How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA
A new model of the way the THz waves interact with DNA explains how the damage is done and why evidence has been so hard to gather
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24331/
Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and "frisk" people at distance.
The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted can also be used to determine the chemical composition of a material. And even though they don't travel far inside the body, there is great hope that the waves can be used to spot tumours near the surface of the skin.
With all that potential, it's no wonder that research on terahertz waves has exploded in the last ten years or so.
But what of the health effects of terahertz waves? At first glance, it's easy to dismiss any notion that they can be damaging. Terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionise atoms or molecules, the chief reasons why higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays are so bad for us. But could there be another mechanism at work?
The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. "Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none," say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.
Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they've found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That's a jaw dropping conclusion.
And it also explains why the evidence has been so hard to garner. Ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do do this kind of damage but nonlinear resonances can. These nonlinear instabilities are much less likely to form which explains why the character of THz genotoxic
effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic, say the team.
This should set the cat among the pigeons. Of course, terahertz waves are a natural part of environment, just like visible and infrared light. But a new generation of cameras are set to appear that not only record terahertz waves but also bombard us with them. And if our exposure is set to increase, the question that urgently needs answering is what level of terahertz exposure is safe.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0910.5294: DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Peter Kent Says...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/attack-on-israel-is-an-attack-on-canada-kent-says/article1470538/
Steven Chase
Ottawa — Globe and Mail Update Published on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2010 10:53PM EST Last updated on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010 7:52AM EST
Junior Foreign Affairs minister Peter Kent is suggesting Canada would rush to Israel's defence in a military confrontation, telling a Toronto publication that "an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada."
But he later declined to say whether this means that Canada would automatically declare war on an aggressor attacking Israel.
In an interview published Feb. 12 in Shalom Life – discussing the threat from Iran – Mr. Kent said: "Prime Minister Harper has made it quite clear for some time now and has regularly stated that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada."
Mr. Kent's statement appears to be evidence the Harper government is shifting to an even stronger pro-Israel stance.
His wording – which goes beyond Mr. Harper's previous comments on Israel – evokes Article 5 of the NATO treaty which says "an armed attack against one or more [parties] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all."
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Kent, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of the Americas, dismissed the idea he was altering Canadian foreign policy, saying his comments paraphrased what Stephen Harper has said before.
Mr. Kent declined to say whether this means Canada is ready to join a war against a country that attacked Israel.
"You're putting words in my mouth; we don't have to be this absolute," he said.
At the same time, Mr. Kent sounded a warning note, saying that even though Israel and Canada don't have a military treaty – like the NATO pact – Ottawa is not bluffing.
"There is no military treaty but I think the Prime Minister's … commitment is quite clear: We don't pay lip service to our commitments to friends and allies."
He apologized for the "sometimes imprecision of diplomacy," but said Israel is clear on what Canada means.
"Israel is not in any doubt … as to the degree of Canada's commitment," Mr. Kent said. "And I would hope that any potential aggressor would consider that seriously."
Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Canada-Israel Committee, said it's hard to predict exactly what Canada's commitment would entail in the event of an attack on Israel by Iran.
But he lauded Canada's decision to stand in solidarity with Israel as a democracy. "It's an incredibly positive and assertive comment," he said. Mr. Fogel said it's also recognition an attack on Israel would have an incredibly destabilizing impact on the region. He said statements such as Mr. Kent's ultimately send a signal to Iran that Canada will stand together with Israel if it is attacked.
"We're not simply talking about a rhetorical statement," he said.
The Prime Minister's Office backed up Mr. Kent, saying his words mirror what Mr. Harper has said before, including a speech in May, 2008, in which he said: "Those who threaten Israel also threaten Canada, because, as the last world war showed, hate-fuelled bigotry against some is ultimately a threat to us all, and must be resisted wherever it may lurk."
Khaled Mouammar, national president of the Canadian Arab Federation, panned Mr. Kent’s comments, saying Canada is joining arms with a country alleged to have committed war crimes in Gaza strip during the 2008-09 conflict there.
"It is regrettable that our government has chosen to ally itself with the government of Israel which the United Nations fact finding mission, led by renowned Jewish South African judge Richard Goldstone, found guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza," Mr. Mouammar said in a statement.
The extremely controversial UN report by Mr. Goldstone in fact accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes during the 2008-09 conflict.
Steven Chase
Ottawa — Globe and Mail Update Published on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2010 10:53PM EST Last updated on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010 7:52AM EST
Junior Foreign Affairs minister Peter Kent is suggesting Canada would rush to Israel's defence in a military confrontation, telling a Toronto publication that "an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada."
But he later declined to say whether this means that Canada would automatically declare war on an aggressor attacking Israel.
In an interview published Feb. 12 in Shalom Life – discussing the threat from Iran – Mr. Kent said: "Prime Minister Harper has made it quite clear for some time now and has regularly stated that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada."
Mr. Kent's statement appears to be evidence the Harper government is shifting to an even stronger pro-Israel stance.
His wording – which goes beyond Mr. Harper's previous comments on Israel – evokes Article 5 of the NATO treaty which says "an armed attack against one or more [parties] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all."
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Kent, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of the Americas, dismissed the idea he was altering Canadian foreign policy, saying his comments paraphrased what Stephen Harper has said before.
Mr. Kent declined to say whether this means Canada is ready to join a war against a country that attacked Israel.
"You're putting words in my mouth; we don't have to be this absolute," he said.
At the same time, Mr. Kent sounded a warning note, saying that even though Israel and Canada don't have a military treaty – like the NATO pact – Ottawa is not bluffing.
"There is no military treaty but I think the Prime Minister's … commitment is quite clear: We don't pay lip service to our commitments to friends and allies."
He apologized for the "sometimes imprecision of diplomacy," but said Israel is clear on what Canada means.
"Israel is not in any doubt … as to the degree of Canada's commitment," Mr. Kent said. "And I would hope that any potential aggressor would consider that seriously."
Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Canada-Israel Committee, said it's hard to predict exactly what Canada's commitment would entail in the event of an attack on Israel by Iran.
But he lauded Canada's decision to stand in solidarity with Israel as a democracy. "It's an incredibly positive and assertive comment," he said. Mr. Fogel said it's also recognition an attack on Israel would have an incredibly destabilizing impact on the region. He said statements such as Mr. Kent's ultimately send a signal to Iran that Canada will stand together with Israel if it is attacked.
"We're not simply talking about a rhetorical statement," he said.
The Prime Minister's Office backed up Mr. Kent, saying his words mirror what Mr. Harper has said before, including a speech in May, 2008, in which he said: "Those who threaten Israel also threaten Canada, because, as the last world war showed, hate-fuelled bigotry against some is ultimately a threat to us all, and must be resisted wherever it may lurk."
Khaled Mouammar, national president of the Canadian Arab Federation, panned Mr. Kent’s comments, saying Canada is joining arms with a country alleged to have committed war crimes in Gaza strip during the 2008-09 conflict there.
"It is regrettable that our government has chosen to ally itself with the government of Israel which the United Nations fact finding mission, led by renowned Jewish South African judge Richard Goldstone, found guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza," Mr. Mouammar said in a statement.
The extremely controversial UN report by Mr. Goldstone in fact accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes during the 2008-09 conflict.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Shrimp Wars: Faroes, Greenland Shut Out of Canadian Ports
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/02/14/faroe-greenland-shrimp-shea.html?ref=rss&loomia_si=t0:a16:g2:r3:c0.0751325:b30662634
Canada to close ports to Faroes, Greenland vessels
Last Updated: Sunday, February 14, 201
CBC News
Canada is going to close its ports to vessels from the Faroe Islands and Greenland on Monday because of shrimp overfishing, federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said Sunday.
The Faroes and Greenland have refused to abide by quotas set by the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), which sets catch limits for each member.
"We have acted in good faith for several years to try to resolve this issue, to no avail," Shea said in a news release.
Canada originally closed its ports to vessels from the Faroes and Greenland in December 2004, but reopened them in March 2008 as a sign of good faith.
Now, however, the minister has followed up on a warning issued Jan. 26, when she said the ports would be closed unless the Faroes and Greenland withdrew an objection to the NAFO shrimp quota in NAFO area 3L, in the north Atlantic east of St. John's beyond Canada's 200-mile limit.
Denmark, which acts on behalf of the Faroes and Greenland in international matters, unilaterally set a 3L shrimp quota of 3,101 tonnes, almost 10 times greater than their NAFO quota of 334 tonnes.
"Their continued overfishing is unacceptable," Shea said on Jan. 26.
The minister said Sunday she would be willing to meet her counterparts from the Faroes and Greenland to resolve the issue "at their earliest convenience."
Both the Faroe Islands and Greenland are self-governing overseas administrative divisions of Denmark.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/02/14/faroe-greenland-shrimp-shea.html?ref=rss&loomia_si=t0:a16:g2:r3:c0.0751325:b30662634#ixzz0fZsPBygG
Canada to close ports to Faroes, Greenland vessels
Last Updated: Sunday, February 14, 201
CBC News
Canada is going to close its ports to vessels from the Faroe Islands and Greenland on Monday because of shrimp overfishing, federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said Sunday.
The Faroes and Greenland have refused to abide by quotas set by the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), which sets catch limits for each member.
"We have acted in good faith for several years to try to resolve this issue, to no avail," Shea said in a news release.
Canada originally closed its ports to vessels from the Faroes and Greenland in December 2004, but reopened them in March 2008 as a sign of good faith.
Now, however, the minister has followed up on a warning issued Jan. 26, when she said the ports would be closed unless the Faroes and Greenland withdrew an objection to the NAFO shrimp quota in NAFO area 3L, in the north Atlantic east of St. John's beyond Canada's 200-mile limit.
Denmark, which acts on behalf of the Faroes and Greenland in international matters, unilaterally set a 3L shrimp quota of 3,101 tonnes, almost 10 times greater than their NAFO quota of 334 tonnes.
"Their continued overfishing is unacceptable," Shea said on Jan. 26.
The minister said Sunday she would be willing to meet her counterparts from the Faroes and Greenland to resolve the issue "at their earliest convenience."
Both the Faroe Islands and Greenland are self-governing overseas administrative divisions of Denmark.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/02/14/faroe-greenland-shrimp-shea.html?ref=rss&loomia_si=t0:a16:g2:r3:c0.0751325:b30662634#ixzz0fZsPBygG
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Ottawa Chills Canadian Aid Climate
Canadian aid groups told to keep quiet on policy issues
Earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince wait in line to collect water this week. Aid groups in Canada say they've been warned by the Conservatives not to weigh in on policy.
by Campbell Clark
G&M
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canadian-aid-groups-told-to-keep-quiet-on-policy-issues/article1465349/
Non-governmental organizations say they're receiving veiled warnings about positions that clash with Ottawa's
Ottawa — From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 9:30PM EST Last updated on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 11:11PM EST
Aid groups say the federal government is casting a chill over advocacy work that takes positions on policy or political issues – and one claims a senior Conservative aide warned them against such activities.
An official with a mainstream non-governmental aid group said that Keith Fountain, policy director for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, gave a verbal warning that the organization's policy positions were under scrutiny: “Be careful about your advocacy.”
The official did not want to be identified out of concern that it might jeopardize funding for the group's aid projects from the Canadian International Development Agency, or CIDA.
That's a concern voiced by some other NGO leaders, who said they have received hints the government dislikes their policy advocacy or criticisms of the government policies, but did not want to be identified.
Most aid organizations, from church-based organizations such as Anglican and Mennonite aid agencies to big agencies such as World Vision, Oxfam and CARE, take public positions on some policy issues, and some organize letter-writing campaigns or publish pamphlets.
The aid groups use CIDA money to finance 75 per cent of specific programs, but don't use it for advocacy.
Some have had veiled warnings about positions that clash with Ottawa's on issues such as climate change, free trade with Colombia, or the Middle East, said Gerry Barr, president of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, an umbrella group.
“NGOs are being positively invited to remain silent on key questions of public policy,” he said.
Cheryl Curtis, executive director of the Anglican Church's Primate's World Relief and Development Fund, said government officials have never warned her organization about public-policy positions, but other aid organizations have reported such messages.
“We've certainly heard that amongst colleagues,” she said, adding: “There clearly is a conversation that's brewing at the government level.”
But the government insists that is not so.
A spokesman for Ms. Oda, Jean-Luc Benoit, did not specifically respond to a question about whether Mr. Fountain had warned an aid agency about its advocacy work. But he said an NGO's funding is evaluated on effectiveness in delivering aid and matching CIDA's aid priorities.
“This is about best use of taxpayers' dollars to help the poor, not about what these organizations do with their own money,” Mr. Benoit said in an e-mail.
The fears among the NGOs have been amplified by the government's move to reject a $7-million funding request from Kairos, an aid organization backed by a coalition of churches.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said publicly that Kairos was de-funded because it supported a boycott campaign against Israel. (Kairos insists it doesn't support a boycott.)
The government later backtracked and said the agency's funding was turned down because it did not meet CIDA's new areas of focus. But Ms. Curtis, who is also chair of Kairos's board of directors, said the feeling that the agency lost funding for political reasons has not gone away.
“Each and every one of us who are members of Kairos feel that keenly,” she said.
Another aid NGO, the left-leaning Montreal-based Alternatives, can't get CIDA to return its calls since the National Post – citing unnamed government sources – reported that the organization's long-standing $2.1-million funding proposal would be rejected because of its political advocacy. Its most recent aid funding ran out last March.
Alternatives produces a newspaper that has published left-wing commentators and, for example, a piece that made a controversial argument for a “united Israel” and against Israel's status as a Jewish state – rather than the internationally endorsed “two-state solution” of Israel existing beside a separate Palestinian state.
“Everything we hear is that Alternatives' advocacy work is the main reason we'll eventually be cut,” said the organization's executive director, Michel Lambert.
Earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince wait in line to collect water this week. Aid groups in Canada say they've been warned by the Conservatives not to weigh in on policy.
by Campbell Clark
G&M
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canadian-aid-groups-told-to-keep-quiet-on-policy-issues/article1465349/
Non-governmental organizations say they're receiving veiled warnings about positions that clash with Ottawa's
Ottawa — From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 9:30PM EST Last updated on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 11:11PM EST
Aid groups say the federal government is casting a chill over advocacy work that takes positions on policy or political issues – and one claims a senior Conservative aide warned them against such activities.
An official with a mainstream non-governmental aid group said that Keith Fountain, policy director for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, gave a verbal warning that the organization's policy positions were under scrutiny: “Be careful about your advocacy.”
The official did not want to be identified out of concern that it might jeopardize funding for the group's aid projects from the Canadian International Development Agency, or CIDA.
That's a concern voiced by some other NGO leaders, who said they have received hints the government dislikes their policy advocacy or criticisms of the government policies, but did not want to be identified.
Most aid organizations, from church-based organizations such as Anglican and Mennonite aid agencies to big agencies such as World Vision, Oxfam and CARE, take public positions on some policy issues, and some organize letter-writing campaigns or publish pamphlets.
The aid groups use CIDA money to finance 75 per cent of specific programs, but don't use it for advocacy.
