 2008 | 5:04 PM ET Comments50Recommend22CBC News
Justice Jeffrey Oliphant sits in a courtroom in Winnipeg on May 7, 2008. (Phil Hossack/Canadian Press)Prime Minister Stephen Harper has appointed Associate Chief Justice Jeffrey Oliphant of Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench to head the inquiry into the business dealings of former prime minister Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber.
"A number of questions remain unanswered and it is in the public interest to investigate further and to find answers," Harper said in a statement released Thursday.
Oliphant's report from the inquiry is to be submitted to the government on or before June 12 of next year, the statement said.
Oliphant was appointed to the bench by prime minister Brian Mulroney in 1985.
The inquiry's mandate will be based on recommendations made by David Johnston, who had been asked to advise the Conservative government on what shape a public inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair should take.
Johnston said the inquiry should be limited and possibly include closed-door hearings.
The announcement comes six months after Harper said he would hold an inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber dealings.
It also comes on the same day the House of Commons ethics committee had wanted Mulroney to return to testify at its hearing. Opposition members of the committee had decided to resume the committee's probe into the affair because they hadn't heard anything about the promised inquiry.
But in a letter to the procedural clerk of the committee, Mulroney's lawyer, Guy Pratte, said the former prime minister "respectfully declines" the invitation to provide more testimony.
Pratte said "no useful purpose would be served by his re-attendance."
Pratte wrote that Mulroney has already provided four hours of testimony to the committee, along with relevant documentation. He also wrote that the committee had not specified what it wants to hear from Mulroney.
"In any event, the upcoming public inquiry should now be allowed to take its course."
No subpoena
The committee chair, Liberal MP Paul Szabo, has said the committee has already decided it won't issue a subpoena to Mulroney compelling him to testify.
Last April, the committee released a report calling for a broad, full-fledged public inquiry into the past business relationship between Mulroney and Schreiber, as German-Canadian businessman.
In previous testimony, Mulroney told the ethics committee that he received money between 1993 and 1994 to lobby internationally on behalf of Schreiber's client, Thyssen, a German armoured-vehicle company.
Mulroney said he was paid $225,000 cash in envelopes at three meetings between the two men, and insisted the arrangement was struck after he left office in June 1993.
While saying that accepting cash payments was one of the biggest mistakes of his life, Mulroney has said he did nothing illegal.
But Schreiber testified that the total was $300,000, and that the arrangement was reached while Mulroney was serving his last days as prime minister in 1993, something that could have put him in violation of federal ethics rules.
ARTIST CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE
Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal
Buffalo, NY-- Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as insufficient on its face." This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as "fact") were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara's ruling and will not seek any new charges against Kurtz.
For over a decade, cultural institutions worldwide have hosted Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble's educational art projects, which use common science materials to examine issues surrounding the new biotechnologies. In 2004 the Department of Justice alleged that Dr. Kurtz had schemed with colleague Dr. Robert Ferrell of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to illegally acquire two harmless bacteria cultures for use in one of those projects. The Justice Department further alleged that the transfer of the material from Ferrell to Kurtz broke a material transfer agreement, thus constituting mail fraud.
Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five years to twenty years in prison.
Dr. Kurtz has been fighting the charges ever since. In October 2007, Dr. Ferrell pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor charge after recurring bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered since his indictment prevented him from continuing the struggle.
KURTZ SUMS UP END OF FOUR-YEAR NIGHTMARE
Finally vindicated after four years of struggle, Kurtz, asked for a statement, responded stoically: "I don't have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?"
Said Kurtz's attorney, Paul Cambria, "I am glad an innocent man has been vindicated. Steve Kurtz stared in the face of the federal government and a twenty-year prison term and never flinched, because he believes in his work and his actions were those of a completely innocent man. Clients like him are a blessing, and although I have had many important victories, this one stands at the top of the list."
As coordinator of the CAE Defense Fund, a group organized to support Kurtz from the beginning of the case, Lucia Sommer sees the end of the prosecution as bittersweet, and like Kurtz, is thoughtful about the broader significance of the case: "This ruling is the best possible ending to a horrible ordeal--but we are mindful of numerous cases still pending, and the grave injustices perpetrated by the Bush administration following 9/11. This case was part of a larger picture, in which law enforcement was given expanded powers. In this instance, the Bush administration was unsuccessful in its attempt to erode Americans' constitutional rights."
Referring to the international outcry the case provoked, involving fundraisers and protests held on four continents, Sommer said, "The government has unlimited resources to bring and prosecute these kinds of charges, but the accused often don't have any resources to defend themselves. This victory could never have happened without the activism of thousands of people. Supporters protested, vocally opposed the prosecution, and refused to let it go on in silence. And without their efforts at
fundraising, Kurtz and Ferrell would not have been able to defend themselves from these false accusations."
Sommer added that the next step for the defense will be to get back all of the materials taken by the FBI during its 2004 raid on the Kurtz home, including several completed art projects, as well as Dr. Kurtz's lab equipment, computers, books, manuscripts, notes, research materials, and personal belongings. The four confiscated art projects are the subject of an exhibition entitled SEIZED on view at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, through July 18:
http://www.hallwalls.org/visual_shows/2008/show_seized.html.
BACKGROUND TO THE CASE
The case originated in May 2004, when Kurtz's wife Hope died of heart failure as the couple was preparing a project about genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Police who responded to Steve Kurtz's 911 call deemed the Kurtzes' art materials suspicious and alerted the FBI. Kurtz explained that the materials (legally and easily obtained basic life science equipment and two harmless bacteria samples) had already been displayed at museums throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the public. However, the following day, Kurtz was illegally detained for 22 hours on suspicion of bioterrorism, as dozens of agents from the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland
Security, Department of Defense, ATF, and numerous other law enforcement agencies raided his home, seizing his personal and professional belongings.
After a federal grand jury refused to charge Kurtz with bioterrorism, Kurtz and Ferrell were indicted on two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud concerning the acquisition of of harmless bacteria for one of Critical Art Ensemble's educational art projects. (Critical Art Ensemble is the recipient of numerous awards for its projects, including the prestigious 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, in recognition of twenty years of distinguished work:
http://www.creative-capital.org/index2.html.)
The Department of Justice brought the charges in spite of the fact that the alleged "victims of fraud"--American Type Culture Collection and the University of Pittsburgh--never filed any charges or complained of any wrongdoing, and the fact that in bringing the charges the Department of Justice was acting completely outside its own Prosecution Policy Relating to Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud
(http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/43mcrm.htm).
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 11, 2008
CONTACTS:
Email: media@caedefensefund.org
Dr. Steven J. Kurtz: (716) 812-2968
Lucia Sommer, CAE Defense Fund: (716) 359-3061
Edmund Cardoni, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center: (716) 854-1694
For more information and extensive documentation, including the Judge's
dismissal, please visit: http://caedefensefund.org
Buffalo, NY-- Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as insufficient on its face." This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as "fact") were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara's ruling and will not seek any new charges against Kurtz.
For over a decade, cultural institutions worldwide have hosted Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble's educational art projects, which use common science materials to examine issues surrounding the new biotechnologies. In 2004 the Department of Justice alleged that Dr. Kurtz had schemed with colleague Dr. Robert Ferrell of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to illegally acquire two harmless bacteria cultures for use in one of those projects. The Justice Department further alleged that the transfer of the material from Ferrell to Kurtz broke a material transfer agreement, thus constituting mail fraud.
Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five years to twenty years in prison.
Dr. Kurtz has been fighting the charges ever since. In October 2007, Dr. Ferrell pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor charge after recurring bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered since his indictment prevented him from continuing the struggle.
KURTZ SUMS UP END OF FOUR-YEAR NIGHTMARE
Finally vindicated after four years of struggle, Kurtz, asked for a statement, responded stoically: "I don't have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?"
Said Kurtz's attorney, Paul Cambria, "I am glad an innocent man has been vindicated. Steve Kurtz stared in the face of the federal government and a twenty-year prison term and never flinched, because he believes in his work and his actions were those of a completely innocent man. Clients like him are a blessing, and although I have had many important victories, this one stands at the top of the list."
As coordinator of the CAE Defense Fund, a group organized to support Kurtz from the beginning of the case, Lucia Sommer sees the end of the prosecution as bittersweet, and like Kurtz, is thoughtful about the broader significance of the case: "This ruling is the best possible ending to a horrible ordeal--but we are mindful of numerous cases still pending, and the grave injustices perpetrated by the Bush administration following 9/11. This case was part of a larger picture, in which law enforcement was given expanded powers. In this instance, the Bush administration was unsuccessful in its attempt to erode Americans' constitutional rights."
Referring to the international outcry the case provoked, involving fundraisers and protests held on four continents, Sommer said, "The government has unlimited resources to bring and prosecute these kinds of charges, but the accused often don't have any resources to defend themselves. This victory could never have happened without the activism of thousands of people. Supporters protested, vocally opposed the prosecution, and refused to let it go on in silence. And without their efforts at
fundraising, Kurtz and Ferrell would not have been able to defend themselves from these false accusations."
Sommer added that the next step for the defense will be to get back all of the materials taken by the FBI during its 2004 raid on the Kurtz home, including several completed art projects, as well as Dr. Kurtz's lab equipment, computers, books, manuscripts, notes, research materials, and personal belongings. The four confiscated art projects are the subject of an exhibition entitled SEIZED on view at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, through July 18:
http://www.hallwalls.org/visual_shows/2008/show_seized.html.
BACKGROUND TO THE CASE
The case originated in May 2004, when Kurtz's wife Hope died of heart failure as the couple was preparing a project about genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Police who responded to Steve Kurtz's 911 call deemed the Kurtzes' art materials suspicious and alerted the FBI. Kurtz explained that the materials (legally and easily obtained basic life science equipment and two harmless bacteria samples) had already been displayed at museums throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the public. However, the following day, Kurtz was illegally detained for 22 hours on suspicion of bioterrorism, as dozens of agents from the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland
Security, Department of Defense, ATF, and numerous other law enforcement agencies raided his home, seizing his personal and professional belongings.
After a federal grand jury refused to charge Kurtz with bioterrorism, Kurtz and Ferrell were indicted on two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud concerning the acquisition of of harmless bacteria for one of Critical Art Ensemble's educational art projects. (Critical Art Ensemble is the recipient of numerous awards for its projects, including the prestigious 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, in recognition of twenty years of distinguished work:
http://www.creative-capital.org/index2.html.)
The Department of Justice brought the charges in spite of the fact that the alleged "victims of fraud"--American Type Culture Collection and the University of Pittsburgh--never filed any charges or complained of any wrongdoing, and the fact that in bringing the charges the Department of Justice was acting completely outside its own Prosecution Policy Relating to Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud
(http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/43mcrm.htm).
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 11, 2008
CONTACTS:
Email: media@caedefensefund.org
Dr. Steven J. Kurtz: (716) 812-2968
Lucia Sommer, CAE Defense Fund: (716) 359-3061
Edmund Cardoni, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center: (716) 854-1694
For more information and extensive documentation, including the Judge's
dismissal, please visit: http://caedefensefund.org
Don't Believe the Skype Bush Tells Italy's Youth
Bush Slams Anti-US ‘Propaganda’
by BBC News
US President George W Bush has denounced “misinformation and propaganda” which he says are sullying his country’s image abroad.
On a visit to Italy, he told young entrepreneurs on an exchange programme that going to the US would show them it was compassionate and open.
Mr Bush will later hold talks in Rome with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The two leaders are expected to discuss further sanctions against Iran, and the role of Italian troops in Afghanistan.
Mr Bush will conclude his visit to Italy on Friday by meeting Pope Benedict XVI. In an unusual break with protocol, they will meet not in the Papal Study, but in the Vatican’s gardens.
The Holy See said the Pope wanted to show his gratitude for the hospitality shown to him on his recent visit to the US. Afterwards, Mr Bush will travel to France and the UK.
‘Misinformation and propaganda’
Security for President Bush’s visit has been very tight.
Commercial flights over the city have been diverted, 10,000 policemen have been mobilised, there are frogmen under bridges and snipers on roofs, and mobile phone signals are being disrupted whenever his motorcade moves, says the BBC’s Christian Fraser in Rome.
As Air Force One touched down, hundreds were gathering in the city centre in protest at the Bush administration and Italy’s involvement in Afghanistan.
Another group of demonstrators chanted “Bush, go home” outside the American Academy in Rome’s Villa Aurelia while the president met young entrepreneurs inside.
Mr Bush urged them to ignore the “misinformation and propaganda” spread about his country and to learn the “first-hand truth about America” by visiting.
“The best diplomacy for America, particularly among young folks, is to welcome you to our country,” he said. “We are compassionate, we’re an open country, we care about people and we’re entrepreneurial.”
Shortly afterwards, Mr Bush was greeted by his Italian counterpart, Georgio Napolitano, at his official residence in the Quirinale Palace.
He will later hold talks with Mr Berlusconi, who was staunch supporter of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 during his previous term in office.
After months of pressure from Washington, Mr Berlusconi’s administration has removed restrictions on Italian troops serving in combat operations in western Afghanistan for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf).
In return for this co-operation, Italy wants a bigger say on Iran on the grounds that it has recently become the Iranians’ largest European trading partner.
Mr Bush has said he supports Italy’s bid to join the group of five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany, which has been involved in negotiations about Iran’s nuclear programme.
After meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Wednesday, he repeated a warning to Iran that it would face additional sanctions if it continued to defy the international community by refusing to abandon uranium enrichment.
He said diplomatic pressure remained the best path to deal with the issue, but insisted that “all options are on the table”.
source
by BBC News
US President George W Bush has denounced “misinformation and propaganda” which he says are sullying his country’s image abroad.
On a visit to Italy, he told young entrepreneurs on an exchange programme that going to the US would show them it was compassionate and open.
Mr Bush will later hold talks in Rome with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The two leaders are expected to discuss further sanctions against Iran, and the role of Italian troops in Afghanistan.
Mr Bush will conclude his visit to Italy on Friday by meeting Pope Benedict XVI. In an unusual break with protocol, they will meet not in the Papal Study, but in the Vatican’s gardens.
The Holy See said the Pope wanted to show his gratitude for the hospitality shown to him on his recent visit to the US. Afterwards, Mr Bush will travel to France and the UK.
‘Misinformation and propaganda’
Security for President Bush’s visit has been very tight.
Commercial flights over the city have been diverted, 10,000 policemen have been mobilised, there are frogmen under bridges and snipers on roofs, and mobile phone signals are being disrupted whenever his motorcade moves, says the BBC’s Christian Fraser in Rome.
As Air Force One touched down, hundreds were gathering in the city centre in protest at the Bush administration and Italy’s involvement in Afghanistan.
Another group of demonstrators chanted “Bush, go home” outside the American Academy in Rome’s Villa Aurelia while the president met young entrepreneurs inside.
Mr Bush urged them to ignore the “misinformation and propaganda” spread about his country and to learn the “first-hand truth about America” by visiting.
“The best diplomacy for America, particularly among young folks, is to welcome you to our country,” he said. “We are compassionate, we’re an open country, we care about people and we’re entrepreneurial.”
Shortly afterwards, Mr Bush was greeted by his Italian counterpart, Georgio Napolitano, at his official residence in the Quirinale Palace.
He will later hold talks with Mr Berlusconi, who was staunch supporter of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 during his previous term in office.
After months of pressure from Washington, Mr Berlusconi’s administration has removed restrictions on Italian troops serving in combat operations in western Afghanistan for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf).
In return for this co-operation, Italy wants a bigger say on Iran on the grounds that it has recently become the Iranians’ largest European trading partner.
Mr Bush has said he supports Italy’s bid to join the group of five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany, which has been involved in negotiations about Iran’s nuclear programme.
After meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Wednesday, he repeated a warning to Iran that it would face additional sanctions if it continued to defy the international community by refusing to abandon uranium enrichment.
He said diplomatic pressure remained the best path to deal with the issue, but insisted that “all options are on the table”.
source
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Motion to Ban (Depleted) Uranium Weapons
CANADA: Statement by Member of Canadian Parliament (New Democratic Party) "to ensure that depleted uranium weapons of mass destruction are banned forever".
PARLIAMENT OF CANADA - HOUSE OF COMMONS
39th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION
EDITED HANSARD • NUMBER 105
STATEMENTS BY MEMBERS
Wednesday, June 5, 2008
Depleted Uranium
Mr. Alex Atamanenko (British Columbia Southern Interior, NDP): Mr. Speaker, last year the United Nations First Committee passed a resolution urging member states to re-examine the health hazards posed by the use of uranium weapons.
Belgium has banned the use of uranium in all conventional weapon systems. However, at least 18 countries, including the U.S., use depleted uranium in their arsenals. They are considered weapons of mass destruction under international law.
According to a Canada-U.S. agreement, Canadian uranium exports may only be used for peaceful purposes. However, according to Dr. Douglas Rokke, a U.S. Army research scientist, and others, Canada provides raw uranium to the U.S. and other countries for processing. The resulting depleted uranium is then used in weapons.
One only has to watch the documentary film Beyond Treason to see the devastating effects of these weapons in countries such as Iraq.
I call upon our government to undertake every measure possible to ensure that depleted uranium weapons of mass destruction are banned forever.
NOTE:
To express your support, please contact:
MP Alex Atamanenko (NDP)
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6
Email: Atamanenko.A@parl.gc.ca
Website: http://atamanenko.ndp.ca/
Telephone: (613) 996-8036
Fax: (613) 943-0922
Thank you.
http://peaceinspace.blogs.com/nuclear_free_zone/2008/06/canadian-parlia.html
PARLIAMENT OF CANADA - HOUSE OF COMMONS
39th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION
EDITED HANSARD • NUMBER 105
STATEMENTS BY MEMBERS
Wednesday, June 5, 2008
Depleted Uranium
Mr. Alex Atamanenko (British Columbia Southern Interior, NDP): Mr. Speaker, last year the United Nations First Committee passed a resolution urging member states to re-examine the health hazards posed by the use of uranium weapons.
Belgium has banned the use of uranium in all conventional weapon systems. However, at least 18 countries, including the U.S., use depleted uranium in their arsenals. They are considered weapons of mass destruction under international law.
According to a Canada-U.S. agreement, Canadian uranium exports may only be used for peaceful purposes. However, according to Dr. Douglas Rokke, a U.S. Army research scientist, and others, Canada provides raw uranium to the U.S. and other countries for processing. The resulting depleted uranium is then used in weapons.
One only has to watch the documentary film Beyond Treason to see the devastating effects of these weapons in countries such as Iraq.
I call upon our government to undertake every measure possible to ensure that depleted uranium weapons of mass destruction are banned forever.
NOTE:
To express your support, please contact:
MP Alex Atamanenko (NDP)
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6
Email: Atamanenko.A@parl.gc.ca
Website: http://atamanenko.ndp.ca/
Telephone: (613) 996-8036
Fax: (613) 943-0922
Thank you.
http://peaceinspace.blogs.com/nuclear_free_zone/2008/06/canadian-parlia.html
Monday, June 09, 2008
Dan Rather’s prepared remarks
The following are Dan Rather’s prepared remarks:
I am grateful to be here and I am, most of all, gratified by the energy I have seen tonight and at this conference. It will take this kind of energy - and more - to sustain what is good in our news media… to improve what is deficient… and to push back against the forces and the trends that imperil journalism and that - by immediate extension - imperil democracy itself.
The Framers of our Constitution enshrined freedom of the press in the very first Amendment, up at the top of the Bill of Rights, not because they were great fans of journalists - like many politicians, then and now, they were not - but rather because they knew, as Thomas Jefferson put it, that, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what never was and never will be.”
And it is because of this Constitutionally-protected role that I still prefer to use the word “press” over the word “media.” If nothing else, it serves as a subtle reminder that - along with newspapers - radio, television, and, now, the Internet, carry the same Constitutional rights, mandates, and responsibilities that the founders guaranteed for those who plied their trade solely in print.
So when you hear me talk about the press, please know that I am talking about all the ways that news can be transmitted. And when you hear me criticize and critique the press, please know that I do not exempt myself from these criticisms.
In our efforts to take back the American press for the American people, we are blessed this weekend with the gift of good timing. For anyone who may have been inclined to ask if there really is a problem with the news media, or wonder if the task of media reform is, indeed, an urgent one… recent days have brought an inescapable answer, from a most unlikely source.
A source who decided to tell everyone, quote, “what happened.”
I know I can’t be the first person this weekend to reference the recent book by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, but, having interviewed him this past week, I think there are some very important points to be made from the things he says in his book, and the questions his statements raise.
I’m sure all of you took special notice of what he had to say about the role of the press corps, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. In the government’s selling of the war, he said they were - or, I should say, we were “complicit enablers” and “overly deferential.”
These are interesting statements, especially considering their source. As one tries to wrap one’s mind around them, the phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes to mind.
The first reaction, a visceral one, is: Whatever his motives for saying these things, he’s right - and we didn’t need Scott McClellan to tell us so.
But the second reaction is: Wait a minute… I do remember at least some reporters, and some news organizations, asking tough questions - asking them of the president, of those in his administration, of White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and - oh yes - of Scott McClellan himself, once he took over for Mr. Fleischer a few months after the invasion.
So how do we reconcile these competing reactions? Well, we need to pull back for what we in television call the wide shot.
If we look at the wide shot, we can see, in one corner of our screen, the White House briefing room filled with the White House press corps… and, filling the rest of the screen, the finite but disproportionately powerful universe that has become known as “mainstream media” - the newspapers and news programs, real and alleged, that employ these White House correspondents - the news organizations that are, in turn, owned by a shockingly few, much larger corporations, for which news is but a miniscule part of their overall business interests.
In the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq, these news organizations made a decision - consciously or unconsciously, but unquestionably in a climate of fear - to accept the overall narrative frame given them by the White House, a narrative that went like this: Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator, harbored weapons of mass destruction and, because of his supposed links to al Qaeda, this could not be tolerated in a post-9/11 world.
In the news and on the news, one could, to be sure, find persons and views that did not agree with all or parts of this official narrative. Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, comes to mind as an example. But the burden of proof, implicitly or explicitly, was put on these dissenting views and persons… the burden of proof was not put on an administration that was demonstrably moving towards a large-scale military action that would represent a break with American precedent and stated policy of how, when, and under what circumstances this nation goes to war.
So with this in mind, we look back to the corner of our screen where the White House Press Corps is asking their questions. I have been a White House correspondent myself, and I have worked with some of the best in the business. You have an incentive, when you are in that briefing room, to ask the good, tough questions: If nothing else, that is how you get in the paper, or on the air. There is more to it than that, and things have changed since I was a White House correspondent - something I want to talk about in a minute. But the correspondents - the really good ones - these correspondents ask their tough questions.
And these questions are met with what is now called, euphemistically and much too kindly, what is now called “message discipline.”
Well, we used to have a better and more accurate term for “message discipline.” We called it “stonewalling.” Now, cut back to your evening news, or your daily newspaper… where that White House Correspondent dutifully repeats the question he asked of the president or his press secretary, and dutifully relates the answer he was given - the same non-answer we’ve already heard dozens of times, which amounts to a pitch for the administration’s point of view, whether or NOT the answer had anything to do with the actual question that was asked.
And then: “Thank you Jack. In other news today… .”
And we’re off on a whole new story.
In our news media, in our press, those who wield power were, in the lead-up to Iraq, given the opportunity to present their views as a coherent whole, to connect the dots, as they saw the dots and the connections… no matter how much these views may have flown in the face of precedent, established practice - or, indeed, the facts (as we are reminded, yet again, by the just-released Senate report on the administration’s use of pre-war intelligence). The powerful are given this opportunity still, in ways big and small, despite what you may hear about the “post-Katrina” press.
But when a tough question is asked and not answered, when reputable people come before the public and say, “wait a minute, something’s not right here,” the press has treated them like voices crying in the wilderness. These views, though they might be given air time, become lone dots - dots that journalists don’t dare connect, even if the connections are obvious, even if people on the Internet and in the independent press are making these very same connections. The mainstream press doesn’t connect these dots because someone might then accuse them of editorializing, or of being the, quote, “liberal media.”
But connecting these dots - making disparate facts make sense - is a big part of the real work of journalism.
So how does this happen? Why does this happen?
Let me say, by way of answering, that quality news of integrity starts with an owner who has guts.
In a news organization with an owner who has guts, there is an incentive to ask the tough questions, and there is an incentive to pull together the facts - to connect the dots - in a way that makes coherent sense to the news audience.
I mentioned a moment ago that things have changed since I was a White House correspondent. Yes, presidential administrations have become more adept at holding “access” over the heads of reporters - ask too tough a question, or too many of them, so the implicit threat goes, and you’re not going to get any more interviews with high-ranking members of the administration, let alone the president. But I was covering Presidents Johnson and Nixon - men not exactly known as pushovers. No, what has changed, even more than the nature of the presidency, is the character of news ownership. I only found out years after the fact, for example, about the pressure that the Nixon White House put on my then-bosses, during Watergate - pressure to cut down my pieces, to call me off the story, and so on… because, back then, my bosses took the heat, so I didn’t have to. They did this so the story could get told, and so the public could be informed.
But it is rare, now, to find a major news organization owned by an individual, someone who can say, in effect, “The buck stops here.” The more likely motto now is: “The news stops… with making bucks.”
America’s biggest, most important news organizations have, over the past 25 years, fallen prey to merger after merger, acquisition after acquisition… to the point where they are, now, tiny parts of immeasurably larger corporate entities - entities whose primary business often has nothing to do with news. Entities that may, at any given time, have literally hundreds of regulatory issues before multiple arms of the government concerning a vast array of business interests.
These are entities that, as publicly-held and traded corporations, have as their overall, reigning mandate: Provide a return on shareholder value. Increase profits. And not over time, not over the long haul, but quarterly.
One might ask just where the news fits into this model. And if you really need an answer, you can turn on your television, where you will see the following:
Political analysis reduced to in-studio shouting matches between partisans armed with little more than the day’s talking points.
Precious time and resources wasted on so-called human-interest stories, celebrity fluff, sensationalist trials, and gossip.
A proliferation of “news you can use” that amounts to thinly-disguised press releases for the latest consumer products.
And, though this doesn’t get said enough, local news, which is where most Americans get their news, that seems not to change no matter what town or what city you’re in… so slavish is its adherence to the “happy talk” formula and the dictum that, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
I could continue for hours, cataloging journalistic sins of which I know you are all too aware. But, as the time grows late, let me say that almost all of these failings come down to this: In the current model of corporate news ownership, the incentive to produce good and valuable news is simply not there.
Good news, quality news of integrity, requires resources and it requires talent. These things are expensive, these things eat away at the bottom line.
Years ago, in the eighties and the nineties, when the implications of these cost-trimming measures were becoming impossible to ignore, and the quality of the news was clearly threatened, I spoke out against this cutting of news operations to the bone and beyond. Even then, though, I couldn’t have imagined that the cost-cutting imperatives would go as far as they have today - deep into the marrow of what was once considered a public trust.
But since the financial resources always seem to be available for entertainment, promotion, and - last but not least - for lobbying… perhaps there is an even more important reason why the incentive to produce quality news is absent, and that is: quality news of integrity, by its very nature, is sure to rock the boat now and then. Good, responsible news worthy of its Constitutional protections will, in that famous phrase, afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted.
And that, when one feels the need to deliver shareholder value above all, means that good news… may not always mean good business - or so goes the fear, a fear that filters down into just about every big newsroom in this country.