Some have had veiled warnings about positions that clash with Ottawa's on issues such as climate change, free trade with Colombia, or the Middle East, said Gerry Barr, president of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, an umbrella group.
“NGOs are being positively invited to remain silent on key questions of public policy,” he said.
Cheryl Curtis, executive director of the Anglican Church's Primate's World Relief and Development Fund, said government officials have never warned her organization about public-policy positions, but other aid organizations have reported such messages.
“We've certainly heard that amongst colleagues,” she said, adding: “There clearly is a conversation that's brewing at the government level.”
But the government insists that is not so.
A spokesman for Ms. Oda, Jean-Luc Benoit, did not specifically respond to a question about whether Mr. Fountain had warned an aid agency about its advocacy work. But he said an NGO's funding is evaluated on effectiveness in delivering aid and matching CIDA's aid priorities.
“This is about best use of taxpayers' dollars to help the poor, not about what these organizations do with their own money,” Mr. Benoit said in an e-mail.
The fears among the NGOs have been amplified by the government's move to reject a $7-million funding request from Kairos, an aid organization backed by a coalition of churches.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said publicly that Kairos was de-funded because it supported a boycott campaign against Israel. (Kairos insists it doesn't support a boycott.)
The government later backtracked and said the agency's funding was turned down because it did not meet CIDA's new areas of focus. But Ms. Curtis, who is also chair of Kairos's board of directors, said the feeling that the agency lost funding for political reasons has not gone away.
“Each and every one of us who are members of Kairos feel that keenly,” she said.
Another aid NGO, the left-leaning Montreal-based Alternatives, can't get CIDA to return its calls since the National Post – citing unnamed government sources – reported that the organization's long-standing $2.1-million funding proposal would be rejected because of its political advocacy. Its most recent aid funding ran out last March.
Alternatives produces a newspaper that has published left-wing commentators and, for example, a piece that made a controversial argument for a “united Israel” and against Israel's status as a Jewish state – rather than the internationally endorsed “two-state solution” of Israel existing beside a separate Palestinian state.
“Everything we hear is that Alternatives' advocacy work is the main reason we'll eventually be cut,” said the organization's executive director, Michel Lambert.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Privileges Assumed and Taken: Harper and "Executive Privilege"
Harper assumes powers of executive privilege, U.S.-presidential style
A dispute that began with stonewalled reports of Afghan prisoner abuse is set to become the crucible that determines if the Prime Minister or Parliament is now supreme.
By JAMES TRAVERS
Published December 21, 2009
http://www.hilltimes.com/page/view/inside_politics_2-12-21-2009
OTTAWA—Pierre Trudeau first freed the genie of expansive prime ministerial power. Now an increasingly feeble Parliament is trying to stuff the monster back into the bottle by demanding Stephen Harper release uncensored documents on Afghanistan prisoner abuse.
At stake is the ability to hold the ruling party accountable between elections. Already dangerously diminished, that capacity will shrink to irrelevance if the Prime Minister wins what is fast becoming an annual Parliament Hill showdown.
On the surface, the current clash favours opposition parties. Armed with legal opinion and the majority of seats won in the 2008 campaign, they have the theoretical right and political numbers to insist the government reveals what Conservatives are desperate to keep secret.
Worse still for the ruling party, the defence is porous.
National security concerns can be easily satisfied either by releasing the documents to MPs under the protection of secrecy laws or, by naming a judge—as Ottawa did in the Maher Arar case—to decide what is damaging to the country as opposed to injurious to politicians.
But the opposition's upper hand is deceptive. As the coalition parties learned during last year's Christmas crisis, a cornered Prime Minister is formidable prey.
Facing certain defeat, Harper escaped by persuading the Governor General to suspend Parliament and by convincing a surprising number of civics-challenged citizens that he alone could rule. On balance, Michaëlle Jean was right. By any measure beyond a propaganda triumph, Harper was wrong.
Americans directly choose presidents; Canadians elect Members of Parliament. In the absence of U.S. checks and balances, prime ministers are controlled by the confidence of the Commons.
How loose that control has become was exposed by the Quebec sponsorship scandal. Not only were MPs in the dark about how Liberals were misspending public money, Justice John Gomery couldn't follow the dollars through the maze of "mechanics" up the command chain to a responsible minister.
Conservatives won the 2006 election in part by promising transparency. Since then, Ottawa has become only more opaque as the result of the resolute Conservative effort to mute public watchdogs, pass the buck to civil servants and continue concentrating power among appointed partisans in the Prime Minister's Office.
Those factors are coalescing again in a replay of recent history. Denied vital facts, MPs are lost along the Afghanistan prisoner paper trail. Bureaucrats, most notably diplomat Richard Colvin, are the designated scapegoats. By balking at Parliament's demand for information, Harper is assuming powers of executive privilege normally associated with U.S. presidents, not Canadian prime ministers.
Forcing compliance and re-establishing the democratic balance of power is as straightforward as it is twisted. At the first opportunity, opposition parties can defeat Conservatives in the Commons, forcing election-weary voters back to the polls.
Not an appealing political proposition. The loss of Commons confidence is still the appropriate democratic response if the threat of an unwanted campaign, the possible embarrassment of a court challenge or Parliamentary censure fail to cool overheated heads. If not, a dispute that began with stonewalled reports of Afghan prisoner abuse is set to become the crucible that determines if the Prime Minister or Parliament is now supreme.
James Travers is a national affairs columnist with The Toronto Star. This column was released on Dec. 15.
news@hilltimes.com
The Hill Times
A dispute that began with stonewalled reports of Afghan prisoner abuse is set to become the crucible that determines if the Prime Minister or Parliament is now supreme.
By JAMES TRAVERS
Published December 21, 2009
http://www.hilltimes.com/page/view/inside_politics_2-12-21-2009
OTTAWA—Pierre Trudeau first freed the genie of expansive prime ministerial power. Now an increasingly feeble Parliament is trying to stuff the monster back into the bottle by demanding Stephen Harper release uncensored documents on Afghanistan prisoner abuse.
At stake is the ability to hold the ruling party accountable between elections. Already dangerously diminished, that capacity will shrink to irrelevance if the Prime Minister wins what is fast becoming an annual Parliament Hill showdown.
On the surface, the current clash favours opposition parties. Armed with legal opinion and the majority of seats won in the 2008 campaign, they have the theoretical right and political numbers to insist the government reveals what Conservatives are desperate to keep secret.
Worse still for the ruling party, the defence is porous.
National security concerns can be easily satisfied either by releasing the documents to MPs under the protection of secrecy laws or, by naming a judge—as Ottawa did in the Maher Arar case—to decide what is damaging to the country as opposed to injurious to politicians.
But the opposition's upper hand is deceptive. As the coalition parties learned during last year's Christmas crisis, a cornered Prime Minister is formidable prey.
Facing certain defeat, Harper escaped by persuading the Governor General to suspend Parliament and by convincing a surprising number of civics-challenged citizens that he alone could rule. On balance, Michaëlle Jean was right. By any measure beyond a propaganda triumph, Harper was wrong.
Americans directly choose presidents; Canadians elect Members of Parliament. In the absence of U.S. checks and balances, prime ministers are controlled by the confidence of the Commons.
How loose that control has become was exposed by the Quebec sponsorship scandal. Not only were MPs in the dark about how Liberals were misspending public money, Justice John Gomery couldn't follow the dollars through the maze of "mechanics" up the command chain to a responsible minister.
Conservatives won the 2006 election in part by promising transparency. Since then, Ottawa has become only more opaque as the result of the resolute Conservative effort to mute public watchdogs, pass the buck to civil servants and continue concentrating power among appointed partisans in the Prime Minister's Office.
Those factors are coalescing again in a replay of recent history. Denied vital facts, MPs are lost along the Afghanistan prisoner paper trail. Bureaucrats, most notably diplomat Richard Colvin, are the designated scapegoats. By balking at Parliament's demand for information, Harper is assuming powers of executive privilege normally associated with U.S. presidents, not Canadian prime ministers.
Forcing compliance and re-establishing the democratic balance of power is as straightforward as it is twisted. At the first opportunity, opposition parties can defeat Conservatives in the Commons, forcing election-weary voters back to the polls.
Not an appealing political proposition. The loss of Commons confidence is still the appropriate democratic response if the threat of an unwanted campaign, the possible embarrassment of a court challenge or Parliamentary censure fail to cool overheated heads. If not, a dispute that began with stonewalled reports of Afghan prisoner abuse is set to become the crucible that determines if the Prime Minister or Parliament is now supreme.
James Travers is a national affairs columnist with The Toronto Star. This column was released on Dec. 15.
news@hilltimes.com
The Hill Times
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Istanbul: A Week Of Western War Councils
The Planning of War Behind Closed Doors
Brussels, London, Istanbul: A Week Of Western War Councils
by Rick Rozoff
Global Research, February 5, 2010
Stop NATO
The defense chiefs of all 28 NATO nations and an undisclosed number of counterparts from non-Alliance partners gathered in Istanbul, Turkey on February 4 to begin two days of meetings focused on the war in Afghanistan, the withdrawal of military forces from Kosovo in the course of transferring control of security operations to the breakaway province's embryonic army (the Kosovo Security Force) and "the transformation efforts required to best conduct the full range of NATO’s agreed missions." [1]
Istanbul was the site of the bloc's 2004 summit which accounted for the largest expansion in its 60-year history - seven new Eastern European nations - and its strengthening military partnerships with thirteen Middle Eastern and African nations under the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative.
The Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis and the top commander of all U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan - soon to reach over 150,000 - General Stanley McChrystal are also in attendance, as are European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton and United Nations High Representative for Afghanistan Kai Eide as well as the defense and interior ministers of Afghanistan.
The meetings follow by a week the International Conference on Afghanistan held in London, which in turn occurred the day after two days of meetings of the NATO Military Committee with the Chiefs of Defense of the military bloc's 28 member states and 35 more from what were described as Troop Contributing Nations; presumably NATO partner nations with troops stationed in the Afghan war theater. In all, the military chiefs of 63 countries.
The U.S.'s McChrystal was present there also as were Israeli Chief of General Staff Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi and Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Beforehand the bloc's website reported that "The various meetings will focus on the progress made in ongoing operations and the New Strategic Concept for NATO." [2] That 35 top military commanders from non-NATO countries were present to hear plans for the escalation of what is already the largest war in the world is understandable, as their forces are on the ground as part of a 50-nation plus force under NATO military command.
That the same conference discussed the bloc's 21st century new global military doctrine - former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright delivered an address on the topic - raises the question of how many of the 35 partner states' military chiefs may have joined their 28 NATO colleagues for that phase of discussions. That such a high percentage of the world's leading military commanders attended a two-day affair which deliberated on both the war in South Asia and the expansion of the world's only military bloc's activities even further outside the Euro-Atlantic area (when it has already conducted operations in four continents) confirms that the Afghan war serves more than one purpose for the West. It is the laboratory for strengthening military ties with nations on every inhabited continent and for building the nucleus of and foundation for a potential future world army.
The London conference on Afghanistan, presented in the West as a benign undertaking tantamount to an economic development or humanitarian aid planning event - the conference's website described it as "The international community [coming] together to fully align military and civilian resources behind an Afghan-led political strategy" [3] - was preceded by two days of meetings between top military commanders of almost a third of the world's nations at NATO headquarters and followed by two days of meetings by NATO and allied defense chiefs this week. Many of the same people - EU foreign policy chief Baroness Ashton and the UN's Eide (who formerly occupied comparable posts in Bosnia and Kosovo and was Norway's ambassador to NATO from 2002 to 2006) - attended both the London conference and are attending the Istanbul NATO defense ministers conclave.
(Ashton's predecessor's Javier Solana was Secretary General of NATO from 1995 to 1999 before becoming the EU's High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy - the title slightly adjusted after the Lisbon Treaty - from 1999 until December of 2009, effecting the transition seamlessly.)
By way of reciprocity, the London conference was addressed by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen who said, inter alia, "with more than 85,000 troops from 44 nations deployed to Afghanistan – and with over 39,000 additional forces arriving over the coming weeks and months - the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force remains NATO’s top priority." [4]
If any further evidence was required that the United Nations is at the service of NATO and not vice versa, that the EU is NATO's civilian valet de chambre, and that all three are subordinated to the United States, the last week's events and the roster of attendees at them should suffice.
The chain of command begins in Washington and orders barked out there work their way down to Brussels and New York City.
The two organizations based in the Belgium capital, the "military alliance of democratic states in Europe and North America" (NATO's self-definition) and the "European military superstate" (Irish opposition parties' reference to the effects of the Nice and Lisbon treaties), are afflicted with political echolalia, parroting the U.S. position on conflicts armed and with the potential to become so around the world - Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia-Russia, Georgia-Abkhazia, Georgia-South Ossetia, Russia-Ukraine, Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Yemen, Colombia, Myanmar, Sudan, Chad, the Central African Republic, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Israel-Lebanon, Lebanon-Syria, Israel-Palestine, Macedonia, Ivory Coast, Djibouti-Eritrea, Transdniester and all those to come - with truly impressive fidelity in this otherwise inconsistent age.
Condemnations, tirades and threats issued by the U.S. secretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations may as well be presented in triplicate.
Permanent Security Council members Russia and China may occasionally - all too occasionally - block hostile Western actions against defenseless third parties in the United Nations, but Washington always walks away with a mandate and the final say in the selection of viceroys to complement U.S. and NATO military forces on the ground in subjugated nations.
As a recent example, during the second day of the NATO Military Committee meetings in Brussels and the day before the Afghan conference in London, an "international" conference on Yemen was also held in London which "Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for...in response to the failed bomb attack on an airliner over Detroit on December 25." [5]
That bears repeating. The apprehension in the U.S. of a Nigerian national alleged to have been trained in Yemen led the head of state of the United Kingdom to summon representatives of the Group of Eight (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the U.S.), the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), Egypt, Jordan - but not the Arab League - Turkey and the European Union, United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund "to bolster Yemen's fight against al Qaeda...." [7] Soon 50,000 non-American NATO troops will be bogged down in Afghanistan because the bloc invoked its Article 5 collective defense provision in 2001...to fight against al-Qaeda.
Ever-compliant UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lent legitimacy to this American and British charade, as he did the following day's Afghan conference where he delivered a speech in the presence of 28 NATO and perhaps dozens of its International Security Assistance Force non-member states foreign ministers.
Yemen has joined the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq as a target for Western "assistance and stabilization." NATO will conduct more planning sessions with scores of military chiefs and defense and foreign ministers and not only for the war in Afghanistan.
Its new Strategic Concept knows no geographical bounds.
Notes
1) NATO, February 3, 2010
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-07E5106A-22C87D27/natolive/news_61170.htm?]