Now, I have spent my entire life in for-profit news, and I happen to think that it does not have to be this way. I have worked for news owners who, while they may have regarded their news divisions as an occasional irritant, chose to turn that irritant into a pearl of public trust. But today, sadly, it seems that the conglomerates that have control over some of the biggest pieces of this public trust would just as soon spit that irritant out.
So what does this mean for us tonight, and what is to be done?
It means that we need to be on the alert for where, when, and how our news media bows to undue government influence. And you need to let news organizations know, in no uncertain terms, that you won’t stand for it… that you, as news consumers, are capable of exerting pressure of your own.
It means that we need to continue to let our government know that, when it comes to media consolidation, enough is enough. Too few voices are dominating, homogenizing, and marginalizing the news. We need to demand that the American people get something in exchange for the use of airwaves that belong, after all, to the people.
It means that we need to ensure that the Internet, where free speech reigns and where journalism does not have to pass through a corporate filter… remains free.
We need to say, loud and clear, that we don’t want big corporations enjoying preferred access to - or government acting as the gatekeeper for - this unique platform for independent journalism.
And it means that we need to hold the government to its mandate to protect the freedom of the press, including independent and non-commercial news media.
The stakes could not possibly be higher. Scott McClellan’s book serves as a reminder, and the current election season, not to mention the gathering clouds of conflict with Iran, will both serve as tests of whether lessons have truly been learned from past experience. Ensuring that a free press remains free will require vigilance, and it will require work. Please, take tonight’s energy and inspiration home with you. Take it back to your desks and your workplaces, to your colleagues and your fellow citizens. magnify it, multiply it, and spread it. Make it viral. Make it something that cannot be ignored - not by the powers in Washington, not by the owners and executives of media companies. Write these people. Call them. Send them the message that you know your rights, you know that you are entitled to news media as diverse and varied as the American people… and that you deserve a press that provides the raw material of democracy, the good information that Americans need to be full participants in our government of, by, and for the people.
There is energy here, that can be equal to that task, but this energy must be maintained… if the press - if democracy - is to be preserved.
Thank you very much, and good night.
I am grateful to be here and I am, most of all, gratified by the energy I have seen tonight and at this conference. It will take this kind of energy - and more - to sustain what is good in our news media… to improve what is deficient… and to push back against the forces and the trends that imperil journalism and that - by immediate extension - imperil democracy itself.
The Framers of our Constitution enshrined freedom of the press in the very first Amendment, up at the top of the Bill of Rights, not because they were great fans of journalists - like many politicians, then and now, they were not - but rather because they knew, as Thomas Jefferson put it, that, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what never was and never will be.”
And it is because of this Constitutionally-protected role that I still prefer to use the word “press” over the word “media.” If nothing else, it serves as a subtle reminder that - along with newspapers - radio, television, and, now, the Internet, carry the same Constitutional rights, mandates, and responsibilities that the founders guaranteed for those who plied their trade solely in print.
So when you hear me talk about the press, please know that I am talking about all the ways that news can be transmitted. And when you hear me criticize and critique the press, please know that I do not exempt myself from these criticisms.
In our efforts to take back the American press for the American people, we are blessed this weekend with the gift of good timing. For anyone who may have been inclined to ask if there really is a problem with the news media, or wonder if the task of media reform is, indeed, an urgent one… recent days have brought an inescapable answer, from a most unlikely source.
A source who decided to tell everyone, quote, “what happened.”
I know I can’t be the first person this weekend to reference the recent book by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, but, having interviewed him this past week, I think there are some very important points to be made from the things he says in his book, and the questions his statements raise.
I’m sure all of you took special notice of what he had to say about the role of the press corps, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. In the government’s selling of the war, he said they were - or, I should say, we were “complicit enablers” and “overly deferential.”
These are interesting statements, especially considering their source. As one tries to wrap one’s mind around them, the phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes to mind.
The first reaction, a visceral one, is: Whatever his motives for saying these things, he’s right - and we didn’t need Scott McClellan to tell us so.
But the second reaction is: Wait a minute… I do remember at least some reporters, and some news organizations, asking tough questions - asking them of the president, of those in his administration, of White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and - oh yes - of Scott McClellan himself, once he took over for Mr. Fleischer a few months after the invasion.
So how do we reconcile these competing reactions? Well, we need to pull back for what we in television call the wide shot.
If we look at the wide shot, we can see, in one corner of our screen, the White House briefing room filled with the White House press corps… and, filling the rest of the screen, the finite but disproportionately powerful universe that has become known as “mainstream media” - the newspapers and news programs, real and alleged, that employ these White House correspondents - the news organizations that are, in turn, owned by a shockingly few, much larger corporations, for which news is but a miniscule part of their overall business interests.
In the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq, these news organizations made a decision - consciously or unconsciously, but unquestionably in a climate of fear - to accept the overall narrative frame given them by the White House, a narrative that went like this: Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator, harbored weapons of mass destruction and, because of his supposed links to al Qaeda, this could not be tolerated in a post-9/11 world.
In the news and on the news, one could, to be sure, find persons and views that did not agree with all or parts of this official narrative. Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, comes to mind as an example. But the burden of proof, implicitly or explicitly, was put on these dissenting views and persons… the burden of proof was not put on an administration that was demonstrably moving towards a large-scale military action that would represent a break with American precedent and stated policy of how, when, and under what circumstances this nation goes to war.
So with this in mind, we look back to the corner of our screen where the White House Press Corps is asking their questions. I have been a White House correspondent myself, and I have worked with some of the best in the business. You have an incentive, when you are in that briefing room, to ask the good, tough questions: If nothing else, that is how you get in the paper, or on the air. There is more to it than that, and things have changed since I was a White House correspondent - something I want to talk about in a minute. But the correspondents - the really good ones - these correspondents ask their tough questions.
And these questions are met with what is now called, euphemistically and much too kindly, what is now called “message discipline.”
Well, we used to have a better and more accurate term for “message discipline.” We called it “stonewalling.” Now, cut back to your evening news, or your daily newspaper… where that White House Correspondent dutifully repeats the question he asked of the president or his press secretary, and dutifully relates the answer he was given - the same non-answer we’ve already heard dozens of times, which amounts to a pitch for the administration’s point of view, whether or NOT the answer had anything to do with the actual question that was asked.
And then: “Thank you Jack. In other news today… .”
And we’re off on a whole new story.
In our news media, in our press, those who wield power were, in the lead-up to Iraq, given the opportunity to present their views as a coherent whole, to connect the dots, as they saw the dots and the connections… no matter how much these views may have flown in the face of precedent, established practice - or, indeed, the facts (as we are reminded, yet again, by the just-released Senate report on the administration’s use of pre-war intelligence). The powerful are given this opportunity still, in ways big and small, despite what you may hear about the “post-Katrina” press.
But when a tough question is asked and not answered, when reputable people come before the public and say, “wait a minute, something’s not right here,” the press has treated them like voices crying in the wilderness. These views, though they might be given air time, become lone dots - dots that journalists don’t dare connect, even if the connections are obvious, even if people on the Internet and in the independent press are making these very same connections. The mainstream press doesn’t connect these dots because someone might then accuse them of editorializing, or of being the, quote, “liberal media.”
But connecting these dots - making disparate facts make sense - is a big part of the real work of journalism.
So how does this happen? Why does this happen?
Let me say, by way of answering, that quality news of integrity starts with an owner who has guts.
In a news organization with an owner who has guts, there is an incentive to ask the tough questions, and there is an incentive to pull together the facts - to connect the dots - in a way that makes coherent sense to the news audience.
I mentioned a moment ago that things have changed since I was a White House correspondent. Yes, presidential administrations have become more adept at holding “access” over the heads of reporters - ask too tough a question, or too many of them, so the implicit threat goes, and you’re not going to get any more interviews with high-ranking members of the administration, let alone the president. But I was covering Presidents Johnson and Nixon - men not exactly known as pushovers. No, what has changed, even more than the nature of the presidency, is the character of news ownership. I only found out years after the fact, for example, about the pressure that the Nixon White House put on my then-bosses, during Watergate - pressure to cut down my pieces, to call me off the story, and so on… because, back then, my bosses took the heat, so I didn’t have to. They did this so the story could get told, and so the public could be informed.
But it is rare, now, to find a major news organization owned by an individual, someone who can say, in effect, “The buck stops here.” The more likely motto now is: “The news stops… with making bucks.”
America’s biggest, most important news organizations have, over the past 25 years, fallen prey to merger after merger, acquisition after acquisition… to the point where they are, now, tiny parts of immeasurably larger corporate entities - entities whose primary business often has nothing to do with news. Entities that may, at any given time, have literally hundreds of regulatory issues before multiple arms of the government concerning a vast array of business interests.
These are entities that, as publicly-held and traded corporations, have as their overall, reigning mandate: Provide a return on shareholder value. Increase profits. And not over time, not over the long haul, but quarterly.
One might ask just where the news fits into this model. And if you really need an answer, you can turn on your television, where you will see the following:
Political analysis reduced to in-studio shouting matches between partisans armed with little more than the day’s talking points.
Precious time and resources wasted on so-called human-interest stories, celebrity fluff, sensationalist trials, and gossip.
A proliferation of “news you can use” that amounts to thinly-disguised press releases for the latest consumer products.
And, though this doesn’t get said enough, local news, which is where most Americans get their news, that seems not to change no matter what town or what city you’re in… so slavish is its adherence to the “happy talk” formula and the dictum that, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
I could continue for hours, cataloging journalistic sins of which I know you are all too aware. But, as the time grows late, let me say that almost all of these failings come down to this: In the current model of corporate news ownership, the incentive to produce good and valuable news is simply not there.
Good news, quality news of integrity, requires resources and it requires talent. These things are expensive, these things eat away at the bottom line.
Years ago, in the eighties and the nineties, when the implications of these cost-trimming measures were becoming impossible to ignore, and the quality of the news was clearly threatened, I spoke out against this cutting of news operations to the bone and beyond. Even then, though, I couldn’t have imagined that the cost-cutting imperatives would go as far as they have today - deep into the marrow of what was once considered a public trust.
But since the financial resources always seem to be available for entertainment, promotion, and - last but not least - for lobbying… perhaps there is an even more important reason why the incentive to produce quality news is absent, and that is: quality news of integrity, by its very nature, is sure to rock the boat now and then. Good, responsible news worthy of its Constitutional protections will, in that famous phrase, afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted.
And that, when one feels the need to deliver shareholder value above all, means that good news… may not always mean good business - or so goes the fear, a fear that filters down into just about every big newsroom in this country.
Now, I have spent my entire life in for-profit news, and I happen to think that it does not have to be this way. I have worked for news owners who, while they may have regarded their news divisions as an occasional irritant, chose to turn that irritant into a pearl of public trust. But today, sadly, it seems that the conglomerates that have control over some of the biggest pieces of this public trust would just as soon spit that irritant out.
So what does this mean for us tonight, and what is to be done?
It means that we need to be on the alert for where, when, and how our news media bows to undue government influence. And you need to let news organizations know, in no uncertain terms, that you won’t stand for it… that you, as news consumers, are capable of exerting pressure of your own.
It means that we need to continue to let our government know that, when it comes to media consolidation, enough is enough. Too few voices are dominating, homogenizing, and marginalizing the news. We need to demand that the American people get something in exchange for the use of airwaves that belong, after all, to the people.
It means that we need to ensure that the Internet, where free speech reigns and where journalism does not have to pass through a corporate filter… remains free.
We need to say, loud and clear, that we don’t want big corporations enjoying preferred access to - or government acting as the gatekeeper for - this unique platform for independent journalism.
And it means that we need to hold the government to its mandate to protect the freedom of the press, including independent and non-commercial news media.
The stakes could not possibly be higher. Scott McClellan’s book serves as a reminder, and the current election season, not to mention the gathering clouds of conflict with Iran, will both serve as tests of whether lessons have truly been learned from past experience. Ensuring that a free press remains free will require vigilance, and it will require work. Please, take tonight’s energy and inspiration home with you. Take it back to your desks and your workplaces, to your colleagues and your fellow citizens. magnify it, multiply it, and spread it. Make it viral. Make it something that cannot be ignored - not by the powers in Washington, not by the owners and executives of media companies. Write these people. Call them. Send them the message that you know your rights, you know that you are entitled to news media as diverse and varied as the American people… and that you deserve a press that provides the raw material of democracy, the good information that Americans need to be full participants in our government of, by, and for the people.
There is energy here, that can be equal to that task, but this energy must be maintained… if the press - if democracy - is to be preserved.
Thank you very much, and good night.
Newfoundland; Evicting the Innu
Newfoundland orders Innu families to leave
RHÉAL SÉGUIN
With a report from The Canadian Press
June 6, 2008
QUEBEC -- More than 100 Innu families from Quebec occupying land in Labrador are being evicted by the Newfoundland and Labrador government as part of an escalating confrontation over land rights involving resource development and hydroelectric projects.
A lawyer for the Innu said yesterday the people of the Uashat-Maliotenam reserve in northeastern Quebec will take matters into their own hands if they are forced off the land.
"I've heard people saying that if they tear down our cabins, there won't be a single cabin standing, whether it's Innu or a non-Innu cabin, in Labrador," Armand MacKenzie said.
"We're going to call it 'Labrador Burning.'
"If [Newfoundland Premier] Danny Williams wants to pick a fight with the Quebec Innu, he'll get it. He'll get it and we'll have a social crisis in Labrador."
The government posted the eviction notices late last month, and have given the families 60 days to demolish and remove "cabins located at or near Nairn Bay" in western Labrador.
The Innu face fines of $1,000 and up to three months in jail if they refuse to comply. They've been ordered to restore the site to its original condition or face an additional $25 fine for each day the cabins and other structures remain on Crown land. If they don't remove the structures, the province will do it at the occupants' expense, the eviction notice stated.
Mr. Williams told reporters in St. John's yesterday that the Quebec Innu recently erected the cabins in the region, and government lawyers are questioning whether the action is legal. Mr. Williams said he isn't sure why the cabins were built, but added that they appeared after discussions intensified on the development of the Lower Churchill hydroelectric project. He believes the Innu moved in to assert their land claim over the territory, which would be affected if the hydro project goes ahead.
Mr. MacKenzie pledged to challenge the eviction notice in court. He said that some of the structures were built many years ago on the land, and that the Innu occupied it long before Newfoundland and Labrador was formed.
"This is our homeland. We have sacred sites here. They are recognized by all the residents of Labrador. This is where we hunt. Hold ceremonies and bury our relatives. Even the game wardens and other provincial authorities saw us build structures here 20-25 years ago and recognized that the Innu had the right to do so," Mr. MacKenzie said in a telephone interview yesterday.
The Innu accused the Williams government of harassing their community because a claim to the land was before the Federal Court yesterday in Montreal. More than 20 Innu have filed a claim to establish native ownership over the site.
The Innu argue that their traditional homeland, which also cuts across part of Quebec, belongs to them under aboriginal title, and that resource development, especially hydroelectric projects, cannot proceed without their consent. In 1998, the Innu blocked the announcement of the Lower Churchill project by then-Quebec-premier Lucien Bouchard and his Newfoundland and Labrador counterpart at the time, Brian Tobin.
"No one has the right to evict us," Mr. MacKenzie said yesterday. "It is a total disgrace in the international community for the provincial government to attempt to bully us into giving up our land so that it can construct hydroelectric dams and make money off our resources."
RHÉAL SÉGUIN
With a report from The Canadian Press
June 6, 2008
QUEBEC -- More than 100 Innu families from Quebec occupying land in Labrador are being evicted by the Newfoundland and Labrador government as part of an escalating confrontation over land rights involving resource development and hydroelectric projects.
A lawyer for the Innu said yesterday the people of the Uashat-Maliotenam reserve in northeastern Quebec will take matters into their own hands if they are forced off the land.
"I've heard people saying that if they tear down our cabins, there won't be a single cabin standing, whether it's Innu or a non-Innu cabin, in Labrador," Armand MacKenzie said.
"We're going to call it 'Labrador Burning.'
"If [Newfoundland Premier] Danny Williams wants to pick a fight with the Quebec Innu, he'll get it. He'll get it and we'll have a social crisis in Labrador."
The government posted the eviction notices late last month, and have given the families 60 days to demolish and remove "cabins located at or near Nairn Bay" in western Labrador.
The Innu face fines of $1,000 and up to three months in jail if they refuse to comply. They've been ordered to restore the site to its original condition or face an additional $25 fine for each day the cabins and other structures remain on Crown land. If they don't remove the structures, the province will do it at the occupants' expense, the eviction notice stated.
Mr. Williams told reporters in St. John's yesterday that the Quebec Innu recently erected the cabins in the region, and government lawyers are questioning whether the action is legal. Mr. Williams said he isn't sure why the cabins were built, but added that they appeared after discussions intensified on the development of the Lower Churchill hydroelectric project. He believes the Innu moved in to assert their land claim over the territory, which would be affected if the hydro project goes ahead.
Mr. MacKenzie pledged to challenge the eviction notice in court. He said that some of the structures were built many years ago on the land, and that the Innu occupied it long before Newfoundland and Labrador was formed.
"This is our homeland. We have sacred sites here. They are recognized by all the residents of Labrador. This is where we hunt. Hold ceremonies and bury our relatives. Even the game wardens and other provincial authorities saw us build structures here 20-25 years ago and recognized that the Innu had the right to do so," Mr. MacKenzie said in a telephone interview yesterday.
The Innu accused the Williams government of harassing their community because a claim to the land was before the Federal Court yesterday in Montreal. More than 20 Innu have filed a claim to establish native ownership over the site.
The Innu argue that their traditional homeland, which also cuts across part of Quebec, belongs to them under aboriginal title, and that resource development, especially hydroelectric projects, cannot proceed without their consent. In 1998, the Innu blocked the announcement of the Lower Churchill project by then-Quebec-premier Lucien Bouchard and his Newfoundland and Labrador counterpart at the time, Brian Tobin.
"No one has the right to evict us," Mr. MacKenzie said yesterday. "It is a total disgrace in the international community for the provincial government to attempt to bully us into giving up our land so that it can construct hydroelectric dams and make money off our resources."
Sunday, June 08, 2008
This Week on Gorilla Radio
GR for Monday, June 9th, 2008
by C. L. Cook
Of the world's industrial states, Canada has perhaps the most concentrated media. In this country, the confluence of corporate media purveyors with a singular political vision; a State broadcaster run by careerist weaklings, desperate to preserve their jobs by pleasing the party of the day; and, a supine regulatory system, more interested in making life difficult for college and community radio programmers than in challenging the systemic abuses of the nation's "public" airwaves, conspire to make of Canadian media a final product little better than the base propaganda of the communist regimes of old.
What this means for the denizens of this sad, satellite state that is Canada is a monolithic meme delivery system masquerading as journalism, while media handmaidens to power pretend to operate in the public interest. It's no wonder then Canadians can blithely sit before flickering boxes, sucking beer, as the nation is frog-marched into fascism.
It is a dangerous, and seemingly hopeless situation: Corporate players are not likely to change the way they massage their message, and fearful bureaucrats behind the State media apparatus will not endanger their livelihoods to buck the system to deliver truth to the citizenry.
Luckily, we live in a time of technological wonders whose magic promises to change not only the way we live, but the way we learn about the others effecting our lives.
Geraldine Cahill is Communications and Social Media coordinator for The Real News, a Toronto-based emerging media upstart challenging "old media's" news dissemination monopoly. Geraldine Cahill in the first half.
And; almost seven years past the time the first bunker busters fell upon the heads of hapless Afghani goat herds and their keepers, it's instructive to look back upon the carnage of the interim and what meaning we can take away from this madness.
Hundreds of thousands dead; millions maimed and made homeless; landscapes scarred and corrupted with poisons and unexploded ordnance, just waiting for the curious attentions of children to add again to the misery the chosen course engendered for Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and the un-people thrown into dark prisons around the world without a glimmer of hope for salvation.
Mike Ferner is an activist with Voices in the Wilderness and Veterans for Peace, broadcaster, and author of the book, 'Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran for Peace Reports.' He's also a dedicated writer, chronicling America's spiral into perpetual war in hundreds of articles published across the internet.
Mike Ferner and keeping tabs on War, Incorporated in the second segment.
And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week.
UK: Barclays Bank Bows to der Homeland
Barclays bank rejects customers to comply with US terror law
Sean O'Neill, Crime and Security Editor
Barclays is using controversial American anti-terrorism laws to shut down the personal bank accounts of British citizens who are working for Iranian-owned businesses, The Times has learnt.
The bank has unilaterally enforced anti-Iran sanctions drawn up by the Bush Administration under the US Patriot Act against companies that operate completely legally in Britain. Those affected by the account closures are not directors of the companies but ordinary staff members, including clerical officers, computer engineers and bank tellers.
Barclays refuses to discuss the decision or to say how many people have been affected by its action. But The Times has obtained a letter written by Deborah Cooper, a senior Barclays lawyer, which states that the bank must consider “the global regulatory environment” and regards “full compliance with sanctions regimes to be of extreme importance”.
Ms Cooper’s letter was addressed to lawyers representing employees of the Iranian-owned banks Saderat and Melli whose accounts have been closed and funds returned to the account holder.
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Both banks are based in the City, fully licensed to operate in Britain and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Neither is subject to the extensive Iranian sanctions regimes that are operated by the Treasury or the European Union.
However, the US Government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has placed both on its list of specially designated nationals (SDNs).
Ms Cooper’s letter said: “Barclays has . . . a policy of not conducting business with people or entities which are publicly designated SDNs and in line with that Barclays is unable to receive payments from or undertake other business which involves Melli or Saderat.”
Barclays began the account closures in February, shortly after reports from industry sources that US Treasury agents had been touring the City of London putting pressure on financial institutions to withdraw from any form of business that might have Iranian links.
One source told The Times that City banks had been warned that they would lose access to the US market if they continued to deal with Iranian businesses. Barclays has extensive business interests in the United States.
The US Government has accused Melli Bank of alleged links to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and described Bank Saderat as a terrorist financier that has channelled money to Hezbollah and other groups. Both banks deny the allegations strongly.
Case study: Cast out in the supermarket
Chris was doing the shopping in Tesco when Barclays rang to tell him that his bank account was being closed. Later that evening his wife was told that her Barclays account, which she had held for 25 years, was also being closed.
Chris, 46, works in IT for Bank Saderat, and his wife is in the accounts department of Melli Bank. Both institutions are Iranian-owned. “They said it was because of sanctions but I knew there were no British sanctions on the banks. I asked them if they were responding to US laws and they said they didn’t have to give me a reason,” he said.
The couple opened new accounts with one of Barclays’ rivals but they had difficulty transferring standing orders, especially Chris’s child-support payments. He said: “I know that UK banks are being pressured by America to stop all dealings with Iran but what impact will it have to shut an English bloke’s account with an English bank? The Iranians won’t give a monkey’s. What upsets me is the lack of respect Barclays have for their customers.”
source
Sean O'Neill, Crime and Security Editor
Barclays is using controversial American anti-terrorism laws to shut down the personal bank accounts of British citizens who are working for Iranian-owned businesses, The Times has learnt.
The bank has unilaterally enforced anti-Iran sanctions drawn up by the Bush Administration under the US Patriot Act against companies that operate completely legally in Britain. Those affected by the account closures are not directors of the companies but ordinary staff members, including clerical officers, computer engineers and bank tellers.
Barclays refuses to discuss the decision or to say how many people have been affected by its action. But The Times has obtained a letter written by Deborah Cooper, a senior Barclays lawyer, which states that the bank must consider “the global regulatory environment” and regards “full compliance with sanctions regimes to be of extreme importance”.
Ms Cooper’s letter was addressed to lawyers representing employees of the Iranian-owned banks Saderat and Melli whose accounts have been closed and funds returned to the account holder.
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Both banks are based in the City, fully licensed to operate in Britain and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Neither is subject to the extensive Iranian sanctions regimes that are operated by the Treasury or the European Union.
However, the US Government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has placed both on its list of specially designated nationals (SDNs).
Ms Cooper’s letter said: “Barclays has . . . a policy of not conducting business with people or entities which are publicly designated SDNs and in line with that Barclays is unable to receive payments from or undertake other business which involves Melli or Saderat.”
Barclays began the account closures in February, shortly after reports from industry sources that US Treasury agents had been touring the City of London putting pressure on financial institutions to withdraw from any form of business that might have Iranian links.
One source told The Times that City banks had been warned that they would lose access to the US market if they continued to deal with Iranian businesses. Barclays has extensive business interests in the United States.
The US Government has accused Melli Bank of alleged links to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and described Bank Saderat as a terrorist financier that has channelled money to Hezbollah and other groups. Both banks deny the allegations strongly.
Case study: Cast out in the supermarket
Chris was doing the shopping in Tesco when Barclays rang to tell him that his bank account was being closed. Later that evening his wife was told that her Barclays account, which she had held for 25 years, was also being closed.
Chris, 46, works in IT for Bank Saderat, and his wife is in the accounts department of Melli Bank. Both institutions are Iranian-owned. “They said it was because of sanctions but I knew there were no British sanctions on the banks. I asked them if they were responding to US laws and they said they didn’t have to give me a reason,” he said.
The couple opened new accounts with one of Barclays’ rivals but they had difficulty transferring standing orders, especially Chris’s child-support payments. He said: “I know that UK banks are being pressured by America to stop all dealings with Iran but what impact will it have to shut an English bloke’s account with an English bank? The Iranians won’t give a monkey’s. What upsets me is the lack of respect Barclays have for their customers.”
source
Friday, June 06, 2008
National Water Security
How Water Has Become a National Security Issue
by Maude Barlow, June 6, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/87224/
It's a colossal failure of political foresight that water has not emerged as an important issue in the U.S. Presidential campaign. The links between oil, war, and U.S. foreign policy are well known. But water -- whether we treat it as a public good or as a commodity that can be bought and sold -- will in large part determine whether our future is peaceful or perilous.
Americans use water even more wastefully than oil. The U.S relies on non-renewable groundwater for 50 percent of its daily use, and 36 states now face serious water shortages, some verging on crisis.
Meanwhile, dwindling freshwater supplies around the world, inequitable access to water, and corporate control of water, together with impending climate change from fossil fuel emissions, have created a life-or-death situation across the planet. Both Democrats and Republicans have emphasized loosening U.S. dependence on nonrenewable energy resources in their platforms, but neither party gives significant air time to the threats posed by water shortages.
This is not to say that no one is paying attention. In fact, water has become a key strategic security and foreign policy priority for the United States government.
Cut Deals, Carry Water
Corporate interests have pursued schemes to privatize, commodify, and export water for decades. We have seen how this plays out in Canada. For instance, in the late 1990s, Sun Belt Water, Inc., sued the Canadian government under NAFTA because British Columbia banned water exports, preventing a deal that would have sent B.C. water to California.
Corporations have also made attempts to ship Canadian water as far as Asia and the Middle East, proposals that fizzled after fierce opposition from public citizens who were beginning to understand the dangers of permanently removing water from local ecosystems and placing it under corporate control.
Now the Pentagon, as well as various U.S. security think tanks, have decided that water supplies, like energy supplies, must be secured if the United States is to maintain its current economic and military power in the world. And the United States is exerting pressure to access Canadian water, despite Canada's own shortages.
Under the name, "North American Future 2025 Project," the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) brought together high level government officials and business executives from Canada, the United States, and Mexico for a series of six meetings to discuss a wide range of issues related to the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a controversial and tightly guarded set of negotiations to expand NAFTA. [See related story .]