2) NATO, January 25, 2010
http://www.nato.int/ims/news/2010/n100126e.html
3) Afghanistan: The London Conference
http://afghanistan.hmg.gov.uk/en/conference
4) http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/opinions_61101.htm
5) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 28, 2010
6) Reuters, January 27, 2010
Rick Rozoff is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Rick Rozoff
Brussels, London, Istanbul: A Week Of Western War Councils
by Rick Rozoff
Global Research, February 5, 2010
Stop NATO
The defense chiefs of all 28 NATO nations and an undisclosed number of counterparts from non-Alliance partners gathered in Istanbul, Turkey on February 4 to begin two days of meetings focused on the war in Afghanistan, the withdrawal of military forces from Kosovo in the course of transferring control of security operations to the breakaway province's embryonic army (the Kosovo Security Force) and "the transformation efforts required to best conduct the full range of NATO’s agreed missions." [1]
Istanbul was the site of the bloc's 2004 summit which accounted for the largest expansion in its 60-year history - seven new Eastern European nations - and its strengthening military partnerships with thirteen Middle Eastern and African nations under the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative.
The Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis and the top commander of all U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan - soon to reach over 150,000 - General Stanley McChrystal are also in attendance, as are European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton and United Nations High Representative for Afghanistan Kai Eide as well as the defense and interior ministers of Afghanistan.
The meetings follow by a week the International Conference on Afghanistan held in London, which in turn occurred the day after two days of meetings of the NATO Military Committee with the Chiefs of Defense of the military bloc's 28 member states and 35 more from what were described as Troop Contributing Nations; presumably NATO partner nations with troops stationed in the Afghan war theater. In all, the military chiefs of 63 countries.
The U.S.'s McChrystal was present there also as were Israeli Chief of General Staff Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi and Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Beforehand the bloc's website reported that "The various meetings will focus on the progress made in ongoing operations and the New Strategic Concept for NATO." [2] That 35 top military commanders from non-NATO countries were present to hear plans for the escalation of what is already the largest war in the world is understandable, as their forces are on the ground as part of a 50-nation plus force under NATO military command.
That the same conference discussed the bloc's 21st century new global military doctrine - former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright delivered an address on the topic - raises the question of how many of the 35 partner states' military chiefs may have joined their 28 NATO colleagues for that phase of discussions. That such a high percentage of the world's leading military commanders attended a two-day affair which deliberated on both the war in South Asia and the expansion of the world's only military bloc's activities even further outside the Euro-Atlantic area (when it has already conducted operations in four continents) confirms that the Afghan war serves more than one purpose for the West. It is the laboratory for strengthening military ties with nations on every inhabited continent and for building the nucleus of and foundation for a potential future world army.
The London conference on Afghanistan, presented in the West as a benign undertaking tantamount to an economic development or humanitarian aid planning event - the conference's website described it as "The international community [coming] together to fully align military and civilian resources behind an Afghan-led political strategy" [3] - was preceded by two days of meetings between top military commanders of almost a third of the world's nations at NATO headquarters and followed by two days of meetings by NATO and allied defense chiefs this week. Many of the same people - EU foreign policy chief Baroness Ashton and the UN's Eide (who formerly occupied comparable posts in Bosnia and Kosovo and was Norway's ambassador to NATO from 2002 to 2006) - attended both the London conference and are attending the Istanbul NATO defense ministers conclave.
(Ashton's predecessor's Javier Solana was Secretary General of NATO from 1995 to 1999 before becoming the EU's High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy - the title slightly adjusted after the Lisbon Treaty - from 1999 until December of 2009, effecting the transition seamlessly.)
By way of reciprocity, the London conference was addressed by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen who said, inter alia, "with more than 85,000 troops from 44 nations deployed to Afghanistan – and with over 39,000 additional forces arriving over the coming weeks and months - the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force remains NATO’s top priority." [4]
If any further evidence was required that the United Nations is at the service of NATO and not vice versa, that the EU is NATO's civilian valet de chambre, and that all three are subordinated to the United States, the last week's events and the roster of attendees at them should suffice.
The chain of command begins in Washington and orders barked out there work their way down to Brussels and New York City.
The two organizations based in the Belgium capital, the "military alliance of democratic states in Europe and North America" (NATO's self-definition) and the "European military superstate" (Irish opposition parties' reference to the effects of the Nice and Lisbon treaties), are afflicted with political echolalia, parroting the U.S. position on conflicts armed and with the potential to become so around the world - Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia-Russia, Georgia-Abkhazia, Georgia-South Ossetia, Russia-Ukraine, Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Yemen, Colombia, Myanmar, Sudan, Chad, the Central African Republic, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Israel-Lebanon, Lebanon-Syria, Israel-Palestine, Macedonia, Ivory Coast, Djibouti-Eritrea, Transdniester and all those to come - with truly impressive fidelity in this otherwise inconsistent age.
Condemnations, tirades and threats issued by the U.S. secretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations may as well be presented in triplicate.
Permanent Security Council members Russia and China may occasionally - all too occasionally - block hostile Western actions against defenseless third parties in the United Nations, but Washington always walks away with a mandate and the final say in the selection of viceroys to complement U.S. and NATO military forces on the ground in subjugated nations.
As a recent example, during the second day of the NATO Military Committee meetings in Brussels and the day before the Afghan conference in London, an "international" conference on Yemen was also held in London which "Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for...in response to the failed bomb attack on an airliner over Detroit on December 25." [5]
That bears repeating. The apprehension in the U.S. of a Nigerian national alleged to have been trained in Yemen led the head of state of the United Kingdom to summon representatives of the Group of Eight (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the U.S.), the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), Egypt, Jordan - but not the Arab League - Turkey and the European Union, United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund "to bolster Yemen's fight against al Qaeda...." [7] Soon 50,000 non-American NATO troops will be bogged down in Afghanistan because the bloc invoked its Article 5 collective defense provision in 2001...to fight against al-Qaeda.
Ever-compliant UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lent legitimacy to this American and British charade, as he did the following day's Afghan conference where he delivered a speech in the presence of 28 NATO and perhaps dozens of its International Security Assistance Force non-member states foreign ministers.
Yemen has joined the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq as a target for Western "assistance and stabilization." NATO will conduct more planning sessions with scores of military chiefs and defense and foreign ministers and not only for the war in Afghanistan.
Its new Strategic Concept knows no geographical bounds.
Notes
1) NATO, February 3, 2010
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-07E5106A-22C87D27/natolive/news_61170.htm?]
2) NATO, January 25, 2010
http://www.nato.int/ims/news/2010/n100126e.html
3) Afghanistan: The London Conference
http://afghanistan.hmg.gov.uk/en/conference
4) http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/opinions_61101.htm
5) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 28, 2010
6) Reuters, January 27, 2010
Rick Rozoff is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Rick Rozoff
Saturday, February 06, 2010
lynch-mob mentality
SALON, Feb. 5th, 2010
FRIDAY, FEB 5, 2010 04:06 EST
The lynch-mob mentality
BY GLENN GREENWALD
If I had the power to have one statement of fact be universally recognized in our political discussions, it would be this one:
The fact that the Government labels Person X a "Terrorist" is not proof that Person X is, in fact, a Terrorist.
That proposition should be intrinsically understood by any American or Canadian who completed sixth grade civics and was thus taught that a central prong of our political system is that government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they're assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly. In particular, the fact that the U.S. Government, over and over, has falsely accused numerous people of being Terrorists -- only for it to turn out that they did nothing wrong -- by itself should compel a recognition of this truth. But it doesn't.
All throughout the Bush years, no matter what one objected to -- illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, denial of civilian trials -- the response from Bush followers was the same: "But these are Terrorists, and Terrorists have no rights, so who cares what is done to them?" What they actually meant was: "the Government has claimed they are Terrorists," but in their minds, that was the same thing as: "they are Terrorists."
They recognized no distinction between "a government accusation" and "unchallengeable truth"; in the authoritarian's mind, by definition, those are synonymous. The whole point of the Bush-era controversies was that -- away from an actual battlefield and where the Constitution applies (on U.S. soil and/or towards American citizens wherever they are) -- the Government should have to demonstrate someone's guilt before it's assumed (e.g., they should have to show probable cause to a court and obtain warrants before eavesdropping; they should have to offer evidence that a person engaged in Terrorism before locking them in a cage, etc.). But to someone who equates unproven government accusations with proof, those processes are entirely unnecessary. Even in the absence of those processes, they already know that these persons are Terrorists. How do they know that? Because the Government said so. Even when it comes to their fellow citizens, that's all the "proof" that is needed.
That authoritarian mentality is stronger than ever now. Why? Because unlike during the Bush years, when it was primarily Republicans willing to blindly trust Government accusations, many Democrats are now willing to do so as well. Just look at the reaction to the Government's recent attempts to assassinate the U.S.-born American citizen and Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
Up until last November, virtually no Americans had ever even heard of al-Awlaki. But in the past few months, beginning with the Fort Hood shootings, government officials have repeatedly claimed that he's a Terrorist: usually anonymously, with virtually no evidence, and in the face of al-Awlaki's vehement denials but without any opportunity for him to defend himself (because he's in hiding out of fear of being killed by his own Government).
The Government can literally just flash someone's face on the TV screen with the word Terrorist over it (as was done with al-Awlaki), and provided the face is nefarious and Muslim-looking enough (basically the same thing), nothing else need be offered. That's enough for many people -- including many Democrats -- to march forward overnight and mindlessly proclaim that al-Awlaki is "a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans" (if you can stomach it, read some of these comments -- from Obama defenders at a liberal blog -- with several sounding exactly like Dick Cheney, screeching: "Of course al-Awlaki should be killed without charges; he's a Terrorist who is trying to kill Americans!!!").
Even now, beyond government assertions about his associations, the public knows virtually nothing about al-Awlaki other than the fact that he's a Muslim cleric with a Muslim name dressed in Muslim garb, sitting in a Bad Arab Country expressing anger towards the actions of the U.S. and Israel. But no matter. That's more than enough.
They're willing not only to mindlessly embrace the Government's unproven accusation that their fellow citizen is a TERRORIST ("a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans"), but even beyond that, to cheer for his due-process-free execution like drunken fans at a football game. And the same people declare: no civilian trials are necessary for Terrorists (meaning: people accused by the Government of being Terrorists). Even more amazingly, the identities of the other Americans on the hit list aren't even known, but that's OK: they're Terrorists, because the Government said so.
A very long time ago, I would be baffled when I'd read about things like the Salem witch hunts. How could so many people be collectively worked up into that level of irrational frenzy, where they cheered for people's torturous death as "witches" without any real due process or meaningful evidence? But all one has to do is look at our current Terrorism debates and it's easy to see how things like that happen.
It's just pure mob mentality: an authority figure appears and affixes a demonizing Other label to someone's forehead, and the adoring crowd -- frothing-at-the-mouth and feeding on each other's hatred, fears and desire to be lead -- demands "justice." I imagine that if one could travel back in time to the Salem era in order to speak with some of those gathered outside an accused witch's home, screaming for her to be killed, the conversation would go something like this:
Mob Participant: Hang the Witch!!! Kill her!!!
Far Left Civil Liberties Extremist-Purist ("FLCLE-P"): How do you know she's a witch?
Mob Participant: Didn't you just hear the government official say so?
FLCLE-P: But don't you want to see real evidence before you assume that's true and call for her death?
Mob Participant: You just heard the evidence! The magistrate said she's a witch!
FLCLE-P: But shouldn't there be a real trial first, with tangible evidence and due process protections, to see if the accusation is actually true?
Mob Participant: A "real" trial? She's a witch! She's trying to curse us and kill us all. She got more than what she deserved. Witches don't have rights!!!
Return to Question 1.
That's essentially how I hear our debates over Terrorism, and how I've heard them for quite some time. And it's how I hear them more loudly now than ever before. And with those deeply confused premises now locked into place on a bipartisan basis ("no trials are needed to determine if someone is a Terrorist because Terrorists don't have rights"), imagine how much louder that will get if there is another successful terrorist attack in the U.S. But in fairness to the 17th Century Puritans, at least the Salem witches received pretenses of due process and even trials (albeit with coerced confessions and speculative hearsay). Even when it comes to our fellow citizens, we don't even bother with those. For us, the mere accusation by our leaders is sufficient: Kill that American Terrorist with a drone!
UPDATE: A long-time, regular commenter here, Jestaplero, is a state prosecutor in New York, and he explains -- in this comment -- how the mentality discussed here can and does easily expand beyond the realm of Terrorism.
Interestingly, even Allahpundit at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air recognizes the serious dangers in allowing the Government to decree even U.S. citizens to be "Terrorists" and then treat them accordingly, with no due process. But note how his right-wing commenters are almost exclusively of the "just-kill-him" school of thought, and how identical they sound to that minority of Daily Kos commenters I linked above who, in their blind loyalty to Obama, also insist that there's nothing wrong with simply snuffing out the lives of their fellow citizens who are "Terrorists" (meaning: anyone their Leader claims is a Terrorist) with no due process or oversight whatsoever. Ultimately, authoritarians are authoritarians, regardless of whether they situate themselves on the left or right.
FRIDAY, FEB 5, 2010 04:06 EST
The lynch-mob mentality
BY GLENN GREENWALD
If I had the power to have one statement of fact be universally recognized in our political discussions, it would be this one:
The fact that the Government labels Person X a "Terrorist" is not proof that Person X is, in fact, a Terrorist.
That proposition should be intrinsically understood by any American or Canadian who completed sixth grade civics and was thus taught that a central prong of our political system is that government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they're assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly. In particular, the fact that the U.S. Government, over and over, has falsely accused numerous people of being Terrorists -- only for it to turn out that they did nothing wrong -- by itself should compel a recognition of this truth. But it doesn't.
All throughout the Bush years, no matter what one objected to -- illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, denial of civilian trials -- the response from Bush followers was the same: "But these are Terrorists, and Terrorists have no rights, so who cares what is done to them?" What they actually meant was: "the Government has claimed they are Terrorists," but in their minds, that was the same thing as: "they are Terrorists."
They recognized no distinction between "a government accusation" and "unchallengeable truth"; in the authoritarian's mind, by definition, those are synonymous. The whole point of the Bush-era controversies was that -- away from an actual battlefield and where the Constitution applies (on U.S. soil and/or towards American citizens wherever they are) -- the Government should have to demonstrate someone's guilt before it's assumed (e.g., they should have to show probable cause to a court and obtain warrants before eavesdropping; they should have to offer evidence that a person engaged in Terrorism before locking them in a cage, etc.). But to someone who equates unproven government accusations with proof, those processes are entirely unnecessary. Even in the absence of those processes, they already know that these persons are Terrorists. How do they know that? Because the Government said so. Even when it comes to their fellow citizens, that's all the "proof" that is needed.
That authoritarian mentality is stronger than ever now. Why? Because unlike during the Bush years, when it was primarily Republicans willing to blindly trust Government accusations, many Democrats are now willing to do so as well. Just look at the reaction to the Government's recent attempts to assassinate the U.S.-born American citizen and Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
Up until last November, virtually no Americans had ever even heard of al-Awlaki. But in the past few months, beginning with the Fort Hood shootings, government officials have repeatedly claimed that he's a Terrorist: usually anonymously, with virtually no evidence, and in the face of al-Awlaki's vehement denials but without any opportunity for him to defend himself (because he's in hiding out of fear of being killed by his own Government).
The Government can literally just flash someone's face on the TV screen with the word Terrorist over it (as was done with al-Awlaki), and provided the face is nefarious and Muslim-looking enough (basically the same thing), nothing else need be offered. That's enough for many people -- including many Democrats -- to march forward overnight and mindlessly proclaim that al-Awlaki is "a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans" (if you can stomach it, read some of these comments -- from Obama defenders at a liberal blog -- with several sounding exactly like Dick Cheney, screeching: "Of course al-Awlaki should be killed without charges; he's a Terrorist who is trying to kill Americans!!!").
Even now, beyond government assertions about his associations, the public knows virtually nothing about al-Awlaki other than the fact that he's a Muslim cleric with a Muslim name dressed in Muslim garb, sitting in a Bad Arab Country expressing anger towards the actions of the U.S. and Israel. But no matter. That's more than enough.
They're willing not only to mindlessly embrace the Government's unproven accusation that their fellow citizen is a TERRORIST ("a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans"), but even beyond that, to cheer for his due-process-free execution like drunken fans at a football game. And the same people declare: no civilian trials are necessary for Terrorists (meaning: people accused by the Government of being Terrorists). Even more amazingly, the identities of the other Americans on the hit list aren't even known, but that's OK: they're Terrorists, because the Government said so.
A very long time ago, I would be baffled when I'd read about things like the Salem witch hunts. How could so many people be collectively worked up into that level of irrational frenzy, where they cheered for people's torturous death as "witches" without any real due process or meaningful evidence? But all one has to do is look at our current Terrorism debates and it's easy to see how things like that happen.
It's just pure mob mentality: an authority figure appears and affixes a demonizing Other label to someone's forehead, and the adoring crowd -- frothing-at-the-mouth and feeding on each other's hatred, fears and desire to be lead -- demands "justice." I imagine that if one could travel back in time to the Salem era in order to speak with some of those gathered outside an accused witch's home, screaming for her to be killed, the conversation would go something like this:
Mob Participant: Hang the Witch!!! Kill her!!!
Far Left Civil Liberties Extremist-Purist ("FLCLE-P"): How do you know she's a witch?
Mob Participant: Didn't you just hear the government official say so?
FLCLE-P: But don't you want to see real evidence before you assume that's true and call for her death?
Mob Participant: You just heard the evidence! The magistrate said she's a witch!
FLCLE-P: But shouldn't there be a real trial first, with tangible evidence and due process protections, to see if the accusation is actually true?
Mob Participant: A "real" trial? She's a witch! She's trying to curse us and kill us all. She got more than what she deserved. Witches don't have rights!!!
Return to Question 1.
That's essentially how I hear our debates over Terrorism, and how I've heard them for quite some time. And it's how I hear them more loudly now than ever before. And with those deeply confused premises now locked into place on a bipartisan basis ("no trials are needed to determine if someone is a Terrorist because Terrorists don't have rights"), imagine how much louder that will get if there is another successful terrorist attack in the U.S. But in fairness to the 17th Century Puritans, at least the Salem witches received pretenses of due process and even trials (albeit with coerced confessions and speculative hearsay). Even when it comes to our fellow citizens, we don't even bother with those. For us, the mere accusation by our leaders is sufficient: Kill that American Terrorist with a drone!
UPDATE: A long-time, regular commenter here, Jestaplero, is a state prosecutor in New York, and he explains -- in this comment -- how the mentality discussed here can and does easily expand beyond the realm of Terrorism.
Interestingly, even Allahpundit at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air recognizes the serious dangers in allowing the Government to decree even U.S. citizens to be "Terrorists" and then treat them accordingly, with no due process. But note how his right-wing commenters are almost exclusively of the "just-kill-him" school of thought, and how identical they sound to that minority of Daily Kos commenters I linked above who, in their blind loyalty to Obama, also insist that there's nothing wrong with simply snuffing out the lives of their fellow citizens who are "Terrorists" (meaning: anyone their Leader claims is a Terrorist) with no due process or oversight whatsoever. Ultimately, authoritarians are authoritarians, regardless of whether they situate themselves on the left or right.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Water Heist
Water Heist: Corporations Are Targeting Cash-Strapped Cities for Control of Their Public Water
From wastewater to drinking water, big business is looking to cash in on public water systems and they've got a new tactic.
January 29, 2010 |
Corporate interests are eyeing our water. From wastewater to drinking water, big business is looking to cash in on public water systems and they've got a new tactic: They're using desperate economic times to convince city officials that they should place a corporation between families and their ability to eat, drink, and clean.
Take Akron, Ohio, for example. In September 2008 I wrote an article for Alternet about a ballot measure in Akron where voters were asked whether to lease the city's wastewater system to a corporation in return for an immediate, one-time payment. The plan was roundly defeated. But more importantly, as the article suggested, the lease signaled a new direction for water privatization in the U.S. This involved a collaboration between water companies and Wall Street to snatch up control of water infrastructure for the better part of a century.
Since that vote, similar lease plans have been floated in Milwaukee and Chicago, presenting a dangerous possibility: In the near future, a major U.S. city could sign over unprecedented control of its water system to a corporation for a generation or longer. The silver lining in this narrative is that the same communities being targeted by water corporations for these deals are now charting out new ways to ensure their water remains in public hands. And for the moment, advocates of public control are winning.
The Lease Model of Water Privatization
Recent decades have been an active period for water corporations. In the 1990s the corporate push to privatize was buffeted by a tax law change under the Clinton administration that encouraged multinationals to enter the U.S. market. However, when privatization of water systems in large cities proved to be a nonstarter-due in no small part of public education and opposition-the largest players like Veolia, Suez, American Water, and Aqua America opted instead for a strategy of gobbling up smaller systems. This has been the basic narrative of municipal water privatization in the U.S., until recently.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, water companies are pushing a new model of privatization and targeting some of America's largest cities, starting in the water-rich Midwest. This new business model involves the acquisition of systems for periods much longer than previously considered, and with much greater control of the asset. These companies now want to lease your water, so they can sell it back to you.
The concept is relatively simple. The company pays the municipality an upfront sum of money in return for control of the water system. The company regains its investment through water bills over the life of the lease. The lease model stands in contrast to the more common "operation and maintenance" (O&M) contracts of the past decade in three main respects. For starters, cash flows in the opposite direction: an O&M contract generally involves a city making payments to the water company. The lease also differs significantly in the degree of the control that the public hands over, which may include capital improvements, system reach, and collection of excess revenue. Finally, these proposals span a much greater length of time-often 75 to 99 years-theoretically so the company has adequate time to regain its investment.
The incentive for cities is clear, if shortsighted. In the rustbelt Midwest, where the recession has hit state budgets hard, the one-time cash influx-a lifeline of sorts-is hard to refuse. And while water systems are not the only asset companies are willing to acquire, many cities in the water-rich Midwest see their access to freshwater as one of their most valuable assets. Cities like Milwaukee and Chicago have excess capacity to deliver freshwater, a resource described with growing frequency as "blue gold" and "the new oil."
But the intrinsic costs to the community are numerous and in part account for the fact that no such deal has yet been concluded in a large U.S. city. For starters, rate increases are guaranteed, seeing as this is the company's primary means of recouping its investment. In Chicago, where parking meters were leased in 2008, a schedule of rate increases was written into the lease to ensure a return for the company. And loss of control can extend beyond rate-setting to encompass decisions over bulk water sales and regional development too. After all, no company would spend a pretty penny on an asset that it can not leverage or use to its advantage. These are costs to the community that endure over the life of the lease, whether it be 75 or 99 years.
Despite the drawbacks to these deals, water companies are using tough economic times as leverage.
Mobilization in the Midwest: Communities Fight Back
The upshot of this assault on large public water systems is that the same cash-strapped communities targeted by water corporations for these deals are meanwhile growing smart water activists and developing new tools to prevent the sale of their water. The three primary instances are Akron, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
The Voter Initiative in Akron
Akron, Ohio, a city with a well-functioning sewer system, was the first in the recent pack of large cities to consider leasing its water. In 2008 Akron Mayor Donald Plusquellic hired Morgan Stanley to act as a financial advisor to the deal and, despite public opposition, used his control over council to move the city inexorably toward a wastewater lease. Faced with little hope of swaying the council, residents organized the city's first successful voter initiative in ten years. Citizens to Save our Sewers and Water proposed amending the city's Charter to state that any sale or lease of a public asset must be subject to a public referendum. In November 2008, after a nine-month struggle, the electorate voted 2 to 1 to amend the city's charter and sink the mayor's privatization plan.
Akron voters had not only rejected privatization, they had also erected a hurdle for future privatization deals in the form of a referendum requirement. It was a landmark victory that inspired a similar strategy in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2009 when city officials sought to spin-off that city's water system (that issue will go to ballot this year).
Preventing the Financial Advisor in Milwaukee
Within months of the Akron vote the lease proposal reared its head in another Midwest city with a valuable and well-functioning water system. In late 2008 Milwaukee City Council voted to explore leasing its drinking water system. By May it had begun accepting applications from Morgan Stanley, Citibank and other Wall Street suitors to serve as financial advisor for the deal.
That spring Food & Water Watch joined with environmental, nonprofit, union and neighborhood partners in Milwaukee to form the Keep Public Our Water (KPOW) coalition. This energetic and smart group used lessons from Akron to launch an education campaign and pressure elected officials to halt the process. Central to these efforts was a critique of the financial advisor role. These advisors, commonly Wall Street firms, are supposed to aid cities in weighing whether to pursue a contract. However, they are frequently paid a "success fee" for their assistance, amounting to a portion of the completed contract-a clear incentive to ensure that privatization occurs.
The KPOW campaign was a success. One city alderman who had stated confidently in April that a financial advisor "would unquestionably be hired" joined three colleagues in June asking City Comptroller Wally Morics to suspend the plan indefinitely. The winning message was this: Hiring a financial advisor would sweep Milwaukee too quickly down a path that did not have the support of the community.
In November, KPOW went a step further to introduce a city resolution declaring water a public trust and stating that Milwaukee's water should not be privatized.
Is Chicago Next?
If 2008 and 2009 brought battles over water leases, 2010 promises to further up the ante. With water multinationals still without a flagship city to tout the lease model, talk has moved to the Windy City. The issue arose in Chicago during the November budget approval process when it came to light that Mayor Daily would consider leasing the water system. The mayor's remark sparked a flurry of questions and speculative news pieces.
Although there has not yet been a formal proposal, the threat of a water lease is very real in Chicago. Perhaps more than any other U.S. city Chicago has embraced the concept of major asset leases. In 2004 Mayor Daley oversaw a 99-year lease of the Chicago Skyway, followed in 2008 by a 75-year lease of the city's parking meters, and currently he is seeking to lease Chicago's Midway Airport. In this water-rich city where the mayor has firm control of city council, a serious budget shortfall, and penchant for unloading public assets, a water lease is hardly a stretch of the imagination.
However, stung by the surprising and disastrous parking meter lease in 2008, some Chicagoans are wisely not waiting to mobilize against this possibility. In October, Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack introduced the Asset Lease Taxpayer Protection Ordinance. The measure would raise hurdles and restrict the circumstances under which a city asset could be leased. It is a first step in protecting Chicago's water from private control.
In the end, advocates of public control can hardly relish the thought of a fight with Mayor Daley over privatization. However, they are wise to not wait to take protective steps. And whether it is a charter amendment, a sharp analysis of Wall Street advisors, or more responsible city ordinances, advocates of public control have demonstrated that they have the tools needed to win.
Jon Keesecker is the midwest region director for Food & Water Watch.
http://www.alternet.org/water/145480/?page=entire
From wastewater to drinking water, big business is looking to cash in on public water systems and they've got a new tactic.
January 29, 2010 |
Corporate interests are eyeing our water. From wastewater to drinking water, big business is looking to cash in on public water systems and they've got a new tactic: They're using desperate economic times to convince city officials that they should place a corporation between families and their ability to eat, drink, and clean.
Take Akron, Ohio, for example. In September 2008 I wrote an article for Alternet about a ballot measure in Akron where voters were asked whether to lease the city's wastewater system to a corporation in return for an immediate, one-time payment. The plan was roundly defeated. But more importantly, as the article suggested, the lease signaled a new direction for water privatization in the U.S. This involved a collaboration between water companies and Wall Street to snatch up control of water infrastructure for the better part of a century.
Since that vote, similar lease plans have been floated in Milwaukee and Chicago, presenting a dangerous possibility: In the near future, a major U.S. city could sign over unprecedented control of its water system to a corporation for a generation or longer. The silver lining in this narrative is that the same communities being targeted by water corporations for these deals are now charting out new ways to ensure their water remains in public hands. And for the moment, advocates of public control are winning.
The Lease Model of Water Privatization
Recent decades have been an active period for water corporations. In the 1990s the corporate push to privatize was buffeted by a tax law change under the Clinton administration that encouraged multinationals to enter the U.S. market. However, when privatization of water systems in large cities proved to be a nonstarter-due in no small part of public education and opposition-the largest players like Veolia, Suez, American Water, and Aqua America opted instead for a strategy of gobbling up smaller systems. This has been the basic narrative of municipal water privatization in the U.S., until recently.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, water companies are pushing a new model of privatization and targeting some of America's largest cities, starting in the water-rich Midwest. This new business model involves the acquisition of systems for periods much longer than previously considered, and with much greater control of the asset. These companies now want to lease your water, so they can sell it back to you.
The concept is relatively simple. The company pays the municipality an upfront sum of money in return for control of the water system. The company regains its investment through water bills over the life of the lease. The lease model stands in contrast to the more common "operation and maintenance" (O&M) contracts of the past decade in three main respects. For starters, cash flows in the opposite direction: an O&M contract generally involves a city making payments to the water company. The lease also differs significantly in the degree of the control that the public hands over, which may include capital improvements, system reach, and collection of excess revenue. Finally, these proposals span a much greater length of time-often 75 to 99 years-theoretically so the company has adequate time to regain its investment.
The incentive for cities is clear, if shortsighted. In the rustbelt Midwest, where the recession has hit state budgets hard, the one-time cash influx-a lifeline of sorts-is hard to refuse. And while water systems are not the only asset companies are willing to acquire, many cities in the water-rich Midwest see their access to freshwater as one of their most valuable assets. Cities like Milwaukee and Chicago have excess capacity to deliver freshwater, a resource described with growing frequency as "blue gold" and "the new oil."
But the intrinsic costs to the community are numerous and in part account for the fact that no such deal has yet been concluded in a large U.S. city. For starters, rate increases are guaranteed, seeing as this is the company's primary means of recouping its investment. In Chicago, where parking meters were leased in 2008, a schedule of rate increases was written into the lease to ensure a return for the company. And loss of control can extend beyond rate-setting to encompass decisions over bulk water sales and regional development too. After all, no company would spend a pretty penny on an asset that it can not leverage or use to its advantage. These are costs to the community that endure over the life of the lease, whether it be 75 or 99 years.
Despite the drawbacks to these deals, water companies are using tough economic times as leverage.