"As ... globalization continues and the balance of power potentially shifts, and risks to global security evolve, it is only prudent for Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. policymakers to contemplate a North American security architecture that could effectively deal with security threats that can be foreseen in 2025," said a leaked copy of a CSIS backgrounder. On the agenda for one of two meetings in Calgary were, "water consumption, water transfers, and artificial diversions of bulk water" with the aim of achieving "joint optimum utilization of the available water."
The water and security connection deepens with the fact that Sandia National Laboratories, a vital partner with CSIS in its Global Water Futures Project, also plays a major role in military security in the United States. While Sandia is technically owned by the U.S. government, and reports to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, its management is contracted out to Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest weapons manufacturer. Ralph Pentland, water consultant and primary author of the Canadian government's Federal Water Policy in 1987, believes that the purpose of these cross-border discussions is to secure sufficient water for Alberta tar sands production in order to ensure uninterrupted oil supplies to the United States.
Energy extraction would be far more attractive if a new source of water -- potentially from northern Canada -- could be brought to the tar sands through pipelines or other diversions. As long as the water doesn't cross the international border, it is within Alberta's power to do this.These schemes to displace water from one ecosystem to another in the service of corporate profit are an environmental problem for the entire planet, which is another reason why water must form a crucial part of any progressive discussion around U.S. dependence on foreign energy resources.
Corporate interests understand the connection and are using it to make their case for private solutions to the water crisis. In language that will be familiar to critics who argued that the United States invaded Iraq not for democracy but for access to oil and profits for corporations, a 2005 report from CSIS's Global Water Futures project had this to say about water: "Water issues are critical to U.S. national security and integral to upholding American values of humanitarianism and democratic development. Moreover, engagement with international water issues guarantees business opportunity for the U.S. private sector, which is well positioned to contribute to development and reap economic reward."
Water for All
Clearly, the powers that be in the United States have decided that water is not a public good but a private resource that must be secured by whatever means. But there are alternatives. North Americans must learn to live within our means, by conserving water in agriculture and in the home. We could learn from the many examples here and beyond our borders -- from the New Mexican "Acequia" system that uses an ancient natural ditch irrigation tradition to distribute water in arid lands to the International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance in Geneva, that works globally to promote sustainable rainwater harvesting programs.
Conservation strategies would undermine the massive investment now going into corporate technological and infrastructure solutions, such as desalination, wastewater reuse, and water transfer projects. And conservation would be many times cheaper, a boon to the public but not to the corporate interests that are currently driving international water agreements.
At the grassroots, a global water justice movement is demanding a change in international law to settle once and for all the question of who controls water, and whether responses to the water crisis will ensure water for the public or profits for corporations.
Ricardo Petrella has led a movement in Italy to recognize access to water as a basic human right, which has support among politicians at every level. The Coalition in Defense of Public Water in Ecuador is demanding that the government amend the constitution to recognize the right to water. The Coalition Against Water Privatization in South Africa is challenging the practice of water metering before the Johannesburg High Court on the basis that it violates the human rights of Soweto's citizens. Dozens of groups in Mexico have joined COMDA, the Coalition of Mexican Organizations for the Right to Water, a national campaign for a constitutional guarantee of water for the public.
The U.S. and Canada are the only two countries actively blocking international attempts to recognize water as a human right. But movements in both countries are working to change that. A large network of human rights, faith-based, labor, and environmental groups in Canada has formed Canadian Friends of the Right to Water to get the Canadian government to support a U.N. right-to-water covenant. And a network in the United States led by Food and Water Watch is calling for a national water trust to ensure safekeeping of the nation's water assets and a change of government policy on the right to water.
Such campaigns may have a fight ahead of them, but the vision is within reach: a United Nations covenant that recognizes the right of the Earth and other species to clean water, pledges to protect and conserve the world's water supplies, and forms an agreement between those countries who have water and those who don't to work toward local -- not corporate -- control of water. We must acknowledge water as a fundamental human right for all.
Maude Barlow wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Maude is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
by Maude Barlow, June 6, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/87224/
It's a colossal failure of political foresight that water has not emerged as an important issue in the U.S. Presidential campaign. The links between oil, war, and U.S. foreign policy are well known. But water -- whether we treat it as a public good or as a commodity that can be bought and sold -- will in large part determine whether our future is peaceful or perilous.
Americans use water even more wastefully than oil. The U.S relies on non-renewable groundwater for 50 percent of its daily use, and 36 states now face serious water shortages, some verging on crisis.
Meanwhile, dwindling freshwater supplies around the world, inequitable access to water, and corporate control of water, together with impending climate change from fossil fuel emissions, have created a life-or-death situation across the planet. Both Democrats and Republicans have emphasized loosening U.S. dependence on nonrenewable energy resources in their platforms, but neither party gives significant air time to the threats posed by water shortages.
This is not to say that no one is paying attention. In fact, water has become a key strategic security and foreign policy priority for the United States government.
Cut Deals, Carry Water
Corporate interests have pursued schemes to privatize, commodify, and export water for decades. We have seen how this plays out in Canada. For instance, in the late 1990s, Sun Belt Water, Inc., sued the Canadian government under NAFTA because British Columbia banned water exports, preventing a deal that would have sent B.C. water to California.
Corporations have also made attempts to ship Canadian water as far as Asia and the Middle East, proposals that fizzled after fierce opposition from public citizens who were beginning to understand the dangers of permanently removing water from local ecosystems and placing it under corporate control.
Now the Pentagon, as well as various U.S. security think tanks, have decided that water supplies, like energy supplies, must be secured if the United States is to maintain its current economic and military power in the world. And the United States is exerting pressure to access Canadian water, despite Canada's own shortages.
Under the name, "North American Future 2025 Project," the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) brought together high level government officials and business executives from Canada, the United States, and Mexico for a series of six meetings to discuss a wide range of issues related to the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a controversial and tightly guarded set of negotiations to expand NAFTA. [See related story .]
"As ... globalization continues and the balance of power potentially shifts, and risks to global security evolve, it is only prudent for Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. policymakers to contemplate a North American security architecture that could effectively deal with security threats that can be foreseen in 2025," said a leaked copy of a CSIS backgrounder. On the agenda for one of two meetings in Calgary were, "water consumption, water transfers, and artificial diversions of bulk water" with the aim of achieving "joint optimum utilization of the available water."
The water and security connection deepens with the fact that Sandia National Laboratories, a vital partner with CSIS in its Global Water Futures Project, also plays a major role in military security in the United States. While Sandia is technically owned by the U.S. government, and reports to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, its management is contracted out to Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest weapons manufacturer. Ralph Pentland, water consultant and primary author of the Canadian government's Federal Water Policy in 1987, believes that the purpose of these cross-border discussions is to secure sufficient water for Alberta tar sands production in order to ensure uninterrupted oil supplies to the United States.
Energy extraction would be far more attractive if a new source of water -- potentially from northern Canada -- could be brought to the tar sands through pipelines or other diversions. As long as the water doesn't cross the international border, it is within Alberta's power to do this.These schemes to displace water from one ecosystem to another in the service of corporate profit are an environmental problem for the entire planet, which is another reason why water must form a crucial part of any progressive discussion around U.S. dependence on foreign energy resources.
Corporate interests understand the connection and are using it to make their case for private solutions to the water crisis. In language that will be familiar to critics who argued that the United States invaded Iraq not for democracy but for access to oil and profits for corporations, a 2005 report from CSIS's Global Water Futures project had this to say about water: "Water issues are critical to U.S. national security and integral to upholding American values of humanitarianism and democratic development. Moreover, engagement with international water issues guarantees business opportunity for the U.S. private sector, which is well positioned to contribute to development and reap economic reward."
Water for All
Clearly, the powers that be in the United States have decided that water is not a public good but a private resource that must be secured by whatever means. But there are alternatives. North Americans must learn to live within our means, by conserving water in agriculture and in the home. We could learn from the many examples here and beyond our borders -- from the New Mexican "Acequia" system that uses an ancient natural ditch irrigation tradition to distribute water in arid lands to the International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance in Geneva, that works globally to promote sustainable rainwater harvesting programs.
Conservation strategies would undermine the massive investment now going into corporate technological and infrastructure solutions, such as desalination, wastewater reuse, and water transfer projects. And conservation would be many times cheaper, a boon to the public but not to the corporate interests that are currently driving international water agreements.
At the grassroots, a global water justice movement is demanding a change in international law to settle once and for all the question of who controls water, and whether responses to the water crisis will ensure water for the public or profits for corporations.
Ricardo Petrella has led a movement in Italy to recognize access to water as a basic human right, which has support among politicians at every level. The Coalition in Defense of Public Water in Ecuador is demanding that the government amend the constitution to recognize the right to water. The Coalition Against Water Privatization in South Africa is challenging the practice of water metering before the Johannesburg High Court on the basis that it violates the human rights of Soweto's citizens. Dozens of groups in Mexico have joined COMDA, the Coalition of Mexican Organizations for the Right to Water, a national campaign for a constitutional guarantee of water for the public.
The U.S. and Canada are the only two countries actively blocking international attempts to recognize water as a human right. But movements in both countries are working to change that. A large network of human rights, faith-based, labor, and environmental groups in Canada has formed Canadian Friends of the Right to Water to get the Canadian government to support a U.N. right-to-water covenant. And a network in the United States led by Food and Water Watch is calling for a national water trust to ensure safekeeping of the nation's water assets and a change of government policy on the right to water.
Such campaigns may have a fight ahead of them, but the vision is within reach: a United Nations covenant that recognizes the right of the Earth and other species to clean water, pledges to protect and conserve the world's water supplies, and forms an agreement between those countries who have water and those who don't to work toward local -- not corporate -- control of water. We must acknowledge water as a fundamental human right for all.
Maude Barlow wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Maude is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Canadian TV Journalist Held in Bagram
Detained Journalist Sues Bush Administration
By AP.
Lawyers for a Canadian television journalist being held as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing the Bush administration of holding him illegally and demanding his release.
Afghani native Jawed Ahmad, 22, has been held in Bagram, Afghanistan, for more than six months without being charged, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia.
Ahmad was working for CTV, a Canadian television network, when he was detained in October 2007. Authorities accused him of being in contact with Taliban leaders, including having video of them and possessing their phone numbers, according to the complaint.
Attorneys with the International Justice Network compared Ahmad’s case to that of Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photographer who spent more than two years in U.S. military custody. Hussein initially was accused of working with Iraqi insurgents but was released in April after Iraqi judges closed his case.
“Given the pivotal role of freedom of the press in the development and maintenance of a true democracy, the United States should not seize journalists like Jawed Ahmed merely because they are doing their jobs,” said Barbara Olshansky, an attorney at the International Human Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School who is representing Ahmed.
The Justice Department declined to comment. “Needless to say, we’ll have to review the complaint before we decide how to ultimately respond,” said spokesman Charles Miller.
– By LARA JAKES JORDAN
By AP.
Lawyers for a Canadian television journalist being held as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing the Bush administration of holding him illegally and demanding his release.
Afghani native Jawed Ahmad, 22, has been held in Bagram, Afghanistan, for more than six months without being charged, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia.
Ahmad was working for CTV, a Canadian television network, when he was detained in October 2007. Authorities accused him of being in contact with Taliban leaders, including having video of them and possessing their phone numbers, according to the complaint.
Attorneys with the International Justice Network compared Ahmad’s case to that of Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photographer who spent more than two years in U.S. military custody. Hussein initially was accused of working with Iraqi insurgents but was released in April after Iraqi judges closed his case.
“Given the pivotal role of freedom of the press in the development and maintenance of a true democracy, the United States should not seize journalists like Jawed Ahmed merely because they are doing their jobs,” said Barbara Olshansky, an attorney at the International Human Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School who is representing Ahmed.
The Justice Department declined to comment. “Needless to say, we’ll have to review the complaint before we decide how to ultimately respond,” said spokesman Charles Miller.
– By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Doctors Seek War Crimes Charge Against former Australia PM Howard
Howard war charges bid
June 3, 2008
AN AUSTRALIAN doctors' group is pushing to have former prime minister John Howard charged with war crimes for sending troops to Iraq.
The Medical Association for the Prevention of War said the war was illegal because it was not backed by the United Nations.
Association spokesman Robert Marr said Mr Howard committed Australian troops to the war on the basis of misleading information about weapons of mass destruction. He said the medical group was supporting a legal brief prepared by International Criminal Court Action Victoria that would be sent to the court. Dr Marr said more than 650,000 Iraqi citizens had died as a result of the war.
Mr Howard said last week that while the war's cost had been heavy he believed it had been right. He said he would not have brought the troops home at this point.
BRENDAN NICHOLSON
June 3, 2008
AN AUSTRALIAN doctors' group is pushing to have former prime minister John Howard charged with war crimes for sending troops to Iraq.
The Medical Association for the Prevention of War said the war was illegal because it was not backed by the United Nations.
Association spokesman Robert Marr said Mr Howard committed Australian troops to the war on the basis of misleading information about weapons of mass destruction. He said the medical group was supporting a legal brief prepared by International Criminal Court Action Victoria that would be sent to the court. Dr Marr said more than 650,000 Iraqi citizens had died as a result of the war.
Mr Howard said last week that while the war's cost had been heavy he believed it had been right. He said he would not have brought the troops home at this point.
BRENDAN NICHOLSON
Inedible: Food Summit 'Disgusting' Farmers Say
Dismay at UN food summit outcome
The UN talks were held amid steep increases
in the price of staple foods [AFP]
Small farmers' groups have reacted with "disgust" to the conclusions of the UN food security summit in Italy.
"We are dismayed and disgusted to see the food crisis used to further the policies that have led us to the food crisis in the first place," Maryam Rahmanian from Iran's centre for sustainable development said.
Dozens of non-governmental organisations and small farmers' groups held a forum in Rome this week to coincide with the United Nations food and agriculture organisation (FAO) summit.
The FAO summit distributed a draft text on Wednesday that Rahmanian said "will not fill any plate".
"The recommendations for more liberalisation would lead to more violations of the right to food," she said in a statement.