Mobilization in the Midwest: Communities Fight Back
The upshot of this assault on large public water systems is that the same cash-strapped communities targeted by water corporations for these deals are meanwhile growing smart water activists and developing new tools to prevent the sale of their water. The three primary instances are Akron, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
The Voter Initiative in Akron
Akron, Ohio, a city with a well-functioning sewer system, was the first in the recent pack of large cities to consider leasing its water. In 2008 Akron Mayor Donald Plusquellic hired Morgan Stanley to act as a financial advisor to the deal and, despite public opposition, used his control over council to move the city inexorably toward a wastewater lease. Faced with little hope of swaying the council, residents organized the city's first successful voter initiative in ten years. Citizens to Save our Sewers and Water proposed amending the city's Charter to state that any sale or lease of a public asset must be subject to a public referendum. In November 2008, after a nine-month struggle, the electorate voted 2 to 1 to amend the city's charter and sink the mayor's privatization plan.
Akron voters had not only rejected privatization, they had also erected a hurdle for future privatization deals in the form of a referendum requirement. It was a landmark victory that inspired a similar strategy in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2009 when city officials sought to spin-off that city's water system (that issue will go to ballot this year).
Preventing the Financial Advisor in Milwaukee
Within months of the Akron vote the lease proposal reared its head in another Midwest city with a valuable and well-functioning water system. In late 2008 Milwaukee City Council voted to explore leasing its drinking water system. By May it had begun accepting applications from Morgan Stanley, Citibank and other Wall Street suitors to serve as financial advisor for the deal.
That spring Food & Water Watch joined with environmental, nonprofit, union and neighborhood partners in Milwaukee to form the Keep Public Our Water (KPOW) coalition. This energetic and smart group used lessons from Akron to launch an education campaign and pressure elected officials to halt the process. Central to these efforts was a critique of the financial advisor role. These advisors, commonly Wall Street firms, are supposed to aid cities in weighing whether to pursue a contract. However, they are frequently paid a "success fee" for their assistance, amounting to a portion of the completed contract-a clear incentive to ensure that privatization occurs.
The KPOW campaign was a success. One city alderman who had stated confidently in April that a financial advisor "would unquestionably be hired" joined three colleagues in June asking City Comptroller Wally Morics to suspend the plan indefinitely. The winning message was this: Hiring a financial advisor would sweep Milwaukee too quickly down a path that did not have the support of the community.
In November, KPOW went a step further to introduce a city resolution declaring water a public trust and stating that Milwaukee's water should not be privatized.
Is Chicago Next?
If 2008 and 2009 brought battles over water leases, 2010 promises to further up the ante. With water multinationals still without a flagship city to tout the lease model, talk has moved to the Windy City. The issue arose in Chicago during the November budget approval process when it came to light that Mayor Daily would consider leasing the water system. The mayor's remark sparked a flurry of questions and speculative news pieces.
Although there has not yet been a formal proposal, the threat of a water lease is very real in Chicago. Perhaps more than any other U.S. city Chicago has embraced the concept of major asset leases. In 2004 Mayor Daley oversaw a 99-year lease of the Chicago Skyway, followed in 2008 by a 75-year lease of the city's parking meters, and currently he is seeking to lease Chicago's Midway Airport. In this water-rich city where the mayor has firm control of city council, a serious budget shortfall, and penchant for unloading public assets, a water lease is hardly a stretch of the imagination.
However, stung by the surprising and disastrous parking meter lease in 2008, some Chicagoans are wisely not waiting to mobilize against this possibility. In October, Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack introduced the Asset Lease Taxpayer Protection Ordinance. The measure would raise hurdles and restrict the circumstances under which a city asset could be leased. It is a first step in protecting Chicago's water from private control.
In the end, advocates of public control can hardly relish the thought of a fight with Mayor Daley over privatization. However, they are wise to not wait to take protective steps. And whether it is a charter amendment, a sharp analysis of Wall Street advisors, or more responsible city ordinances, advocates of public control have demonstrated that they have the tools needed to win.
Jon Keesecker is the midwest region director for Food & Water Watch.
http://www.alternet.org/water/145480/?page=entire
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Monday, February 01, 2010
Olympics head for disaster
Vancouver's Olympics head for disaster
Douglas Haddow
Two weeks before the games and with police officers on every corner, Vancouver is far from an Olympic wonderland
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/31/vancouver-winter-olympics-police
It's now two weeks until the start of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic games, a city-defining event that is a decade in the making. But a decade is a very long time. Much of what seemed sensible in the early 2000s has proven to be the opposite: for instance, allowing investment bankers to pursue profits willy-nilly was acceptable when Vancouver won the bid in 2003, but is now viewed as idiotic. So it comes as no surprise that just days before the opening ceremony, Vancouver is gripped by dread. Not the typical attitude for a host city, but understandable when you consider that everything that could go wrong, is in the process of going wrong.
Vancouver has been continually ranked as the world's most livable city. An Olympic sized-dose of gentrification would only serve to speed up Vancouver's transformation from a livable yet expensive city into a glitzy hotel for international capital. But these neoliberal dreams are now little more than fantasy. In the mid-2000s the games were originally slated to cost a pittance of $660m and bring in a profit of $10bn. This ludicrous projection was made before the market crash – an event that the Vancouver's Olympic committee failed to anticipate.
"The Bailout Games" have already been labelled a staggering financial disaster. While the complete costs are still unknown, the Vancouver and British Columbian governments have hinted at what's to come by cancelling 2400 surgeries, laying off 233 government employees, 800 teachers and recommending the closure of 14 schools. It might be enough to make one cynical, but luckily every inch of the city is now coated with advertisements that feature smiley people enjoying the products of the event's gracious sponsors.
Conservative estimates now speculate that the games will cost upwards of $6bn, with little chance of a return. This titanic act of fiscal malfeasance includes a security force that was originally budgeted at $175m, but has since inflated to $900m. With more than 15,000 members, it's the largest military presence seen in western Canada since the end of the second world war, an appropriate measure only if one imagines al-Qaida are set to descend from the slopes on C2-strapped snowboards. With a police officer on every corner and military helicopters buzzing overhead, Vancouver looks more like post-war Berlin than an Olympic wonderland. Whole sections of the city are off-limits, scores of roads have been shut down, small businesses have been told to close shop and citizens have been instructed to either leave the city or stay indoors to make way for the projected influx of 300,000 visitors.
Vancouver's Olympic committee has also assumed the role of logo police. Librarians are being commanded to feed McDonald's to children while unauthorised brands have been banned from Olympic venues. Worse yet, they've begun to casually slip clips from Leni Riefenstahl films into their Coldplay-soundtracked promotional videos.
This manic mix of hype and gloom is a byproduct of the games' utter pointlessness. For those who have been planning their resistance since 2003, Vancouver is about to become the world's premier political stage. It will be the best chance yet for the Olympics to be derailed and exposed as what they are: a corrupt relic of the 20th century that does little more than gut city coffers and line the pockets of developers and investors. If things go pear-shaped and Vancouverites resort to their riotious ways, at least the city will get its money's worth out of that bloated security force and the ensuing spectacle will boost NBC's slumping ratings. After all, the Olympics are primarily a patriotic event, and in the words of the late Howard Zinn, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism".
Douglas Haddow
Two weeks before the games and with police officers on every corner, Vancouver is far from an Olympic wonderland
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/31/vancouver-winter-olympics-police
It's now two weeks until the start of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic games, a city-defining event that is a decade in the making. But a decade is a very long time. Much of what seemed sensible in the early 2000s has proven to be the opposite: for instance, allowing investment bankers to pursue profits willy-nilly was acceptable when Vancouver won the bid in 2003, but is now viewed as idiotic. So it comes as no surprise that just days before the opening ceremony, Vancouver is gripped by dread. Not the typical attitude for a host city, but understandable when you consider that everything that could go wrong, is in the process of going wrong.
Vancouver has been continually ranked as the world's most livable city. An Olympic sized-dose of gentrification would only serve to speed up Vancouver's transformation from a livable yet expensive city into a glitzy hotel for international capital. But these neoliberal dreams are now little more than fantasy. In the mid-2000s the games were originally slated to cost a pittance of $660m and bring in a profit of $10bn. This ludicrous projection was made before the market crash – an event that the Vancouver's Olympic committee failed to anticipate.
"The Bailout Games" have already been labelled a staggering financial disaster. While the complete costs are still unknown, the Vancouver and British Columbian governments have hinted at what's to come by cancelling 2400 surgeries, laying off 233 government employees, 800 teachers and recommending the closure of 14 schools. It might be enough to make one cynical, but luckily every inch of the city is now coated with advertisements that feature smiley people enjoying the products of the event's gracious sponsors.
Conservative estimates now speculate that the games will cost upwards of $6bn, with little chance of a return. This titanic act of fiscal malfeasance includes a security force that was originally budgeted at $175m, but has since inflated to $900m. With more than 15,000 members, it's the largest military presence seen in western Canada since the end of the second world war, an appropriate measure only if one imagines al-Qaida are set to descend from the slopes on C2-strapped snowboards. With a police officer on every corner and military helicopters buzzing overhead, Vancouver looks more like post-war Berlin than an Olympic wonderland. Whole sections of the city are off-limits, scores of roads have been shut down, small businesses have been told to close shop and citizens have been instructed to either leave the city or stay indoors to make way for the projected influx of 300,000 visitors.
Vancouver's Olympic committee has also assumed the role of logo police. Librarians are being commanded to feed McDonald's to children while unauthorised brands have been banned from Olympic venues. Worse yet, they've begun to casually slip clips from Leni Riefenstahl films into their Coldplay-soundtracked promotional videos.
This manic mix of hype and gloom is a byproduct of the games' utter pointlessness. For those who have been planning their resistance since 2003, Vancouver is about to become the world's premier political stage. It will be the best chance yet for the Olympics to be derailed and exposed as what they are: a corrupt relic of the 20th century that does little more than gut city coffers and line the pockets of developers and investors. If things go pear-shaped and Vancouverites resort to their riotious ways, at least the city will get its money's worth out of that bloated security force and the ensuing spectacle will boost NBC's slumping ratings. After all, the Olympics are primarily a patriotic event, and in the words of the late Howard Zinn, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism".
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Haiti's Geological Fate
The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, January 30, 2010
A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal ‘pact with the Devil.’
Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another—the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.
This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.
A relevant Texas geological project
Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major ‘rescue’ players—the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world’s largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.
The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.
Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called “Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons.” It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons—oil and gas.
Notably, the sponsors of the multi-million dollar research project under Mann are the world’s largest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and BHP Billiton.[1] Curiously enough, the project is the first comprehensive geological mapping of a region that, one would have thought, would have been a priority decades ago for the US oil majors. Given the immense, existing oil production off Mexico, Louisiana, and the entire Caribbean, as well as its proximity to the United States – not to mention the US focus on its own energy security – it is surprising that the region had not been mapped earlier. Now it emerges that major oil companies were at least generally aware of the huge oil potential of the region long ago, but apparently decided to keep it quiet.
Cuba’s Super-giant find
Evidence that the US Administration may well have more in mind for Haiti than the improvement of the lot of the devastated Haitian people can be found in nearby waters off Cuba, directly across from Port-au-Prince. In October 2008 a consortium of oil companies led by Spain’s Repsol, together with Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, announced discovery of one of the world’s largest oilfields in the deep water off Cuba. It is what oil geologists call a ‘Super-giant’ field. Estimates are that the Cuban field contains as much as 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the twelfth Super-giant oilfield discovered since 1996. The discovery also likely makes Cuba a new high-priority target for Pentagon destabilization and other nasty operations.
No doubt to the dismay of Washington, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flew to Havana one month after the Cuban giant oil find to sign an agreement with acting-President Raul Castro for Russian oil companies to explore and develop Cuban oil.[2]
Medvedev’s Russia-Cuba oil agreements came only a week after the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet the recuperating Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. The Chinese President signed an agreement to modernize Cuban ports and discussed Chinese purchase of Cuban raw materials. No doubt the mammoth new Cuban oil discovery was high on the Chinese agenda with Cuba.[3] On November 5, 2008, just prior to the Chinese President’s trip to Cuba and other Latin American countries, the Chinese government issued their first ever policy paper on the future of China’s relations with Latin America and Caribbean nations, elevating these bilateral relations to a new level of strategic importance. [4]
The Cuba Super-giant oil find also leaves the advocates of ‘Peak Oil’ theory with more egg on the face. Shortly before the Bush-Blair decision to invade and occupy Iraq, a theory made the rounds of cyberspace, that sometime after 2010, the world would reach an absolute “peak” in world oil production, initiating a period of decline with drastic social and economic implications. Its prominent spokesmen, including retired oil geologist Colin Campbell and Texas oil banker Matt Simmons, claimed that there had not been a single new Super-giant oil discovery since 1976, or thereabouts, and that new fields found over the past two decades had been “tiny” compared with the earlier giant discoveries in Saudi Arabia, Prudhoe Bay, Daquing in China and elsewhere. [5]
It is critical to note that, more than half a century ago, a group of Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists, working in state secrecy, confirmed that hydrocarbons originated deep in the earth’s mantle under conditions similar to a giant burning cauldron at extreme temperature and pressure. They demonstrated that, contrary to US and accepted Western ‘mainstream’ geology, hydrocarbons were not the result of dead dinosaur detritus concentrated and compressed and somehow transformed into oil and gas millions of years ago, nor of algae or other biological material.[6]
The Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists then proved that the oil or gas produced in the earth’s mantle was pushed upwards along faults or cracks in the earth as close to the surface as pressures permitted. The process was analogous to the production of molten lava in volcanoes. It means that the ability to find oil is limited, relatively speaking, only by the ability to identify deep fissures and complex geological activity conducive to bringing the oil out from deep in the earth. It seems that the waters of the Caribbean, especially those off Cuba and its neighbor Haiti, are just such a region of concentrated hydrocarbons (oil and gas) that have found their way upwards close to the surface, perhaps in a magnitude comparable to a new Saudi Arabia.[7]
Haiti, a new Saudi Arabia?
The remarkable geography of Haiti and Cuba and the discovery of world-class oil reserves in the waters off Cuba lend credence to anecdotal accounts of major oil discoveries in several parts of Haitian territory. It also could explain why two Bush Presidents and now special UN Haiti Envoy Bill Clinton have made Haiti such a priority. As well, it could explain why Washington and its NGO’s moved so quickly to remove-- twice-- the democratically elected President Aristide, whose economic program for Haiti included, among other items, proposals for developing Haitian natural resources for the benefit of the Haitian people.
In March 2004, some months before the University of Texas and American Big Oil launched their ambitious mapping of the hydrocarbon potentials of the Caribbean, a Haitian writer, Dr. Georges Michel, published online an article titled ‘Oil in Haiti.’ In it, Michel wrote,
… .[I]t has been no secret that deep in the earthy bowels of the two states that share the island of Haiti and the surrounding waters that there are significant, still untapped deposits of oil. One knows not why they are still untapped. Since the early twentieth century, the physical and political map of the island of Haiti, erected in 1908 by Messrs. Alexander Poujol and Henry Thomasset, reported a major oil reservoir in Haiti near the source of the Rio Todo El Mondo, Tributary Right Artibonite River, better known today as the River Thomonde. [8]
According to a June 2008 article by Roberson Alphonse in the Haitian paper, Le Nouvelliste en Haiti, “The signs, (indicators), justifying the explorations of oil (black gold) in Haiti are encouraging. In the middle of the oil shock, some 4 companies want official licenses from the Haitian State to drill for oil.”
At the time, oil prices were climbing above $140 a barrel -- on manipulations by various Wall Street banks. Alphonse’s article quoted Dieusuel Anglade, the Haitian State Director of the Office of Mining and Energy, telling the Haitian press: "We've received four requests for oil exploration permits…We have had encouraging indicators to justify the pursuit of the exploration of black gold (oil), which had stopped in 1979."[9]
Alphonse reported the findings from a 1979 geological study in Haiti of 11 exploratory oil wells drilled at the Plaine du Cul-de-sac on the Plateau Central and at L'ile de La Gonaive: “Surface (tentative) indicators for oil were found at the Southern peninsula and on the North coast, explained the engineer Anglade, who strongly believes in the immediate commercial viability of these explorations.”[10]
Journalist Alphonse cites an August 16, 1979 memo by Haitian attorney Francois Lamothe, in which he noted that “five big wells were drilled” down to depths of 9000 feet and that a sample that “underwent a physical-chemical analysis in Munich, Germany” had “revealed tracks of oil.” [11]
Despite the promising 1979 results in Haiti, Dr. Georges Michel reported that, “the big multinational oil companies operating in Haiti pushed for the discovered deposits not to be exploited.” [12] Oil exploration in and offshore Haiti ground to a sudden halt as a result.
Similar if less precise reports claiming that Haitian oil reserves could be vastly larger than those of Venezuela have appeared in Haitian websites. [13] Then in 2010 the financial news site Bloomberg News carried the following:
The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies that included the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said Monday in a telephone interview. ‘A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn't been drilled,’ said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas-based company that's drilling in Israel. [14]
In an interview with a Santo Domingo online paper, Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, former head of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (REFIDOMSA) stated, “there is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people.” [15] Haiti’s minerals include gold, the valuable strategic metal iridium and oil, apparently lots of it.
Aristide’s development plans
Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò'), president of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network (HLLN) who served as attorney for the deposed Aristide, notes that when Aristide was President -- up until his US-backed ouster during the Bush era in 2004 -- he had developed and published in book form his national development plans. These plans included, for the first time, a detailed list of known sites where the resources of Haiti were located. The publication of the plan sparked a national debate over Haitian radio and in the media about the future of the country. Aristide’s plan was to implement a public-private partnership to ensure that the development of Haiti’s oil, gold and other valuable resources would benefit the national economy and the broader population, and not merely the five Haitian oligarchic families and their US backers, the so-called Chimeres or gangsters. [16]
Since the ouster of Aristide in 2004, Haiti has been an occupied country, with a dubiously-elected President, Rene Preval, a controversial follower of IMF privatization mandates and reportedly tied to the Chimeres or Haitian oligarchs who backed the removal of Aristide. Notably, the US State Department refuses to permit the return of Aristide from South African exile.
Now, in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, the United States military has taken control of Haiti’s four airports and presently has some 20,000 troops in the country. Journalists and international aid organizations have accused the US military of being more concerned with imposing military control, which it prefers to call “security,” than with bringing urgently needed water, food and medicine from the airport sites to the population.
A US military occupation of Haiti under the guise of earthquake disaster ‘relief’ would give Washington and private business interests tied to it a geopolitical prize of the first order. Prior to the January 12 quake, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince was the fifth largest US embassy in the world, comparable to its embassies in such geopolitically strategic places as Berlin and Beijing.[17] With huge new oil finds off Cuba being exploited by Russian companies, with clear indications that Haiti contains similar vast untapped oil as well as gold, copper, uranium and iridium, with Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela as a neighbor to the south of Haiti, a return of Aristide or any popular leader committed to developing the resources for the people of Haiti, -- the poorest nation in the Americas -- would constitute a devastating blow to the world’s sole Superpower. The fact that in the aftermath of the earthquake, UN Haiti Special Envoy Bill Clinton joined forces with Aristide foe George W. Bush to create something called the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund ought to give everyone pause.
According to Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò') of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network, under the guise of emergency relief work, the US, France and Canada are engaged in a balkanization of the island for future mineral control. She reports rumors that Canada wants the North of Haiti where Canadian mining interests are already present. The US wants Port-au-Prince and the island of La Gonaive just offshore – an area identified in Aristide’s development book as having vast oil resources, and which is bitterly contested by France. She further states that China, with UN veto power over the de facto UN-occupied country, may have something to say against such a US-France-Canada carve up of the vast wealth of the nation. [18]
Notes:
1 Paul Mann, Caribbean Basins, Tectonic Plates & Hydrocarbons, Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin, accessed in
www.ig.utexas.edu/research/projects/cbth/.../ProposalCaribbean.pdf .
2 Rory Carroll, Medvedev and Castro meet to rebuild Russia-Cuba relations, London Guardian, November 28, 2008 accessed in http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/28/cuba-russia.
3 Julian Gavaghan, Comrades in arms: When China’s President Hu met a frail Fidel Castro, London Daily Mail, November 19, 2008, accessed in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1087485/Comrades-arms-When-Chinas-President-Hu-met-frail-Fidel-Castro.html.
4 Peoples’ Daily Online, China issues first policy paper on Latin America, Caribbean region, November 5, 2008, accessed in http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6527888.html .
5 Matthew R. Simmons, The World’s Giant Oilfields, Simmons & Co. International, Houston, accessed in http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/giantoilfields.pdf .
6 Anton Kolesnikov, et al, Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper-mantle conditions, Nature Geoscience, July 26, 2009.
7 F. William Engdahl, War and Peak Oil—Confessions of an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer, Global Research, September 26, 2007, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6880 .
8 Dr. Georges Michel, Oil in Haiti, English translation from French, Pétrole en Haiti, March 27, 2004, accessed in http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html#oil_GeorgesMichelEnglish .
9 Roberson Alphonse, Drill, and then pump the oil of Haiti! 4 oil companies request oil drilling permits, translated from the original French, June 27, 2008, accessed in
http://www.bnvillage.co.uk/caribbean-news-village-beta/99691-drill-then-pump-oil-haiti-4-oil-companies-request-oil-drilling-permits.html
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid. The full text indicated that, “five big wells were drilled at Porto Suel (Maissade) of a depth of 9000 feet, at Bebernal, 9000 feet, at Bois-Carradeux (Ouest), at Dumornay, on the road Route Frare and close to the Chemin de Fer of Saint-Marc. A sample, a ‘carrot’ (oil reservoir) drilled up from the well of Saint-Marc in the Artibonite underwent a physical-chemical analysis in Munich, Germany, at the request of Mr. Broth. ‘The result of the analysis was returned on October 11, 1979 and revealed tracks of oil,’ confided the engineer, Willy Clemens, who had gone to Germany.”
12 Dr. Georges Michel, op. cit.
13 Marguerite Laurent, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, Radio Metropole, Jan 28, 2008, accessed in
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html#full_of_oil.
14 Jim Polson, Haiti earthquake may have exposed gas, aiding economy, Bloomberg News, January 26, 2010.
15 Espaillat Nanita revela en Haiti existen grandes recursos de oro y otros minerals, Espacinsular.org, 17 November, 2009, accessed in
http://www.espacinsular.org/spip.php?article8942 .
16 The Aristide development plan was contained in the book published in Haiti in 2000, Investir dans l’Human. Livre Blanc de Fanmi Lavalas sous la Direction de Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Port-au-Prince, Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 2000. It contained detailed maps, tables, graphics, and a national development plan for 2004 “covering agriculture, environment, commerce and industry, the financial sector, infrastructure, education, culture, health, women's issues, and issues in the public sector.” In 2004, using NGOs and the UN and a vicious propaganda campaign to vilify Aristide, the Bush administration got rid of the elected President.
17 Cynthia McKinney, Haiti: An Unwelcome Katrina Redux, Global Research, January 19, 2010, accessed in
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17063.
18 Marguerite Laurent (Ezili Danto), Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?, OpEd News.com, January 23, 2010, accessed in
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Did-mining-and-oil-drillin-by-Ezili-Danto-100123-329.html.
F. William Engdahl is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, January 30, 2010
A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal ‘pact with the Devil.’
Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another—the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.
This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.
A relevant Texas geological project
Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major ‘rescue’ players—the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world’s largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.
The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.
Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called “Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons.” It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons—oil and gas.
Notably, the sponsors of the multi-million dollar research project under Mann are the world’s largest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and BHP Billiton.[1] Curiously enough, the project is the first comprehensive geological mapping of a region that, one would have thought, would have been a priority decades ago for the US oil majors. Given the immense, existing oil production off Mexico, Louisiana, and the entire Caribbean, as well as its proximity to the United States – not to mention the US focus on its own energy security – it is surprising that the region had not been mapped earlier. Now it emerges that major oil companies were at least generally aware of the huge oil potential of the region long ago, but apparently decided to keep it quiet.
Cuba’s Super-giant find
Evidence that the US Administration may well have more in mind for Haiti than the improvement of the lot of the devastated Haitian people can be found in nearby waters off Cuba, directly across from Port-au-Prince. In October 2008 a consortium of oil companies led by Spain’s Repsol, together with Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, announced discovery of one of the world’s largest oilfields in the deep water off Cuba. It is what oil geologists call a ‘Super-giant’ field. Estimates are that the Cuban field contains as much as 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the twelfth Super-giant oilfield discovered since 1996. The discovery also likely makes Cuba a new high-priority target for Pentagon destabilization and other nasty operations.
No doubt to the dismay of Washington, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flew to Havana one month after the Cuban giant oil find to sign an agreement with acting-President Raul Castro for Russian oil companies to explore and develop Cuban oil.[2]
Medvedev’s Russia-Cuba oil agreements came only a week after the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet the recuperating Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. The Chinese President signed an agreement to modernize Cuban ports and discussed Chinese purchase of Cuban raw materials. No doubt the mammoth new Cuban oil discovery was high on the Chinese agenda with Cuba.[3] On November 5, 2008, just prior to the Chinese President’s trip to Cuba and other Latin American countries, the Chinese government issued their first ever policy paper on the future of China’s relations with Latin America and Caribbean nations, elevating these bilateral relations to a new level of strategic importance. [4]
The Cuba Super-giant oil find also leaves the advocates of ‘Peak Oil’ theory with more egg on the face. Shortly before the Bush-Blair decision to invade and occupy Iraq, a theory made the rounds of cyberspace, that sometime after 2010, the world would reach an absolute “peak” in world oil production, initiating a period of decline with drastic social and economic implications. Its prominent spokesmen, including retired oil geologist Colin Campbell and Texas oil banker Matt Simmons, claimed that there had not been a single new Super-giant oil discovery since 1976, or thereabouts, and that new fields found over the past two decades had been “tiny” compared with the earlier giant discoveries in Saudi Arabia, Prudhoe Bay, Daquing in China and elsewhere. [5]
It is critical to note that, more than half a century ago, a group of Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists, working in state secrecy, confirmed that hydrocarbons originated deep in the earth’s mantle under conditions similar to a giant burning cauldron at extreme temperature and pressure. They demonstrated that, contrary to US and accepted Western ‘mainstream’ geology, hydrocarbons were not the result of dead dinosaur detritus concentrated and compressed and somehow transformed into oil and gas millions of years ago, nor of algae or other biological material.[6]
The Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists then proved that the oil or gas produced in the earth’s mantle was pushed upwards along faults or cracks in the earth as close to the surface as pressures permitted. The process was analogous to the production of molten lava in volcanoes. It means that the ability to find oil is limited, relatively speaking, only by the ability to identify deep fissures and complex geological activity conducive to bringing the oil out from deep in the earth. It seems that the waters of the Caribbean, especially those off Cuba and its neighbor Haiti, are just such a region of concentrated hydrocarbons (oil and gas) that have found their way upwards close to the surface, perhaps in a magnitude comparable to a new Saudi Arabia.[7]
Haiti, a new Saudi Arabia?
The remarkable geography of Haiti and Cuba and the discovery of world-class oil reserves in the waters off Cuba lend credence to anecdotal accounts of major oil discoveries in several parts of Haitian territory. It also could explain why two Bush Presidents and now special UN Haiti Envoy Bill Clinton have made Haiti such a priority. As well, it could explain why Washington and its NGO’s moved so quickly to remove-- twice-- the democratically elected President Aristide, whose economic program for Haiti included, among other items, proposals for developing Haitian natural resources for the benefit of the Haitian people.
In March 2004, some months before the University of Texas and American Big Oil launched their ambitious mapping of the hydrocarbon potentials of the Caribbean, a Haitian writer, Dr. Georges Michel, published online an article titled ‘Oil in Haiti.’ In it, Michel wrote,
… .[I]t has been no secret that deep in the earthy bowels of the two states that share the island of Haiti and the surrounding waters that there are significant, still untapped deposits of oil. One knows not why they are still untapped. Since the early twentieth century, the physical and political map of the island of Haiti, erected in 1908 by Messrs. Alexander Poujol and Henry Thomasset, reported a major oil reservoir in Haiti near the source of the Rio Todo El Mondo, Tributary Right Artibonite River, better known today as the River Thomonde. [8]
According to a June 2008 article by Roberson Alphonse in the Haitian paper, Le Nouvelliste en Haiti, “The signs, (indicators), justifying the explorations of oil (black gold) in Haiti are encouraging. In the middle of the oil shock, some 4 companies want official licenses from the Haitian State to drill for oil.”
At the time, oil prices were climbing above $140 a barrel -- on manipulations by various Wall Street banks. Alphonse’s article quoted Dieusuel Anglade, the Haitian State Director of the Office of Mining and Energy, telling the Haitian press: "We've received four requests for oil exploration permits…We have had encouraging indicators to justify the pursuit of the exploration of black gold (oil), which had stopped in 1979."[9]
Alphonse reported the findings from a 1979 geological study in Haiti of 11 exploratory oil wells drilled at the Plaine du Cul-de-sac on the Plateau Central and at L'ile de La Gonaive: “Surface (tentative) indicators for oil were found at the Southern peninsula and on the North coast, explained the engineer Anglade, who strongly believes in the immediate commercial viability of these explorations.”[10]
Journalist Alphonse cites an August 16, 1979 memo by Haitian attorney Francois Lamothe, in which he noted that “five big wells were drilled” down to depths of 9000 feet and that a sample that “underwent a physical-chemical analysis in Munich, Germany” had “revealed tracks of oil.” [11]
Despite the promising 1979 results in Haiti, Dr. Georges Michel reported that, “the big multinational oil companies operating in Haiti pushed for the discovered deposits not to be exploited.” [12] Oil exploration in and offshore Haiti ground to a sudden halt as a result.
Similar if less precise reports claiming that Haitian oil reserves could be vastly larger than those of Venezuela have appeared in Haitian websites. [13] Then in 2010 the financial news site Bloomberg News carried the following:
The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies that included the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said Monday in a telephone interview. ‘A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn't been drilled,’ said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas-based company that's drilling in Israel. [14]
In an interview with a Santo Domingo online paper, Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, former head of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (REFIDOMSA) stated, “there is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people.” [15] Haiti’s minerals include gold, the valuable strategic metal iridium and oil, apparently lots of it.