Since the 1996 world food summit, "we have warned continually that the current model would lead to a food crisis, and it has."
The farmers' groups criticised multi-national food corporations whose profits have shot up through the crisis.
Flavio Valente, a Brazilian activist, said it was "about time we treated this as a crime against humanity".
Dena Hoff, an American activist said: "In the first quarter of 2008, profits of Monsanto have already shot up by 108 per cent, while Cargill registered profit increases of 86 per cent... More food aid would help these companies, but do not offer any solutions for the poor and hungry."
World attention
However, the UN and some food agencies hailed the summit a success.
Voices on the crisis
Economic experts talk to
Al Jazeera
"The most important thing about the summit is that it has focused attention on the world leaders and on something that has been ignored for too long," Matthew Wyatt, from the International funds for agricultural development, said.
"We've let investment in agriculture drift terribly. In 1979 it was 18 per cent of all aid. Now it's less than 3 per cent, that's absolutely ridiculous... We have to reverse that.
"If there is a good and strong declaration particularly with the commitment to small-holder farming and commitments to boosting supplies, that would be a bonus," Wyatt said.
Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said: "I think these kinds of conferences are important to put together people discussing. I think it's more important outside the big room and the official speeches.
"It's important to know each other because many times we meet in the operation and if we know each other we can work better together," said Massimo Barra, a Red Cross representative.
The summit is due to issue a declaration later on Thursday committing to eliminating hunger and ensuring food supply sufficiency.
However, according to Mark Seddon, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Rome, the delegates are struggling to agree on a final declaration.
Seddon said: "This has taken a lot longer than anyone expected. There's a consensus that this was a good event to have in that it has concentrated the eyes of the world on the problem.
"However, in terms of concrete deals, it has not been a great success."
source
The UN talks were held amid steep increases
in the price of staple foods [AFP]
Small farmers' groups have reacted with "disgust" to the conclusions of the UN food security summit in Italy.
"We are dismayed and disgusted to see the food crisis used to further the policies that have led us to the food crisis in the first place," Maryam Rahmanian from Iran's centre for sustainable development said.
Dozens of non-governmental organisations and small farmers' groups held a forum in Rome this week to coincide with the United Nations food and agriculture organisation (FAO) summit.
The FAO summit distributed a draft text on Wednesday that Rahmanian said "will not fill any plate".
"The recommendations for more liberalisation would lead to more violations of the right to food," she said in a statement.
Since the 1996 world food summit, "we have warned continually that the current model would lead to a food crisis, and it has."
The farmers' groups criticised multi-national food corporations whose profits have shot up through the crisis.
Flavio Valente, a Brazilian activist, said it was "about time we treated this as a crime against humanity".
Dena Hoff, an American activist said: "In the first quarter of 2008, profits of Monsanto have already shot up by 108 per cent, while Cargill registered profit increases of 86 per cent... More food aid would help these companies, but do not offer any solutions for the poor and hungry."
World attention
However, the UN and some food agencies hailed the summit a success.
Voices on the crisis
Economic experts talk to
Al Jazeera
"The most important thing about the summit is that it has focused attention on the world leaders and on something that has been ignored for too long," Matthew Wyatt, from the International funds for agricultural development, said.
"We've let investment in agriculture drift terribly. In 1979 it was 18 per cent of all aid. Now it's less than 3 per cent, that's absolutely ridiculous... We have to reverse that.
"If there is a good and strong declaration particularly with the commitment to small-holder farming and commitments to boosting supplies, that would be a bonus," Wyatt said.
Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said: "I think these kinds of conferences are important to put together people discussing. I think it's more important outside the big room and the official speeches.
"It's important to know each other because many times we meet in the operation and if we know each other we can work better together," said Massimo Barra, a Red Cross representative.
The summit is due to issue a declaration later on Thursday committing to eliminating hunger and ensuring food supply sufficiency.
However, according to Mark Seddon, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Rome, the delegates are struggling to agree on a final declaration.
Seddon said: "This has taken a lot longer than anyone expected. There's a consensus that this was a good event to have in that it has concentrated the eyes of the world on the problem.
"However, in terms of concrete deals, it has not been a great success."
source
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Canadian Broadcast Corporation: Canada's War Pimp
by C. L. Cook
Yesterday, the House of Commons did something we haven't seen since the heady wayback days when Trudeaumania gripped the nation.
Taking their collective, if figurative cojones in hand, Liberals and Bloc Quebecois members joined the New Democratic Party (NDP) to endorse its motion to immediately stay deportation proceedings against U.S. military war resisters seeking refuge from American justice here in Canada, and offer those already here, (and perhaps the throng sure to follow) and their families the opportunity to stay, live, and work in Canada as the first steps to naturalization.
Predictably, the Conservative minority government voted in lock-step with their leader, Stephen Harper in opposition, but for the first time since Harper's party took power in 2006, a piece of House business the government did not support was ratified: The NDP motion was endorsed in a 137-110 vote.
This is huge news for the millions of anti-war activists in the United States, and the world, but you would not know it watching the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) news flagship, The National. Though last night's program found more than twenty of its allotted 48 minute broadcast window to devote to Barack Obama's as yet to be ratified "victory" in the Democratic Party's primary race for November's scheduled presidential election, not one second was granted to a story that could have both an earth-shaking effect on Canada's relationship with the United States, and could prove literally a matter of life or death for thousands of refugee soldiers in hiding in Canada and the States.
It could, should the Conservatives honour the will of the House, also mean the beginning of the end to the immoral and illegal wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Canadian Broadcast Corporation chose instead silence.
Joining the CBC's dead air on this issue is Canada's biggest private communications company, CanWest Global. Perusing today's edition of Victoria's only daily, Canwest's Times-Colonist, not one mention of Harper's first defeat in the House, or the ramifications of this historic vote: Blank. It was, as Harold Pinder might say, something that; "...never happened; even as it was happening, it never happened."
The CBC's acquiesence to the promoters of perpetual warfare is not new; the management and its correspondents willingly suspended disbelief when George Bush the Elder told tall tales of American womanhood being violated by thugs in Panama City, thus justifying the destruction of thousands of lives to bring to heel the despot Noriega.
Likewise, the CBC cheered along when George Bush recycled WWI era stories of babes butchered in hospitals by Saddam's sadistic storm troopers in Kuwait, thus justifying the destructions of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives; and just so, the CBC willingly embedded itself within the Clinton administration's hide and marched along with it to war against the next newest Hitler, Milosevic of the Former Yugoslav Republic. There, again, uncounted lives ruined and a country laid waste.
In fact, the CBC is itself a war promoter and profiteer, and they do so now as they have done so for too long.
That Canwest Goebbels would seek to banish to the gulag the only hopeful news to emerge Ottawa, in the form of yesterday's triumph for peace, is par for the course for that pathetic excuse for truthful journalism: We need only remember the sentiment of the late patriarch of the Asper-controlled media behemoth, Israel "Izzy" Asper, who vowed; nary a discouraging word would be heard, nor written, by Canada's predominant media operator concerning his namesake nation's beastly behaviour.
That these latest wars are supported, and some venture were created, by Zionist activists in America and elsewhere, Canwest's deafening silence on the House vote is unsurprising. But, I don't have to pay to hear Canwest's lies; the same is not true for the CBC, for which a portion of my taxes, extracted on pain of imprisonment, supports.
Following WWII, both Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose, well known to British and American troops, were hung by the conquering Allied armies. They were deemed war criminals, whose studio night jobs propagandising for Hitler and Hirohito were justly rewarded at the end of a rope.
Sentenced to death not only for the lies they told, but for the truths they refused to reveal, theirs is a fate perhaps undeserved, but the board and camera talent of the CBC might do well to remember: It was sad Haw Haw's and Madame Rose's enabling role being tried following the horror of their day, and they were found complicit.
That these wars and occupations are immoral is truth. That this crime, (the "mother" of all crimes, another stretch-necked war criminal from the recent past might have said) this abomination against humanity is not George W. Bush's, or even America's alone, but is a conspiring of ruthless corporate and politcal interests literally making a killing killing is truth. That these truths are not acknowledged as such by Canada's media is truth.
While the Corp. won't allow talk of peace to interrupt its war tattoo, they do carry two tales that may make of this "conscientious" stuff a story yet.
Tonight's CBC broadcast of The National reports the body of Captain Richard Stephen Leary arriving home in Canada. Captain Leary's tearful widow, Rachel assures the CBC camera team her husband was killed doing a job he believed in, and says he will be missed. Leary is the 78th Canadian killed outright in Afghanistan. (The Canadian government, like it's American partner, does not do body counts of those it kills and maims in the fields and towns of the occupied territory).
The CBC news website, meanwhile hosts a story about another Canadian soldier preparing for his third deployment to Afghanistan.
It begs the question: If "Canada's New Government," as it insists it be described, refuses to grant haven for those Americans with moral qualms about killing innocent men, women, and children half a world away, where will Canada's first soldiers of conscience go in their turn?
Below are both a letter I received with the minister respsonsible's address and a letter I sent to encourage her conscience. You may consider doing the same.
Chris Cook
Victoria, Canada
June 5, 2008
Greetings minister; I applaud the courage of this House to come forward in support of the motion allowing conscientious objectors stay in Canada until which time it is safe for them to return to their families without fear of persecution. Canadians are fully aware of the nature of these young men and women's objection to the war in Iraq, and many of us share that opinion of this country's involvement in Afghanistan.
I'm writing in hopes your party in government will make good its mandated course with all haste, as I'm sure you and your colleagues, with respect to the will of the House will do; just as I have reassured my many media colleagues around the world: "Canada respects democracy."
Cheers and good governance.
Chris Cook
Managing Editor, Pacific Free Press
Host/Producer, Gorilla Radio
Carol Grier
The motion has passed!
Thanks everyone who called and emailed. The next step is to write to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Diane Finley, and prime minister Stephen Harper to ensure that the will of Parliament is implemented.
Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley
phone 613.996.4974
fax 613.996.9749
email finley.d@parl.gc.ca and finled1@parl.gc.ca
Prime Minister Stephen Harper
phone 613.992.4211
fax 613.941.6900
email pm@pm.gc.ca
parliament says: "let them stay!"
The House of Commons has voted in favour of the resolution that demands the Harper government immediately cease all deportation proceedings against any Iraq War resisters currently in Canada and allow all resisters and their families to remain in Canada and apply for permanent residence.
Vote total announced as Yea: 137 & Nay: 110!!
It was a very simple procedure: The motion was read and then voted on. Yeas stood and were counted, then the Nays. The totals were announced, the speaker declared the motion passed, and they moved on to the next item.
House of Commons votes to let U.S. War Resisters stay in Canada
OTTAWA, June 3 /CNW/ - The Opposition parties in the House of Commons joined together today to adopt a recommendation which, if implemented, would make it possible for U.S. Iraq War resisters to obtain Permanent Resident status in Canada.
The recommendation was adopted by a majority of Members of Parliament from the Liberal, Bloc Québécois, and New Democratic Parties. The Conservatives voted against the motion.
The motion, which originated in the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration in December 2007, calls on the government to "immediately implement a program to allow conscientious objectors and their immediate family members ... to apply for permanent resident status and remain in Canada; and ... the government should immediately cease any removal or deportation actions ... against such individuals."
Corey Glass, 25, a war resister who came to Canada in 2006 and was recently told to leave Canada by June 12 or face removal to the United States, welcomed the vote. "I'm thankful that the MPs voted to let me and the other war resisters stay in Canada. I'm also thankful to all the Canadians who urged their MPs to support us."
"This is a great victory for the courageous men and women who have come to Canada because they refuse to take part in the illegal, immoral Iraq War, and for the many organizations and individuals who have supported this campaign over the past four years," said Lee Zaslofsky, Coordinator of the War Resisters Support Campaign and a Vietnam War deserter who came to Canada in 1970.
The War Resisters Support Campaign is calling on the Conservative government to respect the democratic decision of the Canadian Parliament and immediately implement the motion and cease deportation proceedings against Corey Glass and other war resisters.
Posted by redsock at 6/03/2008 03:12:00 PM 13 comments
Labels: canadian politics, war resistersParliament urges Canada to end war resister deportations
On a 137-110 vote, Canadian lawmakers approve the nonbinding motion. It could lead to a last-minute reprieve for a U.S. soldier who deserted in 2006 and has been ordered to leave Canada by June 12.
By Maggie Farley, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
1:41 PM PDT, June 3, 2008
OTTAWA -- Parliament passed a motion this afternoon calling on the Canadian government to stop deportation proceedings against foreign war resisters who have sought refuge in this key U.S. ally.
The measure, though nonbinding, could lead the government to offer a last-minute reprieve for Corey Glass, a 25-year-old American soldier who deserted to Canada in 2006 and has been ordered to leave the country by June 12.
Glass and a busload of resisters came to Ottawa to watch the pivotal hearing, and cheered from the gallery when the motion passed, 137-110.
"This is just great," Glass said. "We hope the will of the Canadian people will be carried out. We will see what happens next."
Despite Canada's history as a haven for as many as 50,000 Vietnam War draft resisters, the new conservative government has stood firm with the Bush administration in supporting the Iraq War and the detention of militants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. But the pending change of U.S. political leadership gives hope to resisters for a change in Canadian policy as well.
"Canada has always been a place that welcomes those who seek peace and freedom," said Bob Rae, a Liberal Party member of Parliament.
"We want to see it remain that way."
Glass joined the National Guard in 2002 after assurances he would not see combat. But he was later deployed to Iraq, where he served as a military intelligence officer. He has said that witnessing the killing of civilians by U.S. troops made him want to quit after his first tour of duty.
"What I saw in Iraq convinced me that the war is illegal and immoral. I could not in good conscience continue to take part in it," Glass said last month after Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board denied him refugee status.
It ruled that he did not face persecution if he returned to the United States.
Glass, who is still on active duty and considered absent without leave, has been working in a funeral home in Toronto since coming to Canada in August 2006.
maggie.farley@latimes.com
Yesterday, the House of Commons did something we haven't seen since the heady wayback days when Trudeaumania gripped the nation.
Taking their collective, if figurative cojones in hand, Liberals and Bloc Quebecois members joined the New Democratic Party (NDP) to endorse its motion to immediately stay deportation proceedings against U.S. military war resisters seeking refuge from American justice here in Canada, and offer those already here, (and perhaps the throng sure to follow) and their families the opportunity to stay, live, and work in Canada as the first steps to naturalization.
Predictably, the Conservative minority government voted in lock-step with their leader, Stephen Harper in opposition, but for the first time since Harper's party took power in 2006, a piece of House business the government did not support was ratified: The NDP motion was endorsed in a 137-110 vote.
This is huge news for the millions of anti-war activists in the United States, and the world, but you would not know it watching the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) news flagship, The National. Though last night's program found more than twenty of its allotted 48 minute broadcast window to devote to Barack Obama's as yet to be ratified "victory" in the Democratic Party's primary race for November's scheduled presidential election, not one second was granted to a story that could have both an earth-shaking effect on Canada's relationship with the United States, and could prove literally a matter of life or death for thousands of refugee soldiers in hiding in Canada and the States.
It could, should the Conservatives honour the will of the House, also mean the beginning of the end to the immoral and illegal wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Canadian Broadcast Corporation chose instead silence.
Joining the CBC's dead air on this issue is Canada's biggest private communications company, CanWest Global. Perusing today's edition of Victoria's only daily, Canwest's Times-Colonist, not one mention of Harper's first defeat in the House, or the ramifications of this historic vote: Blank. It was, as Harold Pinder might say, something that; "...never happened; even as it was happening, it never happened."
The CBC's acquiesence to the promoters of perpetual warfare is not new; the management and its correspondents willingly suspended disbelief when George Bush the Elder told tall tales of American womanhood being violated by thugs in Panama City, thus justifying the destruction of thousands of lives to bring to heel the despot Noriega.
Likewise, the CBC cheered along when George Bush recycled WWI era stories of babes butchered in hospitals by Saddam's sadistic storm troopers in Kuwait, thus justifying the destructions of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives; and just so, the CBC willingly embedded itself within the Clinton administration's hide and marched along with it to war against the next newest Hitler, Milosevic of the Former Yugoslav Republic. There, again, uncounted lives ruined and a country laid waste.
In fact, the CBC is itself a war promoter and profiteer, and they do so now as they have done so for too long.
That Canwest Goebbels would seek to banish to the gulag the only hopeful news to emerge Ottawa, in the form of yesterday's triumph for peace, is par for the course for that pathetic excuse for truthful journalism: We need only remember the sentiment of the late patriarch of the Asper-controlled media behemoth, Israel "Izzy" Asper, who vowed; nary a discouraging word would be heard, nor written, by Canada's predominant media operator concerning his namesake nation's beastly behaviour.
That these latest wars are supported, and some venture were created, by Zionist activists in America and elsewhere, Canwest's deafening silence on the House vote is unsurprising. But, I don't have to pay to hear Canwest's lies; the same is not true for the CBC, for which a portion of my taxes, extracted on pain of imprisonment, supports.
Following WWII, both Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose, well known to British and American troops, were hung by the conquering Allied armies. They were deemed war criminals, whose studio night jobs propagandising for Hitler and Hirohito were justly rewarded at the end of a rope.
Sentenced to death not only for the lies they told, but for the truths they refused to reveal, theirs is a fate perhaps undeserved, but the board and camera talent of the CBC might do well to remember: It was sad Haw Haw's and Madame Rose's enabling role being tried following the horror of their day, and they were found complicit.
That these wars and occupations are immoral is truth. That this crime, (the "mother" of all crimes, another stretch-necked war criminal from the recent past might have said) this abomination against humanity is not George W. Bush's, or even America's alone, but is a conspiring of ruthless corporate and politcal interests literally making a killing killing is truth. That these truths are not acknowledged as such by Canada's media is truth.
While the Corp. won't allow talk of peace to interrupt its war tattoo, they do carry two tales that may make of this "conscientious" stuff a story yet.
Tonight's CBC broadcast of The National reports the body of Captain Richard Stephen Leary arriving home in Canada. Captain Leary's tearful widow, Rachel assures the CBC camera team her husband was killed doing a job he believed in, and says he will be missed. Leary is the 78th Canadian killed outright in Afghanistan. (The Canadian government, like it's American partner, does not do body counts of those it kills and maims in the fields and towns of the occupied territory).
The CBC news website, meanwhile hosts a story about another Canadian soldier preparing for his third deployment to Afghanistan.
It begs the question: If "Canada's New Government," as it insists it be described, refuses to grant haven for those Americans with moral qualms about killing innocent men, women, and children half a world away, where will Canada's first soldiers of conscience go in their turn?
Below are both a letter I received with the minister respsonsible's address and a letter I sent to encourage her conscience. You may consider doing the same.
Chris Cook
Victoria, Canada
June 5, 2008
Greetings minister; I applaud the courage of this House to come forward in support of the motion allowing conscientious objectors stay in Canada until which time it is safe for them to return to their families without fear of persecution. Canadians are fully aware of the nature of these young men and women's objection to the war in Iraq, and many of us share that opinion of this country's involvement in Afghanistan.
I'm writing in hopes your party in government will make good its mandated course with all haste, as I'm sure you and your colleagues, with respect to the will of the House will do; just as I have reassured my many media colleagues around the world: "Canada respects democracy."
Cheers and good governance.
Chris Cook
Managing Editor, Pacific Free Press
Host/Producer, Gorilla Radio
Carol Grier
The motion has passed!
Thanks everyone who called and emailed. The next step is to write to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Diane Finley, and prime minister Stephen Harper to ensure that the will of Parliament is implemented.
Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley
phone 613.996.4974
fax 613.996.9749
email finley.d@parl.gc.ca and finled1@parl.gc.ca
Prime Minister Stephen Harper
phone 613.992.4211
fax 613.941.6900
email pm@pm.gc.ca
parliament says: "let them stay!"
The House of Commons has voted in favour of the resolution that demands the Harper government immediately cease all deportation proceedings against any Iraq War resisters currently in Canada and allow all resisters and their families to remain in Canada and apply for permanent residence.
Vote total announced as Yea: 137 & Nay: 110!!
It was a very simple procedure: The motion was read and then voted on. Yeas stood and were counted, then the Nays. The totals were announced, the speaker declared the motion passed, and they moved on to the next item.
House of Commons votes to let U.S. War Resisters stay in Canada
OTTAWA, June 3 /CNW/ - The Opposition parties in the House of Commons joined together today to adopt a recommendation which, if implemented, would make it possible for U.S. Iraq War resisters to obtain Permanent Resident status in Canada.
The recommendation was adopted by a majority of Members of Parliament from the Liberal, Bloc Québécois, and New Democratic Parties. The Conservatives voted against the motion.
The motion, which originated in the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration in December 2007, calls on the government to "immediately implement a program to allow conscientious objectors and their immediate family members ... to apply for permanent resident status and remain in Canada; and ... the government should immediately cease any removal or deportation actions ... against such individuals."
Corey Glass, 25, a war resister who came to Canada in 2006 and was recently told to leave Canada by June 12 or face removal to the United States, welcomed the vote. "I'm thankful that the MPs voted to let me and the other war resisters stay in Canada. I'm also thankful to all the Canadians who urged their MPs to support us."
"This is a great victory for the courageous men and women who have come to Canada because they refuse to take part in the illegal, immoral Iraq War, and for the many organizations and individuals who have supported this campaign over the past four years," said Lee Zaslofsky, Coordinator of the War Resisters Support Campaign and a Vietnam War deserter who came to Canada in 1970.
The War Resisters Support Campaign is calling on the Conservative government to respect the democratic decision of the Canadian Parliament and immediately implement the motion and cease deportation proceedings against Corey Glass and other war resisters.
Posted by redsock at 6/03/2008 03:12:00 PM 13 comments
Labels: canadian politics, war resistersParliament urges Canada to end war resister deportations
On a 137-110 vote, Canadian lawmakers approve the nonbinding motion. It could lead to a last-minute reprieve for a U.S. soldier who deserted in 2006 and has been ordered to leave Canada by June 12.
By Maggie Farley, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
1:41 PM PDT, June 3, 2008
OTTAWA -- Parliament passed a motion this afternoon calling on the Canadian government to stop deportation proceedings against foreign war resisters who have sought refuge in this key U.S. ally.
The measure, though nonbinding, could lead the government to offer a last-minute reprieve for Corey Glass, a 25-year-old American soldier who deserted to Canada in 2006 and has been ordered to leave the country by June 12.
Glass and a busload of resisters came to Ottawa to watch the pivotal hearing, and cheered from the gallery when the motion passed, 137-110.
"This is just great," Glass said. "We hope the will of the Canadian people will be carried out. We will see what happens next."
Despite Canada's history as a haven for as many as 50,000 Vietnam War draft resisters, the new conservative government has stood firm with the Bush administration in supporting the Iraq War and the detention of militants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. But the pending change of U.S. political leadership gives hope to resisters for a change in Canadian policy as well.
"Canada has always been a place that welcomes those who seek peace and freedom," said Bob Rae, a Liberal Party member of Parliament.
"We want to see it remain that way."
Glass joined the National Guard in 2002 after assurances he would not see combat. But he was later deployed to Iraq, where he served as a military intelligence officer. He has said that witnessing the killing of civilians by U.S. troops made him want to quit after his first tour of duty.
"What I saw in Iraq convinced me that the war is illegal and immoral. I could not in good conscience continue to take part in it," Glass said last month after Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board denied him refugee status.
It ruled that he did not face persecution if he returned to the United States.
Glass, who is still on active duty and considered absent without leave, has been working in a funeral home in Toronto since coming to Canada in August 2006.
maggie.farley@latimes.com
NDP motion to let war resisters stay passes
NDP motion to let war resisters stay passes
Tue 3 Jun 2008
OTTAWA – Iraq War Resisters residing in Canada received overwhelming support from the House of Commons following today’s passage of an NDP motion to let them stay in the country.
NDP Citizenship and Immigration critic, Olivia Chow’s (Trinity-Spadina) motion reflected ordinary Canadians’ belief that George Bush’s war in Iraq is wrong and that resisters should not be deported to jail.
The motion calls on the Harper Conservatives to allow American war resisters who have refused or left military service related to the illegal invasion of Iraq and their immediate family members to stay in Canada and be able to become permanent residents. Furthermore, the motion would force the government to immediately withdraw any removal or deportation orders against War Resisters.
NDP MP Bill Siksay (Burnaby Douglas), moved a similar motion a year ago on May 8, 2007 at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. His motion was rejected by the Conservatives, Liberals and Bloc.
Through ongoing campaigns and mobilizations, supporters have finally been able to sway the Liberal and Bloc vote in support of the war resisters
“Ordinary people want the Iraq war resisters to stay,” said Chow. “The Harper Conservatives must respect this and immediately implement this motion.”
Tue 3 Jun 2008
OTTAWA – Iraq War Resisters residing in Canada received overwhelming support from the House of Commons following today’s passage of an NDP motion to let them stay in the country.
NDP Citizenship and Immigration critic, Olivia Chow’s (Trinity-Spadina) motion reflected ordinary Canadians’ belief that George Bush’s war in Iraq is wrong and that resisters should not be deported to jail.
The motion calls on the Harper Conservatives to allow American war resisters who have refused or left military service related to the illegal invasion of Iraq and their immediate family members to stay in Canada and be able to become permanent residents. Furthermore, the motion would force the government to immediately withdraw any removal or deportation orders against War Resisters.
NDP MP Bill Siksay (Burnaby Douglas), moved a similar motion a year ago on May 8, 2007 at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. His motion was rejected by the Conservatives, Liberals and Bloc.
Through ongoing campaigns and mobilizations, supporters have finally been able to sway the Liberal and Bloc vote in support of the war resisters
“Ordinary people want the Iraq war resisters to stay,” said Chow. “The Harper Conservatives must respect this and immediately implement this motion.”
War and Occupation, American Style
Tomgram: Chris Hedges, War and Occupation, American-style
Written by Tom Engelhardt
Wednesday, 04 June 2008
by Tom Engelhardt
American soldiers have long scrawled messages to the enemy on the bombs they were about to deliver. In the The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes reminds us, for instance, that "Little Boy," the bomb that would inaugurate a new age over Hiroshima, "was inscribed with autographs and messages, some of them obscene. 'Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis,' one challenged." (The Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser which had transported parts of Little Boy to the island of Tinian for assembly, had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine only a week earlier and most of its crew had died at sea under gruesome circumstances.)
Recently, my eye was caught by a report on just such "autographs and messages" from our most recent war. A Washington Post piece discussing the air war over Baghdad and the Hellfire missiles the U.S. military has been regularly firing into the vast Shiite slum, Sadr City, these last months included this passage:
"At a sprawling air base on the outskirts of Baghdad, Edens, Katzenberger and their colleagues live in small trailers surrounded by blast walls, play volleyball on sand courts and eat at an outdoor food court. Many of the pilots are in their 20s. The pilots sometimes scrawl messages on the five-foot-long missiles strapped to their 'birds.' During a recent visit to the base, a reporter saw a missile addressed to 'Haji,' an honorific for people who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Many U.S. soldiers use it to refer dismissively to Iraqis and Arabs in general. Someone wrote 'rock this thang' on another."
"To refer dismissively…": This is the Post's polite way of describing the bedrock racism — the demeaning of the enemy (and hardening of the self) — that is essentially bound to go with any counterinsurgency-cum-neocolonial war like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Few know this better than Pulitzer Prize-winning former war reporter Chris Hedges who, along with Laila al-Arian, has produced a remarkable new book, Collateral Damage, America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (officially published on this very day). Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with veterans of the Iraq war and occupation, it lays out graphically indeed and in their own words the American system of patrols, convoys, home raids, detentions, and military checkpoints that became a living nightmare for civilians in Iraq. Think of their book as a two-person version of the Vietnam-era Winter Soldier Investigation, this time for a war in which Americans have seemed especially uneager to know much about what their troops, many thousands of miles from home, are really doing to the "hajis."