Aristide’s development plans
Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò'), president of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network (HLLN) who served as attorney for the deposed Aristide, notes that when Aristide was President -- up until his US-backed ouster during the Bush era in 2004 -- he had developed and published in book form his national development plans. These plans included, for the first time, a detailed list of known sites where the resources of Haiti were located. The publication of the plan sparked a national debate over Haitian radio and in the media about the future of the country. Aristide’s plan was to implement a public-private partnership to ensure that the development of Haiti’s oil, gold and other valuable resources would benefit the national economy and the broader population, and not merely the five Haitian oligarchic families and their US backers, the so-called Chimeres or gangsters. [16]
Since the ouster of Aristide in 2004, Haiti has been an occupied country, with a dubiously-elected President, Rene Preval, a controversial follower of IMF privatization mandates and reportedly tied to the Chimeres or Haitian oligarchs who backed the removal of Aristide. Notably, the US State Department refuses to permit the return of Aristide from South African exile.
Now, in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, the United States military has taken control of Haiti’s four airports and presently has some 20,000 troops in the country. Journalists and international aid organizations have accused the US military of being more concerned with imposing military control, which it prefers to call “security,” than with bringing urgently needed water, food and medicine from the airport sites to the population.
A US military occupation of Haiti under the guise of earthquake disaster ‘relief’ would give Washington and private business interests tied to it a geopolitical prize of the first order. Prior to the January 12 quake, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince was the fifth largest US embassy in the world, comparable to its embassies in such geopolitically strategic places as Berlin and Beijing.[17] With huge new oil finds off Cuba being exploited by Russian companies, with clear indications that Haiti contains similar vast untapped oil as well as gold, copper, uranium and iridium, with Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela as a neighbor to the south of Haiti, a return of Aristide or any popular leader committed to developing the resources for the people of Haiti, -- the poorest nation in the Americas -- would constitute a devastating blow to the world’s sole Superpower. The fact that in the aftermath of the earthquake, UN Haiti Special Envoy Bill Clinton joined forces with Aristide foe George W. Bush to create something called the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund ought to give everyone pause.
According to Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò') of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network, under the guise of emergency relief work, the US, France and Canada are engaged in a balkanization of the island for future mineral control. She reports rumors that Canada wants the North of Haiti where Canadian mining interests are already present. The US wants Port-au-Prince and the island of La Gonaive just offshore – an area identified in Aristide’s development book as having vast oil resources, and which is bitterly contested by France. She further states that China, with UN veto power over the de facto UN-occupied country, may have something to say against such a US-France-Canada carve up of the vast wealth of the nation. [18]
Notes:
1 Paul Mann, Caribbean Basins, Tectonic Plates & Hydrocarbons, Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin, accessed in
www.ig.utexas.edu/research/projects/cbth/.../ProposalCaribbean.pdf .
2 Rory Carroll, Medvedev and Castro meet to rebuild Russia-Cuba relations, London Guardian, November 28, 2008 accessed in http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/28/cuba-russia.
3 Julian Gavaghan, Comrades in arms: When China’s President Hu met a frail Fidel Castro, London Daily Mail, November 19, 2008, accessed in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1087485/Comrades-arms-When-Chinas-President-Hu-met-frail-Fidel-Castro.html.
4 Peoples’ Daily Online, China issues first policy paper on Latin America, Caribbean region, November 5, 2008, accessed in http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6527888.html .
5 Matthew R. Simmons, The World’s Giant Oilfields, Simmons & Co. International, Houston, accessed in http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/giantoilfields.pdf .
6 Anton Kolesnikov, et al, Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper-mantle conditions, Nature Geoscience, July 26, 2009.
7 F. William Engdahl, War and Peak Oil—Confessions of an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer, Global Research, September 26, 2007, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6880 .
8 Dr. Georges Michel, Oil in Haiti, English translation from French, Pétrole en Haiti, March 27, 2004, accessed in http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html#oil_GeorgesMichelEnglish .
9 Roberson Alphonse, Drill, and then pump the oil of Haiti! 4 oil companies request oil drilling permits, translated from the original French, June 27, 2008, accessed in
http://www.bnvillage.co.uk/caribbean-news-village-beta/99691-drill-then-pump-oil-haiti-4-oil-companies-request-oil-drilling-permits.html
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid. The full text indicated that, “five big wells were drilled at Porto Suel (Maissade) of a depth of 9000 feet, at Bebernal, 9000 feet, at Bois-Carradeux (Ouest), at Dumornay, on the road Route Frare and close to the Chemin de Fer of Saint-Marc. A sample, a ‘carrot’ (oil reservoir) drilled up from the well of Saint-Marc in the Artibonite underwent a physical-chemical analysis in Munich, Germany, at the request of Mr. Broth. ‘The result of the analysis was returned on October 11, 1979 and revealed tracks of oil,’ confided the engineer, Willy Clemens, who had gone to Germany.”
12 Dr. Georges Michel, op. cit.
13 Marguerite Laurent, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, Radio Metropole, Jan 28, 2008, accessed in
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/oil_sites.html#full_of_oil.
14 Jim Polson, Haiti earthquake may have exposed gas, aiding economy, Bloomberg News, January 26, 2010.
15 Espaillat Nanita revela en Haiti existen grandes recursos de oro y otros minerals, Espacinsular.org, 17 November, 2009, accessed in
http://www.espacinsular.org/spip.php?article8942 .
16 The Aristide development plan was contained in the book published in Haiti in 2000, Investir dans l’Human. Livre Blanc de Fanmi Lavalas sous la Direction de Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Port-au-Prince, Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 2000. It contained detailed maps, tables, graphics, and a national development plan for 2004 “covering agriculture, environment, commerce and industry, the financial sector, infrastructure, education, culture, health, women's issues, and issues in the public sector.” In 2004, using NGOs and the UN and a vicious propaganda campaign to vilify Aristide, the Bush administration got rid of the elected President.
17 Cynthia McKinney, Haiti: An Unwelcome Katrina Redux, Global Research, January 19, 2010, accessed in
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17063.
18 Marguerite Laurent (Ezili Danto), Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?, OpEd News.com, January 23, 2010, accessed in
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Did-mining-and-oil-drillin-by-Ezili-Danto-100123-329.html.
F. William Engdahl is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl
In the West Bank's stony hills, Palestine is slowly dying
In the West Bank's stony hills, Palestine is slowly dying
In the richest of the Occupied lands, Israeli bureaucracy is driving Palestinians out of their homes. Robert Fisk reports from Jiftlik
Palestinian women huddle amid their belongings after Israeli forces demolished their homes in the West Bank village of Khirbet Tana, near Nablus earlier this month
Area C doesn't sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it's part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually supposed to be handed over to its Palestinian inhabitants.
But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders lying on the table in front of Abed Kasab, head of the village council in Jiftlik, and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results.
Palestinian houses that cannot be permitted to stand, roofs that must be taken down, wells closed, sewage systems demolished; in one village, I even saw a primitive electricity system in which Palestinians must sink their electrical poles cemented into concrete blocks standing on the surface of the dirt road. To place the poles in the earth would ensure their destruction – no Palestinian can dig a hole more than 40cm below the ground.
But let's return to the bureaucracy. "Ro'i" – if that is indeed the Israeli official's name, for it is difficult to decipher – signed a batch of demolition papers for Jiftlik last December, all duly delivered, in Arabic and Hebrew, to Mr Kasab. There are 21 of them, running – non-sequentially – from numbers 143912 through 145059, all from "The High Planning Council Monitoring [sic] Sub-Committee of the Civil Administration for the Area of Judea and Samaria". Judea and Samaria – for ordinary folk – is the occupied West Bank. The first communication is dated 8 December, 2009, the last 17 December.
And as Mr Kasab puts it, that's the least of his problems. Palestinian requests to build houses are either delayed for years or refused; houses built without permission are ruthlessly torn down; corrugated iron roofs have to be camouflaged with plastic sheets in the hope the "Civil Administration" won't deem them an extra floor – in which case "Ro'i's" lads will be round to rip the lot off the top of the house.
In Area C, there are up to 150,000 Palestinians and 300,000 Jewish colonists living – illegally under international law – in 120 official settlements and 100 "unapproved" settlements or, in the language we must use these days, "illegal outposts"; illegal under Israeli as well as international law, that is – as opposed to the 120 internationally illegal colonies which are legal under Israeli law. Jewish settlers, needless to say, don't have problems with planning permission.
The winter sun blazes through the door of Mr Kasab's office and cigarette smoke drifts through the room as the angry men of Jiftlik shout their grievances. "I don't mind if you print my name, I am so angry, I will take the consequences," he says. "Breathing is the only thing we don't need a permit for – yet!" The rhetoric is tired, but the fury is real. "Buildings, new roads, reservoirs, we have been waiting three years to get permits. We cannot get a permit for a new health clinic. We are short of water for both human and agricultural use. Getting permission to rehabilitate the water system costs 70,000 Israeli shekels [about £14,000] – it costs more than the rehabilitation system itself."
A drive along the wild roads of Area C – from the outskirts of Jerusalem to the semi-humid basin of the Jordan valley – runs through dark hills and bare, stony valleys lined with deep, ancient caves, until, further east, lie the fields of the Palestinians and the Jewish settlers' palm groves – electrified fences round the groves – and the mud or stone huts of Palestinian sheep farmers. This paradise is a double illusion. One group of inhabitants, the Israelis, may remember their history and live in paradise. The smaller group, the Palestinian Arabs, are able to look across these wonderful lands and remember their history – but they are already out of paradise and into limbo.
Even the western NGOs working in Area C find their work for Palestinians blocked by the Israelis. This is not just a "hitch" in the "peace process" – whatever that is – but an international scandal. Oxfam, for example, asked the Israelis for a permit to build a 300m2 capacity below-ground reservoir along with 700m of underground 4in pipes for the thousands of Palestinians living around Jiftlik. It was refused. They then gave notice that they intended to construct an above-ground installation of two glass-fibre tanks, an above-ground pipe and booster pump. They were told they would need a permit even though the pipes were above ground – and they were refused a permit. As a last resort, Oxfam is now distributing rooftop water tanks.
I came across an even more outrageous example of this apartheid-by-permit in the village of Zbeidat, where the European Union's humanitarian aid division installed 18 waste water systems to prevent the hamlet's vile-smelling sewage running through the gardens and across the main road into the fields. The £80,000 system – a series of 40ft shafts regularly flushed out by sewage trucks – was duly installed because the location lay inside Area B, where no planning permission was required.
Yet now the aid workers have been told by the Israelis that work "must stop" on six of the 18 shafts – a prelude to their demolition, although already they are already built beside the road – because part of the village stands in Area C. Needless to say, no one – neither Palestinians nor Israelis – knows the exact borderline between B and C. Thus around £20,000 of European money has been thrown away by the Israeli "Civil Administration".
But in one way, this storm of permission and non-permission papers is intended to obscure the terrible reality of Area C. Many Israeli activists as well as western NGOs suspect Israel intends to force the Palestinians here to leave their lands and homes and villages and depart into the wretchedness of Areas B and A. B is jointly controlled by Israeli military and civil authorities and Palestinian police, and A by the witless Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. Thus would the Palestinians be left to argue over a mere 40 per cent of the occupied West Bank – in itself a tiny fraction of the 22 per cent of Mandated Palestine over which the equally useless Yasser Arafat once hoped to rule. Add to this the designation of 18 per cent of Area C as "closed military areas" by the Israelis and add another 3 per cent preposterously designated as a "nature reserve" – it would be interesting to know what kind of animals roam there – and the result is simple: even without demolition orders, Palestinians cannot build in 70 per cent of Area C.
Along one road, I discovered a series of large concrete blocks erected by the Israeli army in front of Palestinian shacks. "Danger – Firing Area" was printed on each in Hebrew, Arabic and English. "Entrance Forbidden." What are the Palestinians living here supposed to do? Area C, it should be added, is the richest of the occupied Palestinian lands, with cheese production and animal farms. Many of the 5,000 souls in Jiftlik have been refugees already, their families fled lands to the west of Jerusalem – in present-day Israel – in 1947 and 1948. Their tragedy has not yet ended, of course. What price Palestine?
In the richest of the Occupied lands, Israeli bureaucracy is driving Palestinians out of their homes. Robert Fisk reports from Jiftlik
Palestinian women huddle amid their belongings after Israeli forces demolished their homes in the West Bank village of Khirbet Tana, near Nablus earlier this month
Area C doesn't sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it's part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually supposed to be handed over to its Palestinian inhabitants.
But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders lying on the table in front of Abed Kasab, head of the village council in Jiftlik, and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results.
Palestinian houses that cannot be permitted to stand, roofs that must be taken down, wells closed, sewage systems demolished; in one village, I even saw a primitive electricity system in which Palestinians must sink their electrical poles cemented into concrete blocks standing on the surface of the dirt road. To place the poles in the earth would ensure their destruction – no Palestinian can dig a hole more than 40cm below the ground.
But let's return to the bureaucracy. "Ro'i" – if that is indeed the Israeli official's name, for it is difficult to decipher – signed a batch of demolition papers for Jiftlik last December, all duly delivered, in Arabic and Hebrew, to Mr Kasab. There are 21 of them, running – non-sequentially – from numbers 143912 through 145059, all from "The High Planning Council Monitoring [sic] Sub-Committee of the Civil Administration for the Area of Judea and Samaria". Judea and Samaria – for ordinary folk – is the occupied West Bank. The first communication is dated 8 December, 2009, the last 17 December.
And as Mr Kasab puts it, that's the least of his problems. Palestinian requests to build houses are either delayed for years or refused; houses built without permission are ruthlessly torn down; corrugated iron roofs have to be camouflaged with plastic sheets in the hope the "Civil Administration" won't deem them an extra floor – in which case "Ro'i's" lads will be round to rip the lot off the top of the house.
In Area C, there are up to 150,000 Palestinians and 300,000 Jewish colonists living – illegally under international law – in 120 official settlements and 100 "unapproved" settlements or, in the language we must use these days, "illegal outposts"; illegal under Israeli as well as international law, that is – as opposed to the 120 internationally illegal colonies which are legal under Israeli law. Jewish settlers, needless to say, don't have problems with planning permission.
The winter sun blazes through the door of Mr Kasab's office and cigarette smoke drifts through the room as the angry men of Jiftlik shout their grievances. "I don't mind if you print my name, I am so angry, I will take the consequences," he says. "Breathing is the only thing we don't need a permit for – yet!" The rhetoric is tired, but the fury is real. "Buildings, new roads, reservoirs, we have been waiting three years to get permits. We cannot get a permit for a new health clinic. We are short of water for both human and agricultural use. Getting permission to rehabilitate the water system costs 70,000 Israeli shekels [about £14,000] – it costs more than the rehabilitation system itself."