The following piece — with echoes of Hedges's classic work War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning — has been adapted from his introduction to the new book. Tom
Collateral Damage - What It Really Means When America Goes to War
by Chris Hedges
Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations." Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.
Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing — the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm — to murder — the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.
The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. The savagery and brutality of the occupation is tearing apart those who have been deployed to Iraq. As news reports have just informed us, 115 American soldiers committed suicide in 2007. This is a 13% increase in suicides over 2006. And the suicides, as they did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as distraught veterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cotton wool that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality of what they did to innocents in Iraq
American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed within the confines of this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the ideal tragically clash when soldiers and Marines return home. These combat veterans are often alienated from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. They confront the grave, existential crisis of all who go through combat and understand that we have no monopoly on virtue, that in war we become as barbaric and savage as those we oppose.
This is a profound crisis of faith. It shatters the myths, national and religious, that these young men and women were fed before they left for Iraq. In short, they uncover the lie they have been told. Their relationship with the nation will never be the same. These veterans give us a true narrative of the war — one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq. They expose the lie.
War as Betrayal
"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.
"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f — -ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't happen.'"
Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans suffer not only delayed reactions to stress but this crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the awful betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human atrocity, for the stories of heroism used to mask the reality of war.
War is always about betrayal: betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics, and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of America's Iraq War veterans. It has unleashed a new wave of disillusioned veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war's death mask and understand our complicity in evil.
"And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of, 'What the f — - are we doing, that I felt that way in Iraq,'" said Sgt. Ben Flanders, who estimated that he ran hundreds of military convoys in Iraq. "It's the sort of insanity of it and the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people. The only thing that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi — I'm sorry, I'm sorry you live here, I'm sorry this is a terrible situation, and I'm sorry that you have to deal with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these insurgents and all this stuff."
The Hobbesian world of Iraq described by Flanders is one where the ethic is kill or be killed. All nuance and distinction vanished for him. He fell, like most of the occupation troops, into a binary world of us and them, the good and the bad, those worthy of life and those unworthy of life. The vast majority of Iraqi civilians, caught in the middle of the clash among militias, death squads, criminal gangs, foreign fighters, kidnapping rings, terrorists, and heavily armed occupation troops, were just one more impediment that, if they happened to get in the way, had to be eradicated. These Iraqis were no longer human. They were abstractions in human form.
"The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get off the plane and you're holding a duffel bag in each hand," Millard remembered. "You've got your weapon slung. You've got a web sack on your back. You're dying of heat. You're tired. You're jet-lagged. Your mind is just full of goop. And then you're scared on top of that, because, you know, you're in Kuwait, you're not in the States anymore... So fear sets in, too. And they sit you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you know, you can't trust any of these f — -ing hajis, because all these f — -king hajis are going to kill you. And 'haji' is always used as a term of disrespect and usually with the F-word in front of it."
The press coverage of the war in Iraq rarely exposes the twisted pathology of this war. We see the war from the perspective of the troops or from the equally skewed perspective of the foreign reporters, holed up in hotels, hemmed in by drivers and translators and official security and military escorts. There are moments when war's face appears to these voyeurs and professional killers, perhaps from the back seat of a car where a small child, her brains oozing out of her head, lies dying, but mostly it remains hidden. And all our knowledge of the war in Iraq has to be viewed as lacking the sweep and depth that will come one day, perhaps years from now, when a small Iraqi boy reaches adulthood and unfolds for us the sad and tragic story of the invasion and bloody occupation of his nation.
As the war sours, as it no longer fits into the mythical narrative of us as liberators and victors, it fades from view. The cable news shows that packaged and sold us the war have stopped covering it, trading the awful carnage of bomb blasts in Baghdad for the soap-opera sagas of Roger Clemens, Miley Cyrus, and Britney Spears in her eternal meltdown. Average monthly coverage of the war in Iraq on the ABC, NBC, and CBS newscasts combined has been cut in half, falling from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in 2005. And newspapers, including papers like the Boston Globe, have shut down their Baghdad bureaus. Deprived of a clear, heroic narrative, restricted and hemmed in by security concerns, they have walked away.
Most reporters know that the invasion and the occupation have been a catastrophe. They know the Iraqis do not want us. They know about the cooked intelligence, spoon-fed to a compliant press by the Office of Special Plans and Lewis Libby's White House Iraq Group. They know about Curveball, the forged documents out of Niger, the outed CIA operatives, and the bogus British intelligence dossiers that were taken from old magazine articles. They know the weapons of mass destruction were destroyed long before we arrived. They know that our military as well as our National Guard and reserve units are being degraded and decimated. They know this war is not about bringing democracy to Iraq, that all the clichés about staying the course and completing the mission are used to make sure the president and his allies do not pay a political price while in power for their blunders and their folly.
The press knows all this, and if reporters had bothered to look they could have known it a long time ago. But the press, or at least most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth.
The Legions of the Lost and Damned
War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy lives. It allows us to destroy not only things and ideas but human beings.
In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to revoke another person's charter to live on this Earth. The frenzy of this destruction — and when unit discipline breaks down, or when there was no unit discipline to begin with, "frenzy" is the right word — sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir that our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects — objects either to gratify or destroy, or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices, and convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in airstrikes and firepower that obliterate landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can instantly give or deprive human life, and with this power they become sick and demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings are used as objects. And no one walks away uninfected.
War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence, human life is cheap, and the gratification of the moment becomes the overriding desire that must be satiated, even at the cost of another's dignity or life.
"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Spc. Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, 20 year-old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg, and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day for having a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40 year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can — do you know what I mean? — we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol, and to stay alive.
"It's like, you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullsh-t."
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage, which these veterans have exhibited by telling us the truth about the war, is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak to its reality. They push aside these witnesses to hide from a public eager for stories of war that fit the mythic narrative of glory and heroism the essence of war, which is death. War, as these veterans explain, exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us. This is the truth these veterans, often with great pain, have had to face.
The historian Christopher Browning chronicled the willingness to kill in Ordinary Men, his study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during World War II. On the morning of July 12, 1942, the battalion, made up of middle-aged recruits, was ordered to shoot 1,800 Jews in the village of Józefów in a daylong action. The men in the unit had to round up the Jews, march them into the forest, and one by one order them to lie down in a row. The victims, including women, infants, children, and the elderly, were shot dead at close range.
Battalion members were offered the option to refuse, an option only about a dozen men took, although a few more asked to be relieved once the killing began. Those who did not want to continue, Browning says, were disgusted rather than plagued by conscience. When the men returned to the barracks they "were depressed, angered, embittered and shaken." They drank heavily. They were told not to talk about the event, "but they needed no encouragement in that direction."
Each generation responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment, often at a terrible personal price. And the war in Iraq has begun to produce legions of the lost and the damned, many of whom battle the emotional and physical trauma that comes from killing and exposure to violence.
Punishing the Local Population
Sgt. Camilo MejÃa, who eventually applied while still on active duty to become a conscientious objector, said the ugly side of American racism and chauvinism appeared the moment his unit arrived in the Middle East. Fellow soldiers instantly ridiculed Arab-style toilets because they would be "sh-tting like dogs." The troops around him treated Iraqis, whose language they did not speak and whose culture was alien, little better than animals.
The word "haji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese and "raghead" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan. Soon those around him ridiculed "haji food," "haji homes," and "haji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked and left to stand terrified for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," MejÃa remembered, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
These scenes of abuse, which began immediately after the American invasion, were little more than collective acts of sadism. MejÃa watched, not daring to intervene yet increasingly disgusted at the treatment of Iraqi civilians. He saw how the callous and unchecked abuse of power first led to alienation among Iraqis and spawned a raw hatred of the occupation forces. When Army units raided homes, the soldiers burst in on frightened families, forced them to huddle in the corners at gunpoint, and helped themselves to food and items in the house.
"After we arrested drivers," he recalled, "we would choose whichever vehicles we liked, fuel them from confiscated jerry cans, and conduct undercover presence patrols in the impounded cars.
"But to this day I cannot find a single good answer as to why I stood by idly during the abuse of those prisoners except, of course, my own cowardice," he also noted.
Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son. Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot sh-t up," a soldier said. Some opened fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices (IEDS) went off, the troops fired wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who became, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."
"We would drive on the wrong side of the highway to reduce the risk of being hit by an IED," MejÃa said of the deadly roadside bombs. "This forced oncoming vehicles to move to one side of the road and considerably slowed down the flow of traffic. In order to avoid being held up in traffic jams, where someone could roll a grenade under our trucks, we would simply drive up on sidewalks, running over garbage cans and even hitting civilian vehicles to push them out of the way. Many of the soldiers would laugh and shriek at these tactics."
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. MejÃa and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man's body with bullets. MejÃa checked his clip afterward and determined that he had fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers, and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.
"The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," MejÃa said, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."
The Algebra of Occupation
It is the anonymity of the enemy that fuels the mounting rage. Comrades are maimed or die, and there is no one to lash back at, unless it is the hapless civilians who happen to live in the neighborhood where the explosion or ambush occurred. Soldiers and Marines can do two or three tours in Iraq and never actually see the enemy, although their units come under attack and take numerous casualties. These troops, who entered Baghdad in triumph when Iraq was occupied, soon saw the decisive victory over Saddam Hussein's army evolve into a messy war of attrition.
The superior firepower and lightning victory was canceled out by what T. E. Lawrence once called the "algebra of occupation." Writing about the British occupation of Iraq following the Ottoman Empire's collapse in World War I, Lawrence, in lessons these veterans have had to learn on their own, highlighted what has always doomed conventional, foreign occupying powers.
"Rebellion must have an unassailable base… it must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts," Lawrence wrote. "It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 percent active in a striking force, and 98 percent passive sympathy. Granted mobility, security… time and doctrine… victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive."
The failure in Iraq is the same failure that bedeviled the French in Algeria; the United States in Vietnam; and the British, who for 800 years beat, imprisoned, transported, shot, and hanged hundreds of thousands of Irish patriots. Occupation, in each case, turned the occupiers into beasts and fed the insurrection. It created patterns where innocents, as in Iraq, were terrorized and killed. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans said, has given rise to a culture of terror and hatred among U.S. forces, many of whom, losing ground, have in effect declared war on all Iraqis.
MejÃa said, regarding the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, "This sort of killing of civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment."
MejÃa also watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. He related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck. "Take a picture of me and this motherf — -er," said one of the soldiers who had been in MejÃa's squad in Third Platoon, putting his arm around the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body, revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
"Damn, they really f — -ed you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.
The scene, MejÃa noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.
The senior officers, protected in heavily fortified compounds, rarely experienced combat. They sent their troops on futile missions in the quest to be awarded Combat Infantry Badges. This recognition, MejÃa noted, "was essential to their further progress up the officer ranks."
This pattern meant that "very few high-ranking officers actually got out into the action, and lower-ranking officers were afraid to contradict them when they were wrong." When the badges — bearing an emblem of a musket with the hammer dropped, resting on top of an oak wreath — were finally awarded, the commanders brought in Iraqi tailors to sew the badges on the left breast pockets of their desert combat uniforms.
"This was one occasion when our leaders led from the front," MejÃa noted bitterly. "They were among the first to visit the tailors to get their little patches of glory sewn next to their hearts."
War breeds gratuitous, senseless, and repeated acts of atrocity and violence. Abuse of the powerless becomes a kind of perverted sport for the troops.
"I mean, if someone has a fan, they're a white-collar family," said Spc. Philip Chrystal, who carried out raids on Iraqi homes in Kirkuk. "So we get started on this day, this one, in particular. And it starts with the psy-ops [psychological operations] vehicles out there, you know, with the big speakers playing a message in Arabic or Farsi or Kurdish or whatever they happen to be saying, basically, saying put your weapons, if you have them, next to the front door in your house. Please come outside, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had Apaches flying over for security, if they're needed, and it's also a good show of force. And we were running around, and we'd done a few houses by this point, and I was with my platoon leader, my squad leader, and maybe a couple other people, but I don't really remember.
"And we were approaching this one house, and this farming area; they're, like, built up into little courtyards," he said. "So they have like the main house, common area. They have like a kitchen and then they have like a storage-shed-type deal. And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't — motherf — -er — he shot it, and it went in the jaw and exited out.
"So I see this dog — and I'm a huge animal lover. I love animals — and this dog has like these eyes on it, and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And the family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so I yell at him. I'm like, ‘What the f — - are you doing?' And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just scared. And so I told them, I was like, 'F — -ing shoot it,' you know. 'At least kill it, because that can't be fixed. It's suffering.' And I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but — and I had tears then, too — and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and I get my wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that. Which was very common.
"Was a report ever filed about it?" he asked. "Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out? No, absolutely not."
The Plaster Saints of War
The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of "glory," "honor," and "patriotism" to mask the cries of the wounded, the brutal killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war.
The vanquished know the essence of war — death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin, with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity.
But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children: what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and to be discarded as human refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to look.
We are trapped in a doomed war of attrition in Iraq. We have blundered into a nation we know little about, caught in bitter rivalries between competing ethnic and religious groups. Iraq was a cesspool for the British in 1917 when they occupied it. It will be a cesspool for us as well. We have embarked on an occupation that is as damaging to our souls as to our prestige and power and security. We have become tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. And we believe, falsely, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war.
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chests for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak, and rule. This is our nation's idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits — few people in pulpits have much worth listening to — but are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us into perversion, trauma, and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is the author of several books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. This piece has been adapted from the introduction to the just-published, Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (Nation Books), which he has co-authored with Laila al-Arian.
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