A drive along the wild roads of Area C – from the outskirts of Jerusalem to the semi-humid basin of the Jordan valley – runs through dark hills and bare, stony valleys lined with deep, ancient caves, until, further east, lie the fields of the Palestinians and the Jewish settlers' palm groves – electrified fences round the groves – and the mud or stone huts of Palestinian sheep farmers. This paradise is a double illusion. One group of inhabitants, the Israelis, may remember their history and live in paradise. The smaller group, the Palestinian Arabs, are able to look across these wonderful lands and remember their history – but they are already out of paradise and into limbo.
Even the western NGOs working in Area C find their work for Palestinians blocked by the Israelis. This is not just a "hitch" in the "peace process" – whatever that is – but an international scandal. Oxfam, for example, asked the Israelis for a permit to build a 300m2 capacity below-ground reservoir along with 700m of underground 4in pipes for the thousands of Palestinians living around Jiftlik. It was refused. They then gave notice that they intended to construct an above-ground installation of two glass-fibre tanks, an above-ground pipe and booster pump. They were told they would need a permit even though the pipes were above ground – and they were refused a permit. As a last resort, Oxfam is now distributing rooftop water tanks.
I came across an even more outrageous example of this apartheid-by-permit in the village of Zbeidat, where the European Union's humanitarian aid division installed 18 waste water systems to prevent the hamlet's vile-smelling sewage running through the gardens and across the main road into the fields. The £80,000 system – a series of 40ft shafts regularly flushed out by sewage trucks – was duly installed because the location lay inside Area B, where no planning permission was required.
Yet now the aid workers have been told by the Israelis that work "must stop" on six of the 18 shafts – a prelude to their demolition, although already they are already built beside the road – because part of the village stands in Area C. Needless to say, no one – neither Palestinians nor Israelis – knows the exact borderline between B and C. Thus around £20,000 of European money has been thrown away by the Israeli "Civil Administration".
But in one way, this storm of permission and non-permission papers is intended to obscure the terrible reality of Area C. Many Israeli activists as well as western NGOs suspect Israel intends to force the Palestinians here to leave their lands and homes and villages and depart into the wretchedness of Areas B and A. B is jointly controlled by Israeli military and civil authorities and Palestinian police, and A by the witless Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. Thus would the Palestinians be left to argue over a mere 40 per cent of the occupied West Bank – in itself a tiny fraction of the 22 per cent of Mandated Palestine over which the equally useless Yasser Arafat once hoped to rule. Add to this the designation of 18 per cent of Area C as "closed military areas" by the Israelis and add another 3 per cent preposterously designated as a "nature reserve" – it would be interesting to know what kind of animals roam there – and the result is simple: even without demolition orders, Palestinians cannot build in 70 per cent of Area C.
Along one road, I discovered a series of large concrete blocks erected by the Israeli army in front of Palestinian shacks. "Danger – Firing Area" was printed on each in Hebrew, Arabic and English. "Entrance Forbidden." What are the Palestinians living here supposed to do? Area C, it should be added, is the richest of the occupied Palestinian lands, with cheese production and animal farms. Many of the 5,000 souls in Jiftlik have been refugees already, their families fled lands to the west of Jerusalem – in present-day Israel – in 1947 and 1948. Their tragedy has not yet ended, of course. What price Palestine?
Friday, January 29, 2010
Remembering Zinn
A Memory of Howard
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_memory_of_howard_20100127/
Posted on Jan 27, 2010
By Daniel Ellsberg
I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the February release of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.”
Just weeks ago, after watching the film, I woke up thinking that I had never told him how much he meant to me. For once in my life, I acted on that thought in a timely way. I sent him an e-mail in which I said, among other things, what I had often told others: that he was, “in my opinion, the best human being I’ve ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life.”
Our first meeting was at Faneuil Hall in Boston in early 1971, where we both spoke against the indictments of Eqbal Ahmad and Phil Berrigan for “conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.” We marched with the rest of the crowd to make citizens’ arrests at the Boston office of the FBI. Later that spring, we went with our affinity group (including Noam Chomsky, Cindy Fredericks, Marilyn Young, Mark Ptashne, Zelda Gamson, Fred Branfman and Mitch Goodman), to the May Day actions blocking traffic in Washington (“If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government”). Howard tells that story in the film, and I tell it at greater length in my memoir, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” But for reasons of space, I had to cut out the next section in which Howard—who had been arrested in D.C. after most of the rest of us had gone elsewhere—came back to Boston for a rally and a blockade of the Federal Building. I’ve never published that story, so here it is, an outtake from my manuscript:
A day later, Howard Zinn was the last speaker at a large rally in Boston Common. I was at the back of a huge crowd, listening to him over loudspeakers. Twenty-seven years later, I can remember some of what he said. “On May Day in Washington, thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace. But there is no peace. We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.”
He said, “If Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had been walking the streets of Georgetown yesterday, they would have been arrested. Arrested for being young.”
At the end of his comments, he said: “I want to speak now to some of the members of this audience, the plainclothes policemen among us, the military intelligence agents who are assigned to do surveillance. You are taking the part of secret police, spying on your fellow Americans. You should not be doing what you are doing. You should rethink it, and stop. You do not have to carry out orders that go against the grain of what it means to be an American.”
Those last weren’t his exact words, but that was the spirit of them. He was to pay for that comment the next day, when we were sitting side by side in a blockade of the Federal Building in Boston. We had a circle of people all the way around the building, shoulder to shoulder, so no one could get in or out except by stepping over us. Behind us were crowds of people with posters who were supporting us but who hadn’t chosen to risk arrest. In front of us, keeping us from getting any closer to the main entrance to the building, was a line of policemen, with a large formation of police behind them. All the police had large plastic masks tilted back on their heads and they were carrying long black clubs, about four feet long, like large baseball bats. Later the lawyers told us that city police regulations outlawed the use of batons that long.
But at first the relations with the police were almost friendly. We sat down impudently at the very feet of the policemen who were guarding the entrance, filling in the line that disappeared around the sides until someone came from the rear of the building and announced over a bullhorn, “The blockade is complete. We’ve surrounded the building!” There was a cheer from the crowd behind us, and more people joined us in sitting until the circle was two or three deep.
We expected them to start arresting us, but for a while the police did nothing. They could have manhandled a passage through the line and kept it open for employees to go in or out, but for some reason they didn’t. We thought maybe they really sympathized with our protest, and this was their way of joining in. As the morning wore on, people took apples and crackers and bottles of water out of their pockets and packs and shared them around, and they always offered some to the police standing in front of us. The police always refused, but they seemed to appreciate the offer.
Then one of the officers came over to Howard and said, “You’re Professor Zinn, aren’t you?” Howard said yes, and the officer reached down and shook his hand enthusiastically. He said, “I heard you lecture at the Police Academy. A lot of us here did. That was a wonderful lecture.” Howard had been asked to speak to them about the role of dissent and civil disobedience in American history. Several other policemen came over to pay their respects to Howard and thank him for his lecture. The mood seemed quite a bit different from Washington.
Then a line of employees emerged from the building, wearing coats and ties or dresses. Their arms were raised and they were holding cards in their raised hands. As they circled past us, they held out the cards so we could see what they were: ID cards, showing they were federal employees. They were making the peace sign with their other hands, they were circling around the building to show solidarity with what we were doing. Their spokesman said over a bullhorn, “We want this war to be over, too! Thank you for what you are doing! Keep it up.” Photographers, including police, were scrambling to take pictures of them, and some of them held up their ID cards so they would get in the picture. It was the high point of the day.
A little while after the employees had gone back inside the building, there was a sudden shift in the mood of the police. An order had been passed. The bloc of police in the center of the square got into tight formation and lowered their plastic helmets. The police standing right in front of us, over us, straightened up, adjusted their uniforms and lowered their masks. Apparently the time had come to start arrests. The supporters who didn’t want to be arrested fell back.
But there was no arrest warning. There was a whistle, and the line of police began inching forward, black batons raised upright. They were going to walk through us or over us, push us back. The man in front of us, who had been talking to Howard about his lecture a little earlier, muttered to us under his breath, “Leave! Now! Quick, get up.” He was warning, not menacing us.
Howard and I looked at each other. We’d come expecting to get arrested. It didn’t seem right to just get up and move because someone told us to, without arresting us. We stayed where we were. No one else left either. Boots were touching our shoes. The voice over our heads whispered intensely, “Move! Please. For God’s sake, move!” Knees in uniform pressed our knees. I saw a club coming down. I put my hands over my head, fists clenched, and a four-foot baton hit my wrist, hard. Another one hit my shoulder.
I rolled over, keeping my arms over my head, got up and moved back a few yards. Howard was being hauled off by several policemen. One had Howard’s arms pinned behind him, another had jerked his head back by the hair. Someone had ripped his shirt in two, there was blood on his bare chest. A moment before he had been sitting next to me, and I waited for someone to do the same to me, but no one did. I didn’t see anyone else getting arrested. But no one was sitting anymore, the line had been broken, disintegrated. Those who had been sitting hadn’t moved very far, they were standing like me a few yards back, looking around, holding themselves where they’d been clubbed. The police had stopped moving. They stood in a line, helmets still down, slapping their batons against their hands. Their adrenaline was still up, but they were standing in place.
Blood was running down my hand, covering the back of my hand. I was wearing a heavy watch, and it had taken the force of the blow. The baton had smashed the crystal and driven pieces of glass into my wrist. Blood was dripping off my fingers. Someone gave me a handkerchief to wrap around my wrist and told me to raise my arm. The handkerchief got soaked quickly and blood was running down my arm while I looked for a first-aid station that was supposed to be at the back of the crowd, in a corner of the square. I finally found it, and someone picked the glass out of my arm and put a thick bandage around it.
I went back to the protest. My shoulder was aching. The police were standing where they had stopped, and the blockade had reformed, people were sitting 10 yards back from where they had been before. There seemed to be more people sitting, not fewer. Many of the supporters had joined in. But it was quiet. No one was speaking loudly, no laughing. People were waiting for the police to move forward again. They weren’t expecting any longer to get arrested.
Only three or four people had been picked out of the line to be arrested before. The police had made a decision (it turned out) to arrest only the “leaders,” not to give us the publicity of arrests and trials. Howard hadn’t been an organizer of this action, he was just participating like the rest of us, but from the way they treated him when they pulled him out of the line, his comments directly to the police in the rally the day before must have rubbed someone the wrong way.
I found Roz Zinn, Howard’s wife, sitting in the line on the side at right angles to where Howard and I had been before. I sat down between her and their housemate, a woman her age. They had been in support before until they had seen what happened to Howard.
Looking at the police in formation, with their uniforms and clubs, guns on their hips, I felt naked. I knew that it was an illusion in combat to think you were protected because you were carrying a weapon, but it was an illusion that worked. For the first time, I was very conscious of being unarmed. At last, in my own country, I understood what a Vietnamese villager must have felt at what the Marines called a “county fair,” when the Marines rounded up everyone they could find in a hamlet—all women, children and old people never draft- or VC-age young men—to be questioned one at a time in a tent, meanwhile passing out candy to the kids and giving vaccinations. Winning hearts and minds, trying to recruit informers. No one among the villagers knowing what the soldiers, in their combat gear, would do next, or which of them might be detained.
We sat and talked and waited for the police to come again. They lowered their helmets and formed up. The two women I was with were both older than I was. I moved my body in front of them, to take the first blows. I felt a hand on my elbow. “Excuse me, I was sitting there,” the woman who shared the Zinns’ house said to me, with a cold look. She hadn’t come there that day and sat down, she told me later, to be protected by me. I apologized and scrambled back, behind them.
No one moved. The police didn’t move, either. They stood in formation facing us, plastic masks over their faces, for quite a while. But they didn’t come forward again. They had kept open a passage in front for the employees inside to leave after 5, and eventually the police left, and we left.
* * *
There was a happier story to tell, slightly more than one month later. On Saturday night, June 12, 1971, we had a date with Howard and Roz to see “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in Harvard Square. But that morning I learned from someone at The New York Times that—without having alerted me—The Times was about to start publishing the top secret documents I had given them that evening. That meant I might get a visit from the FBI at any moment; and for once, I had copies of the papers in my apartment, because I planned to send them to Sen. Mike Gravel for his filibuster against the draft.
From “Secrets” (p. 386):
“I had to get the documents out of our apartment. I called the Zinns, who had been planning to come by our apartment later to join us for the movie, and asked if we could come by their place in Newton [Mass.] instead. I took the papers in a box in the trunk of our car. They weren’t the ideal people to avoid attracting the attention of the FBI. Howard had been in charge of managing antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan’s movements underground while he was eluding the FBI for months (so from that practical point of view he was an ideal person to hide something from them), and it could be assumed that his phone was tapped, even if he wasn’t under regular surveillance. However, I didn’t know whom else to turn to that Saturday afternoon. Anyway, I had given Howard a large section of the study already, to read as a historian; he’d kept it in his office at Boston University. As I expected, they said yes immediately. Howard helped me bring up the box from the car.
“We drove back to Harvard Square for the movie. The Zinns had never seen ‘Butch Cassidy’ before. It held up for all of us. Afterward we bought ice-cream cones at Brigham’s and went back to our apartment. Finally Howard and Roz went home before it was time for the early edition of the Sunday New York Times to arrive at the subway kiosk below the square. Around midnight Patricia and I went over to the square and bought a couple of copies. We came up the stairs into Harvard Square reading the front page, with the three-column story about the secret archive, feeling very good.”
Daniel Ellsberg is a lecturer, writer and activist and the former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who, in 1971, released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
America's Disappearing Babies
US babies mysteriously shrinking
* 16:15 26 January 2010 by Ewen Callaway
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18434-us-babies-mysteriously-shrinking.html
Birthweights in the US are falling but no one knows why, according to a study of 36.8 million infants born between 1990 and 2005.
A 52-gram drop in the weight of full-term singletons – from an average of 3.441 to 3.389 kilograms – has left Emily Oken's team at Harvard Medical School scratching their heads. It can't be accounted for by an increase in caesarean sections or induced labours, which shorten gestation. What's more, women in the US now smoke less and gain more weight during pregnancy, which should make babies heavier. Oken suggests that unmeasured factors, such as diet or exercise, could explain why babies are being born lighter.
"For your average baby, 50 grams probably makes no difference at all," she stresses. But those born substantially lighter could be at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life.
Journal reference: Obstetrics & Gynecology, DOI: 10.1097/aog.0b013e3181cbd5f5
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
* 16:15 26 January 2010 by Ewen Callaway
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18434-us-babies-mysteriously-shrinking.html
Birthweights in the US are falling but no one knows why, according to a study of 36.8 million infants born between 1990 and 2005.
A 52-gram drop in the weight of full-term singletons – from an average of 3.441 to 3.389 kilograms – has left Emily Oken's team at Harvard Medical School scratching their heads. It can't be accounted for by an increase in caesarean sections or induced labours, which shorten gestation. What's more, women in the US now smoke less and gain more weight during pregnancy, which should make babies heavier. Oken suggests that unmeasured factors, such as diet or exercise, could explain why babies are being born lighter.
"For your average baby, 50 grams probably makes no difference at all," she stresses. But those born substantially lighter could be at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life.
Journal reference: Obstetrics & Gynecology, DOI: 10.1097/aog.0b013e3181cbd5f5
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
